The teller at a branch of US Bank in Los Angeles listened patiently as a customer, a middle-aged homeless man, outlined his problem. Someone had stolen his identity, opened a number of credit and current accounts in his name—William Woods—and run up $130,000 in debt. Could the bank help him please?

It was an August day in 2019 and the homeless man presented his identity documents to the teller, who noticed that the accounts had been opened in a different state and that some contained large sums of money. The teller asked him some security questions: where and when had the accounts been opened? How much money was in them? The homeless man didn’t know. The teller called the phone number listed on the accounts. A man with a high-pitched voice picked up and said that he was William Woods. He answered the security questions correctly and said “he was never in California,” the teller would later recall in court.

The teller suspected that the homeless man was trying to get into somebody else’s bank accounts using forged identity documents. He called the police and two officers arrived. One of them called the phone number listed on the bank accounts. The call was again answered by the man with the high-pitched voice. He repeated that his name was William Woods. He told the officer that he had not given anyone permission to close his bank accounts, and faxed them copies of his birth certificate, social-security card and Wisconsin driver’s license. They all seemed genuine.

Back at the station, the detective assigned to the case studied the homeless man’s driver’s license and social-security card. He later testified in court that he thought they were genuine but remained suspicious because he believed, mistakenly, that homeless people were able to obtain official documents without showing the usual ID.

At the insistence of the man with the high-pitched voice, the homeless man was charged with identity theft and false impersonation and held without bail at a local jail. In court, he did not make a good impression. He had a habit of interrupting the judge, and would sometimes ramble, darkly and incomprehensibly, about the FBI and the World Trade Centre. He insisted, time and again, that he was the real William Woods.

How easy it would be, I thought, to dismiss what he said as the ravings of a “crazy” person, as the judge in 2019 had described him

After nearly six months of hearings, the court found him incompetent to stand trial and he was eventually admitted to a state mental hospital, where he was forced to take psychotropic medicine. He remained there for five months until March 2021, when he was deemed to have regained competency and the trial resumed.

His court-appointed lawyer urged him to plead no contest, which avoids admitting guilt. By this point, the homeless man had spent 428 days in the county jail and 147 days in hospital, so the court would consider him to have served his sentence already. If he contested the charges and was found guilty, he could receive a sentence of up to six years in jail. The homeless man did as he was advised. He was convicted of the felonies but, as the judge agreed he had done his time, he was released from custody.

In the course of the investigation, the detective assigned to the case had discovered that the name William Woods was associated with a series of forgeries carried out under the name Matthew David Keirans. The prosecution seems to have assumed that this was the homeless man’s real identity. His freedom came with one condition: he would need to stop calling himself William Woods and must instead use what the judge ruled was his “true name”, Matthew Keirans. And so William Woods or Matthew Keirans, or whoever he was, walked out of jail and back into his old life. To all appearances, he was just another bum with a few loose screws.

This March I travelled to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to meet the man who had unwittingly got himself locked up. He had lived in the city on and off for 15 years, and eventually made his way back there after he got out of jail in 2021. For a time he slept rough but he now lives in the basement of a house owned by Eric Kilmer, his long-term employer and friend.

He does odd jobs for Kilmer, but money is tight. As we were walking down the street, I noticed him scanning the sidewalk before bending down to pick up a pristine cigarette and lighting it, chuffed by this stroke of luck. I got the impression that he did not always know where his next smoke would come from, let alone his next meal.

Although he boasted to me that he looked younger than his 56 years (he turned 57 in May), his face was deeply lined and his full moustache only partially obscured the absence of many teeth. When he tried to smooth down his matted, greying hair, I noticed the mottled skin and yellowed talon-like nails of his left hand—scars from an acid burn he got while working as a hotel cleaner decades ago.

Over lunch at a Wendy’s, he narrated a rambling and often confusing account of his life. His face easily creased into laughter, though it was not always clear why. His voice was weathered by cigarette smoke and Yukon Jack, a Canadian 100-proof mix of whisky and honey (he claimed that his heroic consumption had inured him to the effects of the psychotropic drugs). It was like being buttonholed by a good-natured soak at a dive bar.

