The pain of finding out someone you know and love is holding on to a dark secret can be deeply affecting. For years, you thought you knew that person inside and out, and suddenly you’re faced with the realization they’re not who you believed them to be. Everything was a bold-faced lie.
In 2003, Blake Roth met a woman named Laurie Erica Kennedy at a Texas Bible study class. He was instantly attracted to her, and the two got married just one year later. It was the start of a perfect relationship. Or so Blake thought.
You expect the person you choose to spend your life with to be honest with you about everything. When the foundation of that relationship isn’t sturdy, however, it can be impossible to build upon.
In 2003, a man named Blake Ruff fell madly in love with a woman named Laurie Erika Kennedy. They were married shortly after. What started off as an honest relationship full of potential slowly spiraled into chaos.
Blake and Laurie met at a Texas Bible study class in 2003. She was originally from Arizona but had recently moved and didn’t know anyone yet. She was incredibly private about her personal life, and the only thing she told Blake was she had a tough upbringing and no family. Nevertheless, Blake was smitten.
His family, on the other hand, was suspicious about Laurie from the start. Despite his family’s suspicions about Laurie’s past, Blake married his beloved in 2004 at a private ceremony. Only their preacher was in attendance.
Soon after, the two moved to Leonard, Texas, to start a family. Blake was thrilled to have met the love of his life. What could possibly go wrong?
Soon after they moved, Blake and Lori wanted desperately to have a child, but it wasn’t an easy path for them. Laurie suffered multiple miscarriages over the course of several years. Finally, through in vitro fertilization, Laurie became pregnant with a little girl.
The birth of the couple’s daughter in 2008 should have been a time of celebration, but it became the complete opposite. After the birth, Laurie acted unusually private and distant. She was overprotective of her daughter to the point of obsession and wouldn’t even let Blake’s mother hold her.
All of Blake and Laurie’s friends thought they were the perfect couple, but Blake’s family was growing increasingly suspicious of his wife. Lori became fixated on Blake’s family history, even though she refused to talk about her own. Something wasn’t right.
Blake’s family finally had enough of Lori’s overprotective behavior after she banned them from seeing their granddaughter altogether. Tensions between Blake’s family and Lori were seemingly untenable, and Lori fell into a depression.
Blake and Lori tried counseling in 2010 as a final attempt to save their crumbling marriage, but it was too late. Lori wasn’t the same person Blake fell in love with seven years earlier, and the two filed for divorce the following spring.
In the months following their separation, Lori’s depression became dramatically worse. She lost weight and would ramble on to her church’s pastor several times a week about her problems, fidgeting with her hands the whole time.
By the end of 2010, Lori’s depression and the loss of her marriage became too much for her to bear. On Christmas Eve of 2010, Lori drove to Blake’s family home in a black Tahoe and parked it outside. Then she picked up a shotgun she’d brought with her.
Laurie tragically shot herself in the driver’s seat of the Tahoe on Christmas Eve night. Blake’s father found her body the next morning, along with two suicide letters. One was for Blake, and the other was for their daughter, but the writing on both was completely unintelligible.
Blake and his family couldn’t fathom what had happened. They all knew she was depressed and unstable, but no one thought she was capable of suicide.
But while Blake was sorting through Lori’s belongings not long after, he realized his family was right all along. They had a very good reason to be suspicious of her past.
In the back of a closet he once shared with Laurie, behind some boxes, Blake came across a sealed black lunchbox he’d never seen before. He had a funny feeling the contents of the box would change the way he thought about Laurie forever, but he needed to know the truth.
A police officer helped Blake open the box. What they found inside shocked them both. There were several different ID cards from different states, a birth certificate with a name Blake had never seen before, and a document from 1988 for a legal name change.
Laurie would have been 17 years old at the time of the change. What was going on here?
Blake and the officer examined the evidence carefully. The name change document indicated a woman named Becky Sue Turner changed her name to Laurie Erika Kennedy, Blake’s ex-wife’s name, in 1988. But after a deeper dig, Blake found out that Becky Sue Turner was actually a girl who died in a house fire in 1971 when she was only two years old.
This piece of information threw everyone involved for a loop. Now, officers needed to find out who exactly this puzzling woman was and why she decided to steal the identity of a toddler who died in a house fire many years earlier.
Police investigators soon discovered that as Laurie Erica Kennedy, Blake’s mysterious ex-wife, obtained a state ID and Social Security card in Idaho to get her GED and a degree in business from the University of Texas. But when police traced their databases for her face and fingerprints, no matches were found.
Who exactly was this woman? An old acquaintance told investigators that Lori used to work as a stripper in the early 1990s, but prior to 1988, there was absolutely nothing linked to her.
A social security investigator tried to uncover the truth for years, but every lead came to an abrupt end. Finally, in 2013, a genealogist named Colleen Fitzpatrick learned about the bizarre events surrounding Laurie’s marriage and her suicide.
Colleen took a DNA sample from Blake and Laurie’s daughter to try to find a connection. She discovered several different relatives around the world, with the closest living in Pennsylvania.
Colleen informed Joe about her findings, and the investigator hopped on a plane to Pennsylvania to meet with a man named Michael Cassidy and his family. Almost immediately after seeing Lori’s ID picture, one of the family members recognized her as a woman named Kimberly McLean who disappeared from her family’s Pennsylvania home in 1986 at age 17 because her mother married a man she hated.
But even though the truth was finally out there, there were still gaps of time where Lori’s whereabouts were unknown and other bits of information that didn’t quite add up. Sadly, if there were more secrets this woman was hiding from Blake and the rest of the world, she took them to the grave, never to be uncovered.
It’s hard to imagine finding out your spouse hid a dark secret from you for years. Hopefully, Blake and his daughter were able to move past the traumatizing ordeal.
