Criminology - Lori Erica Ruff

Episode Date: November 21, 2021

Lori Erica Ruff was a secretive person. She was very private and didn't open to people about her past. In 2010, after she took her own life, secrets were revealed and the truth about her past began to unravel. But, it didn't happen easily and it took the hard work of a number of people and a little bit of luck to learn the truth. Join Mike and Morf as they discuss the mysterious Lori Erica Ruff. After her death, Lori's husband found a lockbox with papers inside that shed light on his wife's past. It took hard work on the part of investigators and some unique forensic genealogy for the truth to come out. Lori definitely was not who she portrayed herself to be, so who was she? And, why had she changed her identity and hid her past from those closest to her? You can help support the show at patreon.com/criminology An Emash Digital production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised. Everyone and welcome to episode 184 of the Criminology Podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson. And this is Mike Morford. Mr. Mike Morford, what's going on with you, buddy? Not too much, a little bit under the weather, but I don't know what it is since I turned 50. I'm sort of catching everything that comes along, but I'm going to try and be a trooper and get through this episode and hopefully my voice holds up.

Yeah, the voice is kind of important, right, for a podcast. So hopefully we can get through it. We had no new Patreon shoutouts this week. But we can talk about CrimeCon a little bit. It's getting closer. I don't know about you, Morph, but I'm getting excited. I think I said I've never been to Vegas. So that's one thing.

But then CrimeCon in Vegas just adds an entirely different level to it. Yeah, I think a lot of people are really excited about. I know you and I are, and it seems like anything. thing you do in Vegas just seems like it's going to be really big. So I'm excited. Yeah. So if you're thinking about attending, don't wait, because it definitely is going to sell out. It's going to be the biggest crime con yet. CrimeCon Vegas is April 29th to May 1st, 2022. And we want to see you there. But as Mike just mentioned, it is going to sell out. So don't wait. Head over to crimecon.com to get your badges.

And don't forget to use our promo code criminology to check out to save 10% on your standard crime con badges. Morph, all of that out of the way. It's time to jump into this episode. And in this one, we're talking about Lori Erica Ruff. And we're also going to be talking about ghosting. I think when a lot of us hear the term ghosting, I think we think of someone ending a personal relationship with someone by basically very suddenly and without explanation,

withdrawing from all communication with that person, meaning, the person that they knew was there one day and basically gone the next. They never said goodbye. But ghosting is also referred to as a type of identity theft where someone picks the identity of someone who is deceased in order to steal, commit fraud, or for other types of financial gain. There have been a lot of fairly recent cases in the news of fugitives being discovered with new identities, having lived decades on the run. 77-year-old Douglas Bennett was found in Tampa, Florida,

four decades after he had fled a conviction in Connecticut for rape. 72-year-old Howard D. Farley Jr. was found in Ocala, Florida, almost four decades after fleeing a drug-related conspiracy charge in Nebraska. James Thompson was receiving someone else's benefits after living under their name for 34 years in Denver, Colorado. He was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison for misusing a social security number. While a lot of these goasters are simply criminals avoiding the law, not all of them are running from a criminal history. Some people just don't want to be found.

They're motivated by wanting a new life along with privacy and anonymity. On December 24, 2010, Lori Erica Ruff drove to the home of her in-laws in Longview, Texas, and shot herself, taking her own life inside her black Chevy Tahoe. when Lori's estranged husband John Blakely Ruff, who went by Blake, went outside to get the morning paper. He saw the SUV idling in his parents' driveway, and he called the police. There were two letters inside the car with Lori. One was for her daughter, Jessica, with instructions for it to be open when she turned 18. And the other was for Blake, addressed to my wonderful husband. This letter was 11 pages long.

