It confirmed that as of the June 2018 announcement, no criminal charges had ever been brought against Robert Nichols under either name, that no arrest warrant had existed at the time of his original disappearance, and that investigators had not established a confirmed connection between Nichols and any specific unsolved crime.
What the investigation did not establish — what remains genuinely unresolved — is why. Why he left his family in 1964. What he did from 1965 to 1978. Why he formally assumed a false identity in 1978. What he feared, and whether what he feared was real. Why he spent twenty-four years in Ohio in sustained, exhausting concealment. What the static television meant to him. What the penny was supposed to say.
The identity is known. The reasons are not.
—
## “In Due Time”: A Promise Never Kept
The phrase Robert Nichols used when he left his wife — “you’ll understand in due time” — has a particular quality in retrospect. It suggests a future in which understanding would arrive, as if the reasons for his departure were not secret but merely delayed.
Fifty-eight years have now passed since he said those words. Laverne Korte Nichols — the wife he left, the woman to whom the explanation was promised — has likely not survived to see the identification, though the public record does not confirm her death or life at the time of the 2018 announcement. Phil Nichols, who received the last letter, is in his late seventies or older. The explanation has not arrived.
In due time meant, as it turned out, never. The explanation his wife was promised, the reasons Phil and his brothers were entitled to, the account of what drove a decorated veteran to walk away from everything and spend the next decades in hidden fear — none of it arrived. He took it with him.