The use of a deceased child’s identity is a specific harm that is distinct from the harms of identity theft against living persons. The child cannot be confronted with the theft or seek remedy for it. His name, and by extension whatever small memorial that name represents — the memory kept by family, the record in county documents — was appropriated by someone else and used for decades in ways that had nothing to do with him.
The practice of appropriating dead children’s identities was not unheard of in the decades before systematic cross-referencing of birth and death records. Some accounts of similar cases suggest that the technique was known in certain circles — that people who needed new identities knew to look for children who had died young in counties with limited record-keeping and no obvious surviving relatives to notice the fraud. Whether Robert Nichols arrived at the Chandler identity through such a systematic search, or through some more contingent path, is not established.
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## The Lost Thirteen Years: What Investigators Still Want to Know
The period from 1965 to 1978 — the thirteen years between Robert Nichols’s last known contact with his family and his emergence in South Dakota as Joseph Newton Chandler — represents the central gap in the documented narrative of the case.
The Social Security Administration’s records indicate that Nichols worked under his real name through approximately 1976. This means he was employed for at least eleven of those thirteen years, paying taxes, presumably receiving wages deposited under his given name. Somewhere, there are records of this employment — tax records, employer records, perhaps records in state labor databases. Those records would establish where he was and what he was doing during the years when he had effectively disappeared from his family’s lives while not yet fully disappearing from the government’s administrative record.