Criminal - The Double

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

In 2023, two men told police the same story: each man said that his name was William Woods, and that his identity had been stolen. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Had you ever seen a case like this before? No, I have never seen a case like this before and I don't know that anyone has seen a case like this before. Ian Mallory is a detective with the University of Iowa Police Department. In 2023, he was assigned a case. A 54-year-old man named William Woods said that his identity had been stolen. William Woods was a IT professional at the University of Iowa hospitals. Kind of a quiet man, but definitely a family man. He worked remotely from Heartland, Wisconsin,

from his home, full-time for the university. And then a couple times a month or once a month, he would be required to drive to Iowa City and work on site. That's really all I knew about him, computer professional, worked from home, and a family man. He'd been married for nearly 30 years and had a son. William Woods told Detective Mallory that for the past few years, a man in California had been harassing him, calling the police in the town where he lived, and filing customer disputes with a credit reporting service in his name. But there is a problem.

The man in California, who also said his name was William Woods had reported to the police that the William Woods employed at the University of Iowa had stolen his identity. Both men said they had proof. So what did you think of these two stories? I mean, what did you think was going on? I really had no idea. The onset of the investigation when I was handed a stack of paperwork, basically paperwork that William Woods from Wisconsin had submitted saying

that this is who I am and this is my life and paperwork that William Woods of California had submitted, I really didn't know what to think. Both individuals had quite a story to tell and it was unique in the fact that both people said that the other person wasn't the real person. So there's no way that two human beings could have the same name, the same date of birth, the same social security number and acknowledge that the other person existed. So someone clearly was not telling the truth. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

Detective Ian Mallory said that it was hard to keep the two men straight. Eventually, he settled on nicknames. I called them California Bill and Wisconsin Bill to delineate between the two. Wisconsin Bill was the man who worked for the University of Iowa Hospital in the IT department. California Bill was living in Los Angeles. But he has really bounced around in his life,

and I think that's the sense I got even from talking to him, is that his trajectory has been kind of all over the place. He's been around the country. LA Times reporter, Brittany Mejia. California Bill told Brittany Mejia that he had lived in Kentucky, New Mexico, Texas, and Nevada before he eventually ended up in California. He gets to Southern California, spends several years in San Diego. He told me he worked a tech job there, and then he moved to Santa Monica in 2009.

Then he stays in hotels and motels around the area. He sells gemstones, gold scraps, or other items he found on the streets of downtown LA's jewelry district. He often didn't have a place to live. At one point, he learned from a credit report that he had over $200,000 of debt in his name, mostly car loans and one personal loan. He also learned there were bank accounts he'd never opened. On August 20th, 2019, William goes to this LA branch of a national bank,

tells them that he'd recently discovered someone was using his credit. So he is asking them, can I get my account numbers? I want to close my accounts. So he gives the assistant branch manager his social security card, his California ID, and that name and social security number matched what was on the bank accounts. But because there was so much money in the accounts,

the bank employee, you know, she asked him that the security questions that we're all familiar with that we use set up with accounts. He couldn't answer them. The assistant manager called the phone number on file for the accounts. William Woods in Wisconsin answered. He told her no one in California should be accessing his bank account.

He correctly answered the security question. So then the assistant branch manager called the cops. LAPD officers get there, they arrest William Woods and they arrest him for unauthorized use of personal information. California bill was eventually charged with identity theft and false impersonation. William Woods is telling the judge, you know,

I am William Woods. And I remember when I talked to the court reporter who covered the case and she had told me like, you know, it was clear to her that William Woods had some mental health issues, but that he was always respectful, but she was there. And so she saw kind of the outbursts that were going on and he was always respectful. But she was there. And so she saw kind of the outbursts that were going on. And he was kind of shouting out during court and talking

about like FBI. He brought up the World Trade Center and talking about Betsy Ross. So basically what's happening is that William Woods is saying, I am William Woods, this is my name. But he's also talking about conspiracy theories, which makes the lawyer, his lawyer, the judge question whether he's, you know, if you're talking about conspiracy theories, how can we expect that you're being truthful about your own name? Yes, exactly. I think that that became such, like an easy way to basically brush him off because in the context of what he was saying, they were just like, oh, here's another thing he's making up. In the court transcripts, California bill tells the judge, I want to talk to the

FBI. The judge says, you can give them a call. His lawyer eventually said that he wasn't competent to stand trial. Was it because of these outbursts? Yes, it was. His lawyer was basically saying, based on my conversations with my client, I don't think he's competent. So the judge ends up suspending the criminal proceedings against him and says, you know, a psychiatrist needs to be appointed.

