Joseph Newton Chandler III | Why Did This Man Take a Dead Child's Name For Decades?

In 2002, a man was found deceased in his apartment. What began as a standard investigation soon revealed the name registered to this man actually belonged to a child who died decades prior. As odd clues began to stack, a search commenced for the true identity of the man with no past and no contacts. After nearly two decades, a break in the case uncovered who he was, but left investigators with even more questions about his cryptic life. Today, we analyze the theories behind the true identity of Joseph Newton Chandler III. This is Redweb. Welcome back Task Force to another episode of Redweb, the podcast all about unsolved mysteries, true crime, and the unknown. I'm your resident mystery enthusiast, Trevor Collins, and joining me here in this case for the very first time Alfredo Diaz. I feel like this is going to be a mind boggling case. We have an adult here that has passed away, doesn't really have a life that was categorized, especially, I mean, this isn't deep internet time. No, yeah, early, early internet, but still we're kind of getting there and then have the identity of a child that was what missing died that died. Yeah. The name of this guy. Okay. Yeah. There's just so many things like this child was pronounced dead. How much do we know about that? And then from there, like I don't know if they're mean because maybe you could do some kind of tests on a bus scientist, you know, let me know to compare because then technically you have information, impossible DNA or whatnot on the deceased child. And then now you have the body of this adult that seems to be claiming to have the identity of the child as deceased. There's so many things. And I think it's like two separate categories where it's like, okay, what happened to this child and then what happened to this adult and then how does the two of those connect together? Yes. These are very good questions. Literally is even like another mystery on itself. And so that's why the show exists. Yeah. Exactly. This is why the show exists because the more answers we get with this case and I'll walk you through everything we know about it, all the facts. We do get some information. We do get some answers. But every time you get these answers, as you said, the podcast exists in the realm between the answers and questions, more questions show up. And so it out the gate, it was already hard to consolidate this entire mind twist of a case into one opening hook, but you're you're latching on to a really good one. But ultimately the question that we're going to follow here is, who is this man? Why does he have this name of a child who died decades ago? Is he that child or is he somebody else? What's his relationship if anything to this child? And then who is behind that name and what's going on there? And then also like if you took the identity, yeah, pal, why? And I guess like at that point, how does that, I mean, this is an adult. And so we, I don't know how in the system he is, but you're in the system of some degree, fingerprint, social security, things like that. That's needed to get a job for the most part, right? Yes. Yeah. To function in the society. And so we already know from the beginning of what you're saying that his past, the adult's past is a little mysterious. Oh, yeah. And so it's just like, I feel like it's just two separate things that are happening here and they are connected somehow and it's, it's going to be my modeling, I think. Yes. I loved, I loved to walk you through these cases, Rachel, because I love your instincts. They're always right in line with where we're about to go. Task Force, as you know, I like to say this man sees the future five seconds at a time. We can upgrade that five minutes maybe, maybe if he's feeling strong, you know? Might strain my brain. Yeah. Happy belated birthday, by the way, maybe, maybe with a new age comes a couple. A couple more seconds of seeing the future, you know, you get stronger as you get older, like Thor. And I'm like 80. I'll be able to see the whole 30 seconds ahead. It'll finally be useful. Yeah. But no, so this case is wild. I don't want to, you know, tip my hand or anything, but you are definitely on the right track with a lot of these questions. And this one was new to me. This one comes from an anonymous task force member. They was submitted this one and if you task force want to submit your own mysteries, scary stories for us to explore movies, horror movies for us to watch, you can do so at redweb pod.com. We got a post up there where you can basically learn how to submit any of those. It's all through a form. But speaking of that very website redweb pod.com, it's our Patreon page where you can support us directly. You get things like movie club. We're last Friday. We covered the movie hush by Kate Seagull and Mike Flanagan, a phenomenal thriller where Fred will break down the plot and we just give our reactions. If you talk about Easter eggs, we deep dive in and react to everything going on in the movie. Fred, that was a phenomenal film too. It was a great film. It's our first time seeing it. It holds up. And then also if you've already seen the movie, if you don't know, Christian, let us know that there is a hush cut, which is how they intended the film to originally be, which didn't have any for the most part, you can just like movie scores. Right. Very immersive sound design, black and white, otherwise the same cut, phenomenal to do that. And then if you're over there and you join up, we also every month like this Wednesday, we kind of declassify one of our research outlines. You kind of get eyes on what I'm looking at where we work with cat or in the past with Jillian to kind of truncate all this information into a clear outline to break down everything that we talk about. And then this Friday, if you want to look at our behind the scenes show, we have an episode of break room coming out, lots to eat over there. But without further ado, let us dive into the case and start getting into these twists and turns. Fredo, we're going to start with the discovery on this one. So it's July 30th, 2002. A man, as you know, is found deceased in his apartment in East Lake, Ohio after several reports of a foul odor emanating from his apartment. This is according to a local news source called news, Harold. Now upon discovery of this body, he was quickly identified as the man who rented that apartment, Joseph Newton-Channeler, the third. Investigators determined that he had actually passed away probably about a week prior just looking at the condition of the body. This would have been July 23rd, 2002, though of course there's some discrepancies in the sources, some say July 24th, but otherwise about a week. Now upon stepping into the scene, it became immediately apparent and this is where I want to point out some sensitive topics in the description below, because upon finding the body, it was clear that Chandler had died by suicide via a 38 caliber revolver. In his apartment was actually a calendar that featured kind of a countdown. I couldn't get a lot of other details about it, but it seemed to be that he was marking off at least a few days prior, which seems to indicate that this might have been premeditated by at least a few days. Now I don't know if this was an important date to him or in his life, and through all of our research we didn't really notice a trend with that, but I think it's an important thing in the kind of grand scheme that this is how his life ends, and it begins a trend of curiosities, I'll say, with his life decisions. I'm curious to see what was going on in his life, or it could have