by Sean Dempsey | 07/21/26
Dear reader, before you begin this story please know that every fact is real. I embellished nothing, save my typical literary flare. Always remember this simple truth: human injustice is not the exception, it is the rule…
=====
I first learned that I no longer existed inside a bank. Well, I guess that is rather fitting, as a bank is one of those rare and venerable institutions where everything invisible is treated as real and everything real must first be translated into abstractions.
Well, hold on a second…. let me first go back. I guess if memory recalls, I went into the bank to report that someone had stolen my identity. But by the time I came out, the police had arrested me for stealing it back. This was done politely, mind you, without raised voices, broken furniture or any visible departure from ordinary business. I think the bank manager continued smiling through the entire ordeal. The customers never stopped filling out deposit slips or whatever else customers of banks do. Somewhere behind the walls, money passed silently from one imaginary column to another. I remember thinking, as the handcuffs closed around my wrists, that the only person in the building who seemed surprised was me, and that this was probably because everyone else had been informed in advance by the computer.
I had not gone there to claim the money in the accounts. I did not know how much money was in them, and I did not want it. The accounts were evidence of something that had been done to me. A credit-monitoring service had shown me debts, loans and financial activity tied to my name and Social Security number, a whole second economic life that had developed somewhere beyond my sight. I had purchased the monitoring after a YouTube creator named Yousef Erakat filmed me while I was living on the streets of Los Angeles. Millions of people saw those videos. They saw my face, heard my name and watched me receive money for food and lodging. The videos seemed, at the time, like an unusual proof that I existed. Later I learned that existence viewed by millions of human beings carries less weight than existence confirmed by one bank terminal.
The credit report showed that William Woods had become successful without me. He had opened accounts, borrowed money, developed a respectable history and behaved financially in ways I could not remember. I studied the report as one might study photographs from a vacation one had not taken. There were addresses I had never lived at, obligations I had never accepted and transactions I had never made. Yet all of it bore my name. I began to feel that my life had been proceeding elsewhere and that I was merely the part of it that had been misplaced.
Ah, you must think I just didn’t explain myself well enough, eh? Perhaps. Quite so, I suppose. But I distinctly remember my conversations with all those who questioned me and I don’t think I could have done anything more appropriate even with hindsight! At the bank I explained the facts to the assistant manager. She listened carefully, which I later understood is the simply first stage in not believing someone. I told her, specifically, that someone was using my identity, that I wanted the bank to investigate the accounts and that I did not want to be held responsible for debts created by another person. She asked for identification. I gave her my California identification card and my Social Security card, both genuine, both bearing the name William Donald Woods. She held them in her hand for a moment and then placed them beside the keyboard, where they appeared to shrink under her intense scrutiny.
She asked questions about the accounts. I could not answer them because I had never opened them. She asked about balances, recent transaction history, addresses, loans and security information. I explained I had no knowledge of such things as such things did not involve me. Each wrong answer I gave seemed to strengthen her confidence that she had asked the right and formal set of questions. I tried to explain that my inability to answer was the reason I was there. If I had known the details of the accounts, I said, perhaps I would not be reporting that they were fraudulent.
She replied that the bank still had to verify my identity.
I told her that was exactly what I wanted.
She looked at me as though I had agreed to something I did not understand. Then she called the telephone number listed on the accounts. A man in Wisconsin answered, or so I soon learned.
I could not hear him, but I could hear the manager, and through her replies I listened to myself disappear.
“Yes,” she said. “He is here now.”
There was a pause. I imagined the other man sitting in a clean room, perhaps at a desk, perhaps beside a window, speaking calmly because the telephone had called him by the correct name.
“He says his identity has been stolen.”
Another pause. The manager looked at me.
“No, he cannot answer the security questions.”
The man said something longer. I could tell by the way her face settled that he had provided an explanation large enough to contain me.
“I … understand…” she said pleasantly.
When she ended the call, she appeared relieved. The bank had found the victim.
I reminded her that I had come there to report the theft.
She told me that the account holder had now reported it as well.
It was an elegant reversal. The other man did not need to deny that someone had stolen an identity. He merely had to identify me as the thief. Since his voice came from the telephone number preserved in the bank’s records, his accusation entered the room with credentials.
The police soon arrived. They were courteous, and I remember their courtesy gave the sad event a semi-weightless quality. A violent arrest would have suggested that something dramatic had happened. This arrest was administrative. It seemed less like being seized than being politely corrected.
