"My God, that's Kimberly!"
September 21, 2016 12:37 PM   Subscribe

Lori Erica Ruff has been identified. The case of the woman who stole a deceased Fife, Washington 2 year old's identity has been solved, much to the surprise of the internet.
posted by Pearl928 (34 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
HFS! The past thirty days has seen cold case after cold case being solved.
posted by drezdn at 12:39 PM on September 21, 2016 [6 favorites]


Deanna met a man named Robert Becker and remarried.

This was around the time the troubles started, according to Cassidy.


There is so much left unsaid here. Too much left unsaid. And yet enough.

I think its very interesting that Robert Becker isn't ever mentioned in the article again, not even to say if he's alive or dead.
posted by anastasiav at 12:50 PM on September 21, 2016 [46 favorites]


This is a fascinating, yet very sad, story, Pearl928. Thank you for posting it. I agree with anastasiav that the timing of Kimberly/Lori's disappearance is troublng, but perhaps her family would need to investigate that situation.
posted by Silverstone at 12:57 PM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


There is so much left unsaid here. Too much left unsaid. And yet enough.

I think I know where you're going here, but I am not sure that that speculation is helpful in the face of two families finally getting so many answers.
posted by sparklemotion at 1:00 PM on September 21, 2016 [9 favorites]


I second anastasiav's sense that the author was, perhaps very tactfully, leaving unsaid things unsaid because there was no longer anyone around to corroborate them and at this point it isn't really worth heaping additional hurt on those still alive.
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 1:10 PM on September 21, 2016 [5 favorites]


I am not sure that that speculation is helpful in the face of two families finally getting so many answers.

From the article: "To Velling, the real story of Lori Ruff is in some ways even harder to understand than any of the wild speculation.

“I wondered if she was AWOL from the Army. We wondered if maybe there was some connection to Las Vegas and she was caught up in some kind of crime-family stuff. Nothing like that ever turned up.”


Weekly, we see questions in Ask from people looking to cut off ties with their family, due to many different kinds of dysfunction. But doing that is so hard. So very hard. Lori Ruff did it, in a very dramatic and effective way. I don't think we need to know the specifics of the story to have those two sentences resonate.
posted by anastasiav at 1:23 PM on September 21, 2016 [15 favorites]


I am actually pretty fine with a social narrative in which one of the important questions we ask when a young adult disappears is "who was making it so she couldn't stay?" instead of the pretty worn-out "oh well, loose moral pumpkin spice selfies made her do it, girls are disposable anyway" rhetoric we get from police, school administrators, etc to justify "not getting involved."

I am certain that many members of the family have lost many nights of sleep over that question already. I hope that none of them were stuck in a similar situation to Lori and couldn't get anyone to care.

That's a lot of incredibly dedicated determination to not be found. I don't have a problem with anyone wanting that if they need to have it (aside from crimes committed to do it), but that's not contrary to wanting the original problems, whatever they were, to be better solvable.
posted by Lyn Never at 1:52 PM on September 21, 2016 [52 favorites]


The longing for motive is so powerful. One sentence in a newspaper article, and we have solved the case again, and so neatly too: Stepfather did something nasty, wrap it up, done and dusted. How clever of us.
posted by Diablevert at 2:00 PM on September 21, 2016 [11 favorites]


One of the things that scared me the most growing up in an abusive family was this exact discourse happening in the article and right here. Knowing in my bones that if I ran away and anything happened to me, I would be erased. No one would actually try to figure it out. Hell, calling the police several times on an uncle who beat my cousin and shut him in locked closets for hours on end led to precisely nothing other than us kids being called liars. In spite of police witnesses.

Yeah, let's not hurt the feelings of survivors? Are you kidding? This is exactly why women so rarely dare to speak up. Because we can be raped, beaten, locked up, murdered, and oh, gosh, no, we can't know what on earth would lead to a young woman running away and "not saying anything." (Y'all seriously believe no one knew anything? Seriously?) Let's not "hurt any feelings." OTHER THAN WOMENS' THAT IS.
posted by fraula at 2:23 PM on September 21, 2016 [53 favorites]


I remember in my high school there was an older boy named Jeff (who was for whatever reason rumoured to be the natural child of Clint Eastwood, which now seems incredibly unlikely). There were problems when his single mother remarried, and he left home and was never heard from again. None of us knew exactly why, but we still all knew why, and I don't think anyone ever looked very hard for him either.