just been a life from outside looking in that was, you know, the pill's eyes good and put together or whatnot. Sure. Yeah. You never really know. Now, to build on this scene, you know, he had seen he had the blinds drawn closed. He had turned off the air conditioning for whatever reason. One can only guess as to why one would do that, but of note, what's really interesting here is that Chandler left behind $82,000 in his bank account, and he left behind his 1988 truck, I couldn't find the making model, but given this was likely premeditated based on what we can surmise, it was interesting that he still had that level of cash left behind. Yeah. I mean, it also goes to show you that money doesn't buy happiness, you know, it buys instant gratification, but I don't know, man, people get accustomed to things, right? That's why you have people that work in sanitation or trash or whatnot, and it's like, oh, I can do it. You just get used to a smell. So I like, you know, if you're in a place that has a really bad smell, eventually just get used to it. Sure. Same thing goes with people and like, and just like items like that, you know, and so, yeah, that's like solid amount in your savings, a healthy amount that I would say wouldn't be stressing too much. You can even buy a house, especially during that time and, right, and then also some left over. So I don't think it was a financial issue. I mean, you make a good point though about becoming numb to the things around. A smell is a good one. Let this be a PSA, if you were a colon or what have you, shout out to all the middle schoolers with that ax body spray or whatever they got now. Oh, my God. I doused myself in that, dude. You might become a smell blind, but the rest of us are, it's in noxious fumes as you pass fine, but you know, whatever it is you have in your life, it's easy to become maybe numb to it or blind to it. So I think it's an interesting point you made there. But yeah, like I said, we're not going to try to poke and prod and guess as to, you know, the reasonings here, but it does begin to lay out some of the curiosities and open up some of the, okay, some of the decision making. intrigue. Not so much right now, but it lays that foundation. So upon identifying Chandler, of course, police are then attempting to notify the next of kin so they could make them aware of one, their loss, and probably to figure out some sort of inheritance, who this money would go to, because in lieu of having inheritance, it would kind of just go to the state as my understanding. But this is where things start to get a little odd. They notice they can't find any family members, investigators, of course, thought this was strange and so they begin to look into Chandler a little closer. And they did notice that on his person, he had his wallet in which he had his social security card. Now, again, I'm kind of layering in my assumptions, but I probably wouldn't be carrying around my social security card. You're not really supposed to laminate the thing, and it is just a delicate little piece of paper. And so in your wallet of all things, it's going to get eroded down and you're going to have to get a new one. You put that thing away at a fireproof cabinet and you just don't look at it. But knowing where we're going, I was almost wondering if you did this on purpose, if you wanted this card to be found so as to say, like, look into my identity, but again, I don't know. Also, I mean, you know, it's not getting earlier. I wonder if you had a social security name, you like that. I mean, he had a good amount of money. So I would say he's either really frugal or like he had a solid career job or worked hard a lot of hours. And then he did have a social. And so he's in the system. He's in the system. And then yeah, I do agree something about like leaving that because you're always taught, don't take your social with you. And that's why they say, don't laminate it because if you lose it, you don't want someone to find it and be able to use it. You want it to get you kind of want it to be destroyed if it gets lost. That's the idea, the thinking I believe. Yep. And so to have done the wallet, I don't know, it just doesn't it does seem like it's like, okay, hey, like there's more to me than just a normal case of, you know, what happened here. Yeah, it's kind of like a little yellow flag, like, hey, notice me a little bit. So, okay, so they've got his social. This is of course connecting with who's renting the apartment. We know who we're talking about. But from here, they look a little closer. They discovered that he's 65 years old. He's born in Buffalo, New York. They continue investigating. And this reveals that both of his parents had passed away already. And it appeared that the police were at a dead end, right? That maybe he didn't have any cousins or siblings or children. We just don't really know. And based on this social security info, there was a genealogist who was able to locate a relative of his mothers. So they kind of go up the family tree off to, I don't know if it was an aunt or an uncle, but someone related to who would be his mom on paper. And this person was able to provide some much-needed details. And this is where the case really takes off. So they discovered that this man that was found dead in the apartment wasn't actually Joseph Newton Chandler the third at all, but instead some anonymous, unknown man using that name as an alias. As it turns out, eventually they found out that the real Joseph Chandler had died 57 years prior to this in the year 1945. Okay, so then that tells me that there's, he's probably not that old. So that's not just like he went missing off the grid and then, okay, well, yeah, how old is he? Yeah, I don't know. I didn't know. Because like, is he him? Or, yeah, yeah, you know what I mean? Because that's a lot of years. Okay, you're asking the right questions. Once we get a little further in with more details, I'm going to break down the math because I was also very interested. When this was first submitted by Task Force, I was like, did a 65-year-old man steal the identity of an eight-year-old? It's not like that. I will, like I said, in a little bit here, I'll break down the numbers so we can really understand what we're cooking with. Okay. But he is an older man. 65 is what he would be if he were Joseph Newton Chandler. But remember, this, this eight-year-old boy actually passed away in a tragic car accident along with his parents in Sherman, Texas in 1945. So what then? Who did they contact? Good question, right? So, okay. So this is a good curiosity. I had the same thing because I was kind of losing my spot. So, they used the social security to contact the mom. This is the mom who passed away in 1945. Because on paper, they're thinking they're chasing down Chandler, right? Chandler the third. So they go to, okay, well, the parents are both dead. Well, we know that they died in that car accident. Okay. Well, maybe there's some relatives to these parents. So this, this relative was related to the deceased mother. And they're telling police, oh, yeah, this relative of mine passed away in a car accident along with Joseph Chandler Newton the third. And so that's when police go, oh my god, trailer, the third should be dead. This isn't him, right? Does this make sense? Does make sense. Okay, I'm trying to break it down because I'm a little excited, but yes. So the relative is of the alias's side. This is a real name, but not actually related to the man that is laying there deceased. That's a, what a phone call to get. Right. For the relative. Right. You, you might be a distant cousin. Again, I don't have a source that let us know