One officer examined my identity paperwork, which I had conveniently for them brought with me. The other spoke to the man in Wisconsin. He eventually faxed to the bank a driver’s license, a Social Security card and a certified Kentucky birth certificate, all bearing my name. The documents were real in the way a locked door is real; they had been issued by the proper authorities and could not be argued through. My own cards were also real, but they stood alone. His documents were surrounded by a wife, a child, a house, a job, loans, taxes, bank records and decades of accumulated agreement. Mine were surrounded by my body, which had apparently become the least official object in the room.
The officer asked my name.
“William Woods,” I said.
He wrote something down.
“Do you have another name?”
“No.”
“Have you ever used the name Matthew David Keirans?”
“No.”
“Do you know someone by that name?”
I remembered the hot-dog cart in Albuquerque, although the memory arrived as though it belonged to another life entirely. It was back in 1988. Keirans and I had worked together. My wallet had disappeared and was returned only after I threatened him. I had believed, because the wallet came back, that the incident was over. It had never occurred to me that a man might return the leather while keeping the contents that mattered: the name, date of birth and Social Security number, those small numerical organs by which a person is recognized from a distance.
I told the officer that I had known Keirans briefly and that he had taken my wallet. I suppose it became an admission that I knew him for the police officer’s face bristled with a fatherly understanding.
I explained he was most certainly the man using my identity. I repeated with a certain rage that now flushed my face: “I am William Woods!”
But this became the first indication that I might be mentally unwell.
For the officer kindly and patiently explained to me that there was already a William Woods in Wisconsin and he was the real one and I was therefore the imposter. He had lived under that name for many years. He had a family, a career and extensive records. I said that none of those things made the name his. The officer said they made this matter not one for him to sort out, and he looked relieved to speak the truth of this aloud.
It did not seem complicated to me. There was a man who had stolen my identity and a man whose identity had been stolen. The complication began only after everyone decided which was which.
Facts and truth were inconvenient to the police to determine, so they instead arrested me on August 20, 2019.
The charge: identity theft and false impersonation. I had walked into the bank to prevent fraudulent debts from being assigned to me and was led out for attempting to interfere with the identity under which the debts had been created. The transformation took place so smoothly that I wondered whether this reversal of fate had been waiting for me all along and I, like a fish in a net, was destined for the dinner plate.
At the police station, the room changed but the building did not. The bank, station, and later the courtroom, jail and hospital all seemed like departments of a single, dark institution, connected by corridors I was never permitted to see. Each contained the same chairs, the same forms and the same person asking for my name with an expression suggesting that the wrong answer would delay everyone. Everyone officially asked me my name, but they all failed to listen for my reply.
The officers showed me pieces of a life that had been constructed over thirty years. In 1990, Keirans had obtained a Colorado driver’s license using my identity. He had moved through several states under my name. He had acquired cars, written bad checks and been arrested. In Oregon, the police photographed and fingerprinted him as William Woods. His fingerprints and my name entered the same record and remained there like two insects trapped in amber.
In 1994, he married under my name. His wife believed she had married William Woods. Their child carried my surname. Later, he worked for Kohl’s, the Kentucky Department of Education and private contractors. He paid taxes and established credit. The stolen name settled down, became respectable and stopped attracting the kind of attention that follows a younger man through police stations.
In 2012, after researching my family through a genealogy service, he obtained a certified copy of my Kentucky birth certificate. The certificate was not forged. The State itself produced it. He then used it to obtain a Wisconsin driver’s license in the name William David Woods. My middle name is Donald. His is David. A piece of his true identity had leaked through the disguise, but by then the disguise had become official enough to tolerate imperfections.
In 2013, he obtained a position with University of Iowa Health Care. A background check found nothing unusual because it searched the history already created in my name. He eventually became a highly paid information-technology administrator with elevated access to critical hospital systems. The man who had constructed himself inside databases was placed in charge of databases containing other human beings. The symbolism was so obvious that in a more rational world it might have exposed him.
From 2014 through 2022, he obtained nine vehicle and personal loans worth more than $250,000 using my name, birth date and Social Security number. Each loan confirmed the next. One institution asked another whether William Woods was real, and the second institution consulted a third, which relied upon the first. The records formed a circle and called the absence of an opening proof of completeness.
