TX - 'Lori Ruff', Longview, WhtFem UP9863, *General Discussion and Theories* #4

[BigCityAccountant]

What year was the attorney JP born again??

 

[Gardener1850]

What year was the attorney JP born again??

I don't know, I thought we had found more than one attorney by that name and couldn't determine which one would be mentioned on the sheet?
That's not who T was looking for though. I just found the original post where he asked for help finding Jennifer and he gave her full name and more details about her employment history: http://www.bigbigforums.com/off-topic-chat/309138-tsquared-needs-help.html

 

[BigCityAccountant]

WARNING GRAPHIC

RE: Jennifer Martin.

References 40 years to life and 102 months 1997 era. Lived in California.

https://books.google.com/books?id=B...k#v=onepage&q=Jennifer Martin+missing&f=false

If it doesn't work....type into google books. Jennifer Martin missing.

 

[Gardener1850]

WARNING GRAPHIC

RE: Jennifer Martin.

References 40 years to life and 102 months 1997 era. Lived in California.

https://books.google.com/books?id=B...k#v=onepage&q=Jennifer Martin+missing&f=false

If it doesn't work....type into google books. Jennifer Martin missing.

That's very, very disturbing (if anyone is squeamish do not click--dead body picture in the story).
I don't see how it fits in with FLEK's timeline of disappearance though. 1997 is the year we have the most events which place Lori firmly in Texas--She took out student loans, took a parachuting course, filed for bankruptcy, and graduated from college and somewhere around that time obtained a new Texas drivers license.

 

[llywrch]

When I first read this Information I IMMEDIATELY thought that the names were code.
Some of the comments even seem " off". Especially the ones about her being pretty. Maybe it's a stalker network.

The whole website seems "off" to me, if I may be blunt. Maybe not a stalker network, but I wouldn't be surprised if coded messages for some nefarious purpose were being exchanged amongst stories of shopping deals, freebies, & sweepstakes. I just don't see the attraction here for people.

Then again, I write encyclopedia articles at Wikipedia as a hobby, so who am I to judge what is odd?

 

[sunnynz]

I don't know, I thought we had found more than one attorney by that name and couldn't determine which one would be mentioned on the sheet?
That's not who T was looking for though. I just found the original post where he asked for help finding Jennifer and he gave her full name and more details about her employment history: http://www.bigbigforums.com/off-topic-chat/309138-tsquared-needs-help.html

Yes and the heart problem would indicate that it's not FLEK, I am sure that would have been known about by her husband and mentioned by Velling?

 

[sunnynz]

I have emailed the blogger so will update if I hear anything. On the one hand I don't hold out much hope since none of the other people I've contacted relating to this case have replied to me - however, the fact that she is involved in criminal justice hopefully means she at least has an interest in seeing mysteries get solved!

Ok, the good news - I got a reply from her! The not so good news.... she never met or spoke with FLEK, they only ever dealt with each other over email. It was a brief email, she hadn't even been aware of what had happened to FLEK so I sent her back the Seattle Times article - hoping the article would get her intrigued enough to dig in her memory banks a little more. She seemed very nice and I'm sure she would have said something if there was something to say.

So the odd things to me - firstly, that she knew nothing of FLEK's demise which says that the publicity around this case even in Texas has not been that broad.

Also odd was that she said no one had ever contacted her previously regarding FLEK - I would have though that someone would have been in touch with her - be it an investigator or another amateur sleuth.

Anyhow, I'll let you know if I get any more info out of her but for now it's a dead end unfortunately.

 

[Gardener1850]

Ok, the good news - I got a reply from her! The not so good news.... she never met or spoke with FLEK, they only ever dealt with each other over email. It was a brief email, she hadn't even been aware of what had happened to FLEK so I sent her back the Seattle Times article - hoping the article would get her intrigued enough to dig in her memory banks a little more. She seemed very nice and I'm sure she would have said something if there was something to say.

So the odd things to me - firstly, that she knew nothing of FLEK's demise which says that the publicity around this case even in Texas has not been that broad.

Also odd was that she said no one had ever contacted her previously regarding FLEK - I would have though that someone would have been in touch with her - be it an investigator or another amateur sleuth.

Anyhow, I'll let you know if I get any more info out of her but for now it's a dead end unfortunately.

Wow!
Thank you so much for emailing and reporting back sunnynz! It's amazing to me that she was not aware of Lori's death. Someone made a comment on her blog asking about Lori back in 2013. She must not have time to check anything from her old blog. I'm not surprised investigators never talked to her (but I am surprised no one else ever emailed her). Velling admitted during the live chat he did that he considered contacting people who knew FLEK as LORI a waste of time. IIRC, he didn't even interview people from her church nor the Texas Business Women's group who knew her right before she died. He was focused on finding someone who knew her prior to 1988, IMO. I tend to think there had to be at least one person who she had confided in about her name change or one person who helped her and overlapped from her old life. People say since she didn't confide in Blake she wouldn't have confided in anyone else but I disagree. She may had shared something with a past boyfriend or coworker only to have it go bad and ruin that relationship. Maybe her past experience of sharing her identity change had not been positive so she decided to not tell Blake and his family. Until someone interviews her friends and coworkers there's just no way we can know if she ever revealed anything to anyone else in her life. JMO.

Well, I think you made a very important stride forward. IMO, we can rule out the blogger on her word she didn't know FLEK (if she had something to hide I think you would not have heard back or you would have gotten a rude reply -JMO). If nothing else, maybe she will be interested enough to present the case to her Criminal Justice Club. Getting some more Dallas-area local sleuths from the university involved in this case would help tremendously, IMO. Great work sunnynz!

