CLEVELAND, Ohio - Authorities said Thursday they have solved one of the most bizarre cold cases in Northeast Ohio: the identity of a war hero who spent the last 24 years of his life hiding as someone else.

U.S. Marshal Peter Elliott, his office and a team of researchers spent years investigating why the man stole a child's personal information and lived quietly under an assumed name until his death in 2002.

Elliott and Eastlake Police Chief Larry Reik believe the man was a fugitive on the run. Elliott bases his belief on the elaborate, compulsive way the man concealed a life of lies.

On July 24, 2002, the man, known as Joseph Newton Chandler III, committed suicide in the bathroom of his tiny efficiency apartment on Lakeshore Boulevard in Eastlake.

He left no note. Police found $82,000 in his bank account and a 1988 truck.

Larry Morrow, a private investigator appointed by a Lake County probate judge to locate family members, linked the dead man's identity to an 8-year-old boy from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who died with his parents in a car crash in Sherman, Texas, in 1945.

The man's body had been cremated. Police looking to determine who the man was could not find any usable fingerprints in the apartment to pinpoint the man's true identity.

Elliott now says the lack of fingerprints in the apartment raised questions. He even had some of the books checked, only to find smudges.

The circumstances launched years of investigation, but local detectives could not determine the man's true identity.

In 2014, Eastlake police sought Elliott's help.

Searching for a DNA match

In one of his first moves, he tracked down DNA from a Lake County hospital, where in 2000, Chandler had surgery for colon cancer.

Working with the labs at the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner's office, Penn State and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Elliott received a DNA profile.

Elliott sent the profile to national crime databases, hoping to find a match for unsolved crimes or fugitive cases. There were no matches.

In June 2016, he consulted with Colleen Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press, forensic genealogists in California who created the DNA Doe Project and Identifiers International. They work with police departments to identify missing persons and solve crimes.

They used the profile to search Y-DNA, which all males in a family share. Authorities used similar searches to help find the Golden State Killer last spring.

Fitzpatrick and Press said they searched public, online genealogy databases. They did not use private ones run by companies such as ancestry.com or 23andme.com, which offer information only to their customers. The initial searches gave them a surname, either a Nicholas or a Nichols.

They then sought out matches of potential first and second cousins to create a possible family tree.

Early this spring, they found a Nichols family in New Albany, Indiana.

The family had four boys, three of whom had died. They pinpointed one son who had left the family years ago but had not been reported dead: Robert Nichols.

"They not only put us in the right ballpark, but they told us the exact seat and who paid for the ticket,'' Elliott said of the researchers' work.

Elliott found Nichols' son, Phil, living in Cincinnati in March of this year.

Phil Nichols provided a DNA sample later that month. The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner's office tested it and matched it to the man who had been living in Eastlake.

Phil Nichols also gave Elliott a partial framework of his father's life through letters, documents and family pictures.

"I have no explanation for what he did,'' Phil Nichols told The Plain Dealer. "He was a rather unusual person. He was there, and he wasn't. He was like a stranger who lived in our house. He was with us, but he rarely interacted with us.''

A hidden life

Robert Nichols grew up in New Albany, across the Ohio River from Louisville, and joined the Navy out of high school. On May 3, 1945, he served as a firefighter on the U.S.S. Aaron Ward when Japanese planes bombed it off the coast of Okinawa.

Nichols, 18 at the time, suffered back and hip injuries from shrapnel. The Courier-Journal in Louisville reported that he cared for the wounded and dying and pumped water out of the ship for hours before he realized that he had been wounded. He received the Purple Heart for his bravery.

After the war, he returned to New Albany. He was so upset and distraught with what had happened that he burned his naval uniforms in the back yard, Elliott said.

Nichols married Laverne Korte on Jan. 9, 1947. The couple had three sons, Phil, Charles and David. Robert Nichols worked as a draftsman for General Electric.

In March 1964, Nichols left his family when Phil, the oldest, was a teenager. Elliott said Robert Nichols simply told his wife, "In due time, you'll know why.''

"It didn't surprise me,'' Phil Nichols said. "He was a loner.''

This knowledge made Elliott even more convinced there was more to be discovered.

"He did something, somewhere, at some time, that he wanted to hide from,'' Elliott said. "He was a decorated war veteran. He had a wife and three boys. He had a good life, and he walked away from it all.''

Robert Nichols bounced around the country, Elliott said. He moved to Dearborn, Michigan, where he told his parents that he worked in the car industry. His sons visited him once, but he wouldn't let them stay with him, Phil Nichols said. Instead, his father put them up in a motel.

In March 1965, he wrote to his parents, telling them that he had moved to the northern California city of Richmond.

"Please do not worry about me,'' he said. "I am well and happy.''

That month, he mailed one last envelope to his son, Phil, from Napa, California. It contained just a penny, without a note. He never contacted his family again.

Thirteen years later, in 1978, Nichols drove to Rapid City, South Dakota, and applied for a Social Security card under the name of Joseph Newton Chandler III, using the personal information of the boy, including the child's birthday of March 11, 1937, records show. Joey, as he was known, did not have a Social Security number, which was common then, as the cards were given to adults.

Nichols soon moved to Cleveland and went to work as a draftsman at Edko Co. on East 49th Street in 1978. He later worked at Lubrizol. At each place, he made few friendships and told co-workers that he feared someone "was getting close,'' but he never explained himself, Elliott said.

Nichiols moved to an Eastlake in 1985. He was consumed with keeping his life as private as possible, Elliott said. He didn't drink or smoke and was anti-social, seldom appearing to be at ease in public. In photos of company office parties, it appeared as if he was forced into attending.

"After I had children of my own, I felt empathy for my father,'' Phil Nichols said. "He would never get to see my children. He would never get to be with his family. He was gone.''

Nichols died at the age of 75. As police investigated his suicide in 2002, they found no clues that linked him to a prior life and the family he left behind in Indiana or why he hid his identity.

Elliott said he believes there still is more to the story. During his investigation, he spoke with authorities in San Francisco to determine whether Nichols could have been the Zodiac Killer, who terrorized the Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s by slaying at least five people and claiming in letters to newspapers to have killed dozens more. The case has never been solved.

Nichols can't be ruled out, Elliott said, as he spent unspecified amounts of time in northern California during that period. But it will require more investigation to determine that, as there was little physical evidence in the Zodiac case, according to published reports and interviews.

Elliott has talked with detectives across the country to determine whether Nichols committed other unsolved crimes. He speaks daily with police chiefs and federal agents, seeking to unravel why a man went to such great lengths to hide from his past.

"He wanted to die so that no one would ever know how he lived,'' Elliott said.

Anyone with information on the case can call the U.S. Marshals Service at 216-522-4482.