Between mouthfuls of burger, he told me that he was born in Kentucky in 1968 and that his parents divorced not long afterwards. He rarely saw his father after the age of five. His mother, who got custody of him and his sister, remarried and moved the family to Florida, where she had two more daughters (she would eventually divorce his stepfather and marry a third time).

By his account, the household he grew up in was chaotic and violent. He said that his mother, a drug addict, was the first of many people in his life to persecute him (she is now dead). He claimed that when he was a toddler, she sat him on an electric stove – the burns were so severe he couldn’t walk for months. When he was about five, she “tried to kill” him for the second time by encouraging him to play with household chemicals. The fumes made him “see spots”, and both he and his mother wound up in hospital.

He also claimed his mother sexually abused him, warning that “if we told on anything, she [would] get the CIA and the United States military to kill us.” He told me his mother helped plan 9/11 and was linked to an international drug-smuggling network run by George Bush, John Kerry and Arnold Schwarzenegger; and that members of this gang once kidnapped him and spirited him away to Mexico, in order to pin the blame for their crimes on him. This strain of paranoia made it hard to disentangle imagination from reality. How easy it would be, I thought, to dismiss what he said as the ravings of a “crazy” person, as the judge in 2019 had described him. (The judge declined to comment.)

Happy to be reunited with his wallet, he resolved to forget about the episode. But it wasn’t long before he realised Keirans had stolen something else from him that day

When he was 16 he went to live with his grandparents in Michigan. He studied electrical engineering at a community college then moved to Ohio, where he had his stint as a hotel cleaner and worked in a gas-station deli. In 1988, when he was 20, he moved south-west to Albuquerque after hearing the city was quiet and peaceful. He quickly found a job working for Kilmer as a hot-dog seller.

Kilmer remembers him as a neatly dressed, sunny young man, “just the type of person I wanted to have with my business”. He “turned out to be one of the most honest” of Kilmer’s employees and was good at his job. A reporter, impressed by how quickly he could prepare a hot dog, dubbed him the “fastest weenie man of the West”.

One morning as he was getting ready to start his shift, he saw Kilmer pull up in his white van to drop off the hot-dog cart. There was someone else with him, a scrawny young man with a limp. He recognized the youth as Matthew Keirans, who had just started working at another one of Kilmer’s hot-dog carts a few blocks away. He had met him once before and didn’t think much of him—especially the way Keirans had boasted about being a “gangster” who dealt drugs.

He greeted Kilmer and Keirans then got on with his work, placing buns on the warmer and arranging bags of crisps. Around half an hour later Kilmer and Keirans got back in the van and drove off. Not long after they left, he realised his wallet was missing. He immediately suspected Keirans. At the end of his shift, he and Kilmer drove over to Keiran’s hot-dog cart a few blocks away. “I put my fist in his face,” he recalled. Keirans returned the wallet and $40 he had taken from the till. Kilmer fired Keirans on the spot.

Happy to be reunited with his wallet, he resolved to forget about the episode. But it wasn’t long before he realised Keirans had stolen something else from him that day.

Ian Mallory, a detective at the University of Iowa’s police department, was about to clock off one evening when he got a call on his mobile from a number he didn’t recognise.

“Hello, my name is William Woods,” said the caller, a man with a high-pitched voice.

A couple of weeks earlier, in January 2023, Mallory had been assigned what seemed to him like a straightforward case of identity theft. A homeless man had phoned the university hospital to complain that an employee in its IT department, who mostly worked remotely from Wisconsin, had stolen his identity. The hospital turned the case over to the campus police department.

The IT technician had been tipped off that he was under investigation and wanted to tell Mallory his side of the story. The homeless man, he said, had been hounding him for years and had even served time in jail after being found guilty of impersonating him.

