Her mother did not file a missing person report because Kimberly had left voluntarily, as an adult. She was not missing in a legal sense. She had chosen to disappear. Deanne nonetheless searched for her daughter. The family, according to Tom Cassidy, could not understand why she had gone. Deanne hired a private investigator at some point in the subsequent years, without success.
Between the fall of 1986, when Kimberly McLean left Pennsylvania, and May 1988, when someone obtained a copy of Becky Sue Turner’s birth certificate from Kern County, California, there is a gap in the record. Where Kimberly went, what she did, who she was with, how she supported herself, what brought her to Bakersfield to request that specific document — none of this is documented in any source that investigators or journalists have been able to access.
The gap represents the most opaque portion of the story. She spent approximately eighteen months as Kimberly McLean without any record, navigating whatever circumstances had driven her to leave Pennsylvania and then navigating the steps that would eventually lead her to assume the identity of Becky Sue Turner.
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## The System She Exploited
Understanding how Kimberly McLean was able to execute the identity change she did requires some context about how identity documentation worked in the United States in the late 1980s.
Birth certificates were, and largely remain, the foundational identity document in the American system. They are issued by state or county vital records offices, and in the 1980s, requests for copies were processed by mail or in person with minimal verification of the requester’s identity or relationship to the person named on the certificate. A person who knew the basic biographical details of a deceased individual — name, date of birth, parents’ names, place of birth — could, in most jurisdictions, request and receive a copy of that person’s birth certificate.