“Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!” In Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, the character John Procter struggles to confess to witchcraft and save himself from the gallows.
It has recently come to light that Matthew Keirans, a former University of Iowa Hospital administrator had stolen the identity of William Woods, his former boss, took out numerous loans, got married and even had a child, all under Woods’ name.
Keirans, now 58, began using Woods’ identity in 1988 when he worked for him at a hot dog stand in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Keirans wrote two bad checks to buy a car under Woods’ name and abandoned it when it broke down, leaving authorities to blame Woods.
Using false documents, identifying himself as Woods, Keirans later obtained a position as an administrator at the University of Iowa Hospitals.
“Let’s see, Mr. Woods, under employment history, it says you worked at a hot dog stand in New Mexico?”
“No, I, um, ran the hot dog stand. Yeah, that’s right. It was my own hot dog stand.”
“Oh, that’s different. So, would you like to run our hospital, Mr. Woods?”
Somehow, Keirans was able to earn a salary of $140,500 at the hospital. Meanwhile, in 2019, the real Mr. Woods was homeless, living in Los Angeles where he discovered his identity had been used to secure several large loans. Alarmed at the mounting debt, Woods attempted to close the fake bank account but was promptly arrested when he failed to correctly answer the security questions set up by Keirans.
Because, throughout the criminal proceedings, Woods kept insisting he was the real Mr. Woods, the judge declared him mentally incompetent to stand trial and had him committed to a mental hospital where he was drugged with psychotropic medications. In March 2021, Woods pleaded “no contest” ironically to identity theft and spent 428 days in the county jail, plus 147 days in the mental facility. He was ordered to pay a $400 fine and stop using the name William Woods.
At this point, you’d think Woods would have called it a day and just picked a new name. But, risking arrest for using the name he was born with, Woods eventually discovered where Keirans was working. Woods’ case finally came to the attention of a resourceful U of I Hospital detective, Ian Mallory. Mallory tracked down Woods’ father and obtained a DNA sample that matched Woods’ own DNA and proved he was, in fact, the real William Woods.
Woods, a homeless, failed hot dog stand operator, penniless, now with a criminal history, had nothing left but his name. And it wasn’t even a particularly good name. To an observer, Woods’ irrational struggle to reclaim his identity may have looked like a witch hunt. But now his name belongs to him once more. And Matthew Keirans has his name back, along with a possible 32-year prison sentence.
Living in Iowa: When a man’s name is all he has left…
April 11, 2024