Her Texas driver’s license was real.
Her social security number was real.
Even her name was real in the legal sense.
A judge in Dallas granted it on July 5th, 1988.
And every one of those things rested on a single sheet of paper.
The birth certificate of a 2-year-old girl who died in a houseire in Washington State in 1971.
The woman who carried all of it was known as Lorie Ruff.
She was a wife, a mother, a college graduate, and a member of a well-known family in East Texas.
[music] In a bedroom closet of her house, she kept a strong box with one word written on it.
Crafts.
Her husband knew he was never to touch it.
He never did.
She died on Christmas Eve 2010.
For more than 5 years after that, nobody could say who she really was.
Her husband could not.
His family could not.
Neither could the federal investigator who had spent his career catching people living under names that were not their own.
For 22 years, she had lived as someone else.
And she had done it so carefully that by the time anyone went looking, the trail behind her was gone.
Her photograph went around the world.
Thousands of strangers searched missing person’s files for her face.
Fingerprints, facial recognition, and DNA databases all came back empty.
The answer, when it finally came, did not come from any of those places.
It came from a physicist in California, from a retired investigator who would not let the file go, and from a few drops of saliva from a little girl whose family wanted her to know one day who her mother was.
This is the story of the woman in the strong box, who she was, why the world could not find her, and how almost 6 years after her death, she got her own name back.
It starts on Christmas Eve in a driveway in Long View.
This is the Unnamed Files.
We follow the people the world could not name all the way to the day someone finally does.
If a woman who hid this completely already has you wondering who she was, subscribe now.
Long View sits in East Texas [music] between Dallas and Shreveport, a midsized city that feels like a small town.
The Ruffs were wellknown there.
They were a close family who sent their children to boarding school and socialized at the country club, and they worked in banking and real estate.
[music] Blake Ruff’s grandparents had put down roots in Long View during the oil boom of the 1930s.
[music] Locally, Nancy Ruff explained, families like hers were called Boomers.
By Christmas of 2010, Blake had been living back in his parents house for months.
That summer he had moved out of the home he shared with his wife in Leonard about 125 mi away and he later filed for divorce.
After that, according to people who saw her, she came apart.
A neighbor, a pastor named Denny Gerena, said that the first time he saw her after the separation, she and her 2-year-old both looked very thin [music] and she was frantic, close [snorts] to incoherent.
He offered her counseling at his church.
She came with notebooks full of writing about what was wrong with her and how she could get her husband back.
She spoke in circles, he said, covering the same ground for an hour.
And he noticed her hands.
They were the longest hands he had ever seen on a person.
And they were always moving.
She would hold one out and study it, turn it over, study it again, and put it back in her lap.
In the end, the counseling could not save the marriage.
That fall, according to the family, things got worse.
There were threatening emails.
[music] There was a scene at a custody exchange.
Afterward, the Ruffs noticed that one of their house keys was missing.
They were concerned enough to ask a judge to order her to stop.
On the morning of December 24th, 2010, [music] Blake’s father went out to get the newspaper.
When he raised the garage door, there was a black Tahoe idling in the driveway.
He went back inside and called the police.
[music] It was Lorie.
She had died by suicide in the car.
She was 41 according to her documents.
Inside the vehicle, police found two letters.
One, 11 pages long, was addressed to her husband.
The other was for their daughter to be opened on her 18th birthday.
The police report described them as rambling.
Neither one said a word about where she had come from.
She was cremated.
Then the family began asking out loud the question they had been asking quietly for years.
Blake’s brother-in-law, an attorney named Miles Darby, drove to the house in Leonard with a few other relatives to [music] find any clue to who she really was.
It was January 1st, 2011.
They were uneasy enough about what they might find that they called a sheriff’s deputy to meet them there.
The house was in disarray.
Dishes and laundry were piled up.
There were trash bags full of shredded documents, [music] and there was paper everywhere covered in her handwriting.
New lines written over old ones when she ran out of room.
Before they set out, Blake had told Miles there were places in the house his wife had told him never to look.