“I’m taking all the precautions I can to protect my identity,” said the IT technician, according to Mallory. He had even instructed his bank to text him whenever his card was charged, in case his imposter had hijacked it: “I couldn’t even get a tank of gas without my phone alerting me.”

“My heart skipped a beat,” said Mallory, explaining that the IT technician’s birth certificate “didn’t look real”

The IT technician added that he had complained several times to the police in Wisconsin and LA about the homeless man after his release from jail. “I don’t think you can help me,” he said.

Mallory felt sorry for the guy and was spurred to prove him wrong by his faintly dismissive tone. People often assume that university police “aren’t real cops”, he told me. The man probably saw him as “a keychain-dangling flashlight-carrying security guard”. Mallory wanted to show him he could crack the case.

He set about getting his hands on everything he could find relating to William Woods from New Mexico and William Woods from Wisconsin. Soon he had a thick stack of documents: birth certificates, criminal histories, mug shots, fingerprint cards. The two men’s lives had been merged into one voluminous case file. Mallory set about trying to disentangle them.

When he examined their birth certificates, he found something surprising. The registration number on both documents was identical, meaning one man was using the other man’s certificate as if it was his own. He also noticed that the IT technician’s birth certificate was a reprint from 2012, while his alleged imposter’s was a copy of the original document. “My heart skipped a beat,” said Mallory, explaining that the IT technician’s birth certificate “didn’t look real”: unlike the homeless man’s birth certificate, it was unusually short and didn’t list the hospital or birthweight.

Then Mallory noticed that the middle name on the IT technician’s birth certificate was Donald but on his driver’s licence it was David. When Mallory asked him why that was, the IT technician replied that his middle name was Donald but that he sometimes went by David – an explanation which apparently satisfied the Los Angeles cops in 2019. Not Mallory.

Mallory called Kentucky’s register office, which informed him that both certificates appeared to be legitimate. But he also learned that applicants requesting a reprint of a birth certificate in Kentucky do not have to provide proof of identity. All that is required is the basic information that appears on a birth certificate, including the names of the birth mother and father.

“That’s when I knew that [the IT technician] was maybe not who he said he was,” said Mallory. He stopped responding to the emails “pestering” him for updates that arrived every few days.

Mallory was determined to get to the bottom of whatever was going on. He managed to track down Billie Don Woods, the man listed on the birth certificate as William Woods’s father, who lived in Kentucky. They talked on the phone a few times. During one conversation Billie mentioned that his son lived in California.

Mallory got in contact with the police in Kentucky, who sent officers to Billie’s home. They showed him photos of several men, including the IT technician and the homeless man who had been convicted of impersonating him, and asked Billie to pick out his son. Billie pointed to the photo of the homeless man.

To be absolutely certain, the police took DNA samples from Billie and the homeless man. On June 20th 2023 Mallory got the results. The men were indeed father and son. The “imposter” was in fact the real William Woods.

So who was the hospital IT technician from Wisconsin? A few days later, Mallory was contacted by an analyst at Iowa’s state intelligence unit. In William Woods’s case file, she had found a note about an additional reference number—the string of digits that the FBI issues to every criminal offender. When the analyst searched for documents linked to that number, she found records of a forgery case in Kentucky in 1987 and a criminal trespass case in Albuquerque in 1988. Both were committed by Matthew David Keirans.

The worst thing that could be said about Hartland is that it’s boring. A village surrounded by lakes, it’s where Wisconsinites from nearby Milwaukee go to play gold, retire, or both. Its street names—Caddy Court, Club Circle—suggest moneyed tranquility. Many residents are rich but “it’s blue collar made good” according to one local, and not flash. New arrivals driving past well-tended lawns might reasonably think that they had made it.

Around 2008, a man calling himself Bill Woods moved into a development of cookie-cutter townhouses next to a lake in Hartland with his wife and their young son. His neighbours could never have guessed that this respectable family man was a criminal who had reinvented himself by stealing another man’s identity.

