He rented an apartment in Eastlake, a modest city on Lake Erie’s southern shore, and he lived there for more than two decades. The apartment was his base of operations for a life organized around invisibility. He worked. He returned home. He left his apartment only when necessary — for work, for meals, for occasional errands. He did not make friends. He did not maintain relationships. He listed co-workers as his emergency contacts, the way a person with no real alternatives might.
The co-workers who knew “Joe Chandler” at Lubrizol described him consistently as brilliant, strange, and profoundly isolated. He was highly competent at technical work — drafting, electronics design, engineering tasks that required precision and systematic thinking. Beyond that, he was opaque. He rarely spoke about himself. When he did make personal disclosures, they were odd: he claimed a sister named Mary Wilson who lived at an address in Columbus, Ohio that turned out to be fictitious. There was no Mary Wilson at that address. There was no sister, at least not one whose existence was ever confirmed.
His behavior included specific eccentricities that co-workers and later investigators noted. He would sit for hours with a television tuned to an unused channel — watching static, or listening to white noise — a behavior that struck those who observed it as suggesting something beyond simple idiosyncrasy. Once, he drove approximately seven hundred miles to an L.L. Bean store in Maine, arrived to find that parking was unavailable, and turned around and drove seven hundred miles back without going inside. He had a 1989 hospital visit for injuries he attributed to a vacuum cleaner, a claim that raised no red flags at the time but later struck investigators as worth noting.