One of them was in a closet, a strong box labeled [music] crafts.
“So, what do you think I did?”
Miles said later, “I took a flathead screwdriver and broke that thing open.”
Inside was a court document from Dallas dated 1988.
It recorded a legal change of name.
The woman the family had known as Lorie Erica Kennedy had not been born with that name.
Before she was Lorie, the document said she had been someone called Becky Sue Turner.
For a moment, the family thought that was the answer, a name, a place to start.
Somewhere, there had to be a Turner family who could tell them who she was.
So, they went looking for Becky Sue Turner.
A private investigator happened to live next door, and the family asked him to look into the name.
He came back with a newspaper clipping from 1971.
Three children had died in a houseire in Fe, Washington, a small town in Pierce County, south of Seattle.
[music] One of them was Becky Sue Turner.
She was 2 years old.
Becky Sue was born on July 18th, 1969 in Bakersfield, California.
She died at the end of December 1971 in that fire in Fe along with two of her sisters.
She is buried in Woodbine Cemetery in Puallup, Washington, beneath a stone shear with them.
She never grew up.
She never applied for a driver’s license, never went to college, never married.
And 16 years after she died, someone began to use her name.
The paperwork tells the rest.
Almost to the day, on May 20th, 1988, someone obtained a copy of Becky Sue’s birth certificate from Kern County, California.
In those days, many counties would simply mail a copy to whoever asked for one.
On June 16th, 1988, in Boise, Idaho, that same person obtained a state identification card in Becky Sue Turner’s name with her own photograph on it.
She claimed to be 18.
On July 5th, 1988, she appeared before a judge in Dallas and legally changed her name from Becky Sue Turner to Lorie Erica Kennedy.
On July 12th, she applied for a social security number as Lorie Kennedy.
On July 13th, she had a Texas identification card.
Think [snorts] about that for a second.
In less than 2 months, a person with no paper passed became a person with a court order, a federal number, and a state ID, all in an identity that had never existed before.
It worked for reasons specific to that moment.
Becky Sue was born in one state and died in another.
So her birth record in California and her death record in Washington were unlikely to meet in any single database.
And in 1988, a young adult asking for a first social security number was not unusual.
Before 1986, many Americans did not get a number until they were teenagers.
The Tax Reform Act signed on October 22nd, 1986, began requiring numbers for dependent children aged 5 and older.
And in 1987, the Social Security Administration began piloting numbers at birth.
A girl who died at 2 in 1971 would almost certainly never have had one.
There was no earlier record for the new number to collide with.
Joe Ving, the social security investigator who would spend years on this case, put it simply.
Once you have the name change and the social security number, you are for every practical purpose a whole new person.
Veling would later sit in the living room of Becky Sue’s mother and show her a photograph of the woman who had used her daughter’s name.
She shook her head.
She had never seen her.
Becky Sue’s father did not recognize her either.
So, the name was a dead end in the most literal way.
The woman who called herself Lorie had never been Becky Sue Turner.
She had borrowed her for a few weeks, just long enough to become someone else.
Which left the question the rest of this story is built around.
If she was not Becky Sue and she was not born Lori, then who was she?
Whoever she had been, she built Lorie Kennedy carefully.
The records follow her across Texas.
A driver’s license on April 18th, 1989 stating she was 19.
A passport application on March 19th, 1990.
A GED, which meant no high school transcript would ever be needed.
Enrollment at Dallas County Community College on October 1st, 1990, a bankruptcy filing in 1997, and on December 13th, 1997, a degree in business administration from the University of Texas at Arlington.
[music] Ving later found that she had spent at least some time in Idaho, California, and Las Vegas, and that she kept a mail drop in Boulder City, Nevada, which forwarded her mail to Dallas.
In 2003, she met Blake Ruff in a Bible study class at a church in Dallas.
Blake had degrees from the University of Texas and from Devry, and he worked on commercial accounts for Verizon.
[music] He had an identical twin brother, and he often followed his twin’s lead.
[music] When his brother bought a black Tahoe, Blake bought one, too.