His mother missed him, I know, but she made her choices. This woman's story only sounds unusual in that she was so effective at staying gone.
posted by frumiousb at 2:52 PM on September 21, 2016 [5 favorites]


She had a sister, who upon closer reading of the article is the woman who identified Kimberly, and who also remains unnamed.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:57 PM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


So can anyone explain the "Fitzpatrick found a number of people whose DNA matched up with Lori’s" bit? Who provides that information, and how does that work? Surely it takes more than a "Hi, I'm from the Internet, please provide the names of all people who match this DNA in some way"?
posted by effbot at 3:03 PM on September 21, 2016


Those would be people who volitionally sent in DNA samples to Ancestry or 23andme.
posted by prize bull octorok at 3:07 PM on September 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


I can't favorite Lyn Never's and Fraula's comments enough - this poor woman felt like she had to put such distance between herself and her family of origin! To me this indicates something very disturbing in her past. Fraula rightfully points out that women are so often not believed when they say X bad thing happened to them.

Lori/Kimberly didn't just go no contact, she didn't legally change her name and leave no forwarding address - in the pre-Internet era this alone would have made it much harder to be found. No, she engaged in a very sophisticated identity theft; I followed the case on Websleuths and it was noted that the way Lori/Kimberly went about choosing a new identity, finding a child who died in a different state than she was born, meant that she either used a broker or did some research and knew what she was doing. This is someone who covered her tracks so thoroughly that it took a lot of time and effort to find her former identity.

She did not want to be found, and I think there was a reason. Rest in peace, Lori/Kimberly. May your daughter lead a happier life.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 3:12 PM on September 21, 2016 [9 favorites]


There's no indication that she made any kind of allegation, though. Yes, it's a plausible explanation, but it is irresponsible to make specific accusations against someone based on a plausible explanation, especially when it's attached to someone's name and other identifying information.
posted by ernielundquist at 3:20 PM on September 21, 2016 [8 favorites]


*waves to Rosie at WS*

It's also possible that something happened to her during the two years before she stole someone else's identity- she could have ended up in a terribly abusive relationship or otherwise became so fearful of someone that she decided to go into hiding.
posted by stagewhisper at 3:23 PM on September 21, 2016 [9 favorites]


Futility Closet had a post about this just over a week ago and I got sucked into the online vortex of theories about who Lori actually was. I saw a few comments on Reddit mentioning that there was an East coast lead, but never thought they'd find the answer so quickly!
posted by mollywas at 3:41 PM on September 21, 2016


To me this indicates something very disturbing in her past.

Disturbing in her past or in her mind? On the basis of the facts in the article, I could make just as thorough a case that she was suffering from an untreated mental illness. Schizophrenia often onsets at that age, and paranoia is one of its symptoms.

I don't know if she was mentally ill. I don't know if she was abused. I don't know if she was a murderer. To declare any one of those solutions the most plausible on the basis of a a brief newspaper article and my instincts is nothing but constructing castles in the air. She did an unusual thing, perhaps she did it for an unusual reason.
posted by Diablevert at 3:44 PM on September 21, 2016 [9 favorites]


Unless more comes to light from people who knew her in those early years, we may never know.

But suffering from a mental illness doesn't mean someone couldn't also be a prior victim of abuse.

Obviously she was extremely tortured by inner demons in the last years of her life and she was struggling with her mental health. She also was a very bright woman who was organized enough to not only disappear and reinvent herself completely, but also to attain a GED, a college degree, and run her own business. Her case just breaks my heart and has from the beginning.
posted by stagewhisper at 3:54 PM on September 21, 2016 [6 favorites]


There's a great story a few posts earlier about another woman who died after leaving home and not coming back for 30 years, and it has enough detail to ward off the urge to paint a portrait without having seen its subject.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 4:11 PM on September 21, 2016


All most people really know about this woman is that she wanted to be left alone, and that she's dead now. She never sought public attention, and while it's understandable that she got it once the mystery surrounding her identity was made public, that's been resolved now. If she'd had a story she wanted told publicly, she probably would have told it, but she didn't.