what the relation is. So for all intents and purposes, this could be a second cousin. And you get a phone call and you're going, oh my gosh, I, yeah, she passed away 57 years ago, along with her husband and her son. And they go, her son, yeah, Joseph. And they're like, well, wait a minute. We got a Joseph here. Yeah. Okay. So, okay, I'm glad I could clear that up. It, it does get a little hairy. So coming back to the actual Chandler, the third, the eight year old boy, he died in a car accident with his parents in Sherman, Texas, many states away. And the reason we're really able to know all of this in addition to this family member is that there was a private investigator named Larry Moro, who was hired by a probate judge there in Lake County, Ohio. The whole idea of hiring this PI was to attempt to find Chandler's family members, right? Because they're going, we have a man who died of suicide. We don't really know much else about him. It's a dead end left frightened center. Let's get a PI. The PI is the person who found the relative and that relative is the one who closed the gap and made the revelation that this is a different person. This is an alias. Who is this man now? This episode of Redweb is sponsored by Ridge. I think back to my first wallets that I wore into the ground, those old leather things that I put in my back pocket that got thicker than a book. And I'm so grateful now to use Ridge because it's low profile and it fits in my front pocket, carries everything that I need without being bulky. And I don't need to risk back problems sitting on a brick. Ridge also has way more than just wallets if you're looking for rings, travel, tech, and other things like that. They've got you covered, but task force, let me tell you, Father's Day is coming up. So this year, get dad something he'll use every single day. Trust me, I know a Ridge Wallet. 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And it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. You don't have to say yes to everything this summer. Find support and therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/redweb. That's BetterHELP.com/redweb. So now the hunt is on for the true identity. So in an effort to gather this information, please sweat the apartment for fingerprints to see if they could find a match. And this makes sense because and we've talked about this on and off across the history of this podcast, because even in 2002, when DNA analysis was quickly becoming the new gold standard, matching fingerprints remained a robust, affordable and quick method for matching an identity. However, what they found was even more odd, okay, or what I, or I should say what they didn't find. It would seem that there was a significant lack of fingerprints in this apartment. And looking across various sources, it's unclear forensics only found a few fingerprints, or if they found simply none at all. But this wasn't like a burner phone situation. This isn't a temporary piece of housing. From what we could tell, he had been in this apartment for at least a few years. And the fact that they couldn't find any or at least maybe just a handful of fingerprints makes me think like, how did he scrub his own apartment? This place should be lit up with sticky fingerprints hitting that remote control, touching light switches, whatever. It should be riddled with fingerprints. I mean, he could have been in like a neat freak but I would have been to the extreme because I'm a neat freak, but I'm not that extreme. My fingerprints are still all over this place. Right. Was he trying to hide his identity and stuff? I don't think so. Because like he had a soul showing his wallet. If you're going to the extreme of having a little to no fingerprints, that's very meticulous. You're not going to forget something like a social security card in the wallet. Well, oh my God. Okay, I agree. Your point is well made. However, he knows he doesn't have that name. He knows that that social belongs to somebody else. He does. He does. So what if he's like, don't look any further? I'm just if Newton Chandler the third. It's right there in my wallet. Look no closer. I'm dead. You know what I mean? Like, damn. He gets home. He puts on his rubber gloves and he goes about living his life. He lives like a museum curator. I mean, like at that point, does he have a work or he has like a desk or a car or something? Right. Right. There's got to be somewhere that this, well, he had his 1988 truck. Oh, whatever the truck is. No prints, man. I don't know what we're doing over here. Is he driving like he's Michael Jackson, but dueled up gloves? Or maybe he's a golfer with a weird habit where he wears both gloves, you know what I mean? Oh, driving gloves. Maybe he's Ryan Gosling from the movie drive. Yeah. Get the cool jacket. It just wreaks of like, okay, that's fine. That's fine. But why? We've covered murder cases that have places not as clean as this place. Yes. Right. We've, well, well, I mean like murder case in terms of like people trying to get away with it. And like, yes, you know what I mean? We're just like, oh, there's just fingerprints all over the place. Like how many cases were, it's like hair or fingerprints or it found the scenes. Like they're a suspect, etc. And then here is just this guy leaving his life behind. And there's nothing. You just reminded me of the case we covered where a couple was found dead and like they opened the doors to like the town. And everyone came through like it was like a side show or something. People were taking things. A skull went missing. I remember that case. It's like, why is it like the whole scene was contaminated? Right. You just trampled on it and people were walking through like it's a museum. What are you doing? Meanwhile, this is the exact opposite. Yes. Got a man with a stolen identity in a crispy, clean apartment, living like he's a museum curator, not touching anything without gloves on. Yeah. No one lives that clean. So it just raises more questions, right? And that's only the beginning. So local investigators begin to search and this goes on for years. They're trying to find any insight into who this man might be, what the true identity is. And of course, as you might surmise, there's no luck. Now we flash forward more than a decade. And it's 2014. They now enlist the help and bless them for keeping this hunt on. There's no reason ultimately that, you know, they're like, well, maybe, you know, just throw this in the pile and forget about it. But they enlist the help of US Marshall Peter Elliott, who helps make so many breaks in this case. I actually do have an image of what he looks like in case you want a visual. So that's our first image here. Standard. Yeah. Got the suit. Got a little pin at the American flag. It's got the American flag behind. Got the slick back hair. The serious look. This man means a business. It does. And task force as always, if you want the visuals for this podcast, watch the video podcast on Spotify or on YouTube or come watch the pictures over on Instagram at red web pod. But Elliott's specialty was infugitive recovery. So he and his team were pretty well equipped to track down missing people, John Doe's things of that nature. And Elliott's first goal, as you kind of pointed out or kind of thought about in the beginning here was to find a DNA match. He's kind of leading the charge here because again, well, okay, 2014 DNA is is definitely established now. Throughout the 90s, it gets more of a foothold. Of course, I think the first criminal case it's involved in is in the late 80s. But now at the turn of the century, it's really getting on. And now it's 2014. So he's looking for a DNA