Joseph Newton Chandler III: The Stolen Identity of Robert Ivan Nichols

Joseph Newton Chandler III was an eight-year-old boy who died in a Texas car crash in December 1945. The name later belonged, on paper, to a stranger: Robert Ivan Nichols, a World War II Navy veteran who abandoned his family in 1964, applied for a Social Security card in the dead child’s name in 1978, and lived under that identity in Ohio until his suicide in 2002. The U.S. Marshals Service publicly identified Nichols on June 21, 2018, after forensic genealogists cracked a case that had sat cold for 16 years.¹ Why he did it is still unknown.

The Real Chandler Boy

The actual Joseph Newton Chandler III was eight years old when he was killed in a car crash near Weatherford, Texas, in December 1945. His parents died with him.¹ The paperwork left behind sat untouched for more than three decades. Then, in 1978, a man in Rapid City, South Dakota, applied for a Social Security card and a copy of the birth certificate in Chandler’s name.² With those two documents, he effectively became an adult version of a boy who had never grown up.

Robert Ivan Nichols

Robert Ivan Nichols was born on September 12, 1928, in New Albany, Indiana.¹ He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II aboard the destroyer minelayer USS Aaron Ward, which was struck by kamikaze planes and bombs off Okinawa on May 3, 1945.³ Nichols was wounded in the attack and received a Purple Heart.⁴ When he came home, he reportedly burned his uniforms.

He married in 1947 and had three children, including a son named Phillip.⁵ Phillip later described his father as a loner who had little to do with his children.⁶

Walking Away in 1964

In 1964, Nichols filed for divorce and told his wife he was leaving. He said the family would understand why “in due time.”⁷ He left his wife and three children in Dearborn, Michigan. Postcards and letters tracked him through Michigan and Oklahoma before he settled in California.⁸ His parents reported him missing in 1965, but authorities in California and Indiana never found him.

The last contact anyone in his family received was a letter to Phillip that year, postmarked from Napa, California. Inside was a single penny.⁹

Life Under the Stolen Name

What Nichols did between 1965 and 1978 is unaccounted for. By 1978 he was in Rapid City, South Dakota, filing for the Chandler documents.² From there he moved to the Cleveland area and spent the next 24 years in Ohio.

He worked as an electrical engineer, first at Edko Co. in Cleveland and later at Lubrizol in Wickliffe.⁶ Coworkers remembered him as quiet, reserved, and eccentric. He built electrical devices on his own time and would sit for hours listening to static. He kept a packed suitcase ready at all times.³ He would disappear for days or weeks, telling people only that “they are getting close,” without ever saying who “they” were. He once drove from Ohio to an L.L. Bean store in Maine, saw a full parking lot, and drove straight home.

Death in Eastlake, Ohio

On or around July 24, 2002, the man known as Chandler died by suicide in his Eastlake, Ohio, apartment at age 76.¹⁰ He had locked the doors, shut off the air conditioning, marked his calendar, and shot himself with a gun bought months earlier.⁶ His body was found on July 30, badly decomposed. There was $82,000 in his bank account and the packed suitcase by the door.³ He left no will.

When investigators tried to notify next of kin, the identity collapsed. The Social Security number belonged to a boy dead since 1945, and the man using it had no traceable link to the Chandler family. Decomposition and cremation left no usable fingerprints.⁶ The case went cold.

How He Was Finally Identified

The U.S. Marshals Service formally adopted the case in 2014 at the request of Eastlake police, with Peter J. Elliott, U.S. Marshal for the Northern District of Ohio, leading the investigation.⁹ Tissue samples preserved from a 2002 hospitalization gave investigators a DNA source, but standard law enforcement databases turned up nothing.³

In 2016, the Marshals turned to Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick of Identifinders International, whose Y-STR analysis pointed to the surname “Nicholas” or a close variant.¹¹ The DNA Doe Project, co-founded by Fitzpatrick and Dr. Margaret Press, took on the genealogy work. About 90 percent of the DNA in the sample had degraded, with entire chromosomes missing.¹² The team used whole genome sequencing to produce data that could be uploaded to GEDmatch, an open-source genealogy database, and matched against distant relatives.

Volunteers spent roughly 1,500 hours building family trees from those matches.¹¹ On March 5, 2018, the trees converged on a tentative identification. Investigators located Phillip Nichols in Ohio about a week later. His DNA confirmed the match.³ On June 21, 2018, Elliott announced in Cleveland that the man who had died as Joseph Newton Chandler III was Robert Ivan Nichols.¹

Why He Did It

Identification did not bring an explanation. Elliott said at the 2018 press conference that there was no record of Nichols breaking any law under either name.⁵ No criminal history surfaced, no warrants, no clear reason a decorated veteran would walk away from his wife and children, vanish for 13 years, and then rebuild his life as a dead boy. Elliott said the lengths Nichols took “to assume a new identity and lose himself in the world” suggested he was hiding from something, but what that was is still open.

Speculation has outrun evidence. Because Nichols lived in Northern California in the mid-1960s, worked in electronics, and showed paranoid behavior, online sleuths proposed he was the Zodiac Killer. Elliott said Nichols had not been ruled out but that any such inquiry was for California authorities.⁸ Other theories named him as a Nazi war criminal, a Russian spy, or hijacker D.B. Cooper. Investigators did definitively rule out one claim: that Nichols was Stephen Campbell, wanted for attempted murder in 1983.

As Elliott put it: “Robert Ivan Nichols never wanted to be found throughout his lifetime, even into his death. Someone out there might hold the key as to why.”⁹

1
DNA Doe Project. Case: Joseph Newton Chandler
2
Patch. Who Was the Man Claiming to Be Joseph Newton Chandler III
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WKYC. Mystery of Joseph Newton Chandler III’s True Identity to Be Revealed
4
ABC News. Man Stole Dead Child’s ID Was WWII Vet Who Vanished
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Seattle Times. Real Name of Mystery Man Who Died in 2002 Revealed
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News-Herald. A Year After Joseph Newton Chandler’s True Identity Revealed, the Why Remains Unanswered
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KTLA. WWII Veteran Who Vanished in 1964 Sent Family Last Letter From California
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11Alive. With His True Identity Revealed, What Was Robert Nichols Hiding
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Morning Journal News. Real Name of Mystery Man Revealed
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Washington Post. He Stole the Identity of a Dead 8-Year-Old. Police Now Want to Know What He Was Hiding From
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DNA Doe Project. Press Release for Joseph Newton Chandler III
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Rice Magazine. DNA Detective