Science Vs - The Mystery of the Man Who Died Twice

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

A dead body turns up with a stolen identity. We tell the story of how a grandmother tracked down the truth — and helped create a whole new and controversial world of crime fighting. To tell this story, we talk to U.S. Marshal Peter Elliott, Dr. Margaret Press, and Phil Nichols. [REBROADCAST] CN: This episode discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, in the U.S. you can call or text 988 to reach the government’s suicide and crisis help line. More mental health resources are available at spotify.com/resources. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/3Rf1Vj1 This episode was produced by Rose Rimler and Kaitlyn Sawrey with help from Wendy Zukerman, Meryl Horn and Odelia Rubin. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Editing help from Alex Blumberg and Caitlin Kenney. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. Mix and sound design by Emma Munger. Music by Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. A huge thanks to all the people we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick at DNA Doe Project and Curtis Rogers at GEDmatch. Recording help from Selene Ross, Tana Weingartner and Daniel Robison. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. This is the show that pits facts against fugitives. Today on the show, the mysterious case of a dead man who lived under a stolen identity for decades, and the controversial science that cracked the case. And by the way, in this episode, we will talk a little bit about suicide. So take care while you're listening. And there's resources and numbers to call in the show notes if you just want to talk to someone.

Okay, the mystery of the man who died twice is coming up just after the break. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology and what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have

a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan Eleven? I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right, I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jana Levin. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. Welcome back. We first brought you this episode of a strange man with an even stranger story a few years ago. But it hasn't lost its touch. Let's jump in. Our story begins in the summer of 2002.

A man has been found dead in a quiet leafy suburb about half an hour outside of Cleveland, Ohio. It's right next to Lake Erie. It was July, and it was so hot that by the time they found his corpse, it wasn't pretty. Took a week to find the body, so he was literally covered with maggots. This is U.S. Marshal Peter Elliott. He sounds like the kind of guy who's never really out of uniform. Can you describe yourself for us? Yeah, probably not. Yeah, I don't feel like doing that, but I'm 56 years old and I've been in law enforcement for 35 years.

The man who had been found dead had killed himself in his bathroom. And from what police could tell, it seemed like he lived a pretty lonely life. He lived in this tiny, bare-bones apartment, didn't have much. And from the look of the scene, here's how the cops thought it went down. He counted down the days on the calendar. He locked all the doors in his apartment, you know, went into that bathroom and put the gun underneath the roof of his mouth and shot himself. The man's name was Joseph Newton Chandler III. The cops searched through his finances and found a bank account with more than $80,000 in it. The cops looked for relatives to call, and Joseph had listed a sister on his rental agreement.

She lived in Columbus, Ohio, he said. So, and I believe it was 1823 Center Street. Remember this address. It's important. 1823 Center Street. The thing is, though, when the police went there, there was no sister. Pete told us that the place didn't exist, and that was kind of weird. But then something happens that takes this case from kind of weird to incredibly suspicious.

Because the dead man was known as Joseph Newton Chandler III. But when the cops looked into him, they found out that Joseph Newton Chandler III had already been dead for more than 50 years. Joseph had died in a car crash as a young boy. What goes through the mind of a cop when that happens? You know, we go after fugitives every single day. So usually when people have totally fictitious identities, they do that for a reason. You just don't assume the identity, in my opinion, and through my 35 years of law enforcement, if you don't have a really good reason.

Pete could smell a rat. And he needed to know two things. One, who was this mystery dead guy? And two, why did he live under a stolen identity for more than 20 years? Police didn't have a lot to go on. By the time they figured out how fishy this scene was, the body had already been cremated. So that meant the police had no DNA and no fingerprints.

