Handwriting never lies The signature on this application matches a fake Social Security card sent to South Dakota.

Sherman, Texas: Dec. 21, 1945:

Our mystery begins with a tragic confluence of events that occurred along a dark stretch of country road just before Christmas, not long after the end of the second World War.

The Chandler family are in their 1941 sedan, driving south through Sherman, on their way to Grandma's house in Weatherford. The Chandlers live in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Joe Chandler II is a field rep for Buick Motor Co. His wife, Billie, and their only child, 8-year-old Joe III, are with him in the car, packed between wrapped presents and luggage. They are planning to spend the holidays in Texas.

A man drives another car north, a ways down the road. He doesn't know the Chandlers. And that's a blessing, really, considering what happens next.

In the road between them, a truck full of lumber has pulled to the side of the northbound lane, halfway on the shoulder. The man doesn't see it until it is upon him. Obeying instinct, he swerves to avoid it, never seeing the Chandlers' car coming the other way until it's too late.

The man survives. The Chandlers do not. The presents in the car are donated to a local charity. Their bodies are laid to rest near Grandma's house.

And that was the last anyone heard of Joe Chandler III, until 2002, when he died again in Northeast Ohio.

Eastlake, Ohio: July 30, 2002

Judging by the position of the body, it appears the old man was looking at his reflection in the mirror when he put the gun in his mouth and blew out the left side of his skull.

Detective Christopher Bowersock found him lying in a sticky pool of coagulated blood inside the cramped bathroom of the efficiency rented by one Joseph Newton Chandler. Neighbors had noticed a smell coming from Apartment D and had alerted a Dover Apartments manager, who called the police. But inside, it was much worse. This was one of the hottest days of a very hot summer, and the stink was so bad that Bowersock was forced back outside, where he waited until someone could bring air packs from the station.

The single-room apartment was divided in a corner by a waste-high wooden bar. On one side was the kitchenette - toaster oven, mini fridge, tiny stovetop. On the other was the living room/bedroom. A Murphy bed, covered in a patterned flannel sheet, was in the down position. Across from this was a couch and a framed picture of a castle in Spain. A TV was set against the window on the front wall. Next to the bed was an open closet that held a pair of work pants and a plain button-up shirt, looking lonely next to two clip-on ties hanging beside them. On a shelf above the closet was a tweed hat. Sitting on the wooden bar was an antiquated computer, two books (How to Make Money in Stocks and Making Money with Your Computer at Home), and an open gun case, the kind with gray pointy foam inside.

The bathroom was covered in '70s-era yellow wallpaper, which was mostly obscured by a legion of flies. They buzzed and dived around the detective as he bent to the body, which had fallen, face down, in the corner in front of the mirror, probably a week before. Bowersock pulled an arm to move the body and felt it slide from the torso like "a drumstick being pulled from a well-cooked chicken." Maggots poured out of the hole in the head and landed on the floor.

Under the body was the handgun, a five-shot revolver, with four live rounds still in the spinner. It was an old gun, much older than the case on the counter.

The police double-bagged the body for the coroner. To Bowersock, it looked like a simple suicide.

The emergency contact listed on Joe Chandler's rental application is a man named Mike, Joe's only friend, if he could even be called that. Mike has asked Free Times not to publish his last name because he's tired of the notoriety that has come with being the Mystery Man's executor.

Mike hadn't seen Joe in at least four months when he found out he was dead. He and his wife returned from a vacation to find messages from the police and coroner. They needed someone to ID the body.

PI Mike Lewis Discovered Joe was not Joe.

Mike met Joe while working at Lubrizol, an East Side chemical plant. Joe was a talented electrical engineer, employed by a temp company called Comprehensive Designers Inc., even though he basically worked fulltime at Lubrizol for 12 years, beginning in 1986. He designed new equipment, handling everything from drawing to scheduling installers. And he fixed anything that needed fixing in the plant. For this, he was paid $17 an hour, earning $36,000 a year. Mike's office was located right next to Joe's and so he got to know him about as well as anyone could.

Joe Chandler was quite peculiar. He wore factory-style protective eyeglasses, even outside of work. He stood about 5-foot-8 and looked to be in his 60s, although Mike noticed that whenever someone asked how old he was, Joe always gave a different age. He had larger-than-average hands, with thick fingers. He smelled kind of funny, too, like he didn't bathe often. And he was always making little gadgets.

Joe built himself a white-noise machine that piped static through headphones which he wore at all times. He kept it turned up so loud, you could hear it if you were standing close to him. Joe also wired his TV so that it shut off during commercial breaks and clicked back on when the program started up again; he hated advertisements of all kinds. As a favor to another coworker named Mark Herendeen, Joe once rigged the Madison Fire Department's alarm system so that it turned on the lights in the sleeping area whenever it sounded.

