Crime Immemorial

In the early weeks of 1969, in the eastern United States, eleven-year-old Debra Horn was walking to a school bus stop in Allenstown, New Hampshire with her brother on the morning of January 29th.

As she trudged along, she suddenly slipped and fell on the ice. Complaining that she had injured her neck in the fall, she walked the short distance back to her house, where she asked her parents if she could stay home to recover. They were reluctant, as they believed their daughter wasn’t really hurt and simply wanted to play hooky, but finally they relented. Debra lay down on the sofa in the living room with a blanket over her, and then her parents left for work, and Debra’s brother went on to school as usual.

Several hours passed. Between eleven a.m. and twelve p.m., the Horns returned home to check on Debra, but upon arriving at the house, they discovered that the side door was standing open, and that their daughter had disappeared.

The blanket that had been covering the child was carelessly thrown across the back of the couch, and Debra’s coat and boots were still where she had left them. Additionally, the family’s two poodles, who likely would have followed Debra had she left the house on her own, were found milling around in the yard.

The panicked parents phoned police, who immediately suspected kidnapping. But the only other clue as to Debra’s whereabouts found at the scene was a set of tracks from studded snow tires, discovered in the Horns’ driveway.

As the investigators fanned out in search of the girl, their tracking dogs also came across a few drops of what was later determined to be human blood, spattered on the side of a highway about two miles from the Horn residence. However, there was at the time no way of determining whether this blood was related to Debra’s disappearance.

The hunt for Debra Horn would continue until February, when weather conditions forced it to a standstill. The ultimate fate of the child, in fact, would not be known until August 10th.

On that Sunday, two teenaged boys in the nearby town of Sandown came across an abandoned 1952 Plymouth. Curious, the boys—John Marra and Vincent Rinaldi—poked around the old vehicle, finally popping open the trunk to reveal what they at first thought was a large doll.

Instead, the boys soon realized they had found the remains of Debra Horn, twenty-five miles away from where she had disappeared nearly seven months previously. She was completely naked, and had a wound to the back of her head which could have been the result of an accidental fall, or perhaps bludgeoning by her killer. It appeared that she had been sexually assaulted.

Naturally, a massive inquiry commenced, but investigators seemed hobbled from the beginning, and they were never able to develop a single viable suspect. Some researchers speculated that there could have been a link to the similar murder of Joanne Dunham from June of 1968, which had taken place in Charlestown, New Hampshire, approximately seventy miles from where Debra Horn was abducted.

Theories also later swirled about the previously mentioned Robert Breest, Jr., who in 1973 would be convicted of beating eighteen-year-old Susan Randall to death and flinging her body into the frozen Merrimack River in 1971. Breest was also arrested for the 1969 sexual assault of an unnamed woman, and as previously noted, emerged as the main person of interest in the disappearance and murder of his girlfriend Luella Blakeslee.

Another, even more sinister connection was hypothesized much later, upon the discovery in 1985 and 2000 of four unidentified bodies in fifty-five-gallon metal drums in Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown. These victims, believed to have been murdered sometime between 1977 and 1985, have been linked to Terry Rasmussen, a.k.a. Robert Evans, who DNA established was the father of one of the unidentified children in the barrels. Evans was convicted in 2002 of the murder of his wife, Eunsoon Jun, and subsequently died in prison eight years later.

As Evans was a suspected child killer, was known to operate under several aliases, and was thought to have been in the area of Manchester, New Hampshire at around the time of Debra Horn’s disappearance, some researchers have asserted that there may be a connection between the two crimes. Though investigators have been looking into a link, most find it unlikely that Evans kidnapped and murdered Debra Horn, and thus the mystery of her death endures.