Alright, picture this. You’re scrolling through old family photos one day, maybe after a relative has passed away. You stumble across a picture you’ve never seen before. It’s someone who looks vaguely familiar, maybe a distant cousin you never met. You ask around, but nobody seems to know who this person is. They’re just… there, a ghost in your family history. That unsettling feeling, that itch of the unknown? Multiply it by a thousand, and you might start to understand the strange and ultimately tragic story of Lori Erica Ruff.
This isn’t your typical missing person case. This isn’t about someone who walked out the door one day and never came back. This is about someone who seemingly materialized out of thin air, lived a life shrouded in secrecy, and then vanished again, leaving behind a trail of unanswered questions that would take decades to even begin to unravel.
Our story begins in Wylie, Texas, in 2010. A woman named Lori Erica Ruff took her own life. A devastating event, to be sure. But it was in the aftermath, as her husband Blake began the difficult process of sorting through her belongings, that the true strangeness of Lori’s life started to come to light.
Imagine going through your deceased wife’s personal effects, expecting to find the usual things: old letters, maybe a childhood diary, photographs with family and friends. Instead, Blake found a locked strongbox. He didn’t know the combination, and Lori had never mentioned it. This already raises a flag, right? What secrets could be so important that they needed to be locked away, even from your spouse?
After Lori’s death, Blake had the box drilled open. Inside, he found a jumble of documents, none of which made any sense in the context of the life he thought he knew. There was a birth certificate for a “Becky Sue Turner,” born in 1968 in Idaho. There was an identification card from the state of Nevada, also in the name of Becky Sue Turner. But Lori had always been Lori Erica Ruff, born in 1973. These documents were like pieces of a puzzle that didn’t fit the picture.
As Blake dug deeper, the inconsistencies multiplied. There was a marriage certificate for Becky Sue Turner and a man named Garry Lynn Taylor in 1988. Who were these people? Lori had never mentioned a previous marriage. This wasn’t just a simple oversight; this was a whole other identity that his wife had seemingly lived.
Think about the confusion, the growing unease Blake must have felt. The woman he loved, the woman he shared his life with, was in many ways a complete stranger. Her past was a locked book, and the few pages he had glimpsed only raised more questions.
Blake did what anyone would do: he tried to find out who Becky Sue Turner was. But the deeper he looked, the more the story twisted. It turned out that the real Becky Sue Turner was a toddler who had died in a house fire in 1971. Lori Erica Ruff had somehow stolen the identity of a deceased child.
This is where the story takes a truly bizarre turn. Why would someone take the identity of a dead person? What were they trying to hide from? What kind of life were they running from?
Blake hired a private investigator, a man named Colleen Fitzpatrick, who specializes in what’s called “forensic genealogy” – using DNA and public records to solve mysteries. Fitzpatrick began to painstakingly piece together the fragments of Lori’s life, trying to trace her steps back before she became Lori Erica Ruff.
The trail was ice cold. It was as if Lori had simply appeared in 1988 when she legally changed her name to Lori Erica Ruff. There were no records of her before that. No birth certificate under that name, no school records, no childhood photographs. It was like she had been dropped onto the planet fully formed, with a fabricated past.
Imagine the frustration of trying to find someone who seemingly didn’t exist. It was like chasing a ghost, a shadow with no origin. Fitzpatrick and her team scoured databases, pored over old newspaper archives, and tried every possible lead, but they kept hitting dead ends.
Years went by, and the mystery of Lori Erica Ruff deepened. Her story became a whispered tale in online forums and true crime circles. Who was this woman who had so meticulously erased her past? Was she a criminal on the run? A witness in hiding? Or was there something else, something even stranger, at play?
Then, after years of relentless searching, a breakthrough. Using advanced genealogical techniques and DNA analysis, Colleen Fitzpatrick and her team finally found a link. A distant relative of Lori’s was identified through a DNA sample submitted to a public database.
The connection led them to a family in Pennsylvania. The family had a daughter who had run away from home in 1986. Her name was Kimberly McLean.
Think about that moment of discovery. After years of searching for a ghost, a name emerged. Kimberly McLean. Could this be Lori Erica Ruff? Could the woman who had lived under a stolen identity and then vanished again actually be someone with a family, a past that had simply been buried?
The timeline matched. Kimberly McLean had run away at the age of 18, around the same time Lori Erica Ruff would have been about that age. And when they looked at old photographs of Kimberly, the resemblance, though aged by time and circumstance, was undeniable.
The pieces started to fall into place, though the full picture remained hazy. Why did Kimberly McLean run away? Why did she steal the identity of a deceased child? What happened to her in the years between running away and reappearing as Lori Erica Ruff?
The answers to those questions remain largely unknown. Kimberly McLean, as Lori Erica Ruff, lived a seemingly normal life. She got married, had a job, and by all accounts, was a loving wife. But beneath the surface, she carried a secret, a past she refused to share.
It’s speculated that perhaps Kimberly ran away due to some kind of family conflict or personal trauma. Stealing the identity of a deceased child might have seemed like a way to completely disappear, to create a new life with no ties to her past.
Think about the desperation someone must feel to completely sever all connections to their former life, to become someone else entirely. It speaks to a deep level of pain or fear.
The discovery of Kimberly McLean’s true identity brought a sense of closure to the genealogical mystery. The woman who was no one finally had a name, a family who had likely mourned her loss for years. But it also opened up a new set of questions, a deeper layer of sadness.
What were the years in between like for Kimberly? Did she ever regret her decision? Did she ever want to reach out to her family? We may never know.
The story of Lori Erica Ruff, or Kimberly McLean, is a haunting reminder that not everyone who disappears wants to be found. It’s a look into the extreme measures some people will take to escape their past and the profound impact such choices can have on themselves and their families.
It leaves you with a lingering sense of unease, that feeling that beneath the surface of the ordinary, there can be hidden stories, untold secrets, and lives lived in the shadows. The woman who was no one finally had a name, but the reasons behind her carefully constructed anonymity remain a chilling enigma. And sometimes, the questions that remain unanswered are the ones that stay with you the longest.
