She told her family not to look for her. The investigation that found her took thirty years, used tools that did not exist when she left, and succeeded because she had a daughter whose DNA could point investigators toward the family she had spent her adult life concealing.
She did not want to be found. She was not, in any meaningful sense, findable while she was alive. The person who found her — or rather, found her name — was Colleen Fitzpatrick, working from a genealogical database that did not exist when Kimberly McLean left Pennsylvania, using a method that had not been developed when she transformed herself into Lori Kennedy, more than five years after Kimberly McLean had died as Lori Ruff.
The locked box was not a confession. It was not a map. It was a record of what she had done, kept for reasons that are as opaque as everything else about the years before 1988. Whatever Kimberly McLean intended by keeping those documents, she did not intend what eventually happened: that they would be pried open by her husband’s family, handed to a federal investigator, and eventually become the starting point for a forensic genealogy project that would give her her name back.
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*Slug:* lori-ruff-kimberly-mclean-identity-mystery-locked-box-texas
*Meta description:* Lori Ruff died in 2010 with a locked box full of false identities. DNA and forensic genealogy identified her as Kimberly McLean six years later.
*Category:* True Crime & Identity Mysteries
*Thumbnail hook:* A Texas woman died with a box full of fake identities. It took DNA science six years to find her real name.