Police obtained that sample and submitted it to the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office, which created a DNA profile. The profile was entered into CODIS, the national criminal DNA database. Nothing matched.
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## The Case Goes Cold and Then Reopens
For more than a decade after the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner created a DNA profile from the preserved tissue, the case of Joseph Newton Chandler III was effectively dormant. No additional leads developed. No one came forward to claim the estate or to report a missing family member whose description matched the deceased. The CODIS profile sat in the system without producing a hit.
In 2014, Eastlake police formally requested that the United States Marshals Service take over the investigation. The Marshals’ Fugitive Task Force in the Northern District of Ohio accepted the case. U.S. Marshal Peter J. Elliott, who became the public face of the investigation, later said he believed the man had been hiding from something — though he could not say what.
The reopening of the case coincided with a significant development in forensic investigation: the emergence of genealogical DNA analysis as a tool for identifying unknown individuals. Consumer genetic testing had been growing rapidly through companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA, and the databases these companies maintained — containing genetic profiles of millions of people who had voluntarily submitted DNA samples to learn about their ancestry — were increasingly being used by researchers to identify unknown individuals through shared genetic segments with known relatives.
The technique worked on the principle that genetic material is inherited from ancestors and shared with biological relatives in predictable proportions. Even distant cousins share detectable genetic segments. If a database contains enough profiles, an unknown individual can potentially be connected to a family tree by identifying the relatives whose profiles appear as matches — a process that requires combining genetic analysis with traditional genealogical research to build family trees outward from the DNA matches and eventually converge on the most likely identity.