Lori Ruff’s case had been entered into NamUS as an unidentified person — specifically, as an individual whose documented identity could not be traced further back than 1988, and whose real identity was unknown. The NamUS listing served as a formal record that the case existed and was open, accessible to investigators, researchers, and family members who might have information.
The removal of the listing on September 19, 2016, represented the formal administrative closure of the case from the NamUS perspective. The unidentified person had been identified. She was no longer a Jane Doe in any official system; she was Kimberly Maria McLean, born October 16, 1968, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The removal of a NamUS listing does not mean that the case is legally resolved in every sense. Questions about the circumstances of the assumed identity — the specific frauds committed, the potential civil and legal consequences for anyone connected to them — might theoretically remain. But in practical terms, the identification closed the investigation that had been prompted by the lockbox, and the removal from NamUS was the public marker of that closure.
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## The Question the Investigation Could Not Answer
Six years of investigation, culminating in the identification of Kimberly McLean, answered the question: who was she?
It did not answer the question: why did she do it?
This is the question that haunts the case. Kimberly McLean was eighteen years old when she left Pennsylvania. She had grown up in a suburban Philadelphia family that, by her relatives’ accounts, had been loving during her early childhood and had become difficult after her parents’ divorce. Her mother had remarried, the family had moved, she had started over at a new high school. These are circumstances that many thousands of teenagers in any given year navigate without deciding to permanently erase their identity.