The investigators asked him to provide a DNA sample. He agreed.
Phil Nichols confirmed what the genealogical research had suggested: that his father had been Robert Ivan Nichols, a Navy veteran who had served aboard a ship that was attacked off Okinawa in May 1945, who had been wounded and received the Purple Heart, who had married and had three children, and who had left the family in 1964, sending one last letter from Napa, California in 1965 — a letter containing a single penny — before disappearing from their lives.
Phil Nichols’s DNA sample was compared against the profile extracted from the 2000 surgical tissue. It matched. The identification was complete.
The confirmation resolved the identity question that had been open since 2002. The man who had lived in Eastlake, Ohio as Joseph Newton Chandler III was, beyond a reasonable doubt, Robert Ivan Nichols of New Albany, Indiana, born September 12, 1926, died July 2002 at the age of seventy-five.
It did not resolve why.
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## The Press Conference and the Public Announcement
On June 21, 2018, the United States Marshals Service for the Northern District of Ohio held a press conference in Cleveland to announce the identification. U.S. Marshal Peter J. Elliott presided. The announcement described the case as the Marshals Service’s first use of forensic genealogy — a technique that would soon become more widely known after its role in the identification of the Golden State Killer suspect, which was announced several weeks later in April 2018.
Elliott described the process and credited the work of Identifinders International and the DNA Doe Project. He quoted the central finding: the man known for more than two decades as Joseph Newton Chandler III was Robert Ivan Nichols, a World War II Navy veteran and Purple Heart recipient from Indiana.