When his brother joined a church Bible study and met the woman he would marry, the family could guess where Blake [music] was headed.
His family describes him as honest almost to a fault, a man who takes what people tell him at face value.
Asked years later what drew him to her, he said she was tall and attractive and left it there.
She was smart, he said.
She was fond [music] of animals.
She liked going out for tea.
Blake’s parents invited the couple to lunch.
His mother, Nancy, asked the usual questions.
Where did you grow up?
Tell us about your family.
The answers came back short.
Her parents were dead.
She had no brothers or sisters, no aunts, no [music] uncles.
When Nancy asked about high school, she said she had skipped it and gone straight to college.
It went on that way all afternoon.
Nancy asked, she deflected.
She once told Blake that she had destroyed all her old family photographs because she had had a bad life.
He never asked what had been so bad about it.
When the couple decided to marry, Nancy wanted to put an announcement in the local paper.
Blake Ruff, son of the Ruffs of Long View and Lorie Kennedy, daughter of And there the sentence stopped.
The woman who called herself Lorie would not allow it.
According to Nancy, she said they didn’t do things like that.
On January 5th, 2004, less than a year after they met, they married at a small church outside Dallas.
The only other person there was the preacher.
They bought a house on 2 acres outside Leonard, Texas, a town of about 1,900 people, 125 mi from the family in Long View.
The neighbors on their single lane road could not quite figure them out.
In the evenings, they would see her walking the edge of the property, avoiding everyone’s eyes.
Denny Gorena, the pastor down the road, said that in 6 years, he socialized with the couple exactly once.
Nancy said she simply did not like people as much as she liked working at home on her computer.
She called herself a marketing consultant.
Mostly she worked from home as a mystery shopper, testing products, eating at hamburger places, and reporting [music] on the service.
She was a vegetarian in East Texas.
She was a pretty brunette who dressed far older than her years.
One Christmas, she asked for a child’s Easy Bake oven.
More than anything, she wanted a child.
There were miscarriages and repeated rounds of fertility treatment.
And in 2008, a baby girl.
Blake noticed that she held the baby like someone who had not spent much time around babies.
She was fiercely protective.
If the baby reached for something to chew, she snatched it away.
She would not let Nancy babysit in a family where this was the ninth grandchild and where, as Nancy put it, everyone loved babies.
Her greatest pleasure, the family said, was dressing up and taking the little girl out to tea shops where the two of them posed for mother and daughter photographs.
On family visits, she would often slip away for a long nap.
[music] When the women gathered in the kitchen to cook and talk, she did not join them.
And yet, there was one more habit, which only looks strange in [music] hindsight.
She spent hours tracing the Ruff family’s genealogy.
She collected their family recipes.
A woman who would not say one word about her own family was carefully recording someone else’s.
In another state, a family had spent years hoping that a young woman who had walked out of their lives was alive and safe.
Nothing she had built in Texas pointed back to them.
Years later, summed up what she had made.
A false identity, he said, created for the sole purpose of getting lost in America.
A clean identity, a person with [music] no past.
If it gets to you that someone could live beside a family for years and never once say where she came from, hit like.
It tells YouTube these stories matter [music] and it means more of them get told.
By 2011, the Ruffs wanted help.
In September of that year, at a meeting in Washington DC, a congressman’s aid handed Joe a three- ring binder.
Inside were copies of what the family had found in the strong box and everything else they had gathered.
The congressman was a friend of the roughs.
He also sat on the House Intelligence Committee and as later put it, he wanted to make sure she was not a KGB mole.
Ran the Social Security Administration’s investigations office in Seattle.
Identity theft was his specialty.
He had caught people who opened credit cards and strangers names and conmen who took banks for millions.
He looked at the binder and assumed he would crack it quickly.
The Social Security Administration [music] opened its case on September 1st, 2011.
Began calling her Jane Doe.
He worked through the possibilities.
Had she run from a crime she committed or from one committed against her?
Was she fleeing an abusive relationship?
Had she broken away from a cult?
