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## The 2000 Surgery and the Sample That Waited
In 2000, Robert Nichols was admitted to a hospital in Lake County, Ohio — the county that contains Eastlake — for colon cancer surgery. He was seventy-three years old.
The surgery itself was a standard oncological procedure of the kind performed routinely at hospitals of that era. Tissue removed during the procedure was sent, as a matter of course, to the hospital’s pathology laboratory. There, it was processed and embedded in paraffin blocks — a standard preservation method that suspends the tissue in a wax medium, allowing thin sections to be cut and examined under a microscope. The paraffin blocks are then typically stored in the pathology archive, where they may remain for many years.
At the time of the surgery, no one had any reason to treat the tissue sample from this patient — “Joseph Newton Chandler III,” an elderly retired engineer from Eastlake — as anything other than a routine clinical specimen. The surgery was performed, the tissue was processed, the results were communicated to the patient, and the blocks were filed in the archive.
Robert Nichols left the hospital. He returned to his apartment. His cancer, which was not cured by the surgery, continued its course.
Two years later, after his death in July 2002 and the discovery that his identity was fraudulent, investigators found themselves with few forensic options. The body had been discovered too late for fingerprint recovery. It had been cremated before the identity fraud was discovered and before any investigative action could be taken. The standard tools of forensic identification — fingerprints, dental records, CODIS hits — were unavailable.