Why did he keep a packed suitcase for years, planning for an escape he ultimately never used?
Why did he spend hours watching a television tuned to static? Why did he drive seven hundred miles to a store and turn around at the parking lot? Why did he sit in silence at a costume party, wearing a costume, speaking to no one?
These questions about his inner life are not answerable from the available evidence. They may never be answerable. The man who could answer them planned his own death carefully and executed that plan in July 2002, leaving a calendar marked with the approach of the date he had chosen and $82,000 he never distributed and a suitcase he never used.
The investigators who found him, sixteen years later, found his name. They did not find his reasons.
—
## The Weight of a Penny
Phil Nichols’s description of his last contact with his father — a letter from Napa, California, containing a single penny — is one of the few details in this case that carries an emotional charge capable of surviving its own ambiguity.
The penny may have been a message. It may have been a mistake — something accidentally enclosed, or a literal coin left in the envelope when the letter was sealed. It may have been a gesture whose meaning was private to Robert Nichols, something he understood and that he may have expected Phil to understand, or something he expected would remain cryptic. It may have been a statement of how much he was leaving behind. It may have been the kind of symbolic act that a person in extremis performs without thinking it through.