Joe also had a habit of disappearing. Occasionally, he would call Mike and explain that he wouldn't be coming to work for awhile. "They're getting close," Joe would say. Usually, he was only gone for a few days, though once he was gone for months.

"I should have suspected something," says Mike, thinking back. "But I didn't. I just thought he was a paranoid schizophrenic or something."

Mike felt sorry for Joe; he didn't seem to have anyone. He never mentioned family. He carried around a notepad with lists of restaurants that were open for Thanksgiving and Christmas, for Christ's sake. He invited Joe to have supper at his apartment one evening, but the meal was awkward. Joe wasn't much of a conversationalist. Still, over time, he gave up a few more details. He told Mike that he had once been married to a Cuban woman and had lived in Florida.

When Mike's wife, Marilyn, celebrated her 50th birthday with a costume party, they invited Joe, both thinking that he would never show up, "not in a million years." To everyone's surprise, Joe showed up dressed head-to-toe as a mobster - pinstripe suit, fedora, cigar.

After Joe was laid off from Lubrizol in 1997, Mike made a point to call him at least once a year. During one such call, he noticed that Joe sounded frail. So Mike drove out to Joe's efficiency on Lakeshore Boulevard, a converted Knights Inn hotel room.

Joe was frail. He had just had surgery. He told Mike that he had rectal cancer and the prognosis was not good.

"His doctor wanted to give him chemo," says Mike. "But he couldn't afford it." Joe insisted on paying for everything in cash and his surgery had set him back about $80,000. Mike tried to get him on Medicare or some other plan, but Joe refused.

"He could hardly hear me," says Mike. "His eyes were bad, too." In fact, Joe needed help filling out his new lease. "That's when I got myself in trouble."

Mike saw that Joe had listed an apartment manager as his emergency contact. So, he offered to put his own name there, instead. "My God, that was the beginning of it. That's how I got dragged into this."

Because his name was listed on the lease, and because the courts couldn't find anyone better, Mike became executor of Joe's estate. It became his responsibility to track down Joe's next-of-kin so that his assets could be distributed - those clip-on ties, the out-of-date computer, and the $82,000 in cash and stocks that Joe had left in his bank account.

Mike's wife worked for an attorney in town, so Mike went to him for help. The attorney recommended they hire a private eye.

As chief investigator at Confidential Investigative Services, it takes a lot to surprise Mike Lewis. He's seen it all - workers' comp winners cheating the system, politicians sneaking out on their wives, sports stars sneaking out on their mistresses, media magnates going down on young women in the Metroparks. Cheating is his bread and butter. And Joe Chandler was, in the end, a cheater, too. Lewis would soon realize that Joe had cheated the government out of an identity.

"I thought it was a fairly simple case, at first," says Lewis. "Then I did the normal database search and there was nothing on this guy."

No criminal record, no military service record, no credit history.

Chris Yarbrough Computer tech/Web sleuth.

On his 401K application, Lewis discovered that Joe had listed the name of a sister and a brother as beneficiaries; a Mary R. Wilson, of Columbus, and a George Chandler, in Denver, Colorado. Their addresses turned out to be fictitious.

So Lewis tried his luck with Joe's birth certificate. He noticed that a certified copy of the certificate was issued to Joe on Aug. 29, 1978. It had been sent from Buffalo, New York, where Joe was born. The certificate stated that Joe's father was born in Weatherford, Texas. He thought that maybe he could find a surviving relative still living near there.

In Fort Worth, he found Dan Chandler, a distant relative who acted strangely when Lewis told him that Joe Chandler was dead. After that initial conversation, Lewis could not get Dan back on the phone. He quickly learned that Dan had hired his own investigator to find out if he stood to inherit Joe's estate. That PI eventually found a newspaper clipping detailing the accident that killed Joe Chandler and his parents in Sherman, Texas in 1945. The man in Eastlake was an imposter.

Bound by limited resources provided by "Joe's" estate, Lewis could not afford to do too much more leg work. But he did find one more important clue: Joe had apparently used the copy of his birth certificate to apply for a Social Security card under that name, also in September 1978. The card had been mailed to an address in Rapid City, South Dakota. The signature on the application matched the signature on the lease for the Eastlake efficiency.

"This guy was real thorough," says Lewis. "He used the same fake address for his sister for 10 years. He had a system down."

Now that Joe Chandler was officially a John Doe, the Eastlake police got interested again. Detectives retrieved Joe's possessions from Mike and combed through the stuff looking for some evidence that could point them to the man's true identity. Who had been hiding in their town for almost 20 years?

Joe had a key ring with seven keys on it when he died. One was for his truck, a 1988 GMC pickup, which he had paid for with cash. Another was for his safe, which contained financial documents that yielded nothing new. The purpose of the other five are anyone's guess.