And then things got stranger. The cops worked out that this guy had lived a really weird life. He paid for everything in cash, didn't have credit cards, and when they went looking for friends to talk to, they couldn't really find anyone. The only people who seemed to know him were his workmates. He worked as an engineer. But what they had to say to the police

made everything seem more suspicious. He had a suitcase packed and ready to go at all times. He used to tell his bosses and people he's working with that they're getting close and didn't say who they were, and then he'd disappear for periods of time. They just thought he was basically a little crazy. You know, they'd laugh about it. The evidence soon dried up. The case hit a dead end and went cold.

No one could figure out who this paranoid guy really was and why he stole someone's identity. But then, a couple of years ago, Pete Elliott created a cold case unit and his team took another look at it. And they found something in his medical records that made them wonder even more, what is this guy about?

Science Versus producer Rose Rimler and I talked to Pete about it. Wasn't there something about him going to the hospital with cuts on his penis? Yeah, that is correct. And I'm glad you brought that up. I didn't want to, but... LAUGHTER

And... Glad you brought that up. I didn't want to. But, and, and is there any way I could put you on hold for one second? Sorry about that. We got a double homicide suspect. I got my guys on right now. Oh, my gosh. Okay, well, we will get you off this phone in just a second. That's all right. I got my guy.

I had to call him real quick. They're on it right now, so I've got time. Okay, okay, sure. Can you tell us about the weird penis stuff? Oh, yes. So, not a lot of medical records, but what we did find out from medical records was this. In 1989, he went into the hospital and he had a lacerated penis. And he told the doctor that he had that from masturbating with a vacuum cleaner. With a vacuum cleaner?

With a vacuum cleaner. And do you believe that? Or could it have been something else? Are you going to make that up? I don't know. I have no idea on that one. I mean, if you're going to come up with a story, are you going to come up with, hey, I was masturbating with a vacuum cleaner?

But that gives you a little bit about his mindset. Pete says it's hard to know what to make of this. But it was in the medical records that Pete and his team finally caught a break that didn't suck. They found this guy's DNA. Pete's team discovered that this man had been treated for cancer in hospital a couple of years before he died, and the hospital still had a tissue sample. Bingo. DNA.

Pete's team rushed it through the National Database for Known Criminals. And... it came up with nothing. No matches. So what do you do then in that situation? I mean, have you run out of options? You pray a lot. That's what you do. So that's the best thing you can do. And just a few years ago, this probably would have been the end of it. If your DNA didn't match anything in the police database, it was basically useless. But this story we're telling you, it's one of the first cases that would try to use this new way of tracking people down,

using DNA to hook into a huge network of people who are related to try to catch your mystery guy. To get this done, though, Pete would need a new breed of gumshoes. A real bunch of hard arses. I'm 71 years old. I've got short grey hair. I look like a grandmother. This is Margaret Press. She's an armchair sleuth who also writes mystery novels. She's basically a real-life Angela Lansbury from Murder, She Wrote. I loved that program. In a former life, Margaret worked in software development,

but she always had an interest in genealogy. And then in retirement, she got really good at it. So good that after a while, she wanted a new challenge. Finding yet another great-great-grandfather in Norway was interesting, but it wasn't solving a huge mystery. And so in her hunt for a huge mystery, Margaret became part of a growing network of amateur genealogists who have just started working with police to help them solve the unsolvable. They're volunteers and are literally doing this

because they just love solving puzzles. I told you, basically Jessica Fletcher. And when Pete Elliott heard all about this, he reached out to someone in that network who soon teamed up with Margaret. So could this gang find out who the mystery guy was? Now, Margaret had actually already been thinking about how to solve cases like this. It came to her when she was reading a mystery novel about an unidentified body. I was sitting in a broken down Sears rulebook recliner in the living room. I can picture the moment because I turned the page finishing this book and put the book down and said, I can think of no way why this wouldn't work. Here's the idea. It has to do with those at-home DNA tests.

