He also confirmed biographical details about his father that helped fill in the picture: the Navy service, the ship that had been attacked off Okinawa, the Purple Heart, the burning of the uniforms. These were things Phil had known from childhood, family memory carried across fifty-three years of silence.
Whether Phil or his brothers ever sought to understand what happened — whether they searched for their father in the years between 1965 and 2002, before his death and the emergence of the Chandler identity — is not fully established in the available reporting. The family had reported him missing in 1965, so there was an official record of their concern. What private searches they may have conducted, or what conclusions they reached about why he left, are their own.
The $82,000 estate question — what became of it — was not prominently addressed in the coverage of the 2018 announcement. Whether Phil and his brothers had any claim to it under Ohio law, and whether such a claim was pursued, has not been documented in accessible reporting.
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## The Child Chandler’s Family
The story of Robert Ivan Nichols’s identity theft has necessarily focused on the person who perpetrated it, but the crime had a victim: Joseph Newton Chandler III, the child who died before Christmas 1945.
The Chandler family — the parents who died alongside Joseph in the Sherman, Texas crash, and whatever extended family they had — are not prominent in the reporting on this case. By the time Robert Nichols appropriated the name in 1978, thirty-three years had passed since the child’s death. Whatever relatives might have recognized the name were, by the time the case became public in the 2000s and then again in 2018, decades removed from the loss.