S1, Ep. 1 | Hide and Seek

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You know those eighties movies where a bunch of kids wander the neighborhood on bicycles and then stumble into a mystery? This story starts kinda like that. You know, growing up there was probably you know a good two or three dozen kids that lived in the park and we just roamed the place like we own the place. That's Jesse Morgan. In the movie version of this story, he'd probably be the leader of the group. The scrappy one, the Corey Feldman.

the way the t trailer parks work, I mean there's a lot of people that come in and go out. I mean, I was one of the few kids that moved in when I was two and Thank you. Moved out when I was eighteen. In the summer of 1985, Jesse was 11 years old. It was the year the Nintendo came to North America. New Coke hit the shelves, and Calvin and Hobbes started running in newspapers.

That year, Jesse and his friends came up with a game. It was basically hide and seek, except the seeker rode around on a four wheeler. All the kids would hide and the last one that got found would be able to ride the four-wheeler. Just do that over and over. And we we'd play we played all summer long. The trailer park where Jesse grew up, it's in a town so small that half of its main street is technically in another village.

And right next to the trailer park, covering more than half of the entire town, is fifteen square miles of tall red pines and swampy tangled forest. Bear Brook State Park. we were able to roam because we weren't in in a city. You know, we weren't my parents weren't worried so much about me because they just figured I was over there or over there. You know, there was only so many places to go when we were kids. And one day, in the middle of this game, something strange happened.

Jesse was riding the four wheeler. His friends, Scott and Keith, were supposed to be hiding, and then one of them gave himself away by yelling out. I believe it was Keith that said that he found a barrel. just out in the woods, you know, there was a barrel out there. The barrel was a blue fifty five gallon steel drum. It was covered up with a lid, but whoever closed it hadn't gotten a tight seal. Something was squeezing through, underneath the top. It was a plastic bag.

Scott and Keith both got off the four wheeler and Keith was like trying to pull the top of the the barrel off and when he got the edge of the tarp off we got hit with like this smell of like rotten milk. The kids weren't really sure what to make of this. So they did the only thing a group of 11 year old boys could think to do. They kicked it over. When we knocked the barrel over the top came open a little more, but we still we didn't see into it or anything.

We saw like something white was starting to drizzle out of the top of the barrel, and again I'm thinking it's rotten milk. And then they left. They rode away on the four wheeler without ever looking inside the barrel. That was it. So that was we left.

This is the moment where the story stops being like an 80s movie. Jesse and his friends walked away from the mystery. Had they looked inside the barrel, what they would have found were two bodies. Heavily decomposed, partially dismembered. This moment in the woods is the first in a case where every convention about how true crime stories usually unfold is up to

Where everything about how a murder investigation is supposed to work happens in reverse, where each break in the case seems to raise more questions than it answers. It's the first That this story is not going to go the way you think. How does an entire family This is the story of a serial killer police would come to know as the chameleon. I mean, That's You have to believe that you fall. Grandmother let this happen.

What bus driver or you know, I mean, where were all of you? You know, I mean I I Where were you? And it's the story of a frustrating investigation that after decades of failure led to a forensic breakthrough and changed the science of solving murders. I mean this is the beauty. Step forward. for solving crime since the discovery of DNA itself. I'm Jason Moon.

I am not a crime reporter. Or I wasn't until I discovered this story. I first learned about the Barbrook murders in late twenty fifteen when I was assigned to cover a press conference about the I'd only been living in New Hampshire for about six months, but I didn't know anything about the country.

At the time, I was more concerned with covering the New Hampshire presidential primary. The week before, I was being crushed by a throng of other reporters while trying to follow Hillary Clinton down a hallway. And aside from the primary, New Hampshire is pretty quiet. There isn't the same urgency to news that there is in some other places. It's the sort of state where a rogue bear can and has dominated a news cycle.

So when I learned that in nineteen eighty five, bodies were discovered only twenty minutes or so from the NHPR newsroom, and that police still hadn't identified them. Thirty years later, it stuck with the How is that possible with all of the DNA testing and modern forensic techniques? How could they not even know who the victims were? After that news conference, I filed a short story for the newsroom and went back to my usual beat. But I never forgot about the Bear Brooks.

