This Article Originally Ran On Blumhouse.com
When the Ruff family woke up on Christmas Eve, 2010, things didn’t look all that inviting outside. It was cold out, in the low 40s, and the sky was cloudy, threatening to rain at any moment. The news in Longview, Texas that morning was focused on the death of a 15 year old girl outside a William’s Chicken. The girl was sitting in her mother’s car when she was struck by a stray bullet. A tragedy, to be sure, but one that had nothing to do with the Ruff’s. So, like most of us do, the Ruff’s heard the news, shook their heads sadly, and continued to plan their day.
Sitting outside in the driveway of the Ruff family, was a tragedy they didn’t know about yet. During the night, Lori Erica Ruff, the estranged wife of Jonathan “Blake” Ruff, drove up to the house, put her car in park, and shot herself. A troubling end to a troubled life.
Blake met Lori Erica Kennedy at a Bible study in 2003, and they instantly hit it off. Looking back, Blake couldn’t explain what it was that drew him to Lori, but it is pretty easy to figure out - Lori was attractive, with a long, dark hair and big hazel eyes. She had a welcoming smile, too, but there was something different about her. Lori didn’t much like to talk about her past - she said she was an only child and that her parents had both passed, but that was about as deep as she would get about her own life. Still, she loved to hear about Blake’s family. The Ruff’s were a well known and well respected family in Longview, and Buck had plenty of stories about his family to tell, so maybe he didn’t really catch on to how little Lori talked about her own past. Or maybe he didn’t care - sometimes we become infatuated with how much someone else is infatuated with us.
Either way, Lori and Blake fell in love, though Blake’s family was uneasy with it. Nancy, Blake’s mother, found it hard to talk to Lori. When she would ask Lori questions about her past, Lori would get upset and sometimes even aggressive. Still, Blake loved her, so the family kept quiet. When Blake and Lori announced that they were getting married, Nancy went to call the paper to put in a wedding announcement - Lori refused to let it happen. While the Ruff’s usually had rather large weddings, Lori and Blake had a very small one - just the two of them and a preacher.
Lori and Blake went straight from the wedding to trying to have a kid, but it would take a hell of a lot of work. They had trouble conceiving, and the times that they were able to, Lori had miscarriages. In 2008, the couple tried in vitro fertilization. It worked - Lori gave birth to a girl.
Then things got real weird.
Lori became even more obsessed with learning the past of the Ruff family, while zealously guarding her own history. As fervent as Lori was to learn about the family tree of the Ruff’s, she didn’t like spending time with them - during family gatherings, Lori would quietly disappear only to later be found napping. She wouldn’t let anyone hold her baby, though it was clear that Lori herself was uncomfortable holding the child. When Blake’s family voiced their concerns, Lori cut off all communication with them - not allowing Nancy to see her granddaughter.
Blake, torn between his two families, left Lori in the summer of 2010, moving back in with his parents. According to neighbors, Lori’s mental health seemed to deteriorate the moment Blake left. She would be seen walking around, rambling to herself. One neighbor, Denny Gorena reported that she looked gaunt and clearly could not focus on anything for more than a few minutes. Denny, a pastor, offered to counsel Lori, and she took him up on the offer. When they met, Lori brought in notebooks filled with scribblings that, according to Lori, were lists of her faults and how she would fix them so Blake would come back to her.
Blake came to the counseling sessions, hoping that he and Lori could work things out, but it only got worse. Lori would stop mid-sentence to stare at her hand, then pick up her thought again as if nothing happened. She would speak in circles, barely stopping to take a breath. It was clear that not only was the marriage over, but that Lori needed serious help.
Lori started to send threatening letters to Blake’s parents. They noticed that a set of house keys went missing after Lori had visited. A week before Christmas, Nancy heard the back gate of the house open, but no one was there.
A few days later, as Blake’s dad Jon went to get the paper, he found Lori’s body lying in the car.
When the police arrived, they found two suicide notes, one for Blake and one for their daughter that was not to be opened until she was 18. While the letters have never been released to the public, those who did read them all say the same thing - they were the ramblings of a very disturbed person.
After the funeral, a few members of the Ruff family headed to Lori’s home to clear it out. When they arrived, they couldn’t believe what they found.
The home was a wreck - the baby’s bed was stained from urine and feces, piles of dirty dishes littered the kitchen, and dirty clothes covered most of the floors. Trash bags filled with shredded documents were piled in corners. Every scrap of paper was covered in Lori’s scribbles - some of the papers were written on, then written over, as if Lori had run out of paper, but still needed to write.
Inside a closet was a lock box marked “Crafts”. Miles, Blake’s brother in law, broke it open with a screwdriver. Inside the lock box was court documents showing that Lori had legally changed her name in 1988. Before she became Lori Erica Kennedy, she was known as Becky Sue Turner.
Now here’s the crazy part - Becky Sue Turner died in a fire in 1971. She was two years old.
The Ruff family handed over the lock box to a family friend who just happens to be a Congressman. The Congressman gave it to Joe Velling, an investigator for the SSA, concerned that Lori/Becky was a Russian agent. While Velling doubted the KGB angle, he still took the case on - after all, it’s his job to track down identity thieves.
Inside the lock box, along with the name change documentation, Velling found the birth certificate for the real Becky Sue Turner, an ID card from Idaho, torn out pages from an Arizona phone book, and scraps of paper with scribbled notes, including the name of an attorney and the words “402 months.” Velling didn’t know what the hand written notes meant, but he did know one thing, Lori/Becky planned this all out very well.
The first clue that Lori/Becky knew what she was doing was the use of Becky Sue Turner. Becky Sue, the real Becky Sue, died in Fife, Washington, but was born in Bakersfield, California. Among the scraps of paper in the lockbox was a news clipping about the death of Becky Sue, which means that Lori/Becky Sue specifically chose this little girl. More to it, having died in a different state than she was born in made it less likely, in the 80s at least, that other states would be able to find that Becky Sue had died.
Lori/Becky Sue used the birth certificate of the real Becky Sue Turner to get an ID card in Idaho in 1988. Two months later, the fake Becky Sue Turner showed up in Dallas and had her name legally changed to Lori Erica Kennedy. As Lori Erica Kennedy, this mystery woman applied for, and received a new social security number.
Now legally Lori Erica Kennedy, she took a test to get her GED, then entered college, the University of Texas in Arlington, where she majored in business. Velling was able to find a few people who remembered Lori from college, but none of them could give him any new information about her.
The name of the attorney in the lock box, Ben Perkins, was also a dead end. Perkins had no memory of Lori, or any clue as to what “402 months” could mean.
Velling ran Lori’s fingerprints though the FBI and Homeland Security databases - no matches were found. Facial recognition and DNA databases also came back with nothing.
In the six years since Lori killed herself outside of her in-law’s home on Christmas Eve, Joe Velling is no closer to solving the mystery. This, clearly, isn’t the most important case Velling has on his plate, but it is the one that haunts him the most, the one that has the biggest question marks surrounding it.
Why did this woman throw away her previous life? She was clearly running from something, but what? Somewhere out there, there must be someone who knows more to the story - someone that Lori was running from, hiding from, fearing would find her. Something in this woman’s past drove her to desire a new start with a new family, but kept her from being able to fully integrate into a new setting. The split between her two lives seemingly drove Lori insane, leading to her tragic death. Still, above all else, one question stands out from all the others - in 1988, a young woman left behind everything that she was, so why didn’t anyone go looking for her?
Chances are, we’ll never know. Whatever it was that made Lori go to such extremes, whatever she was hiding, she took the answers with her.