You hear a lot of horror stories about identity theft: Credit cards, mortgages, etc.
But it's not often you hear of a real-deal, Single White Female situation, where someone legitimately becomes someone else.
Enter Matthew David Keirans.
In 1988, Keirans worked with a man named William Donald Woods at a hot dog cart in New Mexico. When Keirans left that job, he became William Donald Woods.
On paper it started off as your run-of-the-mill identity theft. According to the records in 1990, he obtained a Colorado driver's license using Woods' name and birthdate, which he used to open a bank account and began writing bad checks. He used Woods' name to buy a car that he never paid for.
But then in 1994, something unexpected happened.
Keirans fell in love.
But the woman he fell in love with knew him as William Donald Woods.
And how do you tell the girl you love that Woods is just some dude you worked with at a hot dog stand, and you stole his identity?
Instead, Keirans committed to being Woods.
They got married and had a child together, whose last name is Woods.
He managed to obtain a copy of Woods' birth certificate using information he got on a genealogy site, and then went into IT at a hospital where he was pulling down $147,000 per year. He got a mortgage, made investments, planned for retirement, paid his bills, paid his taxes, all under the name William Donald Woods.
The real Woods never got wise to the identity theft, mostly because he was homeless in L.A.
Somehow, he found out there was $200,000 in debt under his name, and he didn't want to have to pay it.
He went into a national bank that was holding some of the loans and presented his real social security card and name. However, he did not know the answers to any of the security questions on the accounts, so the police were called.
During the subsequent investigation, Keirans sent in copies of Woods' birth certificate and social security card he had illegally obtained, and he answered the bank's security questions. He claimed the real Woods was actually Matthew David Keirans.
The real Woods was then arrested and charged with identity theft!!
The real Woods maintained throughout the trial that he was the real William Donald Woods and not Keirans, so in 2021 the judge ruled him mentally incompetent to stand trial and sent him to a mental facility where they pumped the poor guy full of psychotropic drugs for two years.
When the real Woods finally got out in 2023, he dug his heels in and went to Keirans' employer, the University of Iowa Hospital. The University of Iowa agreed to look into their IT guy.
University of Iowa Police Detective Ian Mallory opened an investigation into the case. Mallory found the biological father listed on Woods' birth certificate — which both Woods and Keirans had sent him an official copy of — and tested the father's DNA against Woods' DNA. The test proved Woods was the man's son.
Oh my gosh!
California never tested the DNA??
Leave it to the Iowan college cop to find the simplest, most elegant solution while California imprisons the wrong guy and puts him in a mental hospital for years.
When Keirans was presented with the evidence, he said,
"My life is over" and "everything is gone." He then confessed to the prolonged identity theft, according to court documents.
In federal court, Keirans pled guilty to making a false statement to a National Credit Union Administration insured institution and aggravated identity theft, and he faces up to 30 years in prison.
His poor wife and kid face a lifetime of confusion and suffering, while the real William Donald Woods gets to go back to being a homeless guy in L.A.
There are literally no winners here.
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