One thing he was sure of, she had planned all of it.
Her fingerprints went to the FBI.
No match.
Her fingerprints went to the Department of Homeland Security.
[music] No match.
Her photographs went through every facial recognition database knew of.
No match.
Her DNA was compared against other databases.
Still nothing.
So he went back to the strong box.
Along with the court order and the birth certificate, it held pages torn from an Arizona phone book, a job reference, [music] and scraps of paper covered in notes.
One scrap said North Hollywood Police.
Another said 402 months.
There was the name of a Los Angeles attorney, Ben Perkins.
According to the genealogologist who later worked the case, the box also held a letter of reference [music] on stationary from a hotel in Thailand, a certificate from a parachute school, and a list of phone numbers belonging to people who said they had never met her.
402 months is 33 and 12 years.
It sounds like a prison sentence.
Ving chased it.
The attorney had no memory of her.
The job reference appeared to be signed by a person who had never existed.
And if she had ever faced prison time, reasoned, there would have been fingerprints on file somewhere.
There were none.
His investigation took him from an oil boom family in Texas [music] to a mail drop in Nevada to a graveyard in Puallup.
He kept a [music] timeline.
On one side was everything she had done as Lorie.
On the other side was nothing.
The reason he could find nothing before 1988, Belling said, was that she was very good at this.
And because she had been cremated, there was no body to go back to.
If you’re wondering how anyone stays this hidden in an age of databases, subscribe because the person who refused to accept it is coming next.
And what finally solved this case had been sitting in Texas the whole time.
We’ll get to her name, but first, you need to understand why it took more than 5 years.
There was by then a national system built for exactly this problem.
Namos, the national missing and unidentified person system launched in 2007 and entered her into it.
As of June 2026, Namos held about 15,500 open cases of unidentified people and about 26,500 open missing person’s cases.
But a match in a system like that needs two halves.
A record for the unknown person and a record for the person someone [music] is missing.
Those records come from police, coroners, and medical examiners and sometimes from families.
Two halves of the same [music] story can sit in two different states for years and never touch.
In another state, [music] a relative of that family had paid a private detective to search for her.
She was not found.
By 2013, Ving had run out of official avenues, so he tried something unofficial.
On June 22nd, 2013, with the family’s support, the Seattle Times put the story on its front page along with photographs of the documents from the box.
It spread fast.
More than 4,200 readers recommended it on Facebook within weeks.
It was picked up across the United States and in [music] Britain and translated into Croatian, Russian, and Indonesian.
Readers pulled her bankruptcy records, analyzed her handwriting, even ran an infrared scan on the documents posted online.
One man, laid up with a bad hip, posted more than a hundred comments, and wrote that her story was so tragic he felt compelled to help.
Tips poured in.
One reader said she looked like someone he used to date.
Another said she looked like a tennis pro from Alaska.
Some leads were ruled out by DNA.
Others pointed to women far too old or far too young.
Of one lead, Velling wrote that it needed something to grab [music] onto, but all it gave us was air.
Eventually, with no further leads, the federal case was closed.
Back in 2013, Nancy Ruff had put it simply.
Her daughter-in-law must have had someone [music] somewhere.
Otherwise, why hide so much?
In California, a physicist had read the story, and she had a different idea.
The physicist was Colleen Fitzpatrick.
She had spent 25 years working on lasers and optics, using beams of light as a way of measuring things.
When people asked what she did for a living, she liked to say that she shone light on things.
In the early 2000s, she turned her hobby genealogy into a book called Forensic Genealogy, [music] which some readers described as CSI meets roots, and then into a second career.
She had helped Holocaust survivors find [music] relatives and adopes find birth parents.
She had worked on identifying a child who died on the Titanic [music] in 1912 by tracing his family through the DNA of his relatives.
She read the story in June 2013 [music] and got in touch with Velling.
Her idea was simple to say and hard to do.
The woman who called herself Lorie had [music] been cremated, so there was nothing left to send to a testing company, but half of her DNA was still walking around [music] Texas in her daughter.
