The Bear Brook Murders: New Hampshire's Barrel Bodies and the DNA That Finally Named Them

In 1985, a hunter in the New Hampshire woods found a barrel containing the remains of a woman and a child. No name, no missing persons report, no leads. Fifteen years later, a second barrel turned up nearby — two more children inside. Four bodies, one killer, no names at all.

For over thirty years, investigators had almost nothing to go on. The man believed responsible had lived under a stolen identity in a house down the road, vanished before anyone got suspicious, and died in a California prison in 2010 under yet another false name — never tried for what happened in those woods.

This book traces the case from that first barrel to the breakthrough that cracked it: forensic genetic genealogy, a technique barely a decade old, first proven in the 2018 Golden State Killer case. It let investigators trace a stranger's family tree from fragments no one thought could yield a name — and used it to identify the man and three of his four victims. One victim remains unidentified; the search continues.

Built on court records, contemporaneous reporting, and official investigation statements, this account speculates nowhere the record is silent, and asserts nothing investigators themselves still debate. It's the story of four people erased from public record, the man who erased them, and the science that proved even a carefully hidden life leaves something behind.