Following Ruff's death, her ex-husband and in-laws discovered through documents found in a lock box in her closet that she had been living under a false name when she married into the family.

[3][4] A 2013 Seattle Times feature article about the case was published in news outlets around the world and created enormous interest in the online "websleuth" community.

Ruff's true origins remained a mystery until September 2016, when her identity was confirmed using a combination of public records and direct-to-consumer autosomal SNP analysis of her husband's and daughter's DNA, leading back to the McLean–Cassidy family on Philadelphia's Main Line.

In the fall of 1986, just after reaching age of majority with her 18th birthday,[5] McLean abruptly moved away from home to the nearby town of King of Prussia, cutting off contact with her family shortly thereafter.

[1] On May 20, 1988, McLean obtained the birth certificate of Becky Sue Turner, a two-year-old girl who had died, along with two of her siblings, in a house fire in Fife, Washington in 1971.

[7] McLean, posing as Becky Sue Turner, appeared before a judge in Dallas on July 5, 1988, and legally changed her name to Lori Erica Kennedy.

[6] The couple eloped in January 2004 after Nancy Ruff, Blake's mother, inquired about placing a wedding announcement in the local newspaper.

After some failed marriage therapy sessions, Blake Ruff moved back to his parents' house in Longview and filed for divorce, leaving Lori with their daughter in Leonard.

[7] Other papers included the birth certificate of Becky Sue Turner and a judge's ruling granting a name change to Lori Erica Kennedy.

The nature of these scribblings led some followers of the case to believe that Ruff was trying to avoid prison time, due to the references to police, a possible jail-term length, and the name of Ben Perkins, a Los Angeles attorney.

[9] In September 2011, the Ruff family, with the help of a congressional aide, sought the help of Joe Velling, an investigator for the Social Security Administration (SSA) who specialised in solving identity theft cases.

After following numerous leads, he was still unable to find any information about Lori from before 1986; being stumped, he sought the help of the general public to identify her through an article published June 22, 2013, in The Seattle Times.

Colleen Fitzpatrick, a former nuclear physicist who pioneered in the field of forensic genealogy,[11][12] learned of Lori Ruff in 2013 and began work on the case.