She has a name now. She has a family that can visit a grave. She has a daughter who knows what her mother was called before she was Lori.
What she does not have, and what no amount of investigation can provide, is an explanation for the choices at the center of her story. The locked box had documents but no confession. The handwritten notes had names and numbers but no narrative. The letters she left for Blake and for her daughter addressed the people she was leaving but not the past she had carried.
She told her mother not to look for her. She warned her husband away from the box. She kept the documents anyway.
The investigation found her name. The reasons she lost it remain her own.
—
## The Bishop McDevitt Years
The details that emerged about Kimberly McLean’s time in Pennsylvania are fragmentary and necessarily filtered through the accounts of people who knew her decades before the identification. Childhood acquaintances, relatives, and neighbors who shared memories with journalists were reconstructing a portrait of a teenager from the vantage point of adults in their forties and fifties, knowing in advance the ending of a story they had not known while they were living parts of it.
Bishop McDevitt High School in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, is a Catholic school that has served the suburban Philadelphia area for generations. Kimberly enrolled there after the family moved to Wyncote following her mother’s remarriage. The move represented several disruptions simultaneously: the end of her parents’ marriage, the arrival of a stepfather, relocation to a new town, and enrollment in a new school. Any one of these changes can be difficult for a teenager; the combination arriving together is more so.