Respectfully snipped by me**
Welcome kafkette!
All excellent thoughts and I can tell you have thought about Lori's case a lot and you are well educated--I will ignore any mistakes and I hope you will ignore mine as well. I just want to address two things you said so I snipped for space. Your observation about Ben Perkins being in Inglewood and far from North Hollywood is a great one. He was also a bankruptcy attorney so her wouldn't be one you would call for murder, drug charges, etc. unless he was a close friend/family member who would tell you what kind of jail time you were facing as a favor. OR someone like Lori might have called Ben Perkins because he was a legal advisor for an inter-city Los Angeles shelter run by Good Shepherd Church. See milkymama's post of the news clipping about this here:
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/sh...-4&p=12680474&highlight=shepherd#post12680474
I don't know LA geography as well as you, how close is the Good Shepherd Church to Inglewood? How close is it to North Hollywood? Regardless, Ben Perkins Jr. wasn't ALWAYS located in Inglewood. The date he moved his office to that Inglewood address dates the note's writing. What are the chances the note writer was someone from Inglewood who took a trip into North Hollywood for some reason and ran into trouble while there? Your point about them being 90 minutes apart is a good one but I can think of all kinds of reason for why someone would have Ben Perkins' name and the North Hollywood Police's phone number on the same page. What if the page of notes was written years or months apart? we don't know that the entire note was written the same day or even the same year.
Just some thoughts.
As to your question of--if Lori was into drugs and sex work would we want to know? Yes I still want to know and I would not think less of her for it. On the contrary, I would admire her for getting OUT of that world. She realized it wasn't for her and she created a plan and got out. Maybe she struggled a lot--she still had to declare bankruptcy, she couldn't get good jobs, etc. However, by the time she met Blake in 2003 she was not on drugs (we assume), She had no arrest record, she had gotten a college degree, she was working legit, normal jobs (if we believe her resume), she had immersed herself in the Southern Baptist Church culture since she had membership history at several SBC churches and she was going to adult Sunday School classes when she met Blake. Whatever she had tangled herself up in before 1988, she got out. She changed her life. As you said, she really WAS Lori by 2003.
This is just my personal feeling but at times I feel like she is haunting me, imploring me to find out who she was. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe she would be embarrassed if she knew all these strangers were looking for the truth about her. I just feel like she left those clues in that lockbox for a reason. She could have destroyed them and no one would ever know about her. I feel a strong draw to find out her story and make sure it is told--no matter the truth. I think she escaped from a bad life and whoever hurt her or scared her bad enough to make her change her identity should be exposed. Again, maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe she was just a person born outside the US that chose to get SSN illegally instead of going through the legal channels. I don't think that is the case though.
Thanks for your thoughts!