The last direct communication Phil received from his father was the letter from Napa, California, in 1965. Phil would have been around eighteen or nineteen years old at that point — old enough to understand that the letter with its single coin was likely the last he would hear. Old enough to know that “in due time” had already proven to be a promise his father hadn’t kept.
For the next fifty-three years, Phil Nichols carried that last letter and whatever other memories of his father he had accumulated. He went on with his own life — built his own identity, separate from the father who had left and the mystery of where the father had gone.
When investigators contacted him in 2018, he agreed to help. He provided the DNA sample. He confirmed the biographical details that the genealogical evidence had indicated. He spoke to reporters after the identification was announced.
He said what he knew and acknowledged what he didn’t. He said his father had left the family in a difficult position. He said he had no anger. He said he was at peace.
What Phil didn’t know — what no one knew and what the identification did not reveal — was the reason for any of it: why his father left, what he spent the next thirteen years doing, what drove him to formally become someone else in 1978, what he feared, what “they” meant, what the penny was meant to say.
Those questions remain Phil’s as much as the investigators’. The identification gave him a confirmed name for the man he had known as his father, and a confirmed location and life for the decades when that man had been hidden. It did not give him the conversation that fifty-three years of absence had made impossible.