The Ruffs had their own reason to agree.
Miles Darby said later that the family simply wanted to be able to give the little girl answers [music] one day when she was old enough to ask.
So, in 2014, they sent saliva samples from [music] the girl and from Blake to the commercial DNA testing company 23 andMe.
This seemed small at the time.
A kit in the mail, a tube of saliva, the kind of thing millions of people do out of curiosity.
[music] It would turn out to be the only thing that worked.
If you have ever mailed off one of those kits, you have done exactly what the Roughs did.
You added [music] yourself to a database of people who agreed to be matched with their relatives and every person in that database becomes without meaning to one small piece of somebody else’s family tree.
Ving meanwhile never fully let go.
He knew it was not the most important case he had.
But whenever there was a lull he came back to Jane Doe.
By the time the answer arrived he had retired.
Fitzpatrick worked the matches for 2 years, checking back on the sites and following new angles as they surfaced.
She estimates she spent hundreds of hours on it.
The online sleuths by then had spent thousands of hours of their own comparing [music] her face against photographs of missing women.
The first results were discouraging.
Most of the matches were [music] distant cousins, too far removed to say anything useful.
The few close ones were anonymous or adopted or simply did not answer.
If you’ve stayed with this woman this long, hit like because the answer is close now and it came from the strangest [music] place of all.
Now, here is what Fitzpatrick was working with.
Every person inherits two sets of chromosomes, [music] one from each parent.
A child’s DNA is roughly half her mother’s and half her father’s.
Consumer testing companies read hundreds of thousands of points along that DNA and compare them with every other customer who has agreed to see their [music] relatives.
Where two people share long matching stretches, they are related.
The longer and more numerous those stretches, the closer the relationship.
Because Blake had been tested, too, the company’s tools could do something clever.
Anything in the daughter’s DNA that came from Blake could be set aside.
What remained was the half that came from her mother.
[music] Genealogologists call this phasing.
In effect, it let Fitzpatrick search the database for the relatives of a woman who could no longer be tested.
One of those relatives stood out, a first cousin, which meant they shared a set of grandparents.
But the profile showed only a name, and it was a common one, the kind thousands of American men share.
Messages through the genealogy sites went unanswered.
It was never clear he even saw them.
So Fitzpatrick came at it from another direction.
[music] Using a mapping method she had developed, she plotted where the families of the more distant matches had lived, looking for places where they overlapped.
Those overlaps, combined with the little that was known of the woman’s movements, kept [music] pointing to one region, the area around Philadelphia.
Then a third cousin appeared.
A third cousin on her own is too distant to identify anyone, but she had a family tree.
Fitzpatrick built it out [music] back through the generations until it reached an Irish greatgrandfather born in 1848.
Then she traced the tree forward again down a different branch, generation by generation, until she arrived at a name she already knew, the first cousin.
Suddenly, she said, she had the woman’s extended family laid out in front of her.
With the tree built, she could tell which man with that common name was the [music] right one.
He lived in the Philadelphia area.
Using Facebook, online obituaries, public records, [music] and the peoplefinder tools that private investigators use, she pieced together his family.
The tree told her one thing more.
The woman’s mother was almost certainly one of his aunts.
But which one?
And what had her daughter been called?
The DNA alone could not say.
In December 2015, Fitzpatrick called Joe.
He was convinced she was right.
In March 2016, flew to Philadelphia.
He decided not to approach the cousin.
Instead, he went to another relative, a woman, at her workplace.
He had no badge and no federal identification.
Nothing to show he had ever been anyone official.
He was a retired government employee in a suit trying to look as unthreatening as possible.
He knew how it would sound.
I believe you are related to a woman whose real name none of us knows.
But an old boss had taught him that when something lands in your lap, you [music] do something about it.
I had news, felling said.
Bad or good, I had it.
He asked whether she had a moment to hear a story.
He told her about the strong box, the little girl in Washington, the DNA, the great great grandfather.
It was too tangled.
It was not [music] landing.