So this holiday season, it's Ancestry DNA per tutti! These days, so many people have gotten their DNA tested from sites like 23andMe and Ancestry.com that it has created this massive web where you can find long-lost relatives. In fact, so many people have their DNA info online that even if you personally haven't gotten tested, there's a good chance that your distant cousin did, which means whatever DNA you share with your cousin

is going to be out there. Now, for some, this is all a very creepy invasion of privacy, but for genealogists like Margaret, this is a potential goldmine. Now, she can't just log on to Ancestry and look you up. They have rules. But there is a place for hardcore genealogists where the rules are a little bit different.

It's called GEDmatch. GEDmatch is different from the others because you don't send them your spit for analysis. Rather, you upload the DNA results that you got from a site like Ancestry. And nerds like this place because it lets you do a bunch of stuff that sites like Ancestry won't. And I think it's amazing. Having that kind of knowledge is so important and so exciting.

For Margaret, one of the big things she could do on GEDmatch was use a dead man's DNA to find out who he was related to. And that was critical to solving the mystery of Joseph Newton Chandler. Enough people had uploaded to GEDmatch so that statistically you could do searches there and find biological cousins or parents or second cousins, third cousins, etc. So that the pieces were starting to come together, there was a perfect storm. Still though, when Margaret and the team dove into this Joseph Newton Chandler case, this was pretty much uncharted waters.

So Margaret was nervous. And using this technique to find out who this mysterious dead guy was, was really high stakes because of the DNA situation. He had such a tiny amount of DNA left and we used it all and that was a heavy responsibility for us to know that we were the last chance of Joseph Newton Chandler ever getting solved based on his DNA. They rejigged the teeny bit of DNA they had

so that it would upload properly on GEDmatch. They crossed their fingers and... they got some useful hits. A few distant cousins of the mystery guy. In this case, we were able to locate, you know, maybe a fourth cousin, and that's how we started to create the network. To build that network, Margaret has to take those few cousins to map out a family tree that eventually leads to the dead guy.

And one of the first steps is to search for the first common relative connecting the fake Joseph to this distant cousin, someone like a great-great-grandparent. And after that, the team fills out the branches with more and more relatives, using literally anything they can get their hands on. They search online for obituaries, census records, newspaper articles, working their way down the tree

to find someone who's the right age to be the mystery guy. And as you can imagine, things get really tricky really quickly. I think of it, I guess, as when you get a very complicated Lego project for Christmas and you open up the box and there's just thousands of pieces and you have to start putting them together and ultimately you piece together something that looks like a wing or a propeller or something. And eventually they created a huge interconnected family tree linking more than 15,000 people

and building back to generations that lived in the 16th century. After months of painstaking work, one night they hit the jackpot. It's March 2018, the middle of the night, and one of the volunteers finds an important branch in this family tree. She finds the match. She puts it in the tree. It's looking good. She tells us to take a look at it.

She takes an Ambien and goes to sleep. And so tell me what you were doing at this point. It's 1am. Right. Well, I had also taken an Ambien. So I had to drag myself to Facebook where all the volunteers involved, you know, the few people who were still up, were chattering away and working that...

Here's where the group was up to. They'd finally put together enough of this family tree so that it was pointing to one couple as the potential mother and father of our mystery dead guy. And they had several children. And then when we started taking a close look at those children, they discovered that the fourth son, there was no death date for him. And that's when the little bells went off. Here's why the bells were going off. Three of the children were accounted for.

They'd all died. And that left one kid who would have grown up to be the right age of the mystery dead guy. This guy looked like he was it. After the break, we find out who this mystery dead guy is. So, what was he hiding from? from. Welcome back. We've been following the curious case of a man who lived under the stolen identity of a dead child, Joseph Newton Chandler, for decades. And then he killed himself. US Marshal Pete Elliott suspects this man was on the run from something and needed to find out who he really was.

After hitting several dead ends, a team of armchair genealogists took on the case. It's the middle of the night and they're getting close. They found a child born at the right time to be this fake Joseph and he shared just the right amount of DNA with several known cousins. The name of this man was Robert Ivan Nichols. Now, the group didn't know for sure that they had their man, so they tried to find out everything they could about him.