The Ruff's opened the letters but found that they were basically ramblings from a clearly disturbed person. At this point, Blake and his parents went to Lurie's home in Leonard, Texas, to try and figure out what they could about her. Despite Blake being married to Lori, the Ruff family didn't know much about her. She was very secretive and private, and she wasn't shy about telling anyone who inquired about her past that it was none of their business. Lori claimed that she was the only child of a failed stockbroker and that both of her parents had died. She loved Cuban food and followed a vegetarian diet. She was religious. In fact, Lori and Blake had met at a Bible church in Dallas, Texas in 2003.

Although Lori and Blake hit it off, it's been reported that Blake's family was suspicious of her past when Lori had to go to the bathroom. Instead of leaving young Jessica with Blake's family for a few minutes. minutes, Lori would take her into the bathroom with her. Blake's mother recalled her overprotective instincts, as completely unwarranted, later telling the New York Times, this is grandbaby number nine. We're all baby people. Blake's family told the Dallas Morning News that Lori would sneak off for a long nap during visits and not join the rest of the women gathered in the kitchen to talk and cook.

Lori simply never fit in with the ruffs and was never coming. around them for whatever reason, though she was comfortable living with Blake. Eventually, things between Lori and Blake's family became so stressed that she told him that he needed to cut off ties with his family. Blake's family in return told him that he should leave Lori. It was obviously an ugly situation. And more if I don't think this is ever easy. You know, when you have two people who are in a relationship and one of those individuals doesn't get along with the other person's family. And obviously that's the case here to the point where, you know,

Lori was saying to Blake, hey, you have to cut ties with your family. Well, who wants to cut ties with their family? That's a tough thing to do. Yeah, I think a lot of times in-law situations, interactions between a son-law or a daughter-in-law and their in-laws, it's pretty common that there can be some stressors there, There are some things that they don't see to eye to eye on. I don't think that's very uncommon.

But when it gets to the point where a spouse is telling that person that they need to cut off contact, that seems like something that's beyond repair and is going to just lead to bigger problems. Blake and Lori went to marriage counseling, which Blake's brother David has been said to have attended with them. But he apparently did most of the talking, and it didn't help. Blake wound up moving back into his parents' home in Longview before filing for divorce from Lori. After this, Lori, who was living two hours away in Leonard with Jessica, became erratic, and would cause scenes during custody exchanges. She sent the russ harassing emails, and at one point, even stole a key to their house. When Blake and his family arrived at Lori's home, following her suicide, one neighbor of Lurie's told them that they thought that Lori and Jessica both,

looked very thin and that Lori had been acting frantic and was very clearly going through something. The house was messy. Jessica's bed was dirty. Dishes and laundry piled up. And there were multiple trash bags full of shredded paper. There were pages of written notes in the home, some that had been written over. It was like she couldn't stop writing and had to keep going even when she ran out of room on a page. It was a very strange scene. So, I don't think there's any doubt. People saw something going on with Lori. I mean, if you break down some of the things that people said, both she and Jessica were looking thin. Lori was acting frantic. And then, you know, just the house messy, things piled up. But then when you really kind of go into this writing, right, pages of

written notes, some that had been written. over multiple times. You really have to wonder what was going on. Was this simply, you know, something that resulted from the breakup with Blake or was there more to it? Was Lori going through some type of mental illness or something like that, you know, really raises those types of questions. Yeah.

And I wonder if it could be maybe a combination of things. She's going through a mental illness or something to break. down on top of the marriage ending and that sort of culminated in something that was just too tough for her to get through, which is why she ultimately decided to take her own life. On January 1st, 2011, just a week after Lori died, Blake and his family found a lockbox that Blake had never seen before because the Lori had told him not to look in certain areas of the home, and he always listened. Now, without Lori around to stop them, the lockbox labeled crafts was pried open.