So he took out the photographs the Ruffs had given him and began laying them on the table [music] one at a time.
The last one was the most recent driver’s license photo taken when the woman in Texas was around 40.
[music] The relative looked down at it.
Her name was Kimberly Maria Mlan.
For 5 years, 8 months, and 26 days after her death, she was Lorie Ruff, and in a federal file, Jane Doe.
From here on, she has her own name.
My god, the relative said.
That’s Kimberly.
Veling said later that the hair on the back of his [music] neck stood up.
For 3 years, he had answered emails from well-meaning strangers who were sure they had solved it.
Now, someone actually knew her.
The next day, he met with Kimberly’s extended family and answered as many of their questions as he could.
He described them as anguished.
One thing was certain, he said.
It was definitely Kimberly.
[music] Her mother, Deianne, was about 80.
She had last seen her daughter 30 years earlier.
Now she learned that Kimberly had built an entire life and that she was gone.
Deianne later took a DNA test.
It confirmed the match.
She declined to speak to reporters and referred their questions to her brother.
Kimberly was born on October 16th, 1968 and grew up in Winwood in the suburbs west of Philadelphia with her parents and her sister.
Her mother stayed home with the girls.
Her father, James McClean, was a carpenter and a volunteer firefighter.
Her uncle, Tom Cassidy, remembered rides on fire engines and a magnificent playhouse in the backyard that had been built by hand.
There were family vacations and day trips and dinner together every night.
She went to grade school at Queen of Peace in Arsley, where a class photo from the third grade survives, and later at St.
Margaret’s in Narbirth.
A neighbor whose daughter played with her remembered Kimberly as very withdrawn, but not, she said, always unhappy.
She remembered Deianne as a very good mother who sang to the children and made up silly words for the songs.
Crinkle, crinkle, little star.
[music] A classmate who knew Kimberly from grade school and high school remembered her as quiet and reserved.
When Kimberly was an adolescent, her parents divorced.
Her mother remarried and moved the girls to Windcoat, where Kimberly attended Bishop Mcdev High School.
Her yearbook photo there shows a sophomore.
According to her uncle, that is when the trouble started.
[music] Kimberly never adjusted to the new house or to the divorce.
There were new rules and a new school and at some point it became too much for her.
In 1986, the year she turned 18, she moved to King of Prussia about half an hour away.
Then one day, she told her mother she was leaving for good.
“Don’t come after me,” she said.
The family never heard from her again.
They did not stop looking.
When Kimberly’s father died, he named both [music] of his daughters in his will.
A cousin, James H.
McClean, who was 7 years old when she disappeared, remembered that his own father hired a private detective to try to find her.
Kimberly never came to collect her half of the inheritance.
Her uncle kept returning to one detail when he spoke to reporters.
He repeated it several times.
Her birthday was October 16th, 1968.
Think about what that means.
For 22 years.
On her licenses and her official papers, the woman in Texas used a different birthday, [music] July 18th, the birthday of a 2-year-old who died in F.
October 16th came and went every year, and she could not mark it.
Her uncle asked reporters to imagine the weight of all that pretending adding up year after year.
There was no one from her family at her college graduation or at her wedding or there to help when her daughter [music] was born.
And the strong box marked crafts finally made a kind of sense.
[music] It held the paperwork of the names she had borrowed.
Becky Sue Turner and Lorie Erica Kennedy.
It held notes, a phone book, a parachute certificate.
Nothing in it led [music] back to Kimberly.
Which leaves the hardest question in this story.
She had a mother who sang to her and a playhouse in the yard.
Why did she leave?
[music] And why did she make sure no one could ever follow?
The honest answer is that nobody knows.
Back in 2013, before anyone knew her name, Blake had tried to make sense of it.
Maybe, he said, she was not even comfortable around her own self, so how could she be comfortable around his family?
He assumed something tragic must have happened to her, something awful.
The family worried that when the answer came, it would be something terrible, something they would wish they had never learned.
The truth, when it came, was much less dramatic than anyone had [music] imagined, and in some ways even harder to understand.
