What remained was the Lake County hospital’s pathology archive. The paraffin blocks from the 2000 surgery were still there, because pathology archives routinely retain samples for many years. Investigators retrieved the blocks and sent them to the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office, which created a DNA profile from the tissue.
The profile went into CODIS. There were no matches. This was unsurprising: Robert Nichols had no criminal record under either name, and the people who might have matched him as close biological relatives — his sons, potentially surviving siblings — had not submitted DNA to any system.
The case went dormant.
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## 2014: The Marshals Take Over
The dormancy ended in 2014. Eastlake police, who had been holding the case since 2002 without making significant progress, formally requested that the United States Marshals Service’s Fugitive Task Force in the Northern District of Ohio take over the investigation.
The Marshals Service agreed. U.S. Marshal Peter J. Elliott became the lead investigator on the case and the public face of the identification effort.
Elliott’s approach to the case reflected the investigative resources available to the Marshals Service and also the uncertainty about what, exactly, they were dealing with. The man known as Joseph Chandler had not been accused of any crime. There was no arrest warrant, no known victim, no identified offense. The fraud of assuming a deceased person’s identity was itself a crime, but it was a historical crime by a man who was dead, and it offered no clear investigative direction beyond establishing who the man had actually been.