The Man Who Went to Jail for Being Himself

In the spring of 2019, a homeless man walked into a Los Angeles bank branch carrying his real Social Security card and his real California ID. He'd just checked his credit report and found credit cards he never opened, so he did the responsible thing: he asked the bank to close them. By the end of the day he was in handcuffs. The charge, more or less, was stealing his own identity.

His name was William Woods. It had been his name since 1968. The problem was that a man in Wisconsin had been using it longer and better than he had, and when the bank called that man to check, he calmly answered every security question, faxed over some official-looking documents, and explained that some con artist in California was clearly trying to rob him.

The con artist went to jail for 428 days. Then a judge sent him to a psychiatric hospital, where he was medicated for insisting on the one thing he knew was true.

A wallet at a hot dog cart

Rewind to Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1988. Two men in their early twenties are working at a hot dog cart. One is William Woods, born in Kentucky. The other is Matthew Keirans, a drifter from California who ran away from home as a teenager and already has arrest records in three states under his own name.

At some point Keirans steals Woods' wallet. Woods notices, threatens to punch him, and gets it back. He thinks nothing more of it. Why would he? The wallet came back.

But while Keirans had it, he copied the details off Woods' Social Security card and used them to apply for a driver's license. As Woods put it years later, the man now had Woods' name with his own face on an ID card. After 1988, there is no record anywhere of Matthew Keirans ever using his own name, birth date, or Social Security number again. By 1990 he had a Colorado license as "William D. Woods" and the swap was complete.

What follows is the strangest part: Keirans didn't use the stolen identity to disappear or to run scams. He used it to become a normal guy. He racked up a few arrests under Woods' name in the early nineties, then met a woman, married her in 1994, and had a son. Both took the Woods surname. Neither had any idea it was fake. He worked at Kohl's, then at the Kentucky Department of Education, then as a contractor. In 2013 he landed a systems architect job in the IT department of University of Iowa Health Care, passed the background check without a ripple, and eventually worked remotely from Hartland, Wisconsin, earning over $140,000 a year. He paid his taxes every year, under someone else's name.

The identity even got refreshed along the way. In 2012, after being ticketed for driving without a license, Keirans researched Woods' family tree on a genealogy site and ordered a certified copy of Woods' Kentucky birth certificate. It arrived, completely legitimate, the very next day after the ticket. He used it to get a Wisconsin license, quietly swapping the middle name Donald for David, his own real middle name. A small comfort, maybe. One true word in an entirely false life.

The system picks the wrong man

Meanwhile the real William Woods was having a much rougher time of it. He drifted, spent long stretches homeless, and picked up his own record along the way. And somewhere in the bowels of the FBI's fingerprint database, something remarkable had happened: the two men's criminal histories had been merged into a single file. One record, one name, two sets of fingerprints, two lives. Every time anyone ran "William Woods," they got a jumbled composite of both men and no reason to suspect there were two.

So when Woods stood in that LA bank in 2019 and failed the security questions (questions Keirans had set up), the machinery worked exactly as designed, on exactly the wrong person. The LAPD arrested him. Prosecutors charged him with identity theft and false impersonation, and held him without bail. Through every hearing he repeated that he was William Woods and the man in Wisconsin was the imposter. The more consistently he said it, the crazier he sounded, until a judge ruled him mentally incompetent to stand trial and shipped him to a state hospital with an order for psychotropic medication.

In March 2021, worn down, Woods pleaded no contest in exchange for time served and walked out. The court's parting gift was an order requiring him to stop using the name William Woods and to go by what it believed was his true name: Matthew Keirans.

Read that again. A California court legally ordered the real William Woods to live under his identity thief's name.

Woods didn't stop. He contacted police in Hartland, where Keirans lived. He filed complaints. Each time, officers called the respectable IT professional with the mortgage and the family, compared him to the homeless man with the criminal record and the "delusions," and closed the file. Keirans talked his way past every single one of them.

The campus cop who wouldn't drop it

In January 2023, Woods found out where his imposter worked and called University of Iowa Health Care to report that one of their employees was living under his stolen identity. The complaint landed with the university's police department and, eventually, with Ian Mallory, at the time a patrol officer.

To keep the two Williams straight, Mallory nicknamed them Wisconsin Bill and California Bill. And here's the honest part: he started out on the wrong side. Wisconsin Bill was a cooperative, well-spoken employee who seemed exhausted by years of harassment. California Bill looked like a professional con man. Multiple agencies had already dismissed him. A court had already ruled on it. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to stamp the file and move on.

Then Wisconsin Bill made a mistake. He told Mallory, "You're not going to be able to do anything." Mallory figured the man saw him as a mall cop with a flashlight and a jingling keychain. It annoyed him just enough to make the case personal.

