But the lockbox transformed what they had suspected into something documented and specific. She had been living under multiple false names. The woman they had called Lori had not been Lori. The background she had described — dead parents, no siblings, hard childhood in Arizona — was a construction.
The questions this raised were, in some ways, harder than the mysteries that had preceded them. The earlier mystery had been, in part, about Lori’s personality: why was she so private, why did she resist closeness, what was she protecting? The lockbox made clear that she had been protecting specific information. It did not explain why she had needed to protect it.
The gap between “she had false documents” and “she was hiding something criminal” is significant, and the Ruff family, in the years of investigation, had to live in that gap without a resolution. The online theories that circulated after the 2013 article — organized crime, espionage, witness protection — were theories the Ruffs encountered. They were theories that could have painted Blake’s deceased wife as someone whose past carried danger for the family she had left behind. None of them proved out.
What the identification in 2016 provided was not a dramatic revelation of secret criminality but a relatively mundane origin story: a young woman from Pennsylvania who had been unhappy enough at home to leave permanently, who had been resourceful enough to construct a new identity, and who had lived that new identity for twenty-two years before dying in circumstances that had nothing to do with whatever she had been fleeing.