He made homemade electronic devices. He apparently had a computer, though the use he made of it was documented only after his death and only partially. He wore a costume to a company costume party and sat in complete silence throughout, speaking to no one.
And, most memorably to those who knew him: he sometimes told his co-workers that “they are getting close.” Then he would disappear — vanish from his apartment, from work, from any traceable location — for days or weeks at a time. When he returned, the episode was not explained.
Who “they” were — what entity or set of circumstances he believed was closing in on him — is one of the questions investigators have been unable to answer. The phrase suggests fear of discovery, a sense of being tracked. It also suggests, in retrospect, a mind that had been living with concealment for so long that the prospect of being found had become a permanent background condition. Whether “they” referred to any specific person, organization, or authority, or whether it reflected a more diffuse anxiety that had accumulated over decades of hiding, is not established.
Lubrizol laid Nichols off in 1997, when corporate restructuring eliminated his position. He was seventy years old. He did not find other employment. He remained in his Eastlake apartment, living on whatever savings and pension income he had accumulated, and he continued the same patterns of solitude and occasional disappearance that had characterized his working years.
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## The Cancer Diagnosis and the Calendar
At some point before or around 2000, Robert Nichols was diagnosed with colon cancer. In 2000, he underwent surgery at a Lake County, Ohio hospital for the condition. The surgery produced tissue samples that the hospital preserved according to standard medical protocol — embedded in paraffin blocks and filed in the hospital’s pathology archive, as such samples routinely are.