Possible Serial Killer Uncovered in New Hampshire
He allegedly focused his violence on women and children.
— -- Police in New Hampshire believe a California inmate who died in prison in 2010 is responsible for the death of a woman who went missing in 1981 and for the murders of another woman and three children.
Authorities have linked Bob Evans, who served time in California for murdering his wife, to at least five other killings.
They painted a portrait of him as a drifter, moving among cities and towns in New Hampshire, Idaho and California from the 1970s until the turn of the century and using multiple aliases that made his crime spree difficult to discover.
New Hampshire Assistant Attorney General Jeffery Strelzin left open the possibility that Evans will be linked to more unsolved murders.
"We are concerned, based on his proclivities, that he could have hurt other people," Strelzin said at a press briefing, adding that Evans fit the profile of a serial killer.
Strelzin suggested Evans' inclination to relocate suited his desire to continue killing without detection.
"What's he running from?" he said of the killer, who targeted women and children. "What he's running from is that he's killing people."
Authorities say Evans murdered his girlfriend Denise D. Beaudin, 32, shortly after she spent Thanksgiving with relatives at her family's home in Goffstown, New Hampshire, in 1981.
Strezlin said the family had pinned her disappearance on financial problems and assumed that she ran away.
Beaudin had a 1-year-old daughter at the time. She was located by authorities last year and has been reunited with her maternal family, according to police. Evans raised the child for about five years before giving her to a family in California.
The daughter was later adopted and now has her own family. She provided a DNA profile that was used during the investigation.
Evans disposed of at least two bodies in steel barrels that he left in a wooded area near Allenstown, New Hampshire, police said.
One of the bodies was a girl believed to be his daughter. The body of another girl was also found in those woods, authorities said.
Kim Fallon, the chief forensic investigator for the New Hampshire Medical Examiner's Office, provided ages and descriptions of the girls Evans allegedly killed.
The oldest was 9 or 10 years old and had double-pierced ears.
The other two were substantially younger. One was 3 to 5, and the other was 2 or 3 years old.