On March 19, 1990, she applied for a United States passport, adding an internationally recognized travel document to the identity portfolio. On October 1, 1990, she enrolled at Dallas County Community College after earning her GED. These were not the actions of someone intending a temporary deception; they were the steps of someone building a life.
She pursued education seriously. On February 21, 1997, she filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy — a detail recorded in the legal paper trail that investigators would eventually trace. On December 13, 1997, she graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington with a degree in business administration. She had spent nearly a decade establishing herself as Lori Erica Kennedy.
She was also, during this period, living in different places. Records show her in California, Idaho, and Las Vegas under the Kennedy name before she settled in the Dallas area. By 2001, she was in Bedford, Texas.
—
## Meeting Blake Ruff
She had been Lori Erica Kennedy for fifteen years when she met Blake Ruff at Northwest Bible Church in Dallas in 2003, through what accounts describe as a Bible study class or singles group. She was thirty-four years old, though the documents she carried placed her a year younger.
She was, according to various accounts, engaging in the ways that mattered for building a new social connection. She had interests, a history she could describe in controlled portions, a personality that Blake found compelling enough to pursue. She told him she was from Arizona. She said her parents were dead. She said she had no siblings and no extended family. The losses, she implied, had been real and painful, and they explained her reluctance to discuss her past.