match. We're going to figure this guy out. Within the year, he is able to track down a Lake County hospital where Chandler had undergone a surgery just two years prior to his death. It was 2000. And he was in there to treat colon cancer. And from this, he was able to collect a DNA profile on our John Doe here. Okay, there is so much being put into this. Yes, sir, which is wild because we've had cases that were murder cases and have less competent hands on it. Yeah, dude. But yeah, they're they're really pulling all the stops here. Yeah. And I'm glad they're at least finding leads because there's other cases to where they're somewhere in between where it's someone like this. They do exactly what they should be doing. But it's just dead end after dead end after dead end. Like, you know, if this man hadn't had a surgery nearby two years prior, maybe we wouldn't have a DNA profile. It's true. So they take this DNA, they run it against the national crime databases. And from this, unfortunately, there was no matches in these samples because, you know, they run these samples in movies and TV shows. And they're almost always able to scrounge up some sort of match. But of course, to be at least in this time, I would surmise that like to be in the national crime database, you would have had to be caught prior. And so, for example, they don't have your fingerprints until they have your fingerprints, you know, right? Yeah, that's true. They won't have your DNA until they have your DNA. So Elliott and his team continue working on the case. And then two years after that, June 2016, they consult with a forensic genealogist are actually two of them. You have Colleen Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press, two forensic genealogists who were working in California at the time. And they actually created DNA Doe project and identifiers international. They had dedicated their work to helping police solve missing purses in criminal cases, very much like this one. And we're very grateful for their work because as you'll come to find out, it definitely helps provide closure, figure out answers, and close the gap on much needed criminal cases. Man, this is wild because they're just bringing in people that are getting stuff done. Yeah, man, we're moving. That's rare. It is rather introduce like, okay, we hired this person and they pushed a case further and that person they pushed a case further. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Dude, and the fact that it's gone on this long, you know, it may be it all depends on the jurisdiction or the size of the police force or the town or wherever it's happening. I don't know. Maybe this is a low bar to say, but like, I'm very impressed with this going on for 16 years almost now. And they're still fervently chasing these answers. Whereas there's, like you said, there's in cases where you're just like, we don't know, man, dead end. So it's cold and then they kind of leave it even when there's petitions. There's petitions sometimes that say, we open this case. We got new evidence and they go like a toddler with a toy. Yeah. And this one they're like committed. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Let's go. So they then use the genetic profile from the surgery and they do what's called a search with the Y DNA. So Y DNA is the DNA found specifically on the Y chromosome, meaning it's genetically passed down from father to son, et cetera, et cetera. So all males in the family share this Y DNA from there. They searched public genealogy databases and they were able to discover that the last name of this particular John Doe was either Nichols or Nicholas. They basically run it up all of these public domains. And I don't know if this is like 23 and me kind of thing or ancestry.com. But with the proliferation of services like this, it does broaden your ability to search. And so they find some light matches in the Nicholas and Nichols families. And then finally, nearly 16 years after his death in the spring of 2018, they were able to link the DNA to the Nichols family in particular, the family out of New Albany, Indiana. Now this family in particular had four boys. Okay, three had already passed away, but one of their sons had been missing for decades. Now they were confident that they'd found the right person because they've got a guy here with a mysterious past with a match to a family who has a missing son and maybe were closing some gaps. Yeah, I would think so. I would think that we're like, we've cracked the case here and this is it. Yes, sir. So they're like, we got the right person. We've identified this deceased person of interest. Forensics were able to then turn around and track down the missing man's son. So this is where it gets a little confusing again. But what that is to say is if this guy here, this deceased person of interest, is in fact the missing boy from the Nichols family in New Albany, Indiana, that missing man had children. And so they go after those children to see if they can find a match. Sure enough, that son was Phil Nichols, and he agreed upon being reached out to to provide a DNA sample. Investigators then confirm the match after a year's long investigation. The John Doe's DNA matches Phil Nichols, which confirms the identity of this man now as Robert Nichols. Can we actually have a photo of? This is the DMV photo, thanks to the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles. This is what he looked like on his driver's license under the name Joseph Chandler, but this is what he would have looked like near the end of his life. I mean, I was not expecting for us to nail down exactly who this person was. Oh, we got him. But I feel like there's a lot more episode to go. Yeah, you still get at the runtime, he knows. So what's going on here? What is going on? Because to me, I'm like, that's it. That's the episode we're done. We found DNA and tracked it down, very efficient people, good at their job, and that's closed shut case. You would think so, right? Because great. We do have the person of interest. We know his name, we know his family, we know that he went missing, but now a new case is beginning to unfold. As you so astutely pointed out, Fredo, your instincts were right. We have more than one case on our hands, just not the ones you thought we had. So we know who he is now. But now we have to ask, who was Robert Nichols? Why did he go missing decades ago? And why did he take up the alias of a boy who died states away in 1945? Among many other questions. That's very, very true. So now we're going to join the investigators into the deep dive of Robert Nichols and who he was to see if we can answer some questions or just discover more questions. You know, I don't know. So Robert Nichols, again, we have the photo here. This is what he looked like towards the end of his life. He was born September 12, 1926 in New Albany, Indiana. His parents were Celus and Alpha Nichols, and again, he had three siblings because there were four boys in total. Now during World War II, he joined the US Navy, and he served as a firefighter on the USS Aaron Ward. Now the ship was bombed in May of 1945 just off the coast of Okinawa. This actually resulted in injury as Nichols was struck by shrapnel wounding his back and his hip. He was subsequently awarded the Purple Heart, which if I'm sure you've heard of it, Frado, but if you haven't tasked for us, it is a prestigious US military decoration. It's awarded to service members who are wounded or killed in action, and it's just a great honor to be bestowed upon people who put their life on the line for the nation, right? And I do believe, I don't want to speak out of term, I believe