The online communities that took up the case were not under editorial control, however, and the theories that circulated in forums and comment sections during the period between 2013 and 2016 were wide-ranging. The blank space in Lori Ruff’s documented life before 1988 was, for many online participants, an invitation to imaginative reconstruction. Was she a KGB agent? A witness to organized crime who had entered witness protection? A military deserter? An escapee from a cult or a controlling relationship?
None of these theories was supported by evidence. Investigators who examined the case, including Velling, found no indication that she had been connected to witness protection, organized crime, espionage, or any clandestine institutional structure. Witness protection participants do not, as a practice, construct their own false identities using deceased children’s birth certificates; they are provided with new identities through formal governmental processes. The fact that no institutional connection was found does not absolutely prove that none existed, but the absence of evidence is itself evidential, and the specific theory of witness protection was not supported by anything investigators found.
The prompt guidelines for this article specifically note that the identification of Kimberly McLean does not prove or establish any of the criminal theories that circulated online. Identity assumption does not equal espionage, organized crime, or witness protection. The reasons Kimberly McLean left Pennsylvania and the reasons she chose to build a new identity as thoroughly as she did remain genuinely unknown, and the responsible account treats them as such.
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## The Forensic Genealogy Revolution