And so then in February 2020, the judge finds that he's not mentally competent to stand trial, and he ends up being competent to stand trial, and he ends up being ordered to a psychiatric hospital and ordered to receive psychotropic medication. But there wasn't room at the psychiatric hospital. So instead, he spent more than eight months in jail before being transferred. In total, he was held in jail for 428 days, and then at the psychiatric hospital for 147. We'll be right back.

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Start ritual or add essential for women 18 Plus to your subscription today. That's ritual.com slash criminal for 25% off. Support for Criminal comes from Delete Me. It's important to protect your personal information online, but knowing where to start can be so overwhelming that it feels impossible. DeleteMe can do the hard work for you. When you sign up for DeleteMe, their experts remove your personal information and your family's from data broker websites. And they won't just do it once. DeleteMe keeps checking for your personal information online, monitoring and removing what you want removed. Lauren was

the one who told me about DeleteMe, and when I tried it, I was shocked to see how easily available my address was online. I feel a lot better now that I can choose who has access to that information. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now at a special discount for our listeners. Today, get 20% off your Delete Me plan by texting criminal to 64,000. The only way to get 20% off is to text criminal to 64000. That's criminal to 64000. Message and data rates may apply. In March of 2021, William Woods, in California, was deemed competent enough for the court

proceedings to continue. California Bill pleaded no contest to two felony charges of impersonation and identity theft. He was also ordered to stop calling himself William Woods. He was sentenced to two years in jail and was credited with the time he had already served. When he got out, he moved into a shelter in Santa Monica, and he learned that the owner of the bank accounts he'd tried to close lived in Wisconsin. He contacted the local police there. When the police contacted Wisconsin Bill, he told them about his ongoing problems with someone else claiming to be William Woods.

He sent them his emails with the LAPD about California Bill's conviction. He also wrote to the LAPD saying, quote, I am concerned that he now knows approximately where I live. He filed his own complaint with the local police, accusing California Bill of identity theft. When California Bill learned that Wisconsin Bill worked for the University of Iowa, he decided to try contacting the police there. Detective Ian Mallory started working on the case and a few weeks later, he spoke with Wisconsin Bill.

He seemed concerned. He provided me a lot of information that he's been through this before that someone in California had stolen his identity. He said, you know, I'm just used to this. I get bills, I get statements, I get collections people calling me, and it's all because of this guy in California. And basically in this conversation, this is when he told me, I really don't think you're going to be able to help me because I've had so many other agencies try and help me and they were not successful. DETECTIVE IAN MALLORY STARTED REQUESTING ANY CRIMINAL RECORDS UNDER THE NAME WILLIAM WOODS AND THE BIRTH DATE BOTH MEN HAD GIVEN HIM. started requesting any criminal records under the name William Woods and the birthdate both men had given him. It just seemed like both individuals kind of merged the records together. So running

the names and the databases that we have access to really produced a record of great length. One person committed a crime on one side of the United States, but then one person could commit a crime on one side of the United States, but then another person could commit a crime on the other side of the United States, but the proximity of time just seemed too coincidental, too close. So I validated each individual contact with law enforcement by obtaining booking photographs and fingerprint cards from every arrest or every contact with the police that I could possibly find. That was really step one. He was hoping to find a booking photograph for each time William Woods had been arrested, so he could tell which of the two men was actually there. I contacted one particular location and I

asked for a booking photo and they said, well, these booking photos aren't digitized. I said, yeah, you probably have a Polaroid somewhere in a box in an old storage facility. And the lady I talked to on the phone asked me what a Polaroid was. So