From Oklahoma, he moved west, to Richmond, California. Richmond is a city in the East Bay area of the San Francisco Bay, across the bay from San Francisco itself. It had been a significant industrial and shipbuilding center during the Second World War, when Kaiser Shipyards there had produced an enormous number of Liberty ships. By the mid-1960s it had transitioned to a more general industrial and residential profile.
From Richmond, he appears to have moved to Napa, California — the wine country north of San Francisco. The last letter his family received, the letter containing the single penny that went to son Phil, was postmarked Napa in early 1965.
After that letter, Robert Nichols ceased all contact with his family. They reported him missing in 1965.
The Social Security Administration’s records, reviewed as part of the investigation, indicated that Nichols continued to file taxes and receive wages under his real name through approximately 1976. This means that for eleven years after his last contact with his family, he was somewhere — employed somewhere, earning wages somewhere, potentially living under his real name — but that where and how and with whom are not established by any record that investigators were able to access or disclose.
The thirteen-year gap between 1965 and 1978 — the period between his last family contact and his emergence in South Dakota under the Chandler name — is the central mystery within the mystery. It is not that his movements were entirely unrecorded during this period; his Social Security contributions suggest he was leaving an administrative trail. It is that the trail has not been reconstructed in any publicly disclosed investigation.