She stole another s identity, and took her secret to the grave

She stole another s identity, and took her secret to the grave

Joe Velling arranged the clues around the big table: a birth certificate for a girl in Fife. An Idaho ID card. Pages from an Arizona phone book. And scraps of paper with scribbled notes, including the name of an attorney and the words  402 months.

These, he explained, came from the strongbox. And the strongbox is at the center of a mystery that has vexed him for nearly two years. As an investigator for the Social Security Administration (SSA), he s nabbed more con men than he can count. But this case with the strongbox has him at wit s end  not so much a whodunit but a who-is-it?

The woman in question was known as Lori Ruff. A 41-year-old wife and mother, she never quite fit in. She was a vegetarian in East Texas. A pretty brunette who dressed like a matron. A grown woman who wanted a child s Easy-Bake oven for Christmas.

The strongbox was Lori s. For years, she kept it tucked in a bedroom closet, among a long list of items her husband, Blake Ruff, knew he was never to touch. Blake being Blake, he obeyed.

Lori died in 2010. That s when Blake s relatives found the box. Its contents told an astonishing story: The woman they knew as Lori was someone else entirely. She had created a new identity two decades earlier.

That brings us to our mystery. If Lori wasn t really Lori, who was she? And why would she go so far to hide her past?

Velling s investigation has taken him from his office in Seattle to an oil-boom family in Texas, from a mail drop in Nevada to a graveyard in Puyallup. He s used every trick at his disposal, followed every lead. Finally, as a last resort, he called the newspaper.

The Ruffs are a close-knit East Texas family, warm and friendly people who sent their kids to boarding school and socialize at the country club. They live between Dallas and Shreveport in Longview, a mid-sized city that feels like a small town. They re in the banking and real-estate business, and are well-known around town. Blake s paternal grandparents had set down roots there during the oil boom of the 1930s.

 They re what everybody here likes to call  boomers, ? Blake s mother, Nancy Ruff, explained.

Blake earned bachelor s degrees in economics from the University of Texas in Austin, in telecom management from DeVry, and worked for years on commercial accounts for Verizon. His family describes him as an agreeable guy and honest almost to a fault.

Ask him what drew him to Lori, and his answer isn t entirely clear.  She was tall, you know, an attractive person, he will say, and leave it at that.

His brother-in-law, an attorney named Miles Darby, says that s typical Blake.  He does not have much of an inner monologue, Miles said. Or, for that matter, an outer one. His speech is stilted. Ask one question and he answers another. It s not that Blake is trying to be evasive. He s just different.

Often, he d follow the lead of his identical-twin brother, David. When David bought a black Tahoe, Blake did too, Miles said. And when David joined a church Bible study class and met the woman he would later marry, Miles knew where Blake was headed.

He met Lori Kennedy at the Northwest Bible Church in Dallas, and they soon began to court.  That s the Christian term, Blake noted. She was smart and fond of animals, and enjoyed going out for tea.

Blake s parents were eager to meet his new lady friend, so they invited him and Lori to lunch. Tell us about your youth, Nancy asked, trying to be friendly. Your family. Tell us your story. Her parents were dead, Lori said. She had no living brothers or sisters, aunts or uncles. No one.

Lori once told Blake she had destroyed all the old photos of her family because she d had a bad life.  He didn t follow up with the question,  Well, what was so bad about it? ? Velling said.

When Blake decided to marry Lori, Nancy wanted to put an announcement in the local paper: Blake Ruff, son of Jon and Nancy Ruff, and Lori Kennedy, daughter of ... daughter of who? Lori wouldn t allow it.

In September 2011, Velling was at a meeting in Washington, D.C., when a congressman s aide gave him a three-ring binder. It contained items from Lori s strongbox and other documents pulled together by the Ruff family. By this point, they knew Lori wasn t Lori. They wanted help figuring out who she was.

The SSA, which investigates the fraudulent use of Social Security numbers, was an obvious place to turn. As the special agent in charge of the Seattle investigations office, Velling is an expert in identity theft. He s busted crooks who open credit cards in strangers names.we not only have a large collection of stainless steel bracelet supplier products, He s brought down con men who have swindled banks out of millions. He s tracked cheats who adopt a new identity to avoid supporting their families.

Neighbors on their single-lane road couldn t figure them out. Blake tried to be neighborly. Lori didn t. They d see her in the evenings, walking the perimeter of the property, avoiding eye contact.

 She really didn t like people as much as she liked working at home on her computer, Nancy explained.

For work, Lori called herself a marketing consultant. Mostly, she ran a home business as a mystery shopper. One day she might be testing new products; another she d eat at a hamburger joint and report on the service.

In six years, neighbor Denny Gorena remembers socializing with them exactly once. Most of the time, Lori and Blake lived in their own little world  a cocoon, you might call it.

More than anything, Lori wanted a child. Several times, she miscarried, according to Blake. The family now suspects part of the difficulty was that she was older than she claimed. She had repeated fertility treatments until, finally, in the summer of 2008, she gave birth to a baby girl.

The way Lori held her daughter, it didn t appear she d spent much time around babies, Blake said. She was extremely protective. If the baby tried to chew on something, Lori would snatch it away. She wouldn t let Nancy baby-sit. Come to think of it, Nancy said, she didn t leave her alone with the child at all.

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