The limitation that Fitzpatrick encountered in the early stages of the Lori Ruff investigation was a common one: the closest matches in the database were distant relatives who did not respond to contact attempts, and the genealogical trees required to connect a distant match to a specific contemporary individual were large and time-consuming to build. The work took approximately two years from her initial engagement in 2013 to the point in 2015 when she had traced the connection to the Cassidy family in Philadelphia.
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## The Identification and Its Confirmation
When Colleen Fitzpatrick identified the likely family connection to the Cassidys and informed Joe Velling, the investigation entered a different phase. Genealogical analysis had produced a lead; what was needed now was documentary and biological confirmation.
Velling’s visit to Pennsylvania in March 2016 produced the documentary confirmation. The relative who was shown photographs of the woman known as Lori Ruff recognized her immediately and identified her as Kimberly. This kind of photographic recognition, while legally and forensically less rigorous than biological confirmation, was consistent with the genetic data that Fitzpatrick had developed. It provided the human identification — a person who had known Kimberly McLean in life and recognized her face — that the database search could not.
The biological confirmation came from Deanne McLean, Kimberly’s mother, who agreed to submit a DNA sample. The comparison between Deanne’s DNA and the reconstructed maternal profile from the Lori Ruff investigation confirmed the maternal relationship. Deanne was Kimberly’s mother; the woman who had died in Longview in 2010 was Kimberly McLean.