The name Joseph Newton Chandler III would lie dormant for more than thirty years after the boy’s death. When it was finally claimed, in 1978 in Rapid City, South Dakota, the man claiming it was not a child. He was fifty-one years old, and he had reasons of his own — reasons he never explained to anyone — for needing to become someone else.
—
## Robert Ivan Nichols: The Life Before
Robert Ivan Nichols was born on September 12, 1926, in New Albany, Indiana, a small city across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky. His parents were Silas and Alpha Nichols. He grew up in the years of the Great Depression, came of age during the Second World War, and entered service in the United States Navy, where he would experience one of the most intense single engagements of the Pacific theater.
The details of his early adult life — his education, his training in drafting and electronics, the path that led him to work as a technical professional — are not fully documented in the sources available about his case. What is documented is that he married a woman named Laverne Korte in 1947, two years after the war ended, and that they had three sons. He worked as a draftsman for General Electric at some point during these years.
The marriage lasted nearly two decades. In 1964, Robert Nichols filed for divorce and told his wife he was leaving. He told her she would learn his reasons “in due time.” Whatever those reasons were — and no one who has investigated the case since has been able to establish them — he did not share them with her then or with anyone else afterward. The phrase “in due time” was one of the few things he left behind, a promise that was never kept.