And this is how Blake learned that Lori was not who she said she was. The box had a legal document from 1988, proving that Lori had changed her name. Becky Sue Turner had changed her name to Lori Erica Kennedy in 1988. Taking advantage of the fact that a neighbor was a private investigator, Blake was able to find out more details about his wife, Lori, aka Becky Sue, and discovered something that they never expected. Becky Sue Turner had died in 1971 in Washington State. Becky, just two years old, and her sister's three-year-old Kay, an eight-year-old Anne-Marie had all died in a house fire from smoke inhalation after becoming trapped in an upstairs bedroom. Only their four-year-old

brother Terry was able to be rescued by their parents. News of their deaths was published in multiple newspapers at the time, including the Spokane Chronicle and the Spokesman Review to Spokane, Washington area newspapers. Becky Sue Turner's grave is in Woodbine Cemetery in Washington, specifically in an area of the cemetery called Babyland. A Babyland Cemetery is one for stillbirths, infants, and young children who have died. This would make it easy for someone to find possible identities to steal without having to spend too long in a cemetery or visit every grave. The three Turner sisters, having been buried next to each other with the same year listed on their headstones, would give away that something had happened to the family that could possibly

be in the newspaper somewhere, perhaps nearby in a local library archive. Blake now knew that his wife Lori had stolen a new identity for herself. It seems like choosing Becky Sue's identity to steal was no accident. Choosing the identity of a child meant that there was no large gap in employment or tax history to raise any suspicion. Most people listening today were probably issued a Social Security number when they were born. But in the past, you would only receive one after you started working and needed to pay taxes. There were three female Turner children that could have been chosen, but Becky's identity was unique. Not only had she been born in California and died in Washington,

but her name on her birth certificate was spelled with a Y, and on her death certificate with an IE. On paper, a Becky Sue with a Y had been born in California, and a Becky Sue with an IE had died in Washington. Back then, databases from different states were rarely cross-referenced, and if they were, there wasn't an exact match for Becky Sue with a Y. Her birth date was also off by a few days on her death certificate. If anyone did look at the two documents, they saw her. still weren't a match. Furthermore, Becky Sue was the only one of the three girls who was not born in Washington. This may explain why Anne-Marie or Kay Turner weren't chosen as identities to steal,

but this would take a great deal of research to know and an even bigger amount of luck to have randomly selected the hardest identity to track. Lurie had either put a lot of effort or was skilled in planning all of this, or perhaps she used an identity broker, someone who's a professional and identity theft to help recover her tracks. Tracing her steps, it only took whoever Lori used to be, two months to become a different person. First in late May, 1988. She requested a copy of Becky Sue Turner's birth certificate from Bakersfield, California,

where Becky was born at Kern County General Hospital. Then, with a copy of Becky Sue's birth certificate, she went to Boise, Idaho and applied for a state ID card on June 16. She claimed at the time that she was 18 years old. It's unknown whether Lori used her own actual name between 1986 and 1988, or if she used other aliases that just have not been linked to her or that have been forgotten to time. On July 5th, 1988, the newly named Becky Sue Turner had her name changed in Dallas, Texas. She officially became Lori Erica Kennedy. On July 12th, she requested a social security number under the name Lori Kennedy. And on July 13th, she got her Texas state ID card. On April 18, 1989,

Lori received her driver's license with her age listed as 19. Almost a year later, on March 18, 19th, 90. Lurie applied for United States passport. Lurie also obtained her GED and later enrolled at Dallas County Community College on October 1st. So morph, you know, one of the things that really jumps out at me here is how quickly everything kind of happened. You know, in May she gets a copy of the birth certificate. The very next month, she applies for a state ID card in that name, Becky Sue Turner, the very next month, she changed her name from Becky Sue Turner to Lori Erica Kennedy. And within two days, you know, she requested a social security number under that name and got her Texas state ID. It all happened very, very quickly.

Yeah, I think back then compared to now, we live in the computerized, digital age. Things are kept on record. And we also have stuff to root out terrorists. and things like that. So I think for someone to try and get false identities, it seems like it was much easier back then than it would be if she tried to do that now, for example. Yeah, it definitely happens today, right? Identity theft is a real thing.

