by James Renner
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. Assets that included those clip on ties, the out-of-date computer, and the $82,000 in cash and stocks Joe had left in his bank account.
* * *
Mike didn’t know where to begin. His wife worked for an attorney in town, though, so Mike went to him for help. The attorney recommended they hire a private eye. And he already had one in mind.
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 consorting with 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.
On his 401K application, Lewis discovered 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. But under “telephone,” Joe had written “none,” and when Lewis ran the addresses, he found they were fictitious.
Lewis tried his luck with Joe’s birth certificate. A certified copy of the certificate was issued to Joe on August 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. Maybe he could find a surviving relative still living near there.
Bingo.
In Fort Worth, he found Dan Chandler, a distant relative who acted strangely when Lewis told him Joe Chandler was dead. After that initial conversation, Lewis could not get Dan back on the phone. He quickly learned Dan had hired his own investigator. 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 much more leg work. But he did find one more important clue: Joe had apparently used the copy of his birth certificate to get a social security card under that name, as well. He had applied for a card on September, 25, 1978. The card was mailed to an address in South Dakota. The signature on the social security card 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 was anyone’s guess.
Detectives sent various items to the crime lab to be dusted for fingerprints, including an ashtray they discovered in the pickup (Joe didn’t smoke). When they got the results back, they fed the information into several databases. They got two hits. One for Mike 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. His income was listed annually from 1978 to 2002. It was interrupted, strangely, in 1983, when there had been no reported income.
They tried to fire up Joe’s computer, to see if he’d left any files on the hard drive, 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 Joe claimed to have been employed by a company called Wilson & Associates in Los Angeles, California, from 1975 to 1980. When reached, a Wilson & Associates manager said he had no such record.
The Rapid City lead was run down, too. Joe’s social security card had been sent to 2326½ Canyon Lake Drive. Sergeant Tom Senesac, of the Rapid City Police Department, offered to check out the address. It was a slum, 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 Sergeant Senesac. He checked the crisscross directory at the local library to see who was listed under that address. He found the name of a local pothead listed in 1977 and 1979, but no one under 1978. The pothead has been accounted for. He’s dead, too.
“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 a while. 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. After all, there was really no evidence of a crime, here.
Eager to pick up where the police left off, web sleuths were about to turn Joe Chandler into a legend.
* * *
2008
Typing “Joseph Newton Chandler” into Google calls up several amateur detective websites, each with increasingly outlandish theories for who Joe Chandler really was. Everyone from D.B. Cooper to Jim Morrison (no kidding) is suspected. By sheer volume, the leading contender is currently the Zodiac Killer.
Zodiac 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. He sent taunting messages to the police and newspaper reporters, daring them to catch him. But no one ever did. 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 buffs 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 had been a rash of murders that mirrored the Zodiac crimes in Ohio between 1979 and 1982. Known as the Ohio Lovers Murders, eight co
uples were killed while parked in secluded necking spots from Toledo to Akron.
In his letters to police, Zodiac had 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 had 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. And a much more compelling explanation for who Joe might have been was recently put forth by a computer technician—and part-time blogger—from Oklahoma named Chris Yarbrough.
Yarbrough runs Crimeshadows.com, a website devoted to the Zodiac as well as other unsolved murders throughout the United States. He has an odd hobby—in his spare time, Yarbrough likes to pore through old mug shots on city websites. He is specifically interested in any fugitives from the late ’70s, early ’80s. He’s looking for the Zodiac, of course, believing it’s possible the killer was arrested somewhere as he fled California. 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 received 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, 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.
Only, Campbell hadn’t expected his wife to find the toolbox 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 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms 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 Lieutenant Detective 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.
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 he had left on his back porch was similar to the care the Unabomber had 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 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.
* * *
2008 Again
Chris Yarbrough lists the connections between Joe Chandler and Stephen Campbell on his website. He points out that Cheyenne, Wyoming is 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 six foot two, significantly taller than Joe, at five foot eight. Campbell had brown eyes, Joe had gray eyes, according to his driver’s license. And Campbell’s hair was curly, while Joe’s was straight.
“These discrepancies could be explained by the aging process,” suggests Yarbrough. “People lie on the driver’s 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 of 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, in apartment A. “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 co-worker from Lubrizol is still executor of his estate, although the account has dwindled over the years to pay for investigators and court costs. Mike would like to know who he’s helping, someday. He has many questions about the case that beg answers. How did an ashtray end up in Joe’s truck, if the man never smoked? Who was 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’s investigators discovered that Liskey had died in 1999.
“Maybe he was just a spook,” says Detective 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.
The man who called himself Joseph Newton Chandler rented a one-room efficiency in this Eastlake apartment complex.
Private Investigator Mike Lewis tracked down the real Joseph Newton Chandler’s family.
Left: The only known photograph of the mysterious “Joseph Newton Chandler”, from his driver’s license. Right: A composite sketch of the Zodiac killer—what “Chandler” might have looked like when he was younger? (Eastlake Police Department)
Stephen Craig Campbell, who looked a lot like Chandler, has eluded auth
orities for decades. (Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Department)
Chapter 11
West End Girls
The Unsolved Disappearances of Amanda Berry and Georgina DeJesus
The cassettes came wrapped in a crumpled envelope. A short note explained that these tapes contained important information about Amanda Berry’s disappearance. The letter was signed “Jack Bauer.” The return address belonged to a local Burger King.
A woman’s voice, midwestern, middle-aged, floated out of the tape like narration from some long-forgotten dream. “My name is Robin Dedeker,” said the voice. “I’m a psychic medium. I’m doing a reading for the family of Amanda M. Berry and the date today is August 19, 2005. I am located in Minnesota.”
Slowly, over the course of the next two hours, Dedeker described a vision of Amanda—or “Mandy,” as her friends called her—and what happened to her the day she vanished into the smoggy air of Cleveland’s west wide. This message was intended for Mandy’s mother, Louwana Miller, but it never reached her ears. Instead, Louwana gave it to a young magician obsessed with finding her daughter—a man who wanted to be an FBI agent and who sometimes calls himself Jack Bauer. The magician sent it to me.
Now, Louwana is dead. And if the psychic is to be believed, Mandy is, too. And if Mandy is dead, what does that mean for Georgina DeJesus, the girl who disappeared a year later from the same beat-down stretch of Lorain Avenue where Mandy was last seen? Many have wondered if the two disappearances are connected, if this is just the beginning of a serial killer’s spree.
What happened to Mandy and Gina? Are they still alive someplace, together, kept by some deviant that detectives have yet to track down? Or have they crossed over to the other side, unable to communicate their secrets to anyone except the most gifted psychic?