This expanding capability raises questions about the future of identification and privacy that the Lori Ruff case did not raise in acute form but that cases like it — applied to criminal investigations rather than identification of the deceased — have brought into public discourse. The voluntary disappearance that was possible for Kimberly McLean in 1986 and that was sustainable for twenty-two years of her adult life would be substantially more difficult to maintain today. Whether that is entirely a positive development — given that people sometimes have legitimate reasons to leave their previous lives behind, including abusive situations that they cannot document or address through official channels — is a question the policy conversation around forensic genetic genealogy is still working through.
The Ruff case, specifically, does not require a strong answer to that question. It was a case of voluntary disappearance by an adult who chose to leave, with no documented evidence of abuse or danger that would situate her departure in the category of protective flight. It is a case about someone who wanted, for reasons she never disclosed, to become someone else — and who succeeded at that project for more than two decades before a locked box and a daughter’s DNA and a forensic genealogist gave her back her name.
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## The Name at the End of the Thread
Kimberly Maria McLean.
She was born in Philadelphia in October 1968. She grew up in the Pennsylvania suburbs. She left at eighteen. She built a life under names she had borrowed and created. She married. She had a daughter. She died.