I was booked as Matthew Kierans. They misspelled the surname of the man they believed me to be. This did not trouble anyone. The State was permitted small errors because it possessed many records. I was permitted none because I possessed so few.
In jail, the vague shapes of people continued to ask me my name repeatedly. Over and over again. “What is your name?” I was asked to spell it. I was asked to pronounce it slowly. The question was asked at intake, before meals, before court, after court and at every locked door. At first I answered immediately. Later I hesitated. The question had changed. They were no longer asking who I was but whether I had learned what answer was required.
“William Woods,” I said.
The guard would look at the paperwork.
“Matthew Keirans,” he would correct.
“That is not my name.”
“That is what it says here.”
“It is wrong.”
“If it were wrong, it would have been corrected.”
“How?”
“Through the proper process.”
“What is the proper process?”
“You will have to ask your lawyer.”
My lawyer asked whether I understood the seriousness of the charges. I told him that I understood them better than anyone because I was the victim. He explained that the problem was my continued refusal to accept the evidence.
I gave him names of relatives. I offered to contact the former owner of the hot-dog cart. I told him about the videos in which millions of people had already known me as William Woods before the bank arrest. He listened, but I sensed that these details exhausted him. They were human details. They required telephone calls, memory and judgment. The other man baring my name had a mortgage! He was of consequence. I was not.
My public defender raised doubts about my competence. On February 10, 2020, the court declared me incompetent to stand trial. The reasoning possessed the perfect shape of a dream: the records proved that another man was William Woods; I continued to insist that I was William Woods; therefore I could not understand reality. My insistence on the truth became proof that I was incapable of recognizing it.
The psychiatrist’s office contained beige walls, a clock and an artificial plant. I often think of that plant. It seemed to have been placed there as an example of proper citizenship. It looked alive, remained where it had been assigned and required nothing from the institution.
The psychiatrist asked why I believed another man had stolen my identity.
“I do not just believe it,” I said. “It happened. It is a fact.”
She wrote something.
“What did you write?”
“An observation.”
“About what?”
“Your response.”
“What should my response have been?”
“There is no required response.”
“Then why write it down?”
“All responses are relevant.”
She asked whether I believed the bank, police, prosecutors and man in Wisconsin were all wrong. I said they were relying upon the same false records. She observed that this was a very large number of people and institutions. I explained that a single mistake copied many times does not become many independent mistakes.
She wrote again.
I began to understand that the pen could not record anything in my favor. Anger showed instability. Calmness showed a deeply organized delusion. Asking questions suggested suspicion. Refusing to speak suggested withdrawal. The evaluation was not designed to discover whether I was sane. It was designed to classify every possible behavior within the conclusion already reached.
I remained in jail while waiting for a bed in a state hospital. The pandemic lengthened the wait. Time stopped behaving like time. It became fluorescent light, doors, trays and announcements. At night I dreamed of filing cabinets so tall that clouds formed around their upper drawers. Clerks climbed ladders carrying names from one cabinet to another. Occasionally one dropped a name, and the man below vanished.
On October 20, 2020, I was transferred to the hospital. It was quieter than the jail. The doors locked softly. The staff spoke gently. Every command was called treatment, which meant that objection could be interpreted not as refusal but as a need for additional treatment.
A doctor asked what I would do if released.
“I will sue the man who stole my identity,” I said.
This was written down as part of my illness.
They treated me with psychotropic medication under court authority. When I objected, I lacked insight. When I swallowed the pills, I was improving. The institution offered a simple cure: agreement.
In group sessions, I sat beside men who believed satellites watched them, relatives had been replaced or television programs contained private instructions. When I told them that a man had taken my name, married under it, borrowed money with it, built a career with it and arranged for me to be imprisoned, they listened sympathetically. The therapist instructed them not to validate my delusion. I envied the other patients. Their persecutors did not possess certified birth certificates.
On March 17, 2021, I pleaded no contest. I did not confess. I accepted that the State owned the door and that the door would open only after I repeated the necessary language. There was no place on the form to record this distinction.
I had spent 428 days in county jail and approximately 147 days in the state hospital. California later counted 576 custodial days by including part of the day on which I was released. The government remained uncertain who I was but knew exactly how long it had confined me.
The judge sentenced me to two years, imposed a fine and released me for time served. Then came the final correction. I was ordered to use my “true name, Matthew Keirans.”
I had entered the bank to report that my identity had been stolen. I emerged from the system legally forbidden to use it.
