Amateur sleuth helped confirm identities of New Hampshire murder victims
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For years, helping connect people to their missing loved ones had been a hobby of Heath's. Combined with her interest in the Rasmussen case, she got to work on trying to find potential matches for the victims in November 2017.
She scoured ancestry message boards for terms like "California," where Rasmussen had been arrested, or "missing sister" in hopes of finding a relative of the victims. Then she began compiling a list of names.
"I would just go through that list and then I would start searching to see if they had public records, if the person was alive, see if I could find any record for their existence," Heath said. "If not, then I would pursue it a little further and reach out to the person who had originally posted looking for the loved ones."
Heath said she found a posting from around 1999 about a relative looking for Sarah McWaters and her mother Marlyse McWaters. As she conducted further searches for Marlyse McWaters, Heath came across other relatives looking for the same woman. It turned out McWaters was also the mother of a girl named Marie Vaughn.
In a Facebook group about the Rasmussen case, Heath asked whether those missing people could be the victims found in Allenstown, but she didn't get much of a response. So, she dropped it.
About a year later, Heath, who lives in Connecticut, was listening to a New Hampshire Public Radio podcast about the Bear Brook murders when information about the victims reminded her again of the woman looking for Sarah McWaters on that ancestry message board.
"At that point I was like, I need to reach out to this woman," Heath said.
The listing contained an email address, so Heath said she tried to match the address to a Facebook profile. Heath reached out to one woman asking whether she was the same person who had made the ancestry posting.
Within minutes, Heath received a response. It was her.
Heath asked the relative if she had any more information about Sarah and Marlyse McWaters. The woman started sharing more details, including that Marlyse had married a man with the last name Rasmussen.
"Right there, my stomach jumped," Heath said. "It just rocked. I knew right away. There's no way that a woman goes missing with those children with a guy with that last name, Rasmussen. It's just way too coincidental."
Heath didn't say anything to the relative of Sarah McWaters about Rasmussen's criminal history just yet, but she said she began reaching out to relatives of Marie Vaughn. Vaughn's relatives told Heath that Vaughn's mother had left California with a man named Terry.
Within two hours, Heath said she was on the phone with law enforcement in San Bernardino, California. Those authorities quickly turned the information over to investigators in New Hampshire who were already examining DNA research based on information from the family of Marie Vaughn and other genetic databases.
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Amateur sleuth helped confirm identities of New Hampshire murder victims