OK, here's his name, Robert Ivans Nichols. We have he's showing up in the 1930 census along with his brothers. Oh, here's a military record for him. It lists, we see in a later directory that he's an engineer or a draftsman or something. This was a little bell because we knew that's what Joseph Newton Chandler did for a living. But a much bigger bell was about to go off, one that would seal the deal for Margaret's team. One of the volunteers noticed the address listed for the parents was 1823 Center Street in New Albany, Indiana. The volunteer said on Facebook, wait a minute, that address sounds familiar. Isn't that the same address that Joseph Newton Chandler put on the rental application in the 1990s for the sister that turned out to be fictional. So, and I believe it was 1823 Center Street. Yeah, 1823 Center Street.

Our mystery dead guy had put that fake address in Columbus, but this Scooby gang discovered that the real address for this guy's family was Centre Street in Indiana. Then the hair stood up on the backs of our necks. That's not just a coincidence. That is somebody intentionally making up an address that he knew well enough to be able to be consistent. That's amazing.

Do you know what, as you're telling this story, like the hairs on the back of my neck are going up too. They still do. The team tracked Robert Ivan Nichols as far as they could. And then he disappears off the face of the earth. But that's when Joseph Newton Chandler picks up and then his life thread starts. And that you can follow also.

By the time the sun was coming up, Margaret and the other volunteers had solved a massive part of this puzzle. And they couldn't wait to tell U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott what they'd found by burrowing around this dead guy's family tree. One of the volunteers called him up. And she says, we got it. And I said, you are the best. Here's Pete talking about it with our producer, Rose Rimler. Their work was just phenomenal. They not only put us in the ballpark, they took us to the exact seat

Joseph Newton Chandler was sitting in. And then they told us and showed us who paid for that seat. Do you get what they did? Hell no, I don't get it. I don't understand any of it. It is so complicated to me. I mean, you're talking to nuclear scientists. I mean, I bet I came and spelled nuclear scientists.

By the way, the leader of this genealogy gang, Colleen Fitzpatrick, actually has a PhD in nuclear physics. One month after the team cracked this case identifying Robert Ivan Nichols, it was announced that a different group of genealogists using this technique had helped nab the Golden State Killer. Police say they now have the Golden State Killer in custody. A key piece of DNA evidence connected the dots just days ago. When it came to Robert Ivan Nichols,

Margaret and the team had opened up a ton of new information about this guy. They found photos, addresses, and even a marriage notice. This cold case, it was hot. Bingo. Half the story is now solved. We got to worry about the other half. The other half. That is, Pete still needed to find out why this man, Robert Ivan Nichols, had lived under a dead boy's identity for more than 20 years, and why he always had a suitcase packed and ready to go, and why he hinted at his friends at work that someone was after him. Who was he running from? You know, great question. Why would he leave all the time and say they're getting close? I think there's something, just something more there.

That's just my gut feeling. Now that Pete had an identity, the case opened up in front of him. He soon found out that Robert Ivan Nichols had kids of his own, and one of them, a son, lived only a few hours away. Pete thought this guy could know something. So Pete hopped in his car and drove south. And Pete had now been on this case for years. He knew exactly what Robert Ivan Nichols looked like.

White hair, big ears, almond brown eyes. And then, when he came face to face with his son... I felt like I didn't have to say a word. I felt I was staring at Joseph Newton Chandler. He looked exactly like him. There was no doubt. We knew this was family. One of my house neighbors, you know, came up and announced to me, he says, Phil, he says, you got two federal agents here to see you. I said, what? This is Phil Nichols. He's now in his 70s.

Marshall Elliott started the conversation with, first of all, you're not in any trouble. And I said, well, that's good news. And so he says, we wanted to ask you some questions about your dad. And I said, my gosh, I haven't seen him in, you know, 50 or 60 years. The Marshal wanted to know everything he could about Phil's dad, what made him tick, why he might have been hauled up in Ohio, living under a fake name.