that this is most often issued by the president himself. Now it has been reported via a few sources I saw that he had burned his uniform when he had returned home from the war, and this is again where some curiosities start to come to play. So soon after the war, he, you know, burns his uniform, and he goes on to mario woman named laverne court in 1947. So again, he is fresh out of the war. This is like two years after now his ship was struck. He's marrying this woman, and the pair have three sons together before he then left the family and filed for divorce. Not soon after, this was about 17 years, so marries, three kids, 17 years later, 1964. He kind of leaves. He explains to his wife that his reasons for leaving would be revealed quote in due time and quote. That would be so frustrating. Oh my God. 17 years. And all of a sudden it's like, oh, no, this isn't some games. All will be revealed. No, no, you're going to reveal that right now, right now. We're going to, you're going to sit down. We're going to talk. Yeah. Good or bad. Just let it out. You also may answer, sir. Yeah. This is this man has the, there I guess the emotional maturity of a 17-year-old. I'm not very good at these breakups. Um, you'll find out later. I find no later point says. I just think says. I mean, who knows? Maybe he was, you know, battling a lot of inner demons, things like that. And you're totally on to something there. Yes. You need to end up taking his own life. And so maybe there was just a lot of things that he was dealing with. Absolutely. You know, I just for the levity of it, but I don't want to disrespect the situation. We don't know he was in. I will say I agree with you. I think a level of respect for anyone listening out there. You owe that to your partners, your loved ones, your family. Yeah. That's what we're getting. Yeah. But you're totally right. We don't understand what goes down in the fog of war and what a person carries with them after it is. We'll talk about PTSD later on in the theories that attempt to answer what might be going on here. It's kind of a controversial topic across the internet, but we'll dabble with that a little, but you're totally right. So he kind of leaves the family, files for Dvoris. It's 1964. He relocates just north to Dearborn, Michigan. And then shortly after that, he actually kicks over to Stroud, Oklahoma. Now we do know via the family now that we have the connection to Phil and everybody that while living in Dearborn, he had told his parents that he was working in the car industry. Don't have any other details. It's kind of just ambiguously that. And reportedly, his sons went to visit him while he was living there. But for whatever reason, wouldn't allow them to stay with him at his home instead offered to pay for their motel. And so I guess that's what went down. When it comes to his time living in Stroud, Oklahoma, we don't really have much information that we do have a letter postmarked from this city confirming his presence there. So if you want to take a look at this next image, it just kind of confirms that, yep, this is Robert postmarked where he's at. If you want to read that out too. Yeah. Dear mom and dad, I am heading out west all as well. Don't worry. Yeah. Robert. Yeah. Simple as that. Oh man. I don't know. Yeah, he just I feel like there's there's stuff that unpacked there in therapy, maybe like attachments, styles and issues and things like that. Because I mean, that's his parents, you know, mm-hmm. I think there's a lot going on inside, yeah, for sure. Absolutely. And, you know, as a society and as generations have gone by, made great strides in trying to confront and unpack all sorts of things that are going on in the mind. But I think, you know, using personal experience, one can, yeah, guesstimate that, yep, he's probably going through some stuff. He's at least opening up enough to let his family know or at least his parents know, you know, I'm well. I'm happy. Don't worry. As best you can, right? So in a follow up to this Oklahoma letter, then in March of 1965, it seemed he once again wrote his parents letting them know that he had moved this time to Richmond, California. So it seems the Oklahoma letter said that he was moving west. Now he's kind of confirming Richmond California. And now around this time, he also sends a letter to his son Phil. This was the son who he matched with on DNA tests in modern times. Now the letter to Phil was actually quite interesting. It was postmarked from Napa, California, which is about 25 miles or 45 kilometers north of Richmond. And it didn't have a letter. It didn't have a note. It contained only a penny, a singular penny with no return address on the letter or on the envelope. This man is mysterious. Very mysterious. I mean, I'm assuming we don't really know what the penny is. I mean, the son would be the only person that would know if that had any significance. Yeah. Like, is he saying something to his son is this built on a bond that they had an in joke? Is there a date on this penny that is peculiar? We don't know any of those details. But yeah, this is coming from Phil directly. He's like, yep, I got a no return address on this thing postmarked to me just a singular penny inside this envelope tumbling around. I don't know, man. This guy is just mysterious as anything. And I don't know if there's but I can't really think of a reason why there's a lot that he does that I can't just pinpoint. I mean, I would really like to, I mean, I don't think, you know, we have this, but just like like a profiler or something like that or, you know, someone that's an expert on just human action and emotions and stuff like that. I would really love to know their opinion on what they think is going on in his head. Yeah, dude. I mean, because it's almost like counter to what we saw in the apartment with no fingerprints and an alias. Is this man laying breadcrumbs? But then there's no return address. Is the penny like a lucky symbol? Like, I know, like a, when I was a kid at least, if you find a wheatback penny, a copper penny or a penny on the ground with its head up, like the heads up, it was supposed to be good luck. Maybe there's something like that in play. But otherwise, it's, it, we could only guess. I would love the idea of like a behavioral scientist kind of stepping into it to kind of guess here. But what's interesting is that this is the last time that anyone would hear from him, at least as a nickels, because later that same year upon not hearing from Robert anymore, his family reported him as missing, though it's unclear when exactly that was. It was sometime that year. And like, the thing is, it kind of went off and did his thing, so what was it that triggered them to report this, miss it? That's a great question actually, I wonder if this was, if they just grew concerned with the sudden shift, like after 16 years, having these kids kind of becoming more mysterious, he notifies his parents, but the only thing his immediate kin, like his children here, is a penny with no return address, and then months go by with nothing, maybe that was just enough to say hey, let's call this in, because they did hire detectives, both in California and in Indiana to try to find him, maybe not thinking he is definitely just missing, but at least to figure out like, is he okay? Where is he? Right, that's true, it could have been a wellness check. Yeah, something like that, you know, because clearly something shifted in who they knew this man to be, and what's interesting is, again, oddities out the wazoo, investigators could not find anyone who reported, knowing, Nichols. It's like he was a ghost, no one knew who this guy was, once