It became a kind of side project, something to look into when I wasn't sitting at a town hall meeting or covering the state legislature. And one of the first things I wanted to learn more about was the town where the bodies were found. The town where Jesse Morgan, who found the barrel as a kid, grew up. A town with a population just shy of forty three hundred. I got it. Allentown, New Hampshire.

We were only gonna be there a few years. It wasn't and then he started the business and the you know, life went on and before you know it Jesse's parents, Anne and Kevin Morgan, moved to Allensown in the nineteen seventies, into a trailer park called Bear Brook Garden. The Morgans have been married a long time. They're not exactly finishing each other's sentences, but they do have a way of talking at the same time.

of in the homes. But you know, to socialize. Um we used to have uh neighborhood parties. Neighborhood was always invited. And we I would say we partied a little more than I would like my kids to Um we heard things that would go around the In Bearbrook Gardens, the Morgans were the center of gravity for the community. They threw the big barbecues, had all the neighborhood kids over for sleepovers.

We were all just friends. Yeah. And we helped each other. I can remember helping people cut wood and Yeah. There were winters temble up, there was nothing in the winter. And, you know, no c none of the cars in the neighborhood would start. Except for maybe one car we go remember going over to our friend's house and that one car would start all our cars so we could all go You know, we were all young families and we didn't have money. You know.

Okay. The Morgans don't live in Allensown anymore, but they remember it fondly. I think in their minds they picture it like a postcard of country living. But that's not exactly how everyone remembers it. Mine pleasure. Pleasure. Yeah, it should be pronounced differently. Ron Montpleasure was a police officer in Allensown for twenty three years. To describe it, it was um on a Saturday afternoon, warm Saturday afternoon. Uh Now people would start drinking about ten o'clock in the morning.

Ron wears a beanie. He's got a big laugh that he covers with one hand. After retiring in two thousand two, he opened a cleaning supply shop about twenty minutes from Alan. We spoke standing behind the counter of that shop, surrounded by vacuum cleaner parts and bottles of cleaning spray. Mot Pleasure enjoys talking about his days on the force. He liked being a customer.

I I think every kid in the neighborhood either wanted to be a police officer or a uh And he liked Allensown, even if it wasn't a modeled community. You talk about noise complaints, the country music was was blaring. Ha ha. Not that I don't like country music. No, I I do like country music. Uh but but uh uh as as the alcohol flew the the music got louder and louder and then then the calls That's not... Yeah. When the calls did come in, Montpleasure answered many of them on his own.

Back then there was usually only one officer on patrol in Allenstown at any given time. One cop for twenty square miles. It's a lot of area of patrol and there's only one patrol. You know, to cover everything. That was particularly true of the It covers more than half of Allentown.

The trailer park, where Anne, Kevin, and Jessie Morgan lived, hugs the northern edge of the state park. If you walked out the Morgan's back door in a straight line, it would be more than five miles before you saw another house. It's hard to capture just how dense entangled the park is. There are some areas of Bear Brook that are easy to get to, a fly fishing pond, an archery station, a spiderweb of mountain biking trails.

But most of the fifteen square miles is thick and marshy. Aside from a couple of viewless hills, much of the park is flat, so you never have a good idea of where you are or where you've been. And it's wild, even for New Hampshire. Officer Montpleasure says his old police chief used to take him out into the park just for the fun of it. He used to take me to catch rattlesnakes, timber rattles. And I never believed that there were rattlesnakes in New Hampshire and sure enough he goes

Come on, we're gonna go catch some rattlesnakes for you. We are and um sure as heck. We come back with a couple timber rattlers.

What he's trying to say is this place is big. Officer Ron Montpleasure had been on the force in Allenstown for about five years, dealing mostly with drunk drivers, domestic disputes, and noise complaints. Small town cops, though. Until nineteen eighty five. I was on duty. I was the officer that received the call. Oh so you were the first one. I was the first one on the scene. Monpleger drove out to meet him at the edge of the woods.

