The behaviors that co-workers found strange — the static television, the Maine trip, the silence at the party — were presumably not behaviors that Chandler had invented or adopted as part of a performed persona. They were behaviors of Robert Nichols, expressions of a personality and a psychological reality that persisted regardless of the name he used.
The identity fraud was administrative. The person was continuous.
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## The Known and the Unknown: A Final Accounting
What the investigation of the Joseph Newton Chandler III case established, after sixteen years of dormancy and then active forensic genealogical research, is precise and documented.
It established that the man who lived in Eastlake as Joseph Newton Chandler III was Robert Ivan Nichols, born September 12, 1926, in New Albany, Indiana. It established his parentage — Silas and Alpha Nichols — and his marriage and family — Laverne Korte, three sons. It established his military service on the USS Aaron Ward, his wounding in the kamikaze attack of May 3, 1945, and his receipt of the Purple Heart. It established his departure from his family in 1964, his last contact with his son in 1965, and his apparent continued work under his real name through approximately 1976. It established his assumption of the Chandler identity in Rapid City in 1978, his subsequent career at Lubrizol in Wickliffe, his life in Eastlake, his cancer diagnosis, and his death in July 2002.
It confirmed that the identification was accomplished through DNA extracted from preserved surgical tissue, processed through forensic genealogy techniques developed and adapted by Identifinders International and the DNA Doe Project, confirmed through a direct DNA match with his son Philip Nichols of Cincinnati.