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.

[7] 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.

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

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

[11] He also took part in behavior perceived as eccentric and unusual, such as listening to white noise for hours, and once drove 700 miles (1,100 km) to an L.L.

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

[5][9] On his calendar, he had marked down the days until his suicide;[11] before Nicols shot himself, he closed the blinds and turned off the air conditioning.

[3] His identity theft was revealed only when authorities could not find any relatives and discovered that the real Chandler had died decades prior.

Authorities were unable to find any usable fingerprints to assist in identification and were able to get a DNA sample only after discovering he had visited a Lake County, Ohio, hospital for colon cancer surgery back in 2000.

Another theory was that he may have been a fugitive named Steven Campbell, an engineer from Cheyenne, Wyoming, wanted for attempted murder.

[13][14] In 2014, at the request of the local police, Peter J. Elliott, United States Marshal for the Northern District of Ohio, reopened the Chandler case.

Based on DNA extracted from a tissue sample from a Lake County hospital, a CODIS profile was generated, but no hits were found.