The Lori Ruff case was relatively favorable for the method in one sense: there was a high degree of certainty about the subject’s approximate age and geographic background, which constrained the search. Fitzpatrick knew she was looking for a woman born around 1968 to 1970, given the identity documents and the estimated age of the person known as Lori Ruff. This constraint reduced the search space.
The case was less favorable in another sense: the closest matches were distant relatives, requiring approximately two years of genealogical research to trace. A case in which a close relative — a sibling, a parent, a first cousin — had uploaded their DNA would have been resolved much more quickly.
The current expansion of consumer DNA databases is making the method progressively more powerful. As more people upload DNA, the probability that any given unknown individual has at least a second or third cousin in the database increases. By some estimates, the databases now hold sufficient coverage of the United States population that most Americans of European ancestry have at least a second cousin in one of the major databases.
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## The Fife, Washington Fire
On December 30, 1971, a fire destroyed a residence in Fife, Pierce County, Washington. Among those who died in the fire were two-year-old Becky Sue Turner, born July 18, 1969, in Bakersfield, California, and two of her siblings. The fire killed multiple children in a single incident — an event that would have been a devastating local tragedy and that left behind the specific administrative record that would, seventeen years later, become the foundation for another person’s constructed identity.