A librarian with a passion for Agatha Christie has solved a real-life murder case from 1985.

Rebekah Heath, 33, became ‘obsessed’ with trying to find the identities of a woman and three young girls, whose dismembered bodies were found in steel barrels in Bear Brook State Park, New Hampshire, the US.

Police were unable to identify the victims, but had a breakthrough in July 2017, when they discovered drifter Terry Rasmussen was behind the murders through DNA testing.

Officers also found he was the father of one of the three unidentified children.

Rebekah ramped up her research she began scouring genealogy and missing person sites, as well as looking on lost family members message boards.

She told People.com: ‘I’ve always had a soft spot for Jane Doe’s. I wanted to give a voice where there was no voice.’

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In November 2017, she found a series of messages on an ancestry website about a missing woman, Marlyse Honeychurch, and her daughter Sarah McWaters.

From there, she tried to reach out to numerous Facebook groups, but didn’t manage to get a response.

It wasn’t until a year later that she managed to contact the relatives of Ms Honeychurch, having heard about the murders again on a podcast.

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Rebekah said that her stomach ‘just dropped’ when she was told that the victim was last seen with Rasmussen in 1978, when the pair were dating.

She then contacted San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department with the information, telling them: ‘I am almost 100 percent confident that this is the answer to your case.’

DNA testing confirmed that three of the bodies were Ms Honeychurch, her daughter Sarah and her other daughter Marie Elizabeth Vaughn.

Rasmussen had already been arrested in 2002 for murdering and dismembering his wife, Eunsoon Jun, and was sentenced to life in prison the year after.

He died in prison in 2010, and was never charged with murdering Ms Honeychurch and the children.

But Rebekah’s detective work has not ended there, as she is now determined to identify Rasmussen’s unnamed daughter.

She said: ‘I want to give her her identity. She shouldn’t be associated just with him.’