Review: "The Cleveland John Doe Case" by Thibault Raisse

 

The Cleveland John Doe Case by Thibault Raisse Crime Ink, 2025     On the afternoon of July 30, 2002, the body of Joseph Chandler was discovered in the bathroom of his spartan studio apartment in Eastlake, Ohio. It had been an unusually hot summer in Northern Ohio—where Eastlake is a suburb of Cleveland sitting on the shoreline of Lake Erie—and Chandler had been dead for almost a week when a maintenance man discovered his body. The air conditioning in his room had been turned off and the fetid odor of rotting flesh filled the apartment. It was obvious to the investigating detective that Chandler had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but what he didn’t realize at the time was that Joseph Newton Chandler III had died in Texas as a young boy and the dead man was someone else entirely. The Cleveland John Doe Case adeptly introduces Chandler—he had lived in the Dover Apartments for 17 years and worked at a nearby chemical factory for just as long, but he was like a ghost because no one knew anything about him—and the investigators working the case from when the body was discovered in 2002 until the early-2020s when DNA helped identify Chandler’s birth name. And there were five separate investigators, including a couple private eyes and the U.S. Marshal for the Northern District of Ohio.   The investigative question changing over the years from How did Chandler die?, to Who was Chandler?, to Why did Chandler live under an assumed identity? It is an intriguing case from beginning to end and Raisse wrings the facts out with precise and fluid writing and an obvious high dosage of research gleaned from interviews with the investigators, Chandler’s family, police records, and other documents. The only disappointment, and this is hardly anything at all because it only adds to the mysterious nature of the case, is that the final investigative question, Why did Chandler live under an assumed identity for so long? is yet to be solved. But I tell you, as Raisse details in The Cleveland John Doe Case, there are a bevy of high-profile theories about what made Chandler take a new name. And each, as well The Cleveland John Doe Case in its entirety, are worth your reading time. The Cleveland John Doe Case was translated into English from its original French by Laurie Bennett. It is part of Crime Ink’s 50 States of Crime series where French journalists reevaluate major American crimes; one for each of the 50 states of the U.S.

Check out The Cleveland John Doe Case at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.