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U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott is investigating this Eastlake man who stole an 8-year-old boy's identity and lived a lie for more than two decades. The man committed suicide in 2002, and Elliott believes he was a violent fugitive.

(The U.S. Marshal's Service)

The man known as Joseph Chandler, at a costume party in 1992.

CLEVELAND, Ohio – The tired man, suffering from colon cancer, put a .38-caliber gun to his mouth and committed suicide in July 2002 in a tiny apartment in Eastlake.

Joseph Newton Chandler III had died again.

The first time was in 1945, when he was 8.

Now, U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott is looking into how and why the Eastlake man stole the little boy's identity and lived 24 years as a fake. Elliott said he believes the man, who appears to be in his late 60s, took the youth's personal history to cover a past that included unsolved crimes. The marshal said that based on the way the man lived and the elaborate way he concealed a life of lies, he was a violent fugitive.

Elliott and his office have resurrected the case of a man who appeared to be a paradox: a simpleton with a brilliant mind who lived as a pauper but had a modest bank account. All of it was built on a foundation of fiction.

"This is like chasing a ghost,'' Elliott said. "He lived the perfect life of someone on the run. He had no friends. He never got in trouble. He just lived so very quietly. He knew exactly what he was doing.''

Joey Chandler lived in Tulsa, Okla., with his parents. They died in a car wreck in Sherman, Texas, in 1945, just days before Christmas, on their way to visit relatives. In 1978, the man who committed suicide in Eastlake used Joey's personal information to obtain a Social Security card in a small city in South Dakota.

U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott

Elliott has spent six months examining the case, following up on a detailed investigation by Eastlake police detectives. He has looked into links involving handfuls of fugitives from New Hampshire to California. He has examined long shots, such as the Zodiac Killer, who terrified San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s, and inmates who escaped from Alcatraz.

He hasn't ruled out the Eastlake man in those cases, but he has in others, including fugitives in Oklahoma and Ohio.

From a desk filled with piles of folders, Elliott has stared at pictures of the dead man and compared them to mug shots of aging fugitives. He has looked at prison records, dental X-rays and time-enhanced photo images.

Elliott has even formed a behavioral profile of the man: He suffered obsessive-compulsive disorder, worked at Edko Co. in Cleveland and later at Lubrizol Corp. in Wickliffe, specializing in electrical engineering. He didn't drink or smoke and was anti-social, seldom appearing to be at ease in public.

On work forms, the Eastlake man listed co-workers as the first – and only – people to call in the event of an emergency, according to records Elliott obtained. The forms were written in large, block letters.

"He really was very smart,'' Elliott said of the man. "He was a strange guy. He listened to static, white noise for hours. He once drove to the East Coast to go to an L.L.Bean store in Maine.

"Once he pulled into the parking lot, he noticed that there weren't any parking spaces. He got upset, and he drove all the way back to Ohio without going inside.''

After the man's death, his body was cremated. That forced Elliott to track down the DNA from the man's stay at a Lake County hospital in 2000 and attempt to link it to cases from across the country.

Through work with DNA labs at the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner's office, at the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and at Penn State, Elliott was able to gain a DNA profile.

But the process has been exceedingly slow. Elliott has obtained DNA samples from family members of fugitives in an attempt to seek matches. It wasn't a hard sell, as many relatives told Elliott that they simply wanted closure.

Initially, authorities found the man had more than $80,000 in a bank account and a 1988 pickup truck. His apartment on Lakeshore Boulevard contained a few books, a small box of expensive camera lenses and a stack of vitamins. He bought the .38-caliber revolver for $263.55 three months before he died from a Lake County gun store, Elliott said.

The money from the bank account went to the state and for investigators who spent years searching for clues that would lead to the man's identity, said Jim O'Leary, an attorney for the estate's executor.

The executor, Mike Onderisin, worked with the Eastlake man at Lubrizol Corp. for nearly 12 years.

"We weren't friends,'' Onderisin said. "We were work associates. He came to my house for Thanksgiving once, and we had breakfast a few times.''

The only family he ever mentioned was a sister, Mary Wilson, who lived in Columbus. When authorities went to look for her, they found a vacant address.

Private investigators, appointed by a Lake County probate judge to find family members, then linked the man's identity to the 8-year-old boy from Tulsa.

The boy had never been issued a Social Security card, which was common then, as they were given to adults. That enabled the man to easily assume the identity of a person who had no surviving close relatives, The Plain Dealer reported in 2003.

Eastlake police investigated the suicide and contacted scores of people. Detectives spent a year tracking down leads and speaking with neighbors and co-workers and searching for anyone who may have a link to the man.

"It's not something like TV, where you can solve it in three hours,'' said Eastlake police Detective Christopher Bowersock. "There are a lot of questions, and there is only one person who can answer all of them. And he is not here.''

Bowersock said the Eastlake man had been dead for about a week when police went to his apartment July 30, 2002. The body had been in advanced stages of decomposition. Detectives quickly began checking the most basic facts about the man.

On forms to obtain his Social Security card, he listed his parents as Ellen Christina Kaaber Chandler and Joseph Newton Chandler Jr. and said he was born in Buffalo on March 11, 1937, according to records. All the information matched that of the boy who died, Joey Chandler.



Police thought dental records would surely reveal the mystery man's identity. Instead, those records linked back to the Eastlake man because they were established after he took the boy's identity, Bowersock said.



Forensics also were of little help. Fingerprints on the gun and items in the apartment were not clear enough to provide any answers. Elliott brought the man's books to fingerprint experts, who dipped the pages in a solution that would reveal any prints.

The results? Pages and pages of smudges.

Elliott, however, hasn't given up hope. He has tracked down box loads of information linked to the man, from a bank account in East Liverpool to an old apartment in Rapid City, S.D.

He began the search while on a trip to San Francisco in April, when he went to Alcatraz. He brought up the Eastlake man to authorities there.

Once he returned to Ohio, Elliott kept pulling files, talking with family members of fugitives and contacting police departments, steps he has taken for years.

As marshal, he formed a task force in 2003 that has apprehended more than 35,000 fugitives across the country.

In 2011, he tracked down fugitive John Donald Cody, who used the alias Bobby Thompson to fleece millions of dollars from people who believed they were giving money to a fund for veterans. A Cuyahoga County jury convicted Cody last year of racketeering and several financial crimes. He is serving 28 years in the Richland Correctional Institution.

That case took several months to put together, and Elliott expects the Eastlake case to take many more months. He said he is convinced, by the way the man lived, that the man was a wanted fugitive.

"There has to be someone who knew him, someone who knows what he did and how he did it,'' Elliott said. "There is a saying in the Marshal Service, 'Let no guilty man escape.' That extends beyond death.''

Anyone with information can call the Marshal Service in Cleveland at 216.522.4483.