I think it happens in a much different way than how she did it back in the 1980s. And it makes you wonder how many people have done that over the years before everything became so tracked and hard to do this. For years, things were quiet for Lori Kennedy. It seems as though she kept a pretty low profile. She stayed busy studying and working.

On February 21, 1997, she filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, and on December 13th of that same year, she graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington with a degree in business administration. There's really not anything significant in her timeline until January 5th, 2004, when she married John Blakely, Blake Ruff, in Denton County, Texas. She then changed her name to Lori Erica Ruff and would later be issued a Texas driver's license under that name. After years of struggling to conceive, including doctors' visits and multiple miscarriages,

Lori and Blake finally had Jessica on September 15, 2008. She had told doctors in 2005 that she was 35 years old, which could help explain some of the fertility issues that she had, and she placed her age at 38 years old when she had Jessica. In 2010, not long before her death, Lori Ruff attended multiple meetings and banquets for the Texas businesswomen of Bonham, in Fannin counties, and it seemed, at least on the surface, as if things were going pretty well for her, despite the breakup of her marriage.

It wasn't just Lori's husband, Blake, that was trying to figure out who his wife really was. On September 1st, 2011, the Social Security Administration opened an investigation into the true identity of Lori Erica Kennedy Ruff. Lori's computers were taken into evidence, which were provided without argument from the rough family, and they were searched. But there was no evidence at all of who Lurie used to be found on those devices. Although both Blake and the IRS weren't having any luck finding out who Lori really was, the case began to make the rounds online, with a 2013 Seattle Times article bringing Lori's case to the attention of many, including one forensic genealogist named

Colleen Fitzpatrick. Many listeners may recognize Colleen's name. If you follow true crime, or if you've listened to previous episodes of criminology, we've talked about her. And she was our guest in season four. Colleen Fitzpatrick is the founder of Identifiers International, co-founder of the DNA Doe Project. And according to her biography on the website of the Association of Professional Genealogists, she is widely recognized as the founder of modern forensic genealogy. The DNA Doe Project has helped in the identification of almost 50 previously unidentified victims of crime, including the Sumter County Does, featured on episode 145 of criminology. She also helped solve the mystery of Joseph Newton Chandler, who lived and died under an assumed

identity in Ohio before his true name, Robert Ivan Nichols, was discovered. Colleen Fitzpatrick has recently talked about trying to identify. the Somerton man, a case that's pretty popular in online true crime communities. This case is also known as the Tamam Shud case. In 1948, an unidentified man was found dead on Somerton Park Beach, near Adelaide, South Australia. This originates from a scrap of paper found hidden in his pants pocket. It was torn from the last page of a copy of the Rubiat of Omar Khayim.

The scrap of paper held the phrase, Tamam Shud, Persian for a word. it is ended. His body was exhumed on March 19, 2021, and answers will hopefully come soon. True crime enthusiasts are eagerly awaiting the results. And meanwhile, Colleen Fitzpatrick and the DNA Doe Project continue to work on new cases of unidentified Doze. Needless to say, Colleen's resume when it comes to some high-profile cases, is impeccable. And having her digging into Lori's true identity would only help to find answers. Looking for clues in Lori's medical. records. Investigators noticed that she had surgery for breast implants in 1991, and they knew that they would have serial numbers, which could lead to a doctor who had the records containing Lori's

real name. However, Lori was cremated, and she got the implants after she had changed her name to Lori. So the doctor wouldn't have her real name, even if they could get to the serial number on the implants, Lori also was said to have taken medications for either Tourette syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or ADHD. But during the research, the exact cause for the medication has never been pinned down. Investigators next tracked down Becky's Hsu-Turner's family to see if they knew who Lori was, since she apparently knew that Becky's identity wasn't being used anymore. And knowing the family would certainly make her privy to that information.

but none of the Turner's recognized Lori called Jane Doe by investigators. After striking out with Becky Sue Turner's family, investigators next tried to locate former friends and associates of Lurys. One person who claimed to have known Lori in the past said that in the 1990s, she was working in a gentleman's club as a dancer somewhere in the Dallas area. Still for police, there were no clues to Lori's identity before 1988. By 1990, the year before she had a breast augmentation, she was suffering from bulimia, according to her available records, Lori spoke with no discernible accent, which mostly ruled out places she likely was not from, you know, New York, Boston, the southern states, for example, but really didn't help anyone figure out where she might have actually been from.