She wasn't a public figure in life, and there's no evidence that she wanted to be one in death.
posted by ernielundquist at 4:21 PM on September 21, 2016 [7 favorites]


I end up with two simultaneous reactions to this. One is a feeling that it's outrageously cool that we can do things like this now.

The other is a feeling of apprehension that we are so able. What happens to privacy in a world with this kind of capabilities?
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:58 PM on September 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


daaaaaang. Imma go read this now.
posted by Annika Cicada at 5:08 PM on September 21, 2016


regarding voluntary DNA disclosure: yes, this is a normal thing that happens every day due to direct requests, often in the context of adoptees or relinquishers seeking contact. There are several active Facebook groups that pursue this type of reunion and DNA is one of the tools that are in use.
posted by mwhybark at 5:36 PM on September 21, 2016


The way all these people kept digging and digging for the former identity of this woman, using online tools of questionable morality, and then triumphantly proclaimed it to the world and let the people she had worked so hard to distance herself from have the last word on her life makes me want to throw up.

Every detail we know about her just screams that this is the last thing she would ever have wanted to happen.
posted by tigrrrlily at 7:40 PM on September 21, 2016 [15 favorites]


One thing that is under considered is that divorce is really, really hard on some people, to the point where they feel as if they lose part of their identity, especially if they are expected to just get over it and get along with huge social changes. Some people can't handle it and need to get away, even without assuming more nefarious circumstances.
posted by SpacemanStix at 9:24 PM on September 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


One thing that is under considered is that divorce is really, really hard on some people, to the point where they feel as if they lose part of their identity, especially if they are expected to just get over it and get along with huge social changes. Some people can't handle it and need to get away, even without assuming more nefarious circumstances.

And add to that moving to another town, well, there might have been additional factors, but the divorce and move could certainly have been enough.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 9:35 PM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yes, it's a plausible explanation, but it is irresponsible to make specific accusations against someone based on a plausible explanation, especially when it's attached to someone's name and other identifying information.

This. It's totally plausible that she was a victim of abuse, but we don't know that.
posted by Pearl928 at 9:50 PM on September 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


It's sobering that this woman sacrificed so much to disconnect but, because of modern tech and obsession over official identity, ultimately failed. Is this the future, where a decision to disconnect will be a practical impossibility?

I wonder how differently things might have played out if she hadn't been pretty, white, and female. Would there have been as much interest in finding the true identity of a homely black woman, or an old man with no kids?
posted by Western Infidels at 7:51 AM on September 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


I see one comment suggesting one specific person might have done this, but most of the rest of us are talking about the fact that most people don't go completely off the grid and commit a crime to change their identity for reasons that are benign and have nothing to do with anyone else. Especially women people.

And until she died, nobody knew she'd done that, only that she'd disappeared. Most of the time when people disappear, it's because someone else has made them dead or some kind of hostage and that is a thing we want to give a shit about and stop, and so you don't want to just say "oh well, that person must just want their privacy!" and write them off.

This is how men abduct multiple women and keep them in a basement for years. (And yes, this is why they get away with it for longer with women of color or poor white women.) This is how children get victimized for years in schools and churches and the creepy awful "institutions" for "troubled" kids. Because no use stirring up trouble, right? No point upsetting all those perfectly fine upstanding people (men, let's not upset any men) who were entrusted with the care of these people with the non-ideal outcomes. No point into looking into the suicides or the missing kids or that big ol' field that keeps having grave-shaped holes in it, because what about privacy?

The problem, after she died and they figured out she'd gone to some lengths to change her identity, is that there are still a number of scenarios left that are not good at all. There could still to this day be someone out there who did something to her and did it to other women and maybe is still doing it. Her family might be in danger now, or there might be someone out there waiting to be saved. She doesn't get a vote, dead or alive, in whether that possibility should be pursued (as in, literally, that decision doesn't rest with the victim in the legal system and her husband does have a right to hire a private investigator for a civil investigation). She doesn't get to say "leave my predator alone to protect my privacy". What if she killed herself because she was being actively victimized still, or a re-emergence of someone who was dangerous to her and is still dangerous to someone?

This is actually a thing police are supposed to do, and they often don't because all the reasons they don't, and so there is value in someone doing it. And if it turns out, in the end, to be a completely benign story that somehow involves pro-quality identity theft and suicide and was just about one single person not counting all the people she hurt or defrauded, at least due diligence is being attempted. There's always the possibility that she was just very unwell, but often when people are that unwell they get exploited and their ability to consent is compromised, and we need to care about consent.

She had the power to make the truth known, before she died or instead of dying, and she didn't. So someone else has to check.

And yep, that means considering the stepfather because we have statistics on that. And his family. Her school teachers and administration, too, hopefully had to answer a few questions. Her employers. Her friends. Poor babies to all of them if they have to answer some unpleasant questions and face some scrutiny. I've had to answer those questions, it was uncomfortable (that one came back home, at least), life's tough that way sometimes.

I've also not been asked anything because it was "a personal matter" right up until he killed her and her son. Questions are better than no questions, pretty much every time.
posted by Lyn Never at 9:19 AM on September 22, 2016 [9 favorites]


Questions are better than no questions, pretty much every time.

Questions, asked by people who knew her, and the appropriate authorities are good and important.

Speculation by Internet strangers that leaps immediately to: she must have been abused and it must have been her stepfather, is not good, and only likely to amplify the pain being felt by both of her families right now.

I want the legal system to do what they can to sort out what made her do what she did. But we aren't those people.
posted by sparklemotion at 10:49 AM on September 22, 2016 [4 favorites]


sparklemotion, the tough part is that the internet attention, which brings with it the speculation and storytelling, is what got the job done.

I really do understand what you mean, though. I am thinking of how, last night, someone on my FB feed shared pictures of a little girl whose father was dragging her by her hair through a Wal-mart. The woman who had taken the pictures called the police right away, but the sergeant said the man had a right to discipline his child. So she filed suit in the Court of Social Media, and now the story is all the way around the globe, with the faces of the girl and her brothers right out there for all to see, and the local police are now promising to look into it. Will it help? Will it ruin everything? God only knows. The interest of the internet is an enormous shambling Akira-like entity that we summon at our peril.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:01 PM on September 22, 2016 [3 favorites]


sparklemotion, the tough part is that the internet attention, which brings with it the speculation and storytelling, is what got the job done.

Yes, this is where I'm torn. Based on what I've read about this case (this post and the 2013 story) I think that the attempt to crowdsource the discovery of who this woman actually was was appropriate.

But what we've got now is different than photos of a father abusing his girl in public. We know that that little girl in Wal-mart suffered violence at the hands of her father. We don't know that about Lori Ruff. All we have is a woman who went to great lengths to hide from her birth family, and committed suicide in the midst of an icky sounding divorce. The only crime we know of is identity theft. The only victim we know of is Becky Sue Turner (and that was posthumous).

Maybe there's something in the 11 page suicide note that she left to her husband (or the other, to her daughter) that points to unreported abuse in her previous life. But we don't have that, or anything else from Lori, or a witness, or a family member or anything that points to abuse besides the fact that abuse would be a pretty good explanation for why she did what she did in the 80s. I might even go as far as to say that Lori did have a vote in what got done/investigated/pursued after her death, and her vote, as far as we know, was to let her reasons die with her.

So, I don't like the idea of the Internet Detective Service deciding that someone must have hurt her, and then trying to figure out who it was. I'm even ok, I think, with the first part: assuming someone (maybe multiple someones) hurt her. I don't necessarily agree with that assumption, for [reasons] that others have touched on above, but I understand how people are getting there.

It's when the Internet gets into trying to identify suspects in a crime that we don't even have a report of that it starts to feel icky.
posted by sparklemotion at 1:56 PM on September 22, 2016 [3 favorites]


I've seen people who seem perfectly rational on their own, who simply cannot get along with some other person and when they explain why, it's like listening to someone on LSD or post psychotic break. And these are, for all intents and purposes, well adjusted adults with reasonable lives.

Now imagine you're a young girl who is transitioning from "rides on fire engines and a magnificent hand-built playhouse" to adolescence. I mean, Christ, that's often tough enough. Now let's throw in a crumbling family life, followed by New Dad™ and new school district on the other side of town where you don't know anyone. On the back side of adulthood? Yeah, I think I could tough that out. But the thing about young people is they lack baseline. As an apparently very competent teenager who only has those fire engine rides and playhouse as a point of reference? New Dad could be some kind of science fiction amalgam of all the greatest father figures in history and things still ended very badly.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 8:17 PM on September 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


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