It is also, in a different register, a case study in the nature of identity itself — the question of what makes a person who they are when the documentary substrate of their identity has been deliberately severed and reconstructed.
Lori Ruff was, by all accounts of those who knew her in Texas, a real person with real relationships, real feelings, real professional accomplishments, and real failures. The identity that sustained her life in Texas — the name, the Social Security number, the education, the professional history — was false at its foundation but real in its consequences. The daughter she had as Lori Ruff is as real as any daughter, regardless of the documents on which the mother’s name rested.
The identification of Kimberly McLean resolved a documentary question — whose records, whose name, whose biological family — but it did not retroactively alter the reality of the life that Lori Ruff had lived. The identification gave the people who had known her in Texas a context they had lacked, and it gave the people who had known her as Kimberly McLean an answer they had sought for thirty years. What it did not do was resolve the fundamental strangeness of a life that had been constructed on a foundation of borrowed documents and inhabited with sufficient conviction to sustain two decades of daily existence.
That strangeness remains. It is the part of the story that the documents and the databases and the DNA can gesture toward but cannot fully contain.
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## A Note on the Sources