On February 9th, 2012, Lori Ruff was listed on NamUs, the federal database for missing and unidentified persons. From there, investigators went back to the clues, found in Lori's lockbox. Some of the clues in that lockbox included a paper with notes written all over it. There are notes like records in law office near the name of Ben Perkins Jr. Police located and spoke within Englewood, California attorney named Ben Perkins Jr. Before he died in February 2013, he claimed to have no knowledge of Lori Kennedy, which some have speculated is due to attorney-client privilege, but if he was covering for her, we'll never know.

Ben Perkins Jr. was disbarred in 1988, the same year that Becky Sue became Lori for some shading dealings in bankruptcy cases. In the suburbs of D.C., a woman fails to show up for work and is found brutally murdered. I wonder what's emergency. We just walked in the door, and there's blood in the foyer. For the next two decades, the case remained unsolved until new technology allowed investigators to do what had once been impossible. A new series from ABC Audio in 2020, blood and water.

Listen now. wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So we're back from the break and I'm on my own. You know, Morp was under the weather. I'm sure everybody heard that his voice was struggling. So what we thought was that we would wait a day and try to record the rest of the episode. Well, we did that.

And wouldn't you know it, his voice got even worse. So we made the decision that I would do the rest of the episode on my own. So we were talking about Lori's lockbox and some of the clues that were found in it. Further down the page in the lockbox document was the name Jennifer Perkins. And slightly underneath that, but in much larger writing, was Jackson H. Police learned that one woman named Jennifer Perkins had been a practicing lawyer in Texas since 1986. Also of interest was that Ben Perkins Jr. was originally from Mississippi, where there's a Jackson hole. So, you know, I think from the standpoint of investigators, they were trying to figure

all of this out, questioning whether Jennifer and Ben were somehow related. But there was no Jennifer listed in his obituary. And it's not clear if investigators ever connected to two Perkins to each other. There were a few numbers written down on this paper as well. Some with area codes, some without. The 818 area code was written down. And that area code was not entered into service until January 7th, 1984. So the note was probably written sometime after that date. Another three-digit area code in a phone number was 213. Investigators learned that the number was from the Los Angeles area and that it had been since 1994 listed in a directory titled Who's Who and Music Video Production. The number was accompanied by a note that read These Eyes in Capital Letters.

The company associated with that number was called Visages, which is followed by the number nine, denoting that they had produced nine music videos that year alone. Oddly enough, there was a Visages. RPS Inc. at the same number in the 323 area code at one time. 602 Tucson written down likely refers to an Arizona area code. 602 was in use in Arizona until 1995. On August 20, 1987, a memorandum from Malin Oil Company, one of the letters listed as CNA had been listed as belonging to the oil company,

but the number had been reassigned. So when you put all of this together, what it does is it dates Lori Scribbles somewhere between the time frames of January, 1984, to about August of 1987. Two of the numbers on the page were valid numbers if you used a Pennsylvania area code. The number with library written next to it

matches a Pennsylvania library and the number with these eyes belonged to an Asian restaurant, also in Pennsylvania. And really, it was tracking these numbers and what role they played in Lori's background that proved to be, you know, really a kind of a rabbit hole. But there's no doubt that investigators spent a lot of time because there was a lot of information here. I mentioned that it was a rabbit hole. you often see that in especially unsolved cases, but just think about the number of hours that went into trying to track down all of this information. Also on the page of notes in the lockbox was the name Kathleen Young with a few things that are hard to read written next to it. They had been traced over multiple times.

