Joseph Newton Chandler III

In 2017, she made contact with Colleen Fitzpatrick, a forensic genealogist and co-founder of the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit organization known for solving missing person cases through investigative genetic genealogy.

Since its founding, the organization has solved decades-old cases, including Buckskin Girl, Bell in the Well, and the Joseph Newton Chandler III case.

They utilize modern DNA technologies alongside databases such as DNA Justice, Family Tree DNA, and GEDmatch to connect missing persons with their relatives.

The Doe project represented exactly what Lyle's case desperately needed, a helping hand that could make genetic analysis possible.

They never expected for this to become what it did, a tangled web of identity theft and lies, a man who colleagues described as odd, isolated and eccentric, a hermit who only left home to work with no friends or family.

A look around the home, a studio apartment, told authorities that his name was Joseph Newton Chandler III, but they found nothing personal.

There were no contact details for friends or family, no family photos, no evidence that he had anyone in his life at all.

He didn't even leave a suicide note.

They found that Joseph's father was Joseph Chandler II and his mum was Ellen Kaber.

Both had long since died, but experts attempted to find a member of the Kaber family to give this small fortune to and eventually tracked down Ellen Kaber's niece, so Joseph's cousin.

And it's here that they learn that Joseph Newton Chandler III had died alongside his parents on the 21st of December 1945 when he was just eight years old.

The family had been en route to visit extended family for Christmas and got into a car crash in northern Texas and none of them survived.

It took a week for anybody to find him.

The neighbors and coworkers who knew him knew him as Joseph Newton Chandler III, a quiet, eccentric electrical draftsman who worked at a chemical company until 1997, kept almost no friends, and always had a suitcase packed by the door.

He'd shown up in Ohio out of nowhere in 1978.

Dave, where were you in 1978?

Of course it was.

[laughs] Tears are falling, baby.

[laughs] So when police went looking for next of kin, they found out that Joseph Newton Chandler III had died in a car wreck in Texas in 1945 when he was eight years old.

So whoever this man was had taken a dead child's name and lived behind it for the past 24 years, or at that point the past 24 years.