Matthew Keirans’s childhood hadn’t been easy. Born in 1966, he grew up in northern California, the son of a retired Navy officer, John, and a housewife, Vienieta, who had adopted him as a baby (both are now dead). “Matthew had a really hard time growing up,” said his younger brother, Patrick, who was also adopted. “I think he always had a feeling he didn’t belong.” (Keirans declined a request for comment sent via his lawyer.)

On June 20th 2023 Mallory got the results. The men were indeed father and son. The “imposter” was in fact the real William Woods

Their father was “a functioning alcoholic”, Patrick explained, and could be “harsh”, especially to his brother. When they were children their father would punish them by whipping them with a switch and, when they were teenagers, by punching them hard on the shoulder. He stressed, however, that his father meted out corporal punishment only when the boys broke the rules, and that although they were “strict” his parents were “very loving and caring. They just wanted Matthew to do the right thing.”

School was no refuge for Keirans. He had a club foot and his classmates ridiculed the way he walked. Patrick thinks he coped with the bullying by numbing his emotions, and retreating to his computer, an early Mac. He was “very much a loner”, said Patrick, who thinks his brother was jealous of the ease with which he made friends.

Keirans could not always contain his anger. “When it didn’t go Matt’s way, he would just punch somebody,” said Patrick. Once he tossed Patrick through a glass coffee table. “He got upset over the littlest thing, like if I took the last ice cream.” Their parents put him in therapy. It didn’t help.

As a teen Keirans fell in with a bad crowd and started doing drugs, according to Patrick. He stole $1,800 worth of leather jackets for every­ one in his crew of friends – an attempt to ingratiate himself, thought Patrick. He kept one of those jackets for himself, and started slicking his hair back, wearing dark clothing and carrying a guitar around – an impersonation of Johnny Cash, whose rebellious streak he admired.

Once he took his father’s truck out for a joyride and wrecked it. Keirans was injured “but it didn’t phase him one bit,” said Patrick. “It was like he was used to pain. He wanted to inflict it as well.” Patrick recalls that Keirans once killed a kitten by throwing it off a roof. Patrick was “horrified” but Keirans “thought it was kind of funny that he had power, that he could hurt, he could kill, or he could control.”

In 1982, when Keirans was 16, he dropped out of high school and ran away from home, taking his father’s chequebook and service revolver. His brother seized the chance to start afresh, said Patrick. “He hated being Matt. He saw an opportunity to be someone else.”

He bounced around the country committing a string of crimes: he stole a car in San Francisco and was arrested numerous times, in California, Oregon, Kentucky and New Mexico.

By 1988 Keirans was living on the streets of Albuquerque. That was when he got the job as a hot-dog seller and stole Woods’s identity. After that, there is no record of Keirans using his own name.

The last time Patrick saw his brother was in 1991; he didn’t know that Keirans was by that point calling himself William Woods. Keirans had dyed his hair a calico-cat-style patchwork of orange and black; Patrick thinks he was “trying to disguise himself”. Over the years, their mother had received threatening phone calls from people who claimed Keirans owed them cash. “They wanted their money or else he was going to be hurt,” said Patrick. Perhaps he already had been: Keirans had a scar on his arm, which he told his brother was from a gunshot wound.

While he was living in Oregon in the early 1990s, Keirans, now known as “Bill Woods”, met a woman called Nancy Zimmer who would go on to become his wife. She would later describe him as “a temperamental young man who avoided people [and was] private about his childhood, living life more as a recluse, than a socialite”. (Zimmer did not respond to my request for an interview.)

“He hated being Matt. He saw an opportunity to be someone else”

This high-school dropout was hardly husband material, you might think, but Zimmer, a college graduate who went on to get a PhD in theology, was taken with the “street-smart young man hoping to turn his life around”. In 1994, six months after meeting Keirans, she married him. Not long afterwards, she became pregnant. Keirans wept when their son was born, Zimmer later wrote. Her husband was “no longer alone in the world; he had a family.”

According to Zimmer, Keirans had “an almost dire desire to be good at something”. He taught himself computer administration in the evenings and eventually was hired to help manage the IT systems at Kohl’s, a chain of department stores. Several years later he took a senior role in the IT department at the University of Iowa’s hospital.