The writing was also sloppy and very small. by 2014, Post began to surface about Lori's case online and true crime forums like Reddit and web slews. And you had a number of amateur slews who tried to contact Kathy Young

from Los Angeles. Some were successful. Kathy said that she didn't know Lori. But the fact that she had written not only her name, but her given name to Kathy was extremely strange. At one point, Kathy

Young was listed as a makeup artist and contact for a company called Visages Style LA. Under these eyes note, it read shoot. So, you know, investigators started to wonder, was Lori a model? Was she a photographer? Lori had very long hands. She was tall, about 5 foot 10. And a person who investigators interviewed had said that Lori claimed to have been a hand model in the past.

So maybe there was proof out there somewhere of who she had been in the past. Maybe a photographer out there still knew her name. Or if she was a photographer, maybe she had once given out old business cards with her real name on them. But the journey to find the truth was not an easy one. Meanwhile, Colleen Fitzpatrick was going to try something that she was very confident in, forensic genealogy. she obtained DNA from Blake Ruff and from his and Lori's daughter Jessica and she was able to

basically subtract Blake's DNA from his daughter's DNA to see what the DNA of Lori's family line would look like. By December 2015, Colleen knew that Lori was a member of the Cassidy family in Philadelphia. Now Cassidy is a fairly common last name, but Colleen was able to to narrow it down to one specific family. And I know we've talked about this before, but the science of forensic genealogy, to me is just fascinating. You know, we've talked in cases about the authorities using it

to identify a suspect's family line and then work from there to, you know, identify the suspect. Here we have a situation where you have a father and a daughter you have their DNA and you're using the science to subtract the father's DNA from the daughters to see what's left. And then using that to kind of zero in on the mother. I mean, to me, this is just fascinating work. And we've already mentioned it, right? Colleen Fitzpatrick is and kind of has been at the forefront of this technology. In March 2016, Investigator Joe Velling, who had been asked to look into the case by an aid to a Texas congressman flew to Philadelphia.

To meet with the Cassidy family that Colleen identified, the family confirmed that Lori Ruff was their missing blood relative Kimberly McLean. They provided DNA samples to be compared to Lurys and they matched. On September 19, 2016, Lori Ruff's name was removed from the federal database for missing and unidentified persons, Lori Erica Kennedy, aka Becky Sue Turner, was determined to actually be Kimberly McLean.

Kimberly grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia with her sister, her mother, Diane, and her stepfather. Her stepfather was a volunteer firefighter and a carpenter, and Deanne stayed at home to care for the children. Lori's obituary released by her husband stated that his wife, Lori, was born July, 18th, 1969, and lived in Scottsdale, Arizona, before moving to Dallas in 1987. In reality, Kimberly Maria McLean was born on October 16th, 1968 in Pennsylvania.

She left home in 1986 at the age of 18 and moved to King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, almost half an hour west. Eventually, she told her family. She was really leaving to start a new life and warned. them not to try and find her. Today, Kimberly and Blake's daughter, Jessica, has a relationship with the Cassidy family. It seems as though she has a thriving relationship with the people, it seems like her mother spent her adult life running from, or at the very least going to great lengths to avoid. I think one of the big mysteries in this case is that we still don't know

exactly why Kimberly felt the need to get away. After her parents divorced, her mother, remarried and the family moved to Wincoat, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, where Kimberly McLean attended Bishop McDevitt High School. According to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Kimberly's family remembers that she never really adjusted to the new house and the divorce. Maybe she simply didn't like the new rules, the new school, and being old enough to leave, maybe she just chose to do so. Her cousin Michael Cassidy told the Gazette, for the life of me, we can't figure why. He remembers Kimberly's childhood home, had a large handmade playhouse in the backyard, and that her family went on regular

vacations, and they ate dinner together each night. It was actually Michael's DNA match that led to Kimberly being identified. Although Kimberly McLean did steal Becky Sue Turner's identity, there's really no evidence that she used it for anything nefarious. She made sure to quickly change her name again, and it appears that she made a name up that time from scratch before she got her GED or any degrees. When she applied for student loans in the 1990s, she was already Lori Erica Kennedy.

