The trail ended the year the woman had obtained Becky Sue Turner’s birth certificate. Before May 1988, there was no record — no fingerprint database match, no facial recognition match, no connection to any missing person on file, no Social Security record, no school enrollment, no medical record, nothing. The woman who would become Lori Ruff had erased whatever preceded her.
That erasure had been accomplished not through technology or institutional access but through the comparatively simple mechanism of obtaining a certificate, appearing in person before a judge, and waiting for the paperwork to be processed. The systems that might have caught the discrepancy — a database linking a 1971 death record in Washington State to a 1969 birth record in California — did not exist in the form that would have been required to stop her.
Velling used the resources available to him. He searched databases. He followed the geographic trail: Kern County, California; Boise, Idaho; Dallas, Texas; the Nevada mail drop; Bedford, Texas. He interviewed people who had known Lori as Lori Kennedy. He reviewed her employment and financial records. He obtained her medical records. None of it produced a name or a family connection that went back before 1988.
By 2013, the investigation had been running for nearly two years without resolution. Velling was, by his own account, stumped.
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## Maureen O’Hagan and the Seattle Times
On June 22, 2013, the Seattle Times published a feature article by reporter Maureen O’Hagan about the unsolved identity of the woman who had called herself Lori Ruff. The article described the case in detail: the box, the birth certificate, the name changes, the investigation, the absence of any identity before 1988.