He did an “excellent job” of running the hospital’s Linux systems, said a former colleague. She described him as a tall, slightly overweight man with a slight limp who dressed in white button-down shirts, dark slacks and orthopaedic shoes. A “kind of a dork”, she said warmly.

It was a sign of his intelligence that he excelled professionally despite his lack of formal education. Richard Lynch worked at the cubicle next to his at Kohl’s, and would later work for the hospital too. “IT skills are not something that you can just pick up on from reading a book,” he said. Given the depth of Keirans’s knowledge, Lynch just assumed that he had a degree like everyone else did.

Keirans relished the respect that his job conferred. “He did like to come across as ‘I’m in charge, I have this information,’” said the co-worker. He flexed in other ways, too. He picked up the tab at staff lunches and boasted about a big loan he’d got in California and his succession of Jeep Cherokees (he got a new one about once a year). “He wanted to be flashy,” said the colleague. “I think he wanted to be somebody.”

By 2023 his transformation from hoodlum to prosperous pater­ familias was complete. He was earning over $100,000 a year, enough to pay his son’s college tuition fees. “I saw, over the course of 30 years, Matt’s vices decrease, and I saw his virtues increase,” wrote Zimmer.

Keirans appeared to abide by the law, paying his taxes and incurring no further police records after 1993, other than minor traffic violations. He even quit smoking. His worst vice? He “had a forgetfulness about anniversaries common to husbands”, Zimmer noted wryly. But all things considered, he was “an all-American success story”.

Zimmer had a point, though perhaps not the one she intended. Avatars of reinvention loom large in the American imagination—from Jay Gatsby to Don Draper from “Mad Men”. Like Matthew Keirans, these characters used deception to escape their humble origins, taking the “fake it till you make it” ethos to a risky extreme. Americans want to believe that with enough grit, charm and chutzpah, anybody can become a somebody – even a vagabond with a limp.

Yet these stories rarely end happily. Gatsby, spurned by his blue-blooded lover when she learns of his criminal history, winds up dead in his pool. Draper sheds his former self – the poor farm boy with an alcoholic father and abusive stepmother – and becomes an urbane ad man. But he cannot shake the ghosts from his old life, who push him into an endless cycle of self-destructive behaviour. As Keirans would discover, there is nothing more American than failing to outrun the past.

It was mid-afternoon on July 17th 2023 and the man who had been living as William Woods for 35 years was on his way to solve a supposedly urgent IT problem in a conference room at the hospital. But when he got there, he found Mallory and several other detectives waiting for him. They patted him down and took his electronic devices, before escorting him out of the building and into the back of a patrol car.

The real William Woods told me he first learned his identity had been stolen in 1988, shortly after the hot-dog-cart incident. He claims an official from the United States Department of Justice contacted him to tell him that Matthew Keirans was impersonating him. According to Woods, the official also told him that Keirans was in prison for food-stamp fraud, so Woods assumed the problem was resolved (the district attorney’s office in New Mexico says it has no record of the conversation).

In 2015 Woods obtained his credit report. It said that several accounts had been opened which he knew nothing about. Woods realised that a thief had been impersonating him for decades, using his name to pay taxes; to acquire a social-security number, birth certificate and driver’s licence; to take out insurance and loans. “In every aspect of his life requiring identification”, Matthew Keirans lived as William Woods, according to the FBI in 2023.

The first time that William Woods tried to retrieve his identity appears to be in 2019, when he walked into that bank in LA, with catastrophic consequences (the LAPD declined to comment). After he was released from prison, Woods contacted banks and credit-monitoring agencies as well as the police department in Hartland, Wisconsin. They sat on his complaints. Only when he alerted the hospital where Keirans worked did the authorities finally act.