he left the family. So now moving forward, and this is based on, you know, investigators, private investigators, authorities doing their thing, we don't know exactly how, but through a lot of paper trails, it is believed that Nichols officially then stole Joseph Chandler's identity in September of 1978, specifically in Rapid City, South Dakota, and we know this because he applied for a Social Security card using the name Joseph Newton Chandler III, and he listed his birthday as the same as the boys, March 11th, 1937. Now we'll talk about the question here, if he's in South Dakota now, all the sudden, you know, after having kind of gone out west, now he's coming back to Central America, but like kind of north, how is he discovering, how does he know about this eight year old who died in Texas, all the way down to the birthday, that's a very interesting question. I mean, I'm sure there's probably, maybe, public records or, you know what, probably, honestly, right? Like, it's like, I'm sure it was in the news or, at least, you know, things get reported in news, you have obituaries, you can go to public library, totally, and you can find maybe public access to birth certificates, you know, I'm sure there are methods for someone determined enough. We'll wax poetic on that question here in a second because this is where I want to bring that math I was teasing out because I started to feel like the ages were off as you astutely pointed out with 2002 feeling 65, eight year old boy, what's going on? So I got curious. I decided to do some math to figure out how much he was de-aging himself and maybe if that helped answer the question, why this young boy? So in 1945, Chandler, the boy would have been eight, Nichols would have been 19, but he didn't pick up this identity for like 30 plus years. So now it's 1978, Nichols would have been 52 at the time when he was applying for the Social Security Card, and being 52, he is using the identity of a 41 year old, and honestly, for your bog standard guy, that might be the perfect time. You know, I don't know if 41 could claim 31 as well as 51 could claim 41, 61 claiming 51 might also be a bit of a stretch. I don't, it's hard to say, I don't know, you know, like it all depends on the person. Yeah, it all depends on the person. And I don't think the office is going to be like, are you sure because you look old? Yeah. Cause like, you just imagined it's a regular guy going, okay, yeah, like a what? Yeah, he just, you just never know, I don't know, I mean, people also, like, people see ages differently. And also it's like how you, how you act, I've had people that are like, oh, I thought you were, cause I just turned 37, but I've had people all throughout the year be like, oh, I thought you're late 20s or some people would be like, you look late 20, but the way you act, I was like, okay, he's probably in his early 30s. Yeah, like real immature kind of stuff, you know, coloring books. Yeah, like real just like silly farting around, I guess I went out to dinner and my birthday and I got carted. But I just, it's cool. That's cool. Yeah, that's pretty cool. But, um, you know, everyone has, everyone sees, sees everyone differently. Totally. And you know, like, there's people that feel like ageless when you see that they're like set to generions or something, but they're rocking clothes that you'd see Tony Hawk wearing. You're like, well, okay, hold on. Yeah. Age is just a vibe at this point, man. Yeah, it really is. So ultimately though, you know, I was just curious about that. And I think it passed the vibe check. But ultimately, you know, the person running the office is like, and no red flags here. Well, especially I should say because, you know, nowadays, at least when I was a kid, you got your social security card, essentially when you were born, or at least a few months after you were born around this time in the 70s, you didn't really get a social, certainly in the 40s. You don't just get a social security card, Willie Nilly, it's something you got sometimes when you were enrolling in high school, but usually it was issued as needed for work purposes because they need to know how much to deduct with the taxes and the social security program and all of that sort of stuff. And so eight year old Joseph Chandler wouldn't have had a social security card. So they're like, all right. I mean, 41, let's get you that stamp. Let's get you that card off. You go pal. That's just wild. I was just like slipping through with it though. Yeah. So it's almost like, and this comes back to the question, why this young boy, well, maybe one, because all of his kin had passed away, both parents are gone, he's gone. He doesn't have a social security card yet. So that gives him the opening to get it and fly under the radar and almost slip into that life. The age gap isn't super big. And so he can almost seamlessly transition into becoming Joseph Chandler. Yeah. It's kind of what I feel. So after this, he's working at a couple different companies again, now as this new identity as Joseph and co workers again, all through the great vine, all through various reports, but seem to notice various levels of odd behavior. Now listen, I've been a loner and a rebel daughter a few times in my life, but he did tend to keep to himself. He was described as a bit of a hermit. He would tell co workers that someone quote was getting close and quote, but would never explain further than that. And it seems, again, via these reports that he would disappear sometimes for days or weeks at a time before either showing back up or maybe taking a new job. Take a look at this next image as I give this little anecdote, but there was one instance where he reportedly showed up to a company Halloween party dressed up as a gangster, maybe Al Capone or something. Oh, yeah, it's dressed up like old school gangster. Yeah. And there's a photo of him doing that exact thing live in his life. But it seems that again, by all reports that he didn't speak to anybody the entire night. So he dresses to the nines and just kind of becomes a wallflower and then leaves. It definitely seems like he's just a particular human being because now we're as odd as the trends are that we're seeing now they're being consistent. Right. Yeah. Where he's kind of detached from people, does things maybe on impulse? Isn't afraid to make big changes in his life, so very interesting. I did want to kind of highlight though and again, it's reported. But if he was on record as saying to people, you know, people are getting close, it starts to show that interesting level of suspicion or, you know, or maybe even like a paranoia. And maybe this is something that onset later in his adulthood and this could be part of the behavioral change of leaving the family suddenly. You know, I'm not a psychologist, so I won't attempt to guess in that realm, but pattern is kind of there. Now other so-called odd behaviors included playing white noise for hours. Well, color me odd, I fall asleep to that stuff every night. Yeah. It'd be different if he stared at the channel that is white noise. When you stumble across HBO as a kid and it's just like static. Yeah. If he's watching that for hours, then I might need to notify someone. Yeah. That's a little son. Another thing here reportedly, he drove 700 miles to an LL Bean store in Maine only to turn around and drive right back when he discovered upon arrival that there were no spots in the parking lot. Yeah. Definitely seems like he's a very particular human being. Yeah. I also think this detail is suspect. I mean, I see people debate this online all the time. Some say it was directly through co-workers, others say that, well, maybe this was a rumor started to just kind of accentuate his peculiar behavior. But if it's real, I mean, that is, that is a bit of an impulsive person, right? I'm going to go to the LL Bean store in Maine. Oh, no spaces. Better go home. Yeah. Goodbye. 