After 1976, the trail of the real Robert Nichols went cold. Two years later, in 1978, a man appeared in Rapid City, South Dakota, and obtained a Social Security card and a copy of a birth certificate from Buffalo, New York — both in the name of Joseph Newton Chandler III.
The Rapid City Social Security Administration office had no particular reason to question the application. A birth certificate from Buffalo, a plausible identity presented by a fifty-one-year-old man — it was the kind of application that was processed routinely. Children who had died young often had Social Security numbers, but systematic checking of applications against death records was not a standard feature of the process in 1978. The identity was issued.
What motivated the specific choice of the Chandler identity is not known. Whether Nichols had encountered the name somewhere — in a newspaper archive, in a county record he accessed deliberately, through some other means — or whether he arrived at it through a more systematic search for an available identity from a person who had died young without obvious surviving connections, has not been established. The technique itself was known — it appears in published accounts and has been discussed as a known method for identity theft going back to at least the mid-twentieth century — but the specific process Nichols used is undocumented.
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## Joe Chandler Arrives in Ohio
With his new Social Security card and his new name, the man who had been Robert Ivan Nichols made his way to northeast Ohio. He arrived in the Cleveland area in 1978 and initially found work at Edko Company, an engineering firm. He then moved on to Lubrizol, a specialty chemical company headquartered in Wickliffe, Ohio, where he worked as an electrical designer and draftsman.