That summer’s day in 2023, Keirans was photographed and fingerprinted before Mallory escorted him to an interview room. On a wooden table, Mallory laid out 20 cards with fingerprints on them. One set belonged to the real William Woods. The other set had been made, minutes earlier, by his imposter. Keirans studied the inky whorls, taking in the difference between the two sets. “Did you ever think this day was going to come?” asked Mallory.

“What are you talking about?” said Keirans, looking the detective straight in the eye. “He knew that I knew,” recalled Mallory. But he wasn’t ready to confess. Instead, he attempted to take charge of the situation by charming Mallory. He addressed him by his first name and said that he would help the investigation any way that he could. After Keirans found out his interlocutor used to work in IT, the pair chatted about “computer nerd things”, said Mallory. “We were best friends within a matter of moments...He was trying to work on me just as fast as I was trying to work on him, or faster.” Mallory called him “a master manipulator”.

Mallory prefers to let the conversation flow naturally during interviews – when suspects are “comfortable”, they are more likely to confess or slip up. Their conversation ranged widely, from their childhoods to cop shows. But hours went by and Keirans kept insisting he was Woods. “I wasn’t throwing a phone book down and screaming and saying, ‘I know it’s you’,” said Mallory. He tried not to let his frustration show.

Then he had an idea. Earlier in the interview, Keirans had made a mistake. He had told Mallory that his father was dead. (Keirans’s father was dead, but William Woods’s father, Billie, was still alive.) Remembering this, Mallory said: “I found your dad. He’s alive.”

Keirans was taken aback. “I thought he died,” he said. He recovered his composure quickly and tried a new gambit to win Mallory’s sympathy. “Did my dad tell you what a bad person he was? Did he tell you how he used to beat us?” He claimed that his father was an alcoholic and had hurt his mother in some way.

Mallory didn’t take the bait. “What’s your dad’s name?” he asked.

Keirans caught himself and tried to correct his answer. “His name is Billie, I was named after him.” But it was too late. He had provided the name of his real father, not Woods’s. Mallory closed his notebook and placed it on the table. Keirans leaned back in his chair, bumping his head on the wall behind him, and took a deep breath. His mask had slipped, yet he still insisted that he was William Woods. Then Mallory told him about the DNA test that proved the homeless man was Billie Don Woods’s son.

Americans want to believe that with enough grit, charm and chutzpah, anybody can become a somebody – even a vagabond with a limp

“They are related,” said Mallory. “You are not. The father on the birth certificate has seen photos. He doesn’t know who you are. Who are you?”

“My life is over, isn’t it?” said Keirans, then added quietly, “Ian, my name is Matt Keirans.”

They spoke for two more hours after that, Keirans toggling between despair that his wife would leave him and grandiosity. At one point he marvelled at how long it had taken the authorities to uncover his deception and said, “You know who could catch me? I could catch me.”

He explained to Mallory that he had used Ancestry.com to find information about Woods’s family, then used this information to obtain Woods’s birth certificate from the state of Kentucky. He admitted that in the past two years he had tried to get Woods locked up again by telling the police in Hartland and LA that Woods had stolen his identity.

Mallory has two hypotheses about Keirans’s motive for the crime he committed in 1988. “He was a young guy making stupid decisions and getting arrested for dumb, little, petty things” and wanted to run from the law and his lifestyle. The second possible explanation is that Keirans had previously committed a violent crime and used Woods’s identity to evade detection. The FBI is still investigating whether his DNA implicates him in any cold-case homicides or sexual assaults from the late 1980s or early 1990s. Regardless of the nature of his crimes, Mallory said that once Keirans bestowed his false identity on his wife and son, “he was essentially stuck with that name.”

At 11pm Mallory ended the interview; they’d been talking for six hours. After Keirans confessed, he told Mallory, “You know more about me than anyone else in my life, even my wife, and probably even me. You know more about me than I know about me.” At one point Mallory had shown him photos from his childhood. Keirans didn’t want to look at them. “That’s a time in my life I don’t want to go back to,” he said, and explained he had run away to flee his father. Keirans had asked Mallory to stay with him for as long as possible, so Mallory accompanied him to the county jail. “Matt and I were bonded,” said Mallory.