700 miles. All in all, it was clear to investigators that Nichols was an interesting character. At the time of his death, he was actually at the age of 75 years old. Recall that this is ultimately a suicide case. And while no note was left behind on the scene, police theorized that his health had been in decline due to his colon cancer, which may have been what led him to his final decision. We will never know. Upon notifying his sons of their father's true whereabouts, Phil Nichols said this, quote, "I'm at peace and hold no animosity, no anger. I wish it had turned out differently," end quote. So ultimately, it's been a wild and interesting road, a strange case with strange details featuring a stolen identity and a decades-plus long search for a real man using an alias a dead child. And while some longstanding questions were answered, it seems that they only layered in a little bit more, I say, curiosities and oddities a lot this episode, but some like really points of intrigue here. For example, Nichols' choices puzzled US Marshal Elliott and other investigators. And because of this, they became adamant as experts that Nichols was either hiding something or on the run from something, but just didn't know what that was. And this is where those conspiracy theories step into attempt to answer in some really interesting ways. So I say, very interesting. I want to see what conspiracy theories have to offer here. Because it just seemed like it was a particular human being and carried his life accordingly. Yeah. And just decided, you know, just made very interesting choices in his life or by the day. I mean, at the end of the day, that's, I'm with you. It seems like there was a sudden shift for whatever reason that might be due to various things that can happen in the brain over the course of a life. It seems like that stuck, you know, that he didn't want to be close to anybody anymore, that he struggled to want anybody to get closer to him. And so it kept him on the move, kept him staying cryptic. And maybe that even colored his decision to keep his apartment uniquely clean, at least of anything identifying. And maybe why he carried the social security card to keep up the rules post mortem. And also, you know, if he did believe that someone was after him, maybe that's why he was trying to keep things clean. So you, you know, it could be followed or traced. So you just up and leave or something. Sure. Yeah. If you got no trails, if you got no connections, it's easy to uproot yourself and move again. If you think, you know, we'll never know. But if you think the person or the entity is approaching a group, what have you? Now I wanted to tease this at the beginning, but I felt a little clickbadi about it. So I just didn't, but man, I was going to ask you the question, what do you think this has anything to do with the zodiac killer? God, I mean, a lot of things would have to line up. Okay. A lot of things that have to line up in my mind in terms of like where he was. Oh, I don't know, because it also kind of seemed like we do have a general understanding of where he lived his life. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it seems like we've filled in a lot of the gaps. You know, like, when you draw up to that store and turn around, was there a victim there? Oh, great. Yeah, dude. Great question. Like, things like that, the little that we do have in terms of like his movements. Yeah. I wish I looked into that. Dang it. You know, but that's the thing is I don't think we knew exactly the date that that trip happened, but true. Man, I guess I could look at a decade. Task Force, use your buff mines. Help me out. Head to the discord. Let's talk about it. But I'm curious, you're right. And then a radius, maybe, outside of LL bean in the 70s and 80s, say, that's a wide net to cast. That's a pretty wide. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's explore that. Okay. Let's explore this question and see how you feel because some have theorized that Nichols decided to change his identity because he was actually the zodiac killer. We did an entire detailed episode breaking down this case task force. If you haven't heard it, go check it out. There's so many frustrating moments. It's just like the movie zodiac, which we should watch at some point where you're so close to getting it and in just somehow this man slips by. But in brief, the zodiac killer was a prolific serial killer who was active in the 1960s and 1970s in California. He killed at least five people. He wrote cryptic letters to authorities and newspapers saying he had killed many more taunting them, saying that they'll never crack his identity, figure out who he is. And even to this day, we're still still decrypting some of his letters. Now, there's many, many theories about who the zodiac killer is, what their identity is. And we certainly didn't talk about this guy in that episode. There's good reason for it. But the case was never solved. And so it stands to reason why, you know, people might point to this guy as being it. So some believe, and I have an image for you, Fredo and task force, the classic sketch. Some believe that Nichols resembled sketches of the zodiac killer and paired with the fact as you were kind of thinking about, Fredo, paired with the fact that they were both living in California around the same time. It's led some people to conclude that Nichols was the infamous killer. What do you think about the sketch and the similarities? I mean, I can see, I can see some of the similarities, maybe when the eyes and the facial structure, Toshi, if you account for age and everything. Totally. I mean, again, you can link it back to what he told the wife. It's like, you know, all will be revealed or whatever he said. It's like, oh, no, you're totally right. You know, I mean, I would write, I would write in my own code. And then did Daddy commit suicide because of the guilt? Is that why? Oh, no. Now the lower is starting to lower. Yeah, see if you can build the lower off of it. You start linking it together. Yeah. But again, like locations need to add up because we do have, you know, we do have some cement evidence on like Zodiac in terms of like habits where we were these killings took place, etc. And we do have some of his life where it's like, okay, he worked here, he worked there. Yeah, we have more of an NO, right? Is routine maybe. Yeah, I feel like we'd need to know at that point. Yeah, I'm going to, how close is Napa to San Francisco? Napa is not far. Is it over a couple hours? Oh, yeah, you're right. It really isn't that far. And Richmond is even closer. Yeah, an hour. The San Pablo Bay is basically what separate San Francisco from Richmond. Okay, well, yeah, Napa's not far. So if he's in Napa, if he's in Richmond in the 70s. Okay, okay. Here's what I think. With all my infinite wisdom and knowledge, the glasses make it the man here. I think the hair, yes, maybe I think the identities we explored in the episode are a little closer to this sketch. I think the glasses are really helping carry a lot of the similarities because otherwise I think his mouth's a little wider. I think front on his nostrils are a little bit more upturned. Yeah, his eyes are a little bit more puppy dog wide, but the shorter hair, you know, maybe the the square wide jaw, but like the slanted cheeks, I could see some and I could leave some, you know, I can see how you could think