Here is what the record does say.
Her uncle’s account is the divorce, the move, the new house and its new rules, and a teenager who never [music] settled.
Colleen Fitzpatrick summed it up in a paper she presented to forensic scientists in [music] 2017.
None of the theories about Lorie Ruff, she wrote, had been true.
[music] She was simply a runaway teen from Philadelphia, one who had not gotten along with her stepfather.
Those are the only accounts on the record.
Her uncle said the family still could not work out why she did what she did.
The theories had been far stranger.
Over three years, people online suggested she had escaped a polygamous cult or an abusive partner, that she had committed some terrible crime, that she was hiding in witness protection.
Veling himself had wondered whether she was absent without leave from the army or tangled up with organized crime in Las Vegas.
Nothing like that ever turned up.
As far as could tell, she was never connected to any criminal investigation under either name.
The reporter who had followed the case for 3 years put it plainly.
She had not been in a cult.
She had not been a spy.
She had been a teenage runaway.
Ving said he hoped the speculation would stop once her name was known.
He suspected it would not.
What puzzled him most was something simpler.
Most people, he said, get homesick the first time they leave for college or the military.
They wait for that first phone call home.
[music] And at 18, she was out there completely on her own.
Nobody, he said, could fathom walking away from an intact family and never reconnecting.
Some things still have no explanation.
The two years between leaving Pennsylvania in 1986 and taking Becky Sue’s name in 1988 remain blank.
Nobody knows how she chose Becky Sue Turner.
Elling wondered whether she had used a document broker or seen an old obituary or a gravestone or somehow known the family.
The family did not know her.
Nobody has explained the note about North Hollywood police or the 402 months or the attorney who did not remember her or the hotel in Thailand or the parachute school.
We know where she went.
[music] We do not know why.
Offered his own view in 2013 and it is only that a new identity gives you a fresh start he said but it is also a chain you have to hold to the story all the way through [music] and it can take a strangle hold on you in the end he believed that is what happened to her ruffs watched her grow more and more troubled in the years before she died whether the secret caused that or something else did the record cannot say and we will not guess [music] what the record can say is what happened to the people she left in Texas.
The Ruffs finally had an answer for the little girl.
Miles Darby said that at least now they knew who she was and knew she had a family that loved her.
By 2016, Blake’s daughter had a new set of grandparents on the East Coast [music] and a whole new group of cousins.
Two families on opposite sides of the country, each missing the same woman without knowing it, were connected at last.
On September 19th, 2016, her name was removed from the federal government’s database of missing and unidentified persons.
And in Woodbine Cemetery in Puallup, Washington, lies a little girl named Becky Sue Turner, whose name a stranger carried [music] for 22 years.
At the beginning of this story, she looked like a woman with no past at all.
Erased [music] so completely that fingerprints, faces, and federal databases could find no trace and missed by no one.
None of that was quite true.
She had a past.
It had a playhouse in it and fire engines and a mother who sang the wrong words to nursery rhymes on purpose.
And for 30 years, people were looking for her.
They just did not know they were looking for the same woman.
The strong box marked crafts held the papers for every name she had borrowed.
[music] The only name it did not hold was the one that mattered.
She was cremated.
The only gravestone in this story [music] stands in Puallup over a 2-year-old girl and her sisters.
So, here is the person without [music] the case.
She was 42 years old.
She grew up in Winnywood, [music] Pennsylvania.
She was fond of animals and of going out for tea.
She liked dressing up and taking her daughter to tea shops and posing with her for pictures.
More than anything in the world, she wanted a child.
And she had one.
She died as Lorie Ruff.
Her name was Kimberly Maria Mlan.
And Becky Sue Turner, the little girl whose name she carried, deserves to be remembered, [music] too.
This has been the Unnamed Files.
If her story stayed with you, share it with someone who would want to know her name and subscribe because there are thousands more still waiting for theirs.
If you are struggling, you do not have to carry it alone.
In the United States, you can call or text 988 to reach [music] the suicide and crisis lifeline at any time.
