The method is known informally as the “dead baby” technique or the “breeder document” approach. A birth certificate is a foundational identity document — the record that, particularly in an era before computerized cross-referencing of vital records, could be used to obtain other official identification. The method exploited the fact that birth and death records were maintained separately, in different agencies across different states, with no automatic system for matching a death record against the corresponding birth record and flagging it as belonging to a deceased individual.
The technique required finding a deceased person born in a different state or jurisdiction from the one in which the fraudster intended to use the documents, since births and deaths in the same jurisdiction were more likely to be connected in local files. Becky Sue Turner had been born in Bakersfield, California, but died in Fife, Washington — different states, records held in different bureaucratic systems.
The method was not unique to Lori Ruff’s situation. Investigators and journalists covering the case noted that a parallel case had come to light around the same time: a man who had lived under the identity of a child who died in a 1945 car accident and who died in 2002, his real identity still unknown as of the time of the Ruff investigation. The pattern was unusual enough to attract investigative attention but not so rare as to be without precedent.
By 2011, the systems had changed substantially. Computerized vital records linking births and deaths made the technique far more difficult to execute successfully. A passport application, for instance, now triggered checks that could expose a mismatch between a birth record and a corresponding death record. But in 1988, when the person who would become Lori Erica Kennedy obtained Becky Sue Turner’s birth certificate, those systems were not yet in place.