At the jail, the deputy sheriffs asked Keirans for his name and other personal details. “William D. Woods,” he replied, rattling off the particulars of his alias in the monotone of someone talking to his accountant. Mallory was “blown away”: after all, Keirans had just confessed. But he didn’t intervene. For over three decades, Keirans had lived as Woods. It was hardly surprising he couldn’t let go of his old self.

The next day, Keirans asked Mallory to call him Matt.

On January 31st 2025, in a dour courtroom in Iowa, William Woods and the man who had stolen his identity sat a few metres apart from each other. It was the first time they had seen each other since their altercation at the hot-dog cart 37 years earlier.

After Keirans was arrested, the hospital fired him and engaged external consultants to investigate whether the security of their computer system had been compromised (it had not). Keirans pleaded guilty to two felony charges: aggravated identity theft and making a false statement to a credit union (related to loans for over $250,000 he obtained using Woods’s name).

He spent his days in prison reading improving literature, including “On the Consolation of Philosophy” by Boethius, a sixth-century Roman who wrote the book behind bars while awaiting execution for treason.

Now Keirans was about to be sentenced. But before that, the defendant and victim would have a chance to speak. Woods went first. “[He] sent me to jail for nothing. For being myself,” he said. “I may be different. But there’s so many different kinds of people.”

Keirans spoke next. He apologised evasively, in general terms. “I think, first, I’d like to say that I can’t change the past. I would like to apologise to everybody hurt in one way or another in this whole mess.” As he spoke, he stared straight ahead, never once looking at Woods.

Keirans’s court-appointed attorney had argued that Woods deserved to go to jail for attempting to steal Keirans’s money by closing his bank accounts, adding in a memo to the judge that Woods might find prison more comfortable than the streets. Woods told me he was shocked by Keirans’s combative stance. “I didn’t think he was going to fight back,” he said. “He still wanted revenge.”

The judge dismissed the defence’s arguments and said that Keirans’s “callous and criminal acts” had deprived Woods of something “priceless”: his freedom “If this can happen to an innocent man out in California,” he said, “how much can we trust the court system?” He commended Mallory, who “listened to somebody who most of us would reject”. The judge sentenced Keirans to 12 years in federal prison (Keirans is appealing).

Ten days after Keirans pleaded guilty, the state of California vacated William Woods’s conviction and LA County’s district attorney publicly apologised to him. He was free to use his name again. In March 2025 California’s Victim Compensation Board agreed to compensate Woods over $80,000 for wrongful imprisonment. In addition, Keirans was ordered to pay his victim $6,190.

“Repeatedly being told ‘You’re a nobody, you’re trash’...It would really twist someone’s mind. That’s what it’s done to him”

With assistance from After Innocence, an organisation that helps people who’ve been wrongfully imprisoned, Woods has secured legal counsel as he considers suing US Bank, the Los Angeles police department and Keirans (he contends that Keirans stole $120,000 from his account at another bank).

But the ordeal has left its mark. Kilmer, who has known Woods for almost four decades, said he finds it harder to focus, has a tendency to blend stories together, and feels a need to tell people over and over again what happened to him. He suspects the psychotropic drugs administered to Woods in hospital damaged him, on top of the distress of being disbelieved: “Repeatedly being told ‘You’re a nobody, you’re trash’...It would really twist someone’s mind. That’s what it’s done to him.”

As Woods and I sat in my car, the tattered and stained papers chronicling the saga scattered across the dashboard, he started talking about his childhood again. He said that when he was 16 he testified against his mother in court. That set the pattern for the rest of his life, it seemed to me: when his enemies, from the drug-smuggling ring to Keirans, have persecuted him, he has reported them to the authorities. “Even when I was a kid,” he said, he believed that “when you tell the truth, you know, maybe something might be done.” ■

Charlie McCann is a feature writer for 1843

PHOTOGRAPHS: ADRIA MALCOLM

ADDITIONAL IMAGES: JOHNSON COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE VIA AP, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE