The period between Blake’s departure and Lori’s death in December 2010 was, by the accounts that emerged afterward, a time of deterioration. The house in Leonard fell into disorder. Lori and her daughter were reported by neighbors to look underfed. Lori sent communications to the Ruffs that they described as threatening. A custody exchange in a public location became a disturbance. The cease-and-desist order came last, a legal formalization of a conflict that had already escalated beyond what private negotiation could contain.
The events of Christmas Eve 2010 ended that conflict in the most final way possible. They also opened a different kind of inquiry — one that would occupy investigators, journalists, and ultimately a forensic genealogist for the next six years.
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## Joe Velling and the Social Security Investigation
In September 2011, the Ruff family, with the assistance of a congressional aide, reached Joe Velling, an investigator in the Social Security Administration’s investigative division in Seattle. Velling specialized in identity fraud cases — the category of federal investigation that the Lori Kennedy case, with its documented use of a false Social Security number obtained through a fabricated identity, fell under.
Velling took on the case. He was an experienced investigator, and the case was not without evidence. The documents in the box had given him the sequence of identity creation: Becky Sue Turner’s birth certificate, the Idaho state ID, the Dallas name change, the Social Security number, the Texas documents. He could trace what had happened and in what order. What he could not do, despite sustained effort, was push back further than 1988.