Outside, every door required a name. Housing, employment, medicine, assistance and banking all required identification. If I used William Woods, I violated the order. If I used Matthew Keirans, I accepted the theft. My body had been released, but my name remained in custody.
I filed complaints. Police departments referred me to courts. Courts referred me to lawyers. Lawyers referred me to agencies. Agencies mailed forms requiring a legal name before the complaint could be considered. I wrote William Woods. The forms returned because the name was disputed. I wrote Matthew Keirans. The complaint disappeared into the history of the man I said I was not.
In Wisconsin, Keirans filed his own complaint accusing me of identity theft. His accusation was supported by my California conviction. My California conviction had been supported by his accusation. The structure was perfect. No new evidence could enter because every entrance led back to the beginning.
In June 2021, California tried to collect the cost of my state-hospital confinement. The notice reached Keirans in Wisconsin because the hospital had treated me under the name William Woods, which belonged to him in the records. He replied that he was the victim of identity theft. Later, California billed me more than $118,000 for my care.
The joke was too complete to be funny. The State had imprisoned me for claiming to be myself, medicated me for refusing to become someone else, released me under that other man’s name and then demanded payment for the treatment. There was no suitable office to which one could report such sinister irony. I was too bitter to laugh, so I just wept. It seemed the only suitable reaction. Heartache and laughter may both touch the same immortal human soul, but one tickles while the other burns.
With nothing left in my heart remaining other than spite, in January 2023, I desperately called the human-resources department at University of Iowa Health Care and reported that one of its employees was using my identity. My complaint reached the university police and was assigned to Ian Mallory. Like the others, he found two men claiming ownership over the same name. But unlike the others before him, he continued looking after the confusion became mildly inconvenient.
The government’s records had fused us. FBI searches connected my name with two sets of fingerprints. My birth certificate had been joined to Keirans’s arrests, my father to his photograph, my Social Security number to his employment and his financial life to my criminal conviction. The databases had created a third man, one who had been born in Kentucky, arrested in Oregon, employed in Iowa and homeless in California. He was the thief and the victim, sane and delusional, imprisoned and free. Every institution recognized him. Neither Keirans nor I could fully become him.
Mallory found another FBI number buried inside the records. It belonged to Matthew David Keirans and led to a different birth date, Social Security number, photograph and fingerprints. The distinction had never disappeared. It had merely been stored somewhere no one thought to look.
He examined the birth certificates. Mine was genuine. The copy Keirans had obtained was also genuine. The government in its inexhaustible genius had issued two authentic documents describing one birth and allowed two men to carry them.
Mallory found my biological father in Kentucky. My mother had died. My father had not seen me in years, but we spoke regularly, and he believed I lived in California. Police showed him photographs, and he selected me. They collected his DNA and mine.
On June 19, 2023, the laboratory concluded that I was indeed his son!
The fact occupied only a few lines. It did not describe my childhood, my memories or the sound of my father’s voice. It did not explain the bank, the jail, the hospital or the court order. It contained none of the evidence I carried inside me. Yet those few lines succeeded because they were printed by a laboratory. My body had finally produced acceptable paperwork to the righteous and impervious State.
On July 17, 2023, police arrested Keirans at the University of Iowa. Because his identity had not yet been legally established, the warrants called him John Doe. After thirty-five years of living under my name, he entered custody without one.
His fingerprints matched the old Matthew Keirans records. During the interview, he proclaimed innocence and still described me as unstable and suggested I should be confined again. Mallory told him that my father was alive. Keirans had claimed he was dead. When asked to name his father, he first gave the name of his own adoptive father and then corrected himself with the name of mine. The two lives had become entangled in him and were now answering in turn. I suppose a complicated lie has a way of making the truth seem entirely foreign.
When Mallory confronted him with the DNA, Keirans asked, “My life is over, isn’t it?” Then he said, “My name is Matthew Keirans.”
Even after confessing, he gave my name during booking. I suppose old habits die hard, eh?
The following day he asked Mallory to call him Matt because he might as well become accustomed to it.
Mallory telephoned me and told me Keirans had been arrested.
“Cool,” I said. “I told you so. No one believed me.”
People later thought this response strangely calm. They did not understand that the discovery belonged to them. I had known the answer all along.
