He put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
It was July of 2002, and Joseph Newton Chandler was dead again.
From an article published at cbsnews.com on June 2, 2003:
"...Last July, a man identified as Joseph N. Chandler committed suicide in his apartment. It turned out he had stolen the identity of an 8-year-old boy who was killed with his parents in a 1945 car crash near Sherman, Texas.The impostor was described by police as a loner in his 60s.
'We don't know what or who he was hiding from or who he really was,' police Detective Lt. Tom Doyle said(...)
Investigations learned that a man claiming to be Joseph Newton Chandler, of Rapid City, S.D., requested his first Social Security card in September 1978, at 41(...)
'This guy made a life out of another life and he made a point to stay unknown,' Doyle said..."
The mystery man's deception was discovered when the $82,000 he'd socked away in savings could not be distributed to heirs. Using the information he left behind relatives of Joseph Newton Chandler III were sought out. They likely didn't profit from the death of this Joseph Chandler though, since they were relatives of the boy whose name had been stolen.
This man, now a John Doe, had been careful and precise in his construction of the new identity. He took advantage of the times, in part - I doubt such a wholesale theft of identity would be so easy today. However, in this article published in the Rapid City Journal in June of 2003, a detective named Tom Senesac did say the following:
"The fact that a 41-year-old man was requesting a Social Security card should have sent up a red flag at the time..."
The article went on to note that all of "Chandler's" job applications listed, for the most part, false information about relatives in addition to his basic info, like his social security number. Investigators were also able to find that "Chandler" had worked as an electrical engineer and he'd been married twice, once to a Cuban woman. Somehow it was also determined that he'd come from California prior to acquiring his new name. Furthermore it was noted that he was 5'7" or 5'8" and had also lived in Philadelphia at some point. In fact, all credit checks on "Joseph Chandler" began with his time in that city.
He was cremated shortly after his death and the autopsy that found he would have died shortly from colon cancer, anyway.
No usable fingerprints were left behind.
He took a few pages from the Jack the Ripper [casebook.org, the largest site about the Ripper] handbook of serial killer standard operating procedure:
- Taunt the police
- Taunt the public through the press
- Be cryptic
- Be foreboding
- Send souvenirs; but never too many
- Kill strangers, and laugh about it.
Article comments
1 - Embersage
Steve, As usual I am impressed with your work. Your right about the fact that we have been discussing Dennis Rader's obsession with the Zodiac Killer. I have been working along side you as well as the others on these cases for a while now. We may never know the face behind the mask. Yet he has left us with some answers, as Rader tried to do. Hiding them in puzzles and codes. We may never have all the answers to who and why. Yet we will keep on searching. For in knowledge there is power.
2 - kat self
I have been blogging on crime rant.com. I have compiled a massive file linking B.T.K. tot the unsolved Zodiac murders. I have uncovered interesting tibits such as a Zodiac letter and a map made by B.T.K. both sighed with the initals r.H. and a Japanese connection on two Zodiac writings. There's plenty of more solid connections too. I'd like to see B.T.K. prosecuted for all his crimes. I'd like to blog with like minded researchers.