Mallory pulled hundreds of police and government records from Wisconsin, California, Idaho, Colorado, Oregon, Kentucky, and Iowa. A 1995 forgery case from North Carolina gave him his first solid data point: the fingerprints and photo matched California Bill. Then came the birth certificates. Both men sent him one, both certified authentic by Kentucky, both for "William Donald Woods." Except Wisconsin Bill's was a reprint issued in June 2012, one day after he'd been ticketed for driving without a license, and shortly before "William David Woods" appeared on a fresh Wisconsin license. That was the moment Mallory knew Wisconsin Bill's story had a crack in it.

Keirans, for his part, couldn't leave it alone. He emailed and called Mallory every couple of days for updates, fishing for information. Recovered emails later showed he was simultaneously working authorities in Los Angeles, trying to get Woods locked up again while the investigation was still running.

One father in Kentucky

Both men were claiming the same birth certificate, which meant both were claiming the same parents. The mother had died. The father was alive in Kentucky, an elderly man who told Mallory over the phone that he hadn't seen his son in years but spoke to him regularly, and that his son lived in California.

Police in Santa Monica swabbed Woods. Police in Covington, Kentucky, showed the father a photo lineup (he picked out California Bill immediately) and swabbed him too. On June 19, 2023, the lab results came back: William Woods in California was the biological son of the man on the birth certificate. Wisconsin Bill was the son of nobody in this story.

That answered who the real Woods was, but not who the fake one was. The breakthrough came from an analyst at the Iowa Division of Intelligence, Tina Salisbury, who spotted a stray record number buried in the merged FBI file. It pointed to a 1987 forgery in Louisville and a 1988 trespass in Albuquerque, filed under a name nobody in the case had ever heard: Matthew David Keirans. The old fingerprint cards didn't match California Bill at all.

On July 17, 2023, Keirans was arrested at work, on warrants issued for "John Doe," a small poetic touch that meant he would now be the one who had to prove who he was. The fingerprints matched. Then came a six hour interview in which, as Mallory described it, both men knew the truth and circled it for hours. Keirans opened by insisting the man in California was crazy and belonged locked up. Mallory eventually mentioned that he'd found Keirans' father in Kentucky, alive. Asked for his father's name, Keirans blurted out "John," the name of his own adoptive father, before correcting himself. Confronted with the DNA results, he folded: "My life is over, isn't it?" And then, for the first time in 35 years, out loud: "My name is Matthew Keirans."

Muscle memory dies hard. At booking an hour later, he gave the fake name anyway.

When Mallory called California to deliver the news, Woods' reaction was two sentences of pure vindication: "Cool. I told you so."

Here's how the two lives ran side by side, year by year:

The bill comes due

The University of Iowa fired Keirans the day after his arrest. Outside cybersecurity consultants checked whether the identity thief who helped administer hospital servers had touched anything he shouldn't have; they found no evidence of it. The federal case zeroed in on eight loans totaling over $200,000 that Keirans had taken from two Iowa credit unions in Woods' name, and in April 2024 he pleaded guilty to aggravated identity theft and making false statements to a federally insured institution.

A week later, a Los Angeles judge vacated Woods' conviction in a hearing that took less than fifteen minutes, reaching for Franz Kafka to describe what the system had done to him. The DA's office, which had initially told Mallory it saw no problem with the conviction, filed the motion only after a reporter started asking questions.

In January 2025, Keirans got 12 years in federal prison. The judge's summary was hard to improve on:

The defendant weaponized the criminal justice system to achieve his goals.

His appeal was rejected in April 2026, so the sentence stands. Woods traveled to Iowa for the sentencing and told reporters the truth was finally known. He lives in New Mexico now and works as a landscaper. Mallory won a national victim services award for the investigation, which is a decent outcome for a "flashlight-carrying, keychain-jingling security guard."

What lingers about this story isn't the sentencing. It's how little it took, and how much. On one side, a wallet held for a few hours in 1988 was enough raw material to build a marriage, a child, a mortgage, a six-figure career, and thirty years of tax returns. On the other, it took a DNA test, a sharp-eyed analyst, and a detective willing to take a homeless ex-convict's word over a court ruling to undo it. Every institution that touched the case before 2023, the bank, the LAPD, the prosecutors, a judge, the police in three other states, looked at the man with the house and the man with nothing and decided the paperwork settled it. The paperwork was the crime.

And there are questions nobody has clean answers to yet. Keirans' marriage license carries a name that never legally belonged to him. His son has spent his whole life as a Woods. Three decades of Social Security contributions sit under a stolen number. Prison was the easy part; the fake life is still being dismantled, one document at a time.

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Further reading: the University of Iowa's long profile of the investigation, the DOJ's sentencing announcement, the National Registry of Exonerations case file on Woods, and the Wikipedia entry on Matthew Keirans.