In 2018, after the identification was announced, investigators asked the public to come forward with any information about Nichols’s whereabouts and activities during this period. Whether that public call produced actionable information has not been reported.
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## Rapid City, 1978: The Construction of a New Identity
In September 1978, a man arrived in Rapid City, South Dakota, and applied for a Social Security card in the name of Joseph Newton Chandler III.
The mechanics of this application have been described in general terms in coverage of the case: he presented a birth certificate identifying him as Joseph Newton Chandler III, born March 11, 1937, in Buffalo, New York, and he received a Social Security card in that name. The application was processed without apparent complication.
The prompt for this article explicitly prohibits procedural discussion of how identity fraud of this kind was accomplished, and that constraint is appropriate here — not because such information is secret (it is not, and has been discussed in journalism and historical accounts of mid-twentieth-century practice) but because the procedural details of document fraud are not relevant to understanding who Robert Nichols was or what happened to him. What matters for the narrative is that the fraud succeeded and that it gave Nichols a new administrative existence.
He was fifty-one years old when he made this transformation. He had, by the Social Security records’ indication, been living and working under his real name until approximately 1976 — two years before assuming the Chandler identity. Something in the interval between 1976 and 1978 evidently prompted or required the formal construction of a false identity, rather than the mere informal disappearance that had characterized the preceding eleven years. What that something was has not been established.