This decision to preserve the tissue, made for entirely ordinary clinical reasons, would eventually prove to be the key that unlocked his identity. At the time, no one involved in his care had any reason to assign it any significance beyond its clinical function.
What happened in the period between the 2000 surgery and the summer of 2002 is known in outline. Nichols’s cancer was not cured by the surgery. He was facing a terminal diagnosis, or a significant deterioration in his health. In his Eastlake apartment, investigators would later find evidence suggesting a deliberate, planned decision.
On a calendar found in his apartment, he had marked the days approaching his death. The marks showed a countdown — a specific date that he had chosen in advance, a period he had calculated and scheduled. He was not someone who acted impulsively. He was someone who planned.
On or around July 23, 2002, Robert Nichols died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his Eastlake apartment. He used a .38-caliber Charter Arms revolver. His body was found approximately a week later, in a state of decomposition that made fingerprint recovery impossible.
He left $82,000 in a bank account. He left a packed suitcase. He left no note that has been publicly disclosed. He left behind the identity of a dead boy, a collection of eccentric personal effects, and a mystery that would occupy investigators for sixteen years.
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## The Estate Problem and the Discovery
The immediate problem facing Eastlake police after the death of Joseph Newton Chandler III was bureaucratic: what to do with the estate of a man who appeared to have no family.