Keirans pleaded guilty in state and federal court. The federal charges concerned making a false statement to a credit union and aggravated identity theft. The terms made the crime sound primarily financial. He had done more than borrow money. He had borrowed the machinery through which society recognizes a person. He used my name to work, marry, father a child, receive loans and persuade the State to prosecute me for attempting to reclaim it.
Mallory contacted Los Angeles officials to have my conviction vacated. At first, he was told that they saw no defect in it. The confession existed. The fingerprints existed. The DNA existed. Yet the conviction remained correct until the correct office recognized the correct evidence in the correct order.
On April 11, 2024, a judge vacated my convictions and declared me factually innocent. The judge called the case Kafkaesque. The district attorney apologized. The records were ordered sealed and destroyed.
No one said when I had become William Woods again.
Perhaps I had become him at the moment of the DNA result. Perhaps at the moment of the confession. Perhaps when the judge signed the order. Perhaps I had remained him throughout, although the government had temporarily misplaced that fact.
In September 2024, I applied to California for compensation. The application was incomplete. The agency requested additional documents, including an abstract of judgment that my lawyers and I could not obtain despite repeated efforts. The State had imprisoned me through records I could not defeat and required a record I could not locate before it would compensate me.
Eventually, the claim was approved. I received $80,640 for 576 days. There was a precise value for every day. There was no space on the form for the name.
In January 2025, a federal judge sentenced Keirans to twelve years in prison and said he had weaponized the criminal-justice system. The sentence was affirmed on appeal in April 2026. People asked whether justice had been done. I could not answer. Justice had arrived thirty-five years late and expected congratulations for recognizing the person who had been standing in front of it.
I live in Albuquerque now and work as a landscaper. People say I am rebuilding my life. A life, however, is not a wall. The missing years are not stacked nearby waiting to be returned to their original positions. My documents now say William Donald Woods. The courts agree. The State has restored the name it ordered me not to use.
Still, whenever I hand identification to someone behind glass, I remember the bank. I remember the telephone ringing in Wisconsin. I remember the other man answering from inside my name and the manager’s face becoming calmer as mine became less official.
In my dreams, the bank has grown until it contains the whole country. Its corridors extend through police stations, hospitals, courtrooms, credit bureaus and government offices. There are no windows. Every corridor returns to the same counter.
I tell the clerk that someone has stolen my identity.
She gives me a form.
The form asks for my legal name.
I write William Woods.
She examines it and slides it back.
“You have entered the disputed name.”
“It is my name.”
“If it were your name, it would not be disputed.”
“What should I write?”
“The name in the records.”
“The records are what I am disputing.”
“Then you must submit a correction.”
“This is the correction form.”
“No,” she says. “This is the identity-theft form.”
“That is what I am reporting.”
“According to the system, you committed the identity theft.”
“Against whom?”
“William Woods.”
“I am William Woods.”
She looks toward the computer, and I know before she speaks that I have again answered incorrectly.
Behind her, filing cabinets open and close without human hands. One machine prints birth certificates. Another prints arrest reports. A third seals the records created by the first two. The artificial plant from the psychiatrist’s office has grown through the ceiling and spread into every department. Numbered forms hang from its plastic branches like fruit.
I ask to see a supervisor.
The clerk tells me supervisors cannot meet with unidentified persons.
I present my identification.
She studies it and says that it belongs to the man whose identity I claim was stolen.
“That man is me.”
“Then why are you reporting that his identity was stolen?”
“Because another man is using it.”
“Who?”
“Someone else.”
She searches the records.
“That is you.”
“No. That is the other man.”
“The system does not permit two men.”
“Then the system is wrong.”
“The system cannot be wrong. It can only contain information awaiting correction.”
“How do I correct it?”
“By proving your identity.”
“With what?”
“Government-issued identification.”
I slide the same card beneath the glass.
She places it in a metal tray. The tray withdraws into the wall, and I hear the card traveling through pipes above the ceiling, deeper into the building. Somewhere far away, a stamp descends.
“Please take a seat,” she says. “Your identity is being processed.”
The waiting room is filled with men who look vaguely familiar. Each one holds a number. Above us, a screen flashes the words NOW SERVING WILLIAM WOODS.
Every man stands.
The clerk calls for order, and we all sit down again.
The screen continues displaying my name. Bold typeface. But the letters are profane. The letters laugh at me. They each stare at me with ghastly intent. My dreadful, incorrigible name mocks me and shakes my soul entire. My damnable name! It stares at me and condemns me as I cry in horror.
