He presented these photographs to a relative of Michael Cassidy, who lived in the Philadelphia area. The relative’s reaction, as reported subsequently, was immediate and unambiguous. The person in the photograph was identified as Kimberly.
Kimberly McLean. Born October 16, 1968, in Philadelphia, to James McLean and Deanne Cassidy. Raised in the Philadelphia suburbs. Attended Bishop McDevitt High School in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, after her mother remarried and moved the family there.
The DNA confirmation followed. Deanne McLean — Kimberly’s mother, then in her eighties — agreed to submit a DNA sample. The test confirmed the genetic relationship between Deanne and the woman who had been identified as Kimberly McLean. The match established what the photograph recognition had suggested: the woman who had died on Christmas Eve 2010 in Longview, Texas, as Lori Erica Ruff was the same person who had grown up in the Philadelphia area as Kimberly Maria McLean.
On September 19, 2016, Lori Ruff’s entry was removed from the NamUS database — the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System — where she had been listed as a Jane Doe.
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## Kimberly McLean: The Early Life
The life that Kimberly McLean left behind in 1986 can be reconstructed in broad strokes from what her family members described to journalists in the period following the 2016 identification. The reconstruction is necessarily incomplete; the family had its own perspective on a situation that they had lived with for thirty years, and their accounts reflect that perspective.
Kimberly was born in Philadelphia in October 1968, the older of two daughters of James McLean and Deanne Cassidy. Her father, James, was a carpenter and a volunteer firefighter. Her uncle Tom Cassidy later described the early years of her childhood as happy, with memories that included fire engine rides and a backyard playhouse.