And I met him and he and he said I I think you need to go up on the hill and take a look in the barrel. He says I I think there's there's a body up there Montpleasure remembers that the hunter looked pale. He told him to stay behind with the squad car while he headed out into the woods alone. I know in the area right A lot of people would dispose of their pets back.

thinking nothing of us. Ah, that's probably an animal. And it was hunting season. M somebody maybe had, you know, gotten a deer and Brought the caucus out. He struck out through the woods. First over the The the barrel was on the ground and it was a bag and when I opened the bag well face was the decomposed face was looking right at me. It was November nineteen eighty-five, a few months after Jesse Morgan and his friends had kicked over the barrel.

Now Officer Montpleasure was looking at that same barrel. But unlike the kids. was really inside. If you want to be gripped by another cold case, check out Blood and Water from ABC News and twenty twenty. In 2001, Leslie Prieer was found brutally murdered, her body left in the shower of her home in the wealthy suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Investigators initially set their sights on Leslie's husband as the prime suspect until bombshell DNA evidence revealed the presence of an unknown male at the scene. Leslie's killer was finally identified using the same method that solved the mystery of the Bearbrook murders, genetic genealogy. And you won't believe the twists and turns that unfolded along the way.

With extensive access to the original police tapes and interviews with the Colt case detectives who solved the crime, Blood and Water tells the story behind the cutting edge investigative techniques that finally caught the killer. And the decades long wait for justice for Leslie's daughter. Find Blood and Water wherever you get podcasts. Nu kan du ringa Albin på elgiganten företag. Nej, nej. Ton är vad gör du. Nu måste du ju ringa Albin.

På Elgigant Företag ställer vi upp vad som än händer. Det gör oss till hjälpen du vill ha, inte bara behöver. På Circule Key älskar vi att fira våra kunder. Grattis, kund nummer 143 312! Och vi har hittat det perfekta sättet. Som medlem i Circle Key Extra, blir du. för varje besök. Mordfulness på väg. Allstown police officer Ron Montpleasure found himself alone in the woods, confronted by the face of the human remains he had just discovered.

The weight of the situation began to press down on him. This is major, you know, this is this is this is this isn't, you know, somebody parking in the fire lane. This this is Ron says his training from the police academy suddenly kicked in. He knew what to do. I'm like, secure the area. He began staking out the perimeter of a crime scene. But aside from the barrel, there wasn't much else to see. Trees.

Then how exactly do you stake out a perimeter in a forest this big? How far do you stretch the police tape? Montpleasure radioed for back. He was the only patrolman on duty, so Allentstown officers must have been called in from their homes. And even then, cops turned to local residents for help. I think I was still in bed and uh I we hear a knock on the door, I get up, and it was the police. He said, Kevin, we need to deputize you to keep the press out.

As Kevin Morgan put on his boots to go help the police, his wife Anne was suddenly reminded of something their son Jesse had told her a few months earlier, about a game of hide and seek and a barrel that they'd found in the woods. It just came to me, you know, the You know, it came out like mil. He said. How long was the barrel line? How many times had people walked right by, never realizing what was after?

I just I just know that's the one. One was a woman, the other a young girl. Investigators haven't released photos of the remains, so I haven't seen them. The details they have released, though, The remains were almost entirely skeletal. They were nude. They were dismembered, apparently to fit inside the barrel, and they were wrapped in plastic tied together with electrical wires.

Their skulls revealed that they were both killed by blows to the head with a blunt instrument. Based on the level of decomposition, investigators guessed the bodies had been in the barrel from anywhere from several months to a few years. Investigators often say that in a missing person's case, the first forty eight hours are the most important. That's because if you don't find the person by then, your odds of ever finding them are really small.

In a murder case, the first priority is to identify the victim. Victims know their killers. But to know who the victim knew, you have to know who the victim is. And just like in a missing person's case, if investigators don't get this part figured out, their odds of success are really small.

New Hampshire State Police took the lead in the Bearbrook investigation, and they immediately began by trying to ID the victims. Their working theory was that, given the ages, the victims were likely a mother and daughter. So they started searching for missing persons reports that matched. Meanwhile, the Allentstown PD started canvassing the town.

Montpleasure says that's usually how crimes in Allentown were solved. With all those neighborhood barbecues, not to mention all the drinking, gossip had a way of getting around. And he had his ways of getting and out of people. We used to call it let's go fishing. You know, you'd make a motor vehicle stop and you knew somebody that may have known some information about a crime. My my line was, you know any good fishing spots?

