In the fifty-three years between that letter and the investigators’ contact in March 2018, Phil had presumably built his own life: presumably married, worked, raised children of his own or not, established himself in Cincinnati. The public record doesn’t detail what Phil Nichols’s life had looked like in the decades since his father vanished. He was a private individual, and the coverage of the case appropriately treated him as such, focusing on the facts directly relevant to the identification rather than exploring his personal biography.
When investigators asked him for a DNA sample to compare against the profile developed from the 2000 surgical tissue, he agreed to provide one. The comparison, once performed, produced a match consistent with a parent-child relationship — confirming that the man who had lived in Eastlake as Joseph Newton Chandler III was Philip Nichols’s biological father.
The identification was confirmed. The man was Robert Ivan Nichols.
Phil also confirmed, in conversations with investigators, the family history that the DNA evidence had pointed to: that his father had served in the Navy during the Second World War, that he had served on a ship that was attacked off Okinawa, that he had been wounded and received the Purple Heart, and that after the war he had, according to family memory, burned his uniforms.
Phil had not known his father as a man who talked about the war. He had known him as a father who left and never came back. The burning of the uniforms was family knowledge, something passed down or noticed in the period when the family was still intact. It was not an explanation of anything. It was a fact about a man who did something once and who later did something far more difficult to account for.