She went to college and later used that degree for legitimate work and even joined several associations. She started a family that she tried very hard for and never got into any type of trouble. Still, when you look at her Wikipedia page, it lists her as an American identity thief. And technically she did steal someone's identity. And we kind of talked about this earlier on in the episode. You know, identity theft is still a big thing. it obviously gets harder and harder as technology improves, at least in the way that Kimberly

McLean did it. There's definitely going to be less and less cases of this type of ghosting as time goes on. I think what's very interesting here is that no one would have ever known that Lori was not who she said she was if she had not taken her own life, if she had gotten rid of Becky Sue Turner's birth certificate. All that the rough family would have found out about was that she had at some point changed her name to Lori Erica Kennedy. A name change is a lot less unusual than completely taking over a deceased person's identity. So the trail may have ended there, if not for the contents of the lockbox that she hid and mislabeled. It's unknown why she even kept Becky Sue Turner's birth certificate. She also had a passport and

multiple state issued forms of ID in her name. So it's unlikely that she would have needed the birth certificate often, maybe even if at all. I think one of the big questions in this case is, you know, after so many careful moves, changing her identity, not just once but twice, and living such a paranoid and guarded life, why would she hold on to the very thing that could cause it to all come crumbling down. We may never know the truth about what drove Kimberly McLean to leave her old life behind before eventually become Lori Ruff. A book about her life called The Woman in the Strongbox was written by author Maureen

O'Hagan. So definitely if you're interested in more about this story, maybe go out and check that book out. You know, I think as we wrap up this case, it's definitely a head scratcher. There's no doubt about that. You have a woman in Kimberly McLean who obviously wanted to start a new life. She wanted to get away from her family. She basically said, hey, don't try to find me.

And on top of that, you know, she went to the links that she did around changing her name. And part of that included stealing the identity of a deceased toddler. Now, she could have just changed her name from Kimberly McLean to Lori Erica Kennedy, but from my way of thinking that would have left a paper trail, and maybe that was the entire thought there. She wanted to add that one layer in between so that really no one could ever track her down. And if that was the case, it worked. If not for her death, I don't know if anybody would have.

ever stumbled upon the truth. And it's the way that it happened that, you know, to me is so fascinating the genetic genealogy side of things. Obviously, they couldn't use Kimberly's DNA because she was cremated. So to separate out the DNA between father and daughter and then use what was left just amazes me. And I know we've said it, but I think we're going to to see more and more of, you know, these types of things. The technology keeps progressing to the point where we're just going to see more unique type of cases being solved. There's just no doubt about it. It's going to happen. So a little bit of a different story for us here on criminology. Was there a crime? Yes. Technically there was. Kimberly McLean stole

someone's identity. But so much different than what I think we normally think of as identity theft. She didn't use that identity to, you know, take out credit cards, run up debt, take out a mortgage, you know, really anything like that. It seems to me as though she used it as a stepping stone to get to a new name and create a buffer that would not allow anyone to really kind of figure out who she was. But that big question remains. Why? Why did she feel as though she needed to do that? We may not know the whole story, but it didn't sound like she had a horrible childhood, a horrible life. Maybe there are some things that haven't come out that would help explain why she, you know, felt the need to get away. But, you know, it's just,

just one of those types of mysterious cases that, you know, to me is just, it's fascinating. It's, it's intriguing. And I think it's worth talking about. Thanks goes out to Sunny Landon for writing and research assistance in this episode. As always, if you love the show, go out, take a minute, give us a five-star rating. Keep telling your friends about the criminology podcast. That word of mouth really goes a long way. And check us out on social media. We're on Twitter. We're on Facebook, just search criminology. You'll find us very easily. So that's it for another episode of Criminology. Morph and I will be back with everyone next Saturday night with a brand new episode. So until then, for Mike, without Morp, we'll talk to you next week.