And uh they knew what I was talking about. When we weren't actually going fishing, but you know, that meant the difference between I mean Either receiving a warning or receiving a summons or just helping me out. And there was always somebody I knew a good fishing spot. Always. Whether it was a murder or a petty theft, this is how police work went in Allentstown in nineteen eighty five.

No high tech forensics team, no criminal psychologist coming up with a suspect profile. Just a few patrol officers like Montpleasure, rattling the bushes, hoping something would fall out. Only nothing did. And that was the first thing that that threw me off is like, this is strange.'Cause everybody knew everything over there.

Meanwhile, the state police were having their own issues. They couldn't find any reports of a missing mother and daughter, not in New Hampshire, not in neighboring states, not anywhere. Whoever these people were, it seemed that no one was looking for them. As the months started to roll by, police tried lots of ways to get any sort of foothold in the case. They checked the records of every elementary school in the state for some trace of the child victim.

They examined five years of campground records at Bearbrook State Park. They sent out nationwide bulletins to law enforcement agencies with descriptions of the victims. They looked for matches to the adult victim in FBI databases of dental records. None of it worked. One corporal in the New Hampshire State Police called it the most frustrating case of his life.

In nineteen eighty six, several months after the barrel was discovered, composite sketches of the victims were made. The artists didn't have a lot to go on, just their hair and bone structure, so there was a lot of room for interpretation. But however inaccurate they may be, the sketches do manage to give the victims some measure of identity. Since no one knew what they looked like in life, seeing the drawings was kind of like seeing them for the first time.

The adult victim looks tired. Her face is long, her cheeks a little gaunt. A shadow falls across her face. Detectives estimate she was in her mid to late twenties when she died. She was between five foot two and five foot eight. She had weighty, light brown hair. The girl is drawn in profile. She has a small upturned nose. She wears a ponytail of dirty blonde hair with bangs swept across her forehead. Detectives think she was somewhere around nine or ten years old when she was murdered.

When these sketches were released, calls started to come in. Investigators thought they might have something. But none of the tips panned out. Back in Allentown, all anybody could do was speculate. Theories about the victims and who killed them were all over the place, ranging from organized crime to runaways and carnival wars. It seemed like everyone had a guess. I I can't see them not being like. You know, it it could have been someone that lived up the street from you.

I always had it in my mind that it was a trucker living a double life. I don't feel that they they took them from the park, although they could have, because it abutted that area. Pure speculation. I would say within a two hundred. Of New Hampshire I would say South. It's like irresistible for people to just start speculating. You just wanna let know. You wanted to. As the months turned to the Investigators started to run out of ideas.

It seemed their best hope was to simply wait for the k. or someone who knew them to come forward on their own. In 1987, less than two years after the barrel was found, state police decided to release the victims' bodies so they could be buried.

Officer Ron Montpleasure's chief, the one who'd shown him the rattlesnakes in the state park, organized the funeral. He told the local reporter at the time, quote, just because we don't know their names doesn't mean they don't deserve the same respect we do. Parishioners of Saint John the Baptist Church in Allensown pooled their money and paid for a gravesite at the church cemetery.

A Catholic priest and a Methodist minister led a burial ceremony where the bodies were laid to rest in a single steel casket. Just a handful of town officials and reporters were there to see it. And every time I used to patrol and go by that tombstone, you know.

The wheels kept on turning. Just was I on patrol that night when when these bodies were dumped. I and all the officers would think about that. When did this happen? How did I miss this? Or you know, I mean you start second guessing yourself. Burying the bodies seemed like the right thing to do, especially given that two years in, the case was going nowhere. But it also must have seemed like law enforcement had given up hope. I was disappointed. All of a sudden now

The next thing I know the town's getting together to put a headstone on these bodies and what the hell? These where who are these people? For years, Jesse Morgan's parents kept the sketches of the victims pinned to their fridge. Like a lot of people in Allentown, they'd always thought of their town as a good place. Now they struggle to reconcile that idea with what happened.