that. Yeah, there's a there's enough, I guess, to think that. Yeah. Okay, so we can give our guesses as long as the day is here, but as far as I know, as far as we could find with Kat, this theory was never really heavily investigated by police. And the reason why that might be is because we do actually have a partial DNA on the zodiac killer, I believe, and if that were the case, we would be able to take the full DNA profile of Robert Nichols, and partially, you know, there would be some sort of match to a partial DNA. So unless the chances are like, okay, well, we actually don't have his DNA. It's an accidental DNA that somebody else is and not the zodiacs, but we thought it was the zodiacs. That is the big wrinkle here that, you know, if it is the zodiacs, it's not matching. And but the timing and the location, oh, it's interesting. I mean, I could see how people want to fantasize it. And, you know, they kind of are like, okay, this could add up and this could, people want to connect, right, missing pieces with each other. Listen, I follow enough conspiracy subreddits to know that it doesn't take a whole lot for people to become very vehemently convinced about some of these theories. That's very true. It is interesting, you know, people just want that answer. Who is the zodiac? Yeah, I do. And it's just like, you know, if it did line up, it's like, whoa, like, when you have two separate mysteries, that's a whole thing. When you have two separate mysteries that end up connecting to each other, that's a whole different ballgame. Totally. And honestly, it's it's almost like the boy that cries wolf. I feel like of all the various unsolved killer cases out there, the zodiac is the one that comes up as a theory a lot when there's a man unidentified or with a mysterious life. Oh, yes. It's like, hey, two birds one stone. Maybe we'll get it. But the next one is a little bit more ambiguous, but does kind of make some sense. So Elliott and his team maintained that a more likely theory is that Nichols was a fugitive of some kind. And he was on the run from a crime that said, there's no criminal record for Robert Nichols. And it would seem that he hadn't broken any laws. There were no warrants out for his arrest at the time of his disappearance. So it seemed that he was squeaky clean. But Elliott believes that given the lengths he went to and the sacrifices he made in his personal life, that Nichols had to be hiding something. But that's also an assumption. It isn't expertly informed opinion, but it is an assumption. Yes, it's built on suspicious details on behaviors, but so far nothing else. Yeah, it ever really took off aside from odd behaviors. And so it was like, yeah, you know, he did some weird things in the way he carried about his life. It is probably socially interacting with people was very particular, but it didn't really excel past that, you know, there wasn't. He didn't have a rap sheet, you know. Right, that would be a different thing. I think the why factor of this case is is the largest unknown. And that's exactly what weighs on Elliott and his team. In 2018, Elliott stated this, quote, 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 end quote. - I mean, wouldn't be his family, he seemed very detached. He didn't seem to really get attached to any friends. So I don't, man, I don't know if that's the answer there. If someone holds the key, except for himself. - Especially now, you know, you take on this identity in the '70s, he passed away 25 years later, and then 16 years after that, we're kind of talking about, well, now it's been more like 26 years later, but you know, maybe there once was somebody, but if that person ever did exist every year that goes by, there's an exponentially higher chance that they are no longer with us. So that key, if it exists, is likely lost to time. And this brings us back to what I was kind of talking about earlier, the conversation online, a lot of Reddit users have theorized, you know, not trying to diagnose anybody, but it's possible that Nichols was suffering from things like PTSD or maybe some other undiagnosed mental illness. Many users agree that his behavior, strange or otherwise, however you want to categorize it, showed a general dissatisfaction in life that there was a sudden shift in personality, that there was maybe a little bit of paranoia sprinkled into that, and while it's unclear, if Nichols was ever officially diagnosed with PTSD or anything like that, it's not a far-fetched theory given his presence in World War II. And again, we also don't know what he experienced, what he saw, what he felt, what he did during that war. You know, all of those things are, you know, blind spots in the narrative, and all of those individually and together could weigh on a man's conscience in a way that it's just you and I won't ever understand. - Yeah, that's true. If you go back to the core of it, he did live a life where he, yeah, there's a lot of PTSD and it's just a very well-known and studied thing with vets, so. - Truly, there's a lot to unpack with all of the unanswered questions, ultimately. And I won't attempt to fill them all in. You know, it's an interesting conversation to talk about the theories, you know, it's, especially when the zodiac comes to play, but at the end of the day, it is a tragic tale. A man who ran away from his life felt the need or was maybe, I don't know, felt the need to pick up a new identity and lived out the rest of those days alone, growing ill. And, you know, again, there's several unexplained factors here. If somebody was out to get him whatever that was, whoever that was, we don't know. But the unfortunate truth is that his family may never know why Robert Nichols decided to up in his life and disappear, leaving them behind and ultimately becoming a completely different person. And that is the story of Robert Nichols, aka the case of Joseph Newton Chandler. - Yeah, we got a little bit solved, you know, we got his identity, but, yeah, the why he did certain things we'll never know. - Absolutely. And I think at the end of the day, this is a very intriguing tale. There's a lot to draw on and peak your interest, but I think at the end of the day, the mystery here is just the human condition and the mind. Humans are so complex and so interesting and the fabric of our lives are so interwoven to all these other things. I think at the end of the day, that's the takeaway for me is the mystery of, you know, what this man lived through and what culminated in these decisions that made the moments that piqued our interest, right? And out of respect, I'll watch and observe from afar just as somebody interested in philosophy and psychology and the mind, but certainly a fascinating case that, you know, it is still relatively fresh and there's a possibility that new breaks happen, that new revelations come along, and maybe Ellie's right, maybe a key piece of information is yet to unfold. But for now, that's the case. - It's just that in between of like, we got answers, but there's still so much to like, no. - Yeah. - And I think for me, I'll chalk it up to, you know, it's just the particular habits of an individual and carried themself in a very particular way. And I think that was common throughout his big chunk of his life. And so that's kind of how life feel is worth that right now. - Yeah, yeah, like yes, there was a sudden shift, but they maintained a level of consistency. So yeah, I think that does narrow in the curiosity or the unknown into that pivotal moment, what changed, what became the new reality or what have you. - Well, with that said, Frado, I'll see you right back here next Monday for yet another mystery. (upbeat music)