Nearly three years after a heartbroken Texas man buried his wife and the mother of his little girl, he still doesn't know exactly who she was.
Such is the mystery of Lori Erica Ruff, a woman who managed to fool everyone, including federal and private investigators, about her true identity before committing suicide, taking her twisted secrets to the grave.
To her husband, the tall, slender brunette was Lori Kennedy, a woman born in Arizona who had a rough childhood and didn't want to discuss her past. To anyone else who knew her before, she was Becky Sue Turner.
Both names are false.
"She created a false identity for the sole purpose of getting lost in America," stumped Social Security investigator Joseph Velling, who has been painstakingly investigating her case for the last two years
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"It must have been for some horrific reason ... either she was running away from a crime or an abusive family or relationship," he said.
There was always something off about her. That much is known by her surviving in-laws, but everything before she moved to Dallas and married Jon Blakely "Blake" Ruff, is fabricated, with her history spanning at least four other states.
Authorities say it all started in May 1988.
An unknown woman in Bakersfield, Calif., requested the birth certificate of 2-year-old Becky Sue Turner, a girl who died in a house fire in Fife, Wash., in 1971.
The request wasn't unusual at the time and was granted
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But one month later, this woman used it to obtain a valid Idaho identification card bearing her photo with the girl's name. The girl's parents would later tell investigators that they didn't know this woman who stole their daughter's identity when presented with her photo.
Weeks later, the woman's bizarre identity trail continued to Dallas, where she legally changed her name to Lori Erica Kennedy and applied for a new Social Security number.
Back then, as with the birth certificate record, it was far easier to apply for a Social Security number than it is today, say detectives.
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"Once I have that name change and the Social Security number, I'm really a whole new person," Velling told
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of her transformation.
She'd use this number to apply for a Texas driver's license in 1989, listing herself as 19, an age that will perhaps now forever be disputed.
She went on to attend a community college after obtaining her GED, which did not require high school transcripts, and graduated with a business administration degree from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1997.
It was several years later, at the Northwest Bible Church in Dallas, that she met Blake Ruff, describing herself as an only child to parents who had died.
She didn't want to talk anymore about her past. She said she had burned all of her old family photos to escape it, and Blake trusted her and didn't ask.
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As part of a tight-knit family well-established in the area, Blake's mother found it difficult getting to know this woman entering her son's life, because Lori flat out refused to answer personal questions, sometimes aggressively so.
When her future mother-in-law wanted to announce their wedding in the paper, Lori refused the offer, saying it simply wasn't her style.
"She said, 'We don't do things like that,'" Blake's mother, Nancy Ruff,
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The pair instead ran off and was married in a small church outside Dallas in January 2004 with only the preacher in attendance.
But it was far from a happy ending, as the Ruffs’ relationship with Lori grew harder and harder to manage.
After several tries at having a baby, including a few miscarriages, the couple finally gave birth to a daughter through in vitro fertilization. Her difficulty with child bearing has caused the Ruffs to suspect she was older than she claimed.
She was extremely protective of her baby, refusing even to let her mother-in-law have time alone with her.
"This is grandbaby number nine!" Nancy Ruff said, upset with the odd behavior.
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Tensions became stronger, and Lori eventually did not want their daughter visiting her husband's parents at all. She complained about them incessantly, Blake said.
In the summer of 2010, Blake moved out of the house and into his parents’. Soon after, he filed for divorce after unsuccessfully undergoing marriage counseling.
Lori couldn't take it.
She began sending threatening emails to the Ruff family. She made it as difficult as possible to exchange custody of her daughter,
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The Ruffs even noticed one day that one of their house keys was missing, which led them to apply for a cease-and-desist order against her with a judge.
Velling believes it was the challenge of living a life of secrets and distrust that ultimately smothered her, leading to her startling suicide in the months after.
On the morning of Christmas Eve in 2010, Blake's father found her car idling in their driveway. Inside, he found her dead from a self-inflicted bullet wound.
With her, authorities say, was an 11-page letter addressed to "my wonderful husband," as well as one to her daughter to be opened when she turned 18.
"These were ramblings from a clearly disturbed person," the police report
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read.
According to her obituary, Lori was "born July 18, 1969, she lived in Scottsdale, Ariz., and was a member of Cornerstone Baptist Church of Trenton." Her funeral was held on Jan. 3, 2011, with an outpouring of support seen throughout the community.
Blake was beyond distraught, according to his family, but by then the rest of them were fueled and determined to find out who this woman really was.
After the funeral, Blake's brother Miles Darby and a few other family members set out to her home in Leonard with the help of authorities to find any clues she may have left behind.
Though surprised by what they ended up finding, they say they weren't exactly caught off guard.
Inside a bedroom closet, in a strongbox Blake had always been forbidden to touch by his wife, they uncovered her long-kept secrets.
Out poured her Idaho ID reading Becky Sue Turner, along with a copy of the deceased child's birth certificate and scraps of paper, one containing the name of an attorney and the words "402 months."
It still clearly didn't add up to anyone.
With the help of a private investigator, the family uncovered newspaper headlines from 1971 reporting the 2-year-old girl's death
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But the rest of the clues led to dead ends. The attorney named on the paper, a man in California, said he didn't know anything about this mystery woman.
A deeper hunt revealed a mail drop under her name in Boulder City, Nev., that forwarded her mail to Dallas.
Authorities ran her face in every facial recognition database known. Her fingerprints were sent to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Nothing came up.
"Can you tell how frustrating this is?"
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Lori’s success at being evasive, long before the Internet, leads him to believe she had help, possibly by a hired "identity broker."
"This was very sophisticated," Velling
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The Ruffs say they too are at their wits’ ends over her mystery, unable to tell her little girl who her mother was.
Possibly even worse they say is what they may one day find about her.
Whom or what was she running from? Was it something she had done?
Veling says he doesn't plan to stop investigating her mystery and hopes the public will recognize her photos and be able to help.
As far as anyone knows today, Lori Erica Ruff, or Jane Doe to authorities, lived a mysterious life, jumping state to state as different people before she died at the age of 41 in Longview, Texas.
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