It was a whole different different world for us. You know, it was like two worlds. Like, you know, there was this evil world going on that we had no idea about. Good wholesome world that was with the rest of the you know, with the families and the and the children. For Jesse Morgan, who as a kid stumbled across the bodies without really knowing it. The episode changed the woods of his childhood forever. forever. I do remember going out myself, like on rainy days or whatever.

and walking around like other Out in the where we never went.

to see if I could find something. You know, like Is there more? In the year two thousand, John Cody was a detective in the state police's major crime unit. The unit handles most of the homicides in New Hampshire, and Cody had worked a long time to make it so. By that time, fifteen years had passed since the barrel in Allensown was discovered. And that mystery was just one on a long list of the state's unsolved cases. And the way those cases were handled back then was pretty informal.

Basically what used to happen is when you got assigned to the major crime unit, you would get assigned one or two or sometimes three coal cases and When I picked up the Allentown case, um I I didn't know anything about this case. Cody was expected to work on the case basically in his free time, whenever he wasn't working an active case. But Cody says that details of the Bearbrook murders just kept gnawing at him.

it's just it's the type of case where you start reading it, you know, it's sort of like getting into an engrossing book. You start to read the first chapter and you just want to go on to the second, which makes you to go on to the third, etcetera. Cody decided to get a look at the evidence in person. He went to the evidence storage area where he saw the blue barrel, the plastic, the electrical one. Clues that had been sitting idle for fifteen years.

I'm a very visual person, so I decided one day, it was actually a Friday, and I said I'm gonna go out, I'm gonna go see where this area is, try to try to get an idea of what it is, w what I'm looking at through words. Cody drove out to Allensown and walked into the woods. He brought the case file with him as a sort of map. First, he tried to find the area where Jesse Morgan and his friends had first found the barrel as kids. I was walking through that and

For quite a while, and then I kind of just widen my area a little bit. Almost like throwing a rock into a pond. You have those concentric rings that come out. Cody ventured further and further from the spot where the barrel was found, his eyes scanning the forest floor for anything that didn't belong. It was getting late in the afternoon. The sun was sinking behind the hills, and the canopy of trees overhead in Bearbrook State Park made it even darker.

Tony was thinking about how he might need to go back out to his car for his flashlight. And uh that's when I came across um the barrel. A barrel was on its side next to a small boulder in the Cody recognized it right away. He'd been looking at a barrel of the Just like it. Cody decided now was a good time to get the flashlight after all. He made his way back out to the edge of the woods, his mind racing the whole time.

You know, I I think I was trying to talk myself out of it the whole way to the car going. Yeah. When Cody returned with his flashlight, he shined it inside the room. And all I could see was some kind of plastic. You know, kind of sticks out of with the dark background. Stunning discovery. From where the first barrel was found. Inside the second room. Coming up on bare. This is what they're talking. Why wasn't that barrel found? Okay, you know, and I don't you know, to me that's

Thank everyone again for coming today. Uh, we have some new testing results that we want to share with basically. I had a chill run down my back that I've never in my life ever had before. Sometimes it's that dumb luck that you just come across something and it just opens a door for you and once you open the door it's like oh Jigsaw puzzles comes together. This episode was first released in 2018. In the years since then, I learned of an error that I need to correct.

The remains found in the first barrel were not almost entirely skeletal, as I reported. The remains were decomposing, but there were still large amounts of soft tissue. Thanks to Kim Fallon, former Chief Forensic Investigator at the New Hampshire Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, for bringing this to my attention. Bearbrook is reported and produced by me, Jason Moon. Taylor Quimby is senior producer.

Editing help from Corey Princell, Todd Bookman, Lauren Chulton, Sam Evans Brown, Brida Green, and Annie Rope. The executive producer is Erica Janik. Dan Barrick is NHPR's news director. Director of Content is Maureen McMurray. NHPR's digital director is Rebecca Lavoy. Photography and video by Ali Gutierrez.

Graphics and Interactives by Sarah Plord. Original music for this show was composed by me, Jason Moon, and Taylor Quimby. Additional music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions and Simple Minds. To see a timeline of the Bearbrook investigation from Nineteen eighty-five until twenty fifteen, go to our website, Bearbrookpodcast.org. Bearbrook is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

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