The system has changed substantially since 1988. Vital records are increasingly computerized and cross-referenced. The Social Security Administration’s Death Master File flags Social Security numbers associated with deceased individuals, creating a check against the use of those numbers in new applications. Passport applications now include database checks that can identify discrepancies between birth records and death records. The specific vulnerability that Kimberly McLean exploited has been substantially, though not completely, closed.
Cases in which people have assumed the identities of the deceased continue to be discovered. Some are criminal operations — organized identity fraud for financial gain. Some are individual cases in which a person, for personal reasons, sought to disappear from their previous life. The motivations vary. The methods, while more difficult to execute in the contemporary environment, have not disappeared entirely.
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## The American Academy of Forensic Sciences
The case was presented at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences 2017 annual proceedings, in an abstract designated LW6, titled “The Mysterious Case of Lori Ruff — Solved!” The presentation represented the formal scientific and forensic accounting of how the case had been resolved, submitted by the professionals who had worked on the investigation.
The inclusion of the case in a forensic science conference reflected its significance as an example of the application of genealogical DNA methods to an identification problem. The abstract was indexed in the proceedings document but represents a specialized academic record of the methodology and outcomes rather than a narrative account for a general audience.
The professional community’s interest in the case was, in part, methodological. The use of phasing to reconstruct a deceased subject’s DNA profile from a child’s sample, combined with database searching and genealogical research to identify distant relatives, represented a use of forensic genetic genealogy that was distinct from its more common applications to criminal investigations. It demonstrated the range of problems to which the method could be applied and contributed to the developing body of case studies that practitioners in the field use to refine their techniques.