In opposite corners of the country, two families were on flip sides of the same tragic mystery. One, in Texas, had lost a wife to suicide in 2010, then learned that she was not who she claimed.
So who was she? All their digging turned up nothing.
The other, in Pennsylvania, had lost a family member, too, back in 1986. The young woman had fled abruptly, leaving no clue. Where was she? They spent 30 years hoping she was alive and safe.
Earlier this year, a former Social Security Administration (SSA) investigator, Joe Velling, became convinced the dead woman, known as Lori Ruff, and the Pennsylvania woman were one and the same.
It had been a long road to get to this point. The SSA investigates identity theft, and Lori
clearly had stolen someone else’s identity — that of a 2-year-old girl from Pierce County who had died in a fire decades earlier. An aide to a Texas congressman had asked Velling to look into the case, after being contacted by the Ruff family.
There was no indication she adopted the new identity for financial gain. So why did she do it? Velling used every tool he had, but turned up nothing. This was highly unusual.
With the support of the Ruff family, Velling turned to a reporter he knew at The Seattle Times in 2013, hoping that crowdsourcing would provide an answer. Surely somebody would recognize her from years ago.
The story, which ran on the front page and later in
publications all around the world, captured the online imagination.
For three years,
a large cadre of dogged online sleuths has been trying to solve the mystery.
Late last year, one of them called Velling with a theory: Lori Ruff came from a family back East, she said. The Cassidys. Based on the evidence she provided, Velling believed she was right. Earlier this year, he took a plane to Philadelphia to knock on the door of one member of the Cassidy family. He had no idea what he was walking into. He didn’t even know the missing woman’s name.
The Ruffs had provided him some photos, and he began laying them out on the table.
“My God,” the family member said, “that’s Kimberly!”
Kimberly McLean, who left home at 18 and never came back.
During the last three years, theories about Lori Ruff’s identity have run the gamut. Had she run away from a polygamous cult? An abusive partner? Had she committed a terrible crime? Was she in a witness-protection program? Some were even more outlandish. Did she
really take her own life?
But as Velling would soon learn, the truth was much less sensational than all of the theories.
And also, in a way, even more puzzling than the mystery itself.
For most of the online sleuths,
investigating the Lori Ruff case was a matter of poring through records of missing-persons photos looking for women who resembled Lori. There is no doubt they have spent thousands of hours doing this.
Colleen Fitzpatrick, a nuclear-physicist-turned-forensic genealogist, went about the investigation differently. As a scientist, she worked on lasers and optics for 25 years, often using beams of light as a yardstick for measuring something. “People used to ask what I did for a living,” she recalled. “I’d say I shine light on things.”
But in the early 2000s, she began writing a book about her hobby. “Forensic Genealogy” explained methodologies she had developed to solve different kinds of puzzles. Some have called it “CSI meets Roots.”
She has helped Holocaust survivors search for family members and adoptees find birthparents. She has helped estate lawyers track down heirs. In one case that made the news, she was able to find descendants of an unidentified child who died when the Titanic sank in 1912.
When Fitzpatrick read the story about Lori, she immediately thought about DNA. Lori and her husband, Blake Ruff, had a daughter in 2008 and that daughter shared Lori’s DNA. If the daughter provided a DNA sample, there was a way to subtract Blake’s DNA profile from the daughter’s, leaving what is essentially Lori’s.
The Ruff family sent a saliva sample to
23andMe and
Ancestry.com, companies that analyze DNA and provide tools to help people trace their family histories online. The family figured that the girl would one day want to know about her mother.
“We were just wanting to at least have the ability to give her the answers,” said Miles Darby, Blake’s brother-in-law.
Fitzpatrick found a number of people whose DNA matched up with Lori’s, but most of them were distant cousins. They wouldn’t be any help in identifying Lori.
Just one person came up as a first cousin: a man named Michael Cassidy. There were no other details, just a name, and there are probably thousands of people by that name in the United States. Which was the right one? Contacting him via the genealogy sites drew no response. It’s unclear if he even saw the messages.
The Ruffs, along with Fitzpatrick and Velling, had reached a dead end.
And so they waited. Fitzpatrick periodically checked back in with the sites, working other angles as they popped up. All told, she figures she spent hundreds of hours on this. There were some clues pointing to the Pennsylvania area.
But for years, there was no real breakthrough. Then, finally, the name of a third cousin came up. That was too distant of a relative to provide answers to Lori’s identity.
But she could provide some clues through her family tree.
Fitzpatrick created a family tree based on the third cousin’s ancestry, tracing her family’s roots to an Irish great-great-grandfather who was born in 1848. Then — and this is the key — she traced that family tree all the way down another branch and came to a familiar name: Michael Cassidy.
“Suddenly, I had Lori’s extended family in front of me,” Fitzpatrick realized.
With the family tree built, Fitzpatrick was able to zero in on the right Michael Cassidy, who lived in the Philadelphia area.
Between Facebook, online obituaries, public records and people-finder tools used by private investigators, she put together a picture of the Cassidy family. She gleaned from the family tree that Lori’s mother almost certainly was one of Michael’s aunts. But which one? And what was Lori’s real name? There was no way to know.
She called Velling. He was convinced she was right.
Confirmation
When Velling flew to Philadelphia in March, he decided to forgo Michael Cassidy and instead approach another family member.
But how would he introduce himself?
Hi, I don’t know you and you don’t know me, but I think you’re related to this woman — who we also don’t know the name of. Can you help?
But it had to be done. “I had a boss that said, if something lands on your lap, do something,” Velling recalled. “I had news. Bad or good, I had it. And it had to get relayed.”
When he arrived at the relative’s workplace, he had no identification showing he was a federal investigator. He was just a retired government employee, after all. He wore a suit, kept a nonthreatening demeanor and hoped for the best.
“Do you have a moment for me to tell you a story?” he remembers saying to the woman before launching into the tale of Lori and the DNA and the great-great grandfather.
But the story is so convoluted, it wasn’t really getting him anywhere. Then he pulled out the photos, laying them on the table one-by-one. Finally, he got to Lori’s most recent driver’s-license picture, taken when she was around 40. That’s when it clicked. “My God, that’s Kimberly!”
“The hair on the back of my neck stood up when I realized she knew who this person was,” Velling recalls. He had fielded countless emails from well-meaning people who thought they had an answer. They were contacting him long after The Seattle Times published Lori’s story. Now, he knew the answer.
The next day, Velling spoke with the large extended family, answering as many of their questions as he could. “They were angst-ridden,” he said. One thing was certain: it was definitely Kimberly.
out: I was really hoping she was involved in some twisted murder plot and the mafia was coming for her or something.