Detectives sent various items to the crime lab to be dusted for fingerprints, including an ashtray they discovered in the pickup. When they got the results back, they fed the information into several databases. They got two hits. One for Lewis, the private eye, who had handled the documents at some point, and one for an Eastlake detective who had processed the crime scene.

They got lucky when they ran down the gun's serial number. It had been sold in 1966, in Seagoville, Texas, a town less than 80 miles from Weatherford.

The police also got a copy of Joe's Social Security year-by-year earnings statement. It listed his income for every year from 1978 to 2002, except for one - 1983, when he apparently had earned nothing.

They tried to fire up Joe's computer, but it had been damaged in the move from the efficiency. No one could get it running, so they threw it away.

On a job application, detectives learned that Joe claimed to have been employed by a company called Wilson & Associates in Los Angeles from 1975-1980. When reached, a Wilson & Associates manager said he had no such record.

Sgt. Tom Senesac, of the Rapid City (South Dakota) Police Department, agreed to check out the address to which Joe's Social Security card had been sent. It was little more than a shack, tucked behind a ramshackle house. The home's owner was long dead and the man's son could not remember who had rented the place in 1978.

"We don't even know if he actually lived there, or if he was just checking the mailbox periodically," says Sgt. Senesac.

"He had to have a cool secret, whoever he was," says Senesac. "I started thinking about what was happening in history back then. This wasn't too long after D.B. Cooper hijacked that airplane and got away with $200,000, you know? I teased my buddy at the FBI about that for awhile. But he swears D.B. died when he jumped out of the plane."

Soon, the leads dried up and the detectives moved on to more important matters.

Eager to pick up where the police left off, Web sleuths were about to turn Joe Chandler into a legend.

Stephen Campbell On the run for 25 years.

Today

Typing "Joseph Newton Chandler" into Google calls up several amateur detective Web sites, each with increasingly outlandish theories about who Joe Chandler really was. Everyone from D.B. Cooper to Jim Morrison (no kidding) is suspected. By sheer volume, the leading contender is the Zodiac Killer.

Zodiac, or simply "Z", as he's come to be known, was a serial killer who once haunted Northern California. He dispatched five victims (mostly couples, as they parked in lovers' lanes or picnicked in a park) between December 1968 and October 1969, and sent taunting messages to the police and newspaper reporters, daring them to catch him. But the case remains unsolved. To this day, no one knows why Zodiac stopped killing and vanished in 1969. Some suspect he moved away from California, after the police got close, and perhaps quietly continued his spree elsewhere.

When the story of Joe Chandler's suicide hit the Web, Zodiac fans noticed a similarity between a drawing that someone had done of what Joe might have looked like in his 30s and the composite sketch of Zodiac. They noted that Joe had some ties to California and that there was a rash of murders that mirrored the Zodiac crimes in Ohio between 1979 and 1982. Known as the Ohio Lovers Murders, eight couples were killed while parked in secluded necking spots from Toledo to Akron.

In his letters to police, Zodiac often made allusions to Jack the Ripper. Blogger Steve Huff, who has studied both Zodiac and Jack the Ripper, recognized Joe Chandler's name immediately. A London investigator named Joseph Chandler found one of Jack the Ripper's victims. If Zodiac wanted a new identity, Joe Chandler was perfect.

"That's a tangential link, easily dismissed as coincidence," writes Huff at Huff's Crime Blog. "Still, hair stood up on the back of my neck when I saw it."

Another researcher named Mike Rodelli stumbled upon a death certificate for another Joseph Chandler who died in San Rafael, California, just north of Zodiac's stomping grounds, in 1994. That Joseph Chandler died on July 24, eight years to the day before Joe Chandler committed suicide in Eastlake, according to the Lake County Coroner's best estimate, based on the condition of the body.

But there is no hard evidence to link Joe Chandler to the Zodiac. A much more compelling explanation for who Joe might have been was recently put forth by Chris Yarbrough, a computer technician and part-time blogger in Oklahoma.

Yarbrough runs Crimeshadows.com, a Web site devoted to the Zodiac killings and other unsolved cases throughout the United States. He has an odd hobby: In his spare time, Yarbrough pores over old mug shots on city Web sites. He is specifically interested in fugitives from the late '70s and early '80s. In January 2006, he stumbled upon the mug shot of Stephen Craig Campbell, who skipped town after being arrested for attempted murder in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1982. He noticed that Stephen Campbell looked a lot like Joe Chandler.

And the more he looked, the more connections he uncovered between Campbell and the man who committed suicide in Eastlake.

"A lot of things click," says Yarbrough. "There are some discrepancies, too, but nothing that cannot be explained."

