John List was a New Jersey accountant who murdered his family in 1971 and lived under a false name in Virginia for eighteen years before being identified through a profile on the television program “America’s Most Wanted.” His case involved confirmed violent crime and an outstanding warrant.
John Darwin was a British man who faked his own death in 2002, allowing his wife to collect life insurance, and was eventually caught when a photograph of the supposedly dead man turned up.
Lori Ruff was a woman who lived under a false identity for years and whose true identity was established after her death through genealogical research, with the underlying circumstances of her identity assumption remaining mysterious.
None of these cases is the same as Robert Nichols’s case, and comparing them serves primarily to illustrate the range of circumstances under which people have assumed false identities — from clear financial motivation, to flight from criminal charges, to unknown reasons that investigators were never able to establish. Nichols belongs to the last category: a man whose assumed identity was confirmed but whose motivations remain unconfirmed.
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## What Phil Nichols Knew and Didn’t Know
The son who provided the DNA that confirmed the identification is the closest surviving connection to Robert Ivan Nichols, and what Phil Nichols knew — and didn’t know — about his father illuminates both the nature of the disappearance and the limits of what the identification resolved.
Phil had known his father as a child and adolescent, before the 1964 departure. He had known him as a Navy veteran who had served in the Pacific, had been wounded, had come home and built a family and a career. He had known him as a man who one day filed for divorce, told his wife she would understand in due time, and left.