The marriage to Blake Ruff was legally valid at the time it was performed. Whether the concealment of her prior identity, particularly the assertion that she had no living family, constituted grounds for annulment or some other legal remedy was a question that became moot with her death in 2010. The daughter born to the marriage was not affected in her legal status by the facts about her mother’s identity.
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## Joseph Newton Chandler III: A Parallel
The Lori Ruff case was not the only identity mystery of its type to attract public attention in the years around 2013. A parallel case that some investigators and journalists mentioned in the same context was that of a man who lived in Ashtabula County, Ohio, for many years under the name Joseph Newton Chandler III — a name that, after his death in 2002, was discovered to belong to an eight-year-old boy who had died in a car accident in Texas in 1945.
The man calling himself Chandler had retired in Ashtabula, collected Social Security benefits as Chandler, and died by suicide at age seventy-six. When investigators traced the Social Security number after his death, they found that the real Joseph Newton Chandler III had died as a child. Investigators were unable to identify the man who had used that identity, and as of the time of public reporting during the Lori Ruff investigation period, the Chandler case remained unresolved.
The parallel cases illustrated that identity assumption using deceased children’s records was not a unique or eccentric choice. It was, in the era before modern record-linking systems, a documented method with a documented history. Multiple individuals had used similar approaches for similar purposes, and the cases that became public were presumably a small fraction of those that had been executed.