So Phil told him what he could remember. He described Robert, his dad, as next-level smart. He had this methodical engineering brain. As a teen, Robert had built a BB gun from scratch and he also liked making model aeroplanes. Phil has this one memory of his dad that really stuck out. It happened when he was six or seven. The whole family was sitting around the table,

mum, dad, Phil and his little brother. And Phil described what happened to our producer, Rose Rimler. It was his birthday. We had had dinner, but the two kids had not finished the plate yet. Dad had already finished his, and he was saying he wanted some cake. And Mom was saying, no, let's wait and let the kids finish, and we'll all have cake. And he just reached out with that right paw and grabbed a chunk out of that cake.

And what did you do when he did that to the cake as a kid? I was just aghast, you know. And I was kind of, you know, in my mind saying, yeah, you go, Dad, you know, that kind of thing. But actually I was kind of impressed a little bit because that was the first time I had ever seen my father take any kind of action, you know, or at least anything leaning towards macho. So, yeah, so he did grab a big chunk of that cake.

Phil told us that while it was memorable, an outburst like that was totally out of character for his dad. For the most part, Robert Ivan Nichols was not very expressive at all. He was a kind of quiet guy, kept his feelings to himself. Dad was a difficult individual, certainly to get close to. I don't ever recall hearing the word love in our house, ever. Although there was a sense, there was a feeling that we loved each other, but it was never spoken. We certainly weren't the, you know, the 50s sitcom family series on television, you know.

Phil has one idea about why his dad was like that. Before Phil was born, Robert went through something that completely changed his life. He'd served in the Navy in World War II. The ship he was on was attacked, and a newspaper article from the time reported that a lot of people around Robert were killed. The newspaper described it as 52 minutes of hell. As explosions rang out, Robert kept trying to help other sailors, but some were blown up right in front of him.

Robert himself was wounded, and he later received the Purple Heart. When he got home, Robert burnt his military uniform and those airplane models that he'd built by hand, he destroyed them all. And then took that BB gun and shot up all of the airplane models that he had built. Oh, wow. I mean, he was on a gun crew in that one particular battle

where if you see the picture of the ship, it was leveled almost to the waterline. He caught shrapnel in his back and his hip and his legs. When I was 12 years old, he was still having shrapnel removed. We can't know exactly how Robert felt about his time in the war, but Phil told us that growing up, his dad was a patriot. Eventually, though, Robert's relationship with Phil's mum started breaking down. The two divorced in the early 60s,

and it was a year later that Robert Nichols took off. He bought a convertible and ditched the family, telling his wife, quote, in due time, you'll know why, end quote. Huh. How did he say goodbye to you? Do you remember it? Just bye. That was pretty much it. He was a man of few words.

The family didn't hear a whole lot from him after that. Robert popped up in Michigan before letters placed him in California. And the last time Phil heard anything at all from his dad was in 1965. Phil got something in the mail and knew it was from his pa because of the handwriting, but it was all very cryptic. Inside the envelope was no letter, no note, nothing. It was one penny. One penny. That was it. What does that mean?

Well, I can only assume that it was either, you know, a penny for your thoughts, but there was no return address. Or it was, you know, here's your inheritance. It was postmarked from Napa, California, and after the family didn't hear from him again, they reported him missing. Records from Robert's social security number showed that he continued working under his real name for years. And then, in the late 1970s, he took on the identity of the dead little boy, Joseph Newton Chandler. Police worked out how he did that. Robert somehow knew which hospital this boy was born in,

so he sent a letter to City Hall requesting Joseph's birth certificate. And voila, he got it. And that was all he needed to get a social security card and start a new life as Joseph Newton Chandler. Soon after that, he showed up in Ohio. OK, so where does that leave us? Well, we have an answer to U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott's first big question. Who was this man? His name was Robert Ivan Nichols, a military vet who ditched his family, moved around the country, and stole an identity. But we still don't have an answer to that second question of why.

