Standard procedure in such cases is to attempt to identify next of kin who might claim the estate. The investigating officers ran searches on the name Joseph Newton Chandler III and found nothing — no relatives, no family connections, no one who appeared in the records they checked. They then dug deeper, and what they found was not a family but an impossibility.
The real Joseph Newton Chandler III had died in 1945 at the age of eight. He could not have worked as an electrical designer in Ohio in the 1980s and 1990s. He could not have lived in an Eastlake apartment and died there in 2002 at age seventy-five. The Social Security number attached to the name was the Social Security number of a dead child.
This discovery — that the man who had lived in Eastlake as Joe Chandler had used a stolen identity — meant that nothing on record for the deceased could be trusted. The name was false. The biographical details he had given employers were false or unverifiable. The supposed sister with the Columbus address did not exist. The man had built his adult life around a name that did not belong to him, and now that he was dead, investigators had no starting point for identifying who he actually was.
The body had been too decomposed to yield fingerprints, and it had been cremated — a further obstacle to certain types of forensic identification. What remained available was the DNA sample from the 2000 surgical procedure, preserved in the Lake County hospital’s pathology archive.