In 1988, Matthew Keirans began using the identity of a man named William Woods.
For more than 30 years, he built an entire life under Woods’s name.
Keirans married, had a child, obtained identification documents, took out more than $250,000 in loans and eventually became a high-level IT administrator at an Iowa hospital.
Then, in 2019, the real William Woods discovered someone had buried him in debt.
Woods, who was homeless at the time, walked into a Los Angeles bank with his genuine Social Security card and California ID and tried to reclaim his identity.
The bank called police. Officers contacted Keirans.
Keirans insisted that he was William Woods and faxed police fraudulent documents to prove it.
Woods was arrested as the impostor.
He spent 428 days in jail and another 147 days in a psychiatric hospital, where a court ordered him to receive psychotropic medication while he continued insisting that everyone had the wrong man.
He eventually pleaded no contest just to get released.
The court even ordered him to stop calling himself William Woods and use the name “Matthew Keirans.”
But Woods refused to give up.
In 2023, an Iowa detective finally compared DNA from both men to Woods’s biological father.
The result proved Woods had been telling the truth all along.
When confronted with the DNA, Keirans confessed.
In January 2025, he was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison.
The judge called the case “Kafkaesque” and said Keirans had “weaponized the criminal justice system” against the man whose identity he stole.