Why did he steal a new identity? Was he running from something? We don't know. This is where the cop's trail runs cold once again. But there is a very intriguing theory floating around. It's one that we wanted to lay out to you. And it's this. There are people who say that Robert

might be one of the most notorious serial killers in the United States. Zodiac, a symbol that now stands for terror. It's one of the most famous unsolved cases in American crime The killer sent cryptic letters to the San Francisco Chronicle Police have connected him with at least five killings Although the Zodiac claims at least 37 victims He left behind a trail of bodies Then he went silent

The Zodiac Killer This man murdered at least five people in California in the 1960s. And it's that damn penny that makes Phil wonder, could it be? We knew that he had... His correspondents put him in California at the time. And then when he left California to come back east, that's when the Zodiac killings stopped.

So whether that's just pure coincidence is, you know, no one knows, at least at this point. I mean, what do you think about that theory? Kind of a little hard to believe, although, my gosh, you know, this is a man that certainly was fighting his own demons during his lifetime. When you look at the police sketch of the Zodiac Killer, it does kind of look similar to old photos of Robert. He's also about the same height. And police think the killer might have had a military background. We asked U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott about this. Did he fit the description? Yes.

Did he fit the composite? Yes. Was he out there about that time? Yes. You know, that's not for me to say. That would be for California authorities to determine if that would be something they'd want to take a look at. We contacted the police in California and the FBI about this. And they both told us they didn't have any updates. Now, there are lots of people who have been suspected of being the Zodiac Killer over the years.

I mean, even Ted Cruz, right? And he was born after the murders happened. Pete thinks it's probably more likely that Robert Ivan Nichols was involved in some other crime. As for Phil, Robert's son, well, before Pete knocked on his door, he always figured that the story of his dad was much more benign. You know, I'd always kind of suspected and then actually hoped that he had, you know, met another lady and they had a family and there was, you know, I've got some half-siblings out there somewhere. Because even though he left us in a lurch, I've never really held any resentment towards him, especially after I became an adult.

And I've got to ask, how are you not a little bit resentful? Well, I was at first. I have to admit that. But I was only 16, 17 years old at the time. But I'll tell you what helped me more than anything else is because I'm an alcoholic addict. I'm 71 years old, and I've used for most of my life. I've embossed everything, you know, family, dignity. I'm selling blood just to get another hit, that kind of thing.

Phil said that when he got treatment for his addiction, he felt better about everything. And he says it's a shame that his dad never dealt with whatever demons that he had. Yes, as far as my dad is concerned, I just don't think that he ever got the help that he needed. I mean, my story is different. I'm a different person than he is. Even though we share a bloodline, we're two separate individuals. And I only wish that he could have found some serenity before, you know, he put that 38 to his head. This technique that was used to find Robert Ivan Nichols and the Golden State Killer has since gotten way bigger than just those two cases. DNA from hundreds of crime scenes

has been uploaded onto that public genealogy site, GEDmatch, and Margaret's team told us that they've solved around 80 cases so far. They're also using this technique to identify victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre, who were buried in unmarked graves, as well as soldiers from the First and Second World War. And to think that this all started with some nerds just wanting to know where their ancestors came from.

That's Science Versus. This episode was produced by Rose Rimler and Caitlin Sori, with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, as well as Meryl Horn and Odelia Rubin. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Additional editing help from Alex Bloomberg and Caitlin Kenny. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Akedi Foster-Keys. Mix and sound design by Emma Munger.

Music written by Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. A huge thanks to all the people we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr Colleen Fitzpatrick at the DNA Doe Project and Curtis Rogers at GEDmatch. Recording help from Celine Ross, Tana Weingartner and Daniel Robison. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.