 

[Gardener1850]

Now, speaking of Lori's previous coworkers and friends I have been sleuthing the businesses on her resume the last few days. I think I may have found a previously unposted photo of Lori.
From Aug 2000 to Aug 2002 Lori worked for NCH. This is a large worldwide corporation still in business today and still headquartered in Irving, Texas. http://www.nch.com/
Her resume said part of her duties involved maintaining their website. Using archive.org I looked at NCH's website as well as their parent website certifiedlabs.com This image I am going to post is a screen capture from a moving intro presentation that only existed on the certified labs website in 2001. It's not there before 2000 and after 2002, when Lori was no longer working, there the intro was changed completely. I found other work of Lori's from looking at the church website she worked on too. I'll share more about that in another post, but this moving intro is consistent with the work she did for the church and her own website, IMO. Perhaps this was part of team effort as her resume only says she helped maintain the website. I'm not 100% sure this is a picture of Lori from 2001 but it resembles her so much I have to share. Because it's a moving graphic and up for a split second and very tiny it's pix-elated if I try to enlarge it's hard to tell.

 

[Gardener1850]

More on NCH: I looked into the company owners. They are a family owned business being run by the 3rd generation. When Lori worked there it would have been the 2nd generation of the family running things--3 brothers, two of whom have passed away. http://www.nch.com/About-NCH/Leadership
The obituary of one brother has something in it I think could be useful to this investigation. As company president he wrote letters weekly to his sales associates, as did his father before him. A portion of these letters were published in a book called "90 years at NCH" and affectionately called "Lester's Letters" by the family. Lori was not a sales associate but I wonder if her ever wrote her a letter? If he did, that letter could be preserved at the company and might reveal something we didn't previously know about Lori.

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dallasmorningnews/obituary.aspx?pid=157978207
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dallasmorningnews/obituary.aspx?pid=141425954

 

[Gardener1850]

Now, forgive me for jumping around in her resume timeline. I researched each company in chronological order but I found the NCH information to be the most interesting so shared it first. The church Lori reported working for in the last 6 months of 1998 had a website. That website changed drastically after Lori left in 1999. I suspect the 1998 website was part Lori's design based on her other work. The church leadership also changed in 1999. The senior pastor left the church to go pastor a church in Ohio. While he was at the church in Texas he had a weekly radio address, which Lori's resume says she worked on.The pastor continued to give radio addresses at his church in Ohio. Here's a news article about his career history: http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/local/crossview-church-on-xm-satellite-radio/nNFH6/
In 2016 he appears to have stopped pastoring the church to focus only on the radio program. He was still officiating funerals at the church in Ohio in 2015 and was on that church's website as senior pastor until late 2015 so I suspect this a very recent change. The radio program is based in Georgia. http://crosshoperadio.org/
This man should remember Lori if she really worked for him on his church radio address. Who wants to contact him and ask him for details?

ETA: This pastor shares a surname with a missing girl from Richardson, Texas. Carol Sue Snyder went missing in 1982. https://www.findthemissing.org/en/cases/8670/170
Credit goes to BigCityAccountant for cluing me in about this missing girl. I just realized that she shares a surname with the pastor Lori worked with in 1998. I have done some digging into the S family genealogy but only very preliminary and have not yet been able to connect them as related. I'm thinking there's no relation because her family came from Texas and his came from Indiana/Illinois/Ohio. But I do think it is worth looking into because Carol Sue might have been helped to escape by a family member and given this job at the church as a stepping stone until she could find better work. There are very few details about Carol Sue's disappearance. Her height is different on different websites. On some websites it says she was 5' 1" but on other websites it says she was 61"--that would be 5'8" and matches with FLEK's height recorded by the mortuary. There is a also a grade school picture of Carol Sue posted by a family member on Ancestry. She has similar teeth-gapping to Lori, IMO. If Carol Sue is Lori though she lost a lot of weight by 1988, however she had 6 years to do that. Lori reported that she struggled with bulimia. They have Carol's DNA on record. Has anyone submitted Carol Sue as a possibility to Namus?

 

[Gardener1850]

I've got to go do some real life things but I have much more on Lori's other company connections I will post about later.

 

[Harriet]

Yes and the heart problem would indicate that it's not FLEK, I am sure that would have been known about by her husband and mentioned by Velling?

I am sure that I read FLEK had a congenital heart abnormality. Off to search.

 

[docbh]

I am sure that I read FLEK had a congenital heart abnormality. Off to search.

This is my recollection as well - that there was some unspecified heart problem or cardiovascular problem that Velling mentioned in the original Seattle Times article.

 

[Harriet]

All reports about FLEK indicate that she didn't have any real life friends. From descriptions of her it seems to me she had some mental health problems, possibly a personality disorder.
I have been thinking that she may have posted on a support forum for advice and support so does anyone have any ideas for usernames?

 

[milkymama]

Lorike was one she used on forum for business postings.

 

[milkymama]

The heart thing was that she had a genetic marker for possible heart issues. No documentation of a diagnosis of anything.

 

[BigCityAccountant]

[h=1]Levy family takes over NCH Corp.[/h][FONT=&quot]Dec 24, 2001, 1:21pm CST Updated Dec 24, 2001, 1:21pm CST

The Levy family was advised by Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown and Debevoise & Plimpton. NCH's special committee's advisers were Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and Sullivan & Cromwell.
http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2001/12/24/daily8.html

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein is an investment bank that has headquarters in....London and Frankfort Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresdner_Kleinwort

Probably nothing, but it is coincidental. [/FONT]

 

[Laughing]

Forgive me, did the passport application state LEK planned to travel to London & Germany???

 

[BigCityAccountant]

Forgive me, did the passport application state LEK planned to travel to London & Germany???

Yes, but it is a 10 year difference in time. I believe the passport was 1990, IIRC.