The genealogical database method worked because it bypassed the problem of searching for Kimberly McLean specifically. It searched for people who were biologically related to Lori Ruff, regardless of what name they went by. The Cassidy cousins who appeared as matches in the 23andMe and Ancestry databases were not named as McLeans or as anyone connected to Kimberly. They were simply people who shared segments of DNA with the reconstructed maternal profile. The method did not require that Kimberly McLean have a digital presence; it required only that her relatives did.
This is the specific contribution of forensic genetic genealogy to cases involving voluntary disappearance with identity change: it can find people who have deliberately removed themselves from searchable records because it works through biology rather than through documentation. As long as even distant relatives have voluntarily submitted DNA to consumer databases, the biological connection to an unknown person remains findable.
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## The Ruff Family’s Years of Not Knowing
Between January 1, 2011 — when they found the lockbox — and September 2016 — when Kimberly McLean’s identification was announced — the Ruff family lived with the particular weight of not knowing who Blake’s wife had been.
They had known Lori Ruff as a woman with secrets. They had experienced the practical consequences of those secrets: the distance she maintained from them, the protectiveness about the granddaughter they had been kept from knowing closely, the marriage that had deteriorated to legal conflict. They had not been innocent of the suspicion that something was concealed; they had pressed, in the ways available to family members, for the connection that Lori had refused to provide.