Joseph Newton Chandler III

Robert Ivan Nichols, alias Joseph Newton Chandler III (September 12, 1926 – c. July 23, 2002), was a formerly unidentified American identity thief who committed suicide in Eastlake, Ohio, in July 2002.

Robert Nichols was born on September 12, 1926, in New Albany, Indiana, to Silas and Alpha Nichols, who had four boys.

Joseph Newton Chandler III (March 11, 1937 – December 21, 1945), born in Buffalo, New York, was eight years old when he was killed in a traffic accident, along with both of his parents, two miles west of Sherman, Texas on December 21, 1945.

All three members of the family, Joseph Newton Chandler Jr., his wife, Billie Chandler and 8-year-old Joseph Newton III, were killed instantly.

They were on their way to the home of Mrs. Joseph Chandler Sr., in Weatherford, Texas for the Christmas holidays.

Their car was involved in a head on collision with a truck driven by L. C. Black of Dequeen, Arkansas who was not injured.

The passenger of the truck, G. R. Hutchinson, also of Dequeen, was also unhurt.

After his death, investigators were unable to locate his family and discovered that he had stolen the identity of an eight-year-old boy who was killed in a car crash in Texas in 1945.

The lengths to which Nichols went to hide his identity has led to speculation that he was a fugitive.

He joined the US Navy in World War II and served as a firefighter on the USS Aaron Ward, which was bombed by the Japanese in May 1945 off Okinawa.

He was wounded in the back and hip by shrapnel and awarded the Purple Heart.

He burned his uniforms after the war.

Nichols married Laverne Kort in 1947.

They had three sons and Nichols worked for General Electric as a draftsman.

In 1964, Nichols left his wife and sons and filed for divorce the same year.

He moved to Dearborn, Michigan, where he told his parents that he worked in the automobile industry.

In March 1965, he wrote to his parents that he had moved to Richmond, California, and he also sent a letter to his son Phil from Napa, California, the same month.

His family never heard from him again and they reported him missing in 1965.

When the family used detectives to attempt to find him in California and Indiana, they were unable to turn up anyone who knew him.

Nichols worked using his real name until about 1976 according to the US Internal Revenue Service.

Nichols stole Chandler's identity in September 1978 in Rapid City, South Dakota, after applying for a Social Security card.

He then moved to Cleveland, where he briefly worked for the Edko Company, an engineering business.

Nichols later worked as an electrical designer and draftsman for Lubrizol, a chemical company headquartered in Wickliffe, Ohio.

In 1989 he arrived at a local hospital with lacerations to his penis, claiming to have received them via a vacuum cleaner.

He also had a knack for tinkering, and made homemade electronic devices.

He had a computer that he occasionally used, which was accidentally broken by the first set of investigators who worked on the case.

According to these investigators, searches related to Nazism and "plastic explosives" were found on his computer.

In one instance at a Halloween gathering in 1992, he came to the event dressed as a gangster, yet talked to no one the entire night.

He also took part in behavior perceived as eccentric and unusual, such as listening to white noise for hours, and once drove 700 miles to an L.L. Bean store in Maine, only to promptly turn around and drive back to Ohio after discovering that there were no spots available in the store's parking lot.

The company laid him off in 1997.

He had claimed to have a sister named "Mary Wilson"; however, the address he provided for her in Columbus, Ohio, was fictitious.

It was eventually revealed that Nichols was actually born at the same address in New Albany.

Nichols was described as being a hermit who left his home only to go to work and eat.

Co-workers have said he rarely talked to anyone and appeared to have few or no friends.

His body was discovered in his apartment on July 30, 2002.

He was believed to have killed himself about a week earlier; he had shot himself in the mouth with a .38-caliber Charter Arms revolver he had purchased a few months earlier.

On his calendar he had marked down the days until his suicide, and before he shot himself he closed the blinds and turned off the air conditioning.

In late 2016, the U.S. Marshals Service, Cleveland, Ohio, announced that forensic genealogist Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick of Identifinders International had compared the then-unidentified man's Y-STR profile to public genetic genealogy Y-STR databases to determine his possible last name was "Nicholas".

In March 2018, the DNA Doe Project identified the man as Robert Ivan Nichols.

The U.S. Marshals Service announced the identification at a press conference in Cleveland on June 21, 2018.