Colleen Fitzpatrick, a nuclear-physicist-turned-forensic genealogist, went about the investigation differently. As a scientist, she worked on lasers and optics for 25 years, often using beams of light as a yardstick for measuring something. “People used to ask what I did for a living,” she recalled. “I’d say I shine light on things.”
But in the early 2000s, she began writing a book about her hobby. “Forensic Genealogy” explained methodologies she had developed to solve different kinds of puzzles. Some have called it “CSI meets Roots.”
She has helped Holocaust survivors search for family members and adoptees find birthparents. She has helped estate lawyers track down heirs. In one case that made the news, she was able to find the identity of a child who died on the Titanic in 1912 by tracing his ancestry through his relatives’ DNA.
When Fitzpatrick read the story about Lori, she immediately thought about DNA. Lori and her husband, Blake Ruff, had a daughter in 2008 and that daughter shared Lori’s DNA. If the daughter provided a DNA sample, there was a way to subtract Blake’s DNA profile from the daughter’s, leaving what is essentially Lori’s.
The Ruff family sent a saliva sample to 23andMe and Ancestry.com, companies that analyze DNA and provide tools to help people trace their family histories online. The family figured that the girl would one day want to know about her mother.
“We were just wanting to at least have the ability to give her the answers,” said Miles Darby, Blake’s brother-in-law.
Fitzpatrick found a number of people whose DNA matched up with Lori’s, but most of them were distant cousins. They wouldn’t be any help in identifying Lori.
Just one person came up as a first cousin: a man named Michael Cassidy. There were no other details, just a name, and there are probably thousands of people by that name in the United States. Which was the right one? Contacting him via the genealogy sites drew no response. It’s unclear if he even saw the messages.
The Ruffs, along with Fitzpatrick and Velling, had reached a dead end.
And so they waited. Fitzpatrick periodically checked back in with the sites, working other angles as they popped up. All told, she figures she spent hundreds of hours on this. There were some clues pointing to the Pennsylvania area.
But for years, there was no real breakthrough. Then, finally, the name of a third cousin came up. That was too distant of a relative to provide answers to Lori’s identity.
But she could provide some clues through her family tree.
Fitzpatrick created a family tree based on the third cousin’s ancestry, tracing her family’s roots to an Irish great-great-grandfather who was born in 1848. Then — and this is the key — she traced that family tree all the way down another branch and came to a familiar name: Michael Cassidy.
“Suddenly, I had Lori’s extended family in front of me,” Fitzpatrick realized.
With the family tree built, Fitzpatrick was able to zero in on the right Michael Cassidy, who lived in the Philadelphia area.
Between Facebook, online obituaries, public records and people-finder tools used by private investigators, she put together a picture of the Cassidy family. She gleaned from the family tree that Lori’s mother almost certainly was one of Michael’s aunts. But which one? And what was Lori’s real name? There was no way to know.
She called Velling. He was convinced she was right.
