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## The Eccentricities as Evidence
The behaviors that co-workers and later investigators noted about “Joe Chandler” have been extensively catalogued in coverage of the case. They are worth examining not for what they prove — they prove nothing, by themselves — but for what they suggest about the psychological condition of someone living the life Nichols had constructed.
The television tuned to static. This is the detail that has attracted the most comment, and also the detail that is most easily interpreted in multiple incompatible ways. A person who sits for hours watching a television tuned to an unused channel — watching a grey flickering screen, listening to white noise — might be doing something that looks, from the outside, like a meditation practice, or a sensory deprivation exercise, or a coping mechanism for some form of psychological distress, or simply an extremely unusual way to relax. None of these interpretations carries any evidentiary weight. The behavior was observed by people who did not understand it, and none of the people who observed it had the clinical training or the relationship with Nichols to ask him about it in a way that might have produced a useful answer.
The L.L. Bean trip. A seven-hundred-mile drive to a retail store in Maine, followed by a U-turn in the parking lot upon finding no available parking space, followed by a seven-hundred-mile return drive, represents either an extreme form of task-specific rigidity — an inability to handle situational obstacles that would lead most people to simply park in a different lot or come back another day — or a test, or an excuse for a long drive alone, or something else entirely. Attempts to interpret it as evidence of a specific psychological condition are speculative. What it illustrates reliably is that Nichols’s decision-making and social behavior were far outside conventional parameters.