I have nightmares about waking up and learning that my whole life is a lie.

Thankfully, these are just nightmares, but sometimes you wake up and feel like what happened was real. Just the thought of it frightens me.

There actually has been a case where a man's whole life was called into question after the death of his ex-wife.

Unfortunately, this wasn't a nightmare, it was real life.

What Seemed Like A Fairy Tale

Blake Ruff met Lori Kennedy, who he believed to be the love of his life, in 2004.

When they tied the knot, Lori didn't have any family members at her wedding. She told everyone that she had no living relatives.

The couple shared a strong bond, and four years after their marriage they welcomed their first daughter.

But after that, their relationship started to go downhill. Lori didn't get along with her in-laws, and even seeing a marriage counselor couldn't save their relationship.

In 2010, they called it quits.

Lori started acting strangely, sending obscure and threatening messages to Blake, and refused to let her ex-husband or his parents see their daughter.

On Christmas Eve of that year, Lori committed suicide on Blake's driveway.

So Many Questions

Lori's sudden death shocked Blake and his family. They had no idea what possessed her to take her life.

And so they tried to figure out the answers. But the more answers they found, the more questions they asked.

The 42-year-old woman left two suicide notes that took investigators six years to understand.

According to the investigators, they described the notes as "ramblings from a clearly disturbed person."

As people across the country heard about Lori's case, they tried to solve the mystery on their own.

But it was Blake that was able to find the biggest clue.

The Box That Changed It All

When Blake was going through Lori's things, he found a box buried in her closet that had a bunch of ID cards and birth certificates that belonged to several different people.

Strangely, all the cards had her face on them, which meant one thing: She was an identity thief.

That's when investigators and Blake put the pieces together.

Before Blake married Lori Erica Kennedy, she stole the identity of two-year-old Becky Sue Turner, who died in a house fire outside of Seattle in 1971.

Lori got her hands on Becky's birth certificate in 1988, then moved to Idaho and started living under that name.

She was able to legally change her name to Lori Kennedy before she moved to Dallas, where she met Blake.

By 2016, using DNA samples from their daughter, the family discovered that Lori's real name was Kimberly McLean.

She disappeared in Pennsylvania in 1986 when she was only 17 years old.

What a bizarre story! How would you feel if you were in Blake's shoes?

[H/T: Good Housekeeping / Wikipedia / The Houston Chronicle]

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