Cheyenne, Wyoming: 1982

Stephen Craig Campbell was, by all accounts, a brilliant electrical engineer. He was born in California, grew up near Houston, Texas, and earned a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Arkansas. He worked for Stoffer Chemicals in 1982, at their trona mine. He wore large, thick, corrective lenses, even when he wasn't at work. He had bigger-than-average hands. Co-workers described him as a loner. He was interested in ham radio, photography and chess. He kept a small plane at the local airport, which he flew occasionally. And when he found out his wife was having an affair, he tinkered with a homemade gadget - a small bomb that he packed into a toolbox and left on his back porch for the other man to find during his next visit.

But Mrs. Campbell found it first. Sensing something amiss, she got a broom and nudged the box with the handle. The bomb exploded, blowing off the back of the house and a portion of her hand.

Campbell was arrested and charged with attempted murder in Sweetwater County. He made bail and disappeared. The Sheriff's Department and federal agents have been trying to find him ever since.

"He had a number of aliases and Social Security numbers we suspected he was using," says Sweetwater County Sheriff's Lt. Det. Burke Morin. "Obviously, we never found him. But we thought we were close a couple times."

Campbell is suspected of undergoing minor plastic surgery to alter his appearance, funded, perhaps, by a rich uncle.

Dover apartments Joe Chandler's inconspicuous hideout (Inset: his inaccurate resting place).

Their best lead came from an acquaintance of Campbell's who, in an odd twist of fate, bumped into him while vacationing in the Virgin Islands in the '80s. By the time ATF got there, Campbell was gone.

For a while, Campbell was also a top suspect in the Unabomber case. The intricate wiring he had used in the bomb was similar to the care the Unabomber used in his incendiary packages.

ATF Special Agent Ken Bray has pursued Campbell for a quarter of a century, at times coming close, but never quite getting his man. "He got caught using an alias, once," says Bray. "But then he switched names and disappeared again."

Campbell's sister still lives in Texas to this day, but tells detectives she has not heard from her brother for a long time.

In the summer of 2002, a Sweetwater County detective briefly reopened their investigation and started tracking back leads again, contacting those who knew Campbell. But the file was closed again in October of that year.

Today Again

Chris Yarbrough lists some connections between Joe Chandler and Stephen Campbell on his Web site. He points out that Cheyenne, Wyoming is a mere 300 miles from Rapid City, South Dakota, where Joe got his fake Social Security card in 1978.

But there are some things that don't match up. Stephen Campbell was 6-foot-2, significantly taller than 5-foot-8 Joe. Campbell had brown eyes, Joe had gray eyes, according to his drivers' license. And Campbell's hair was curly, while Joe's was straight.

"These discrepancies could be explained by the aging process," suggests Yarbrough. "And people lie on the drivers' licenses all the time. It wouldn't be that hard to lie about one's height." And as for the hair? "I seem to remember permanents being quite popular for men in the early '80s."

Compelling enough already, the idea becomes more intriguing after reviewing the case with Mike Lewis, the private eye who first realized Joe was not who he appeared to be. "The computer the police threw away still worked when I was on the case," he says. "I had a guy I know comb through it. He found a couple searches Joe had made on the Internet prior to his death. One search was on Nazism. The other was a search for information on plastic explosives."

Joe's neighbors at Dover Apartments don't recall the man ever being racist. He didn't seem dangerous, either. Just strange. "I saw him walking every day," says Wayne McNutt. "He'd walk over to Nick's Family Restaurant and have breakfast. Even in the winter, he'd be out there walking in his work clothes. But he always looked straight ahead when he walked. Never made eye contact."

The woman who lived beside him remembers a middle-aged woman with dark hair visiting Joe's apartment once, a short time before he died. She thought it was his daughter, but can't say for sure. Other than that instance, she never saw Joe with company.

Joe's coworker from Lubrizol is still executor of his estate, though the account has dwindled over the years to pay for investigators and court costs. Mike would like to know who he's helping. He has a lot of questions about the case that beg answers. Like, how did an ashtray end up in Joe's truck, if the man never smoked? He also wonders about the man in the photograph a woman from the coroner's office showed him in 2005. He was sure it was Joe and the mystery was solved.

That man's name was Elmer Liskey, a local musician and real-estate salesman, according to the Lake County Coroner's Office. But he was ruled out after coroner investigators discovered that Liskey had died in 1999.

"Maybe he was just a spook," says Det. Bowersock, shrugging his shoulders. "You know, an old CIA operative who saw too much and wanted somewhere safe to live out the remainder of his life."

Whoever Joe Chandler really was, he died with his powerful secret locked away in his eccentric mind. His ashes are safely entombed at Riverside Cemetery, in a wall facing west, under a name that is not his own.