The more specific reference to Tourette syndrome, if accurate, would similarly carry no explanatory weight for the central questions of the case. Tourette syndrome is a neurological condition involving involuntary motor and vocal tics; it does not cause identity fraud, voluntary disappearance, or the particular configuration of secrecy and disclosure that characterized Lori’s behavior.
The notes found in the box were described by law enforcement authorities as reflecting serious mental illness — a characterization that was offered in the context of explaining why the notes did not provide useful investigative leads, not as a clinical diagnosis. Investigators are not mental health clinicians, and their assessment of handwritten notes as reflecting mental illness is not a diagnosis. The prompt guidelines for this article specifically caution against using survivors’ impressions or official characterizations as clinical proof of any diagnosis, and that caution applies here.
What can be said is that the last years of Lori Ruff’s life, by the accounts of the people who were closest to her situation, were marked by significant distress and deteriorating behavior. Whatever the causes of that distress, it contributed to the circumstances that ended with her death on Christmas Eve 2010. The causes are not fully known.
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## The Professional Life: Résumé, References, and Texas Business Women
One of the more specific details that emerged about Lori Ruff’s life in Texas was the fabricated professional reference. A letter of recommendation, written on the letterhead stationery of a hotel in Thailand, recommended Lori Kennedy or Lori Ruff for employment. The signature on the letter, according to published accounts, bore a resemblance to her own signature. The person named as the author of the recommendation — “Roger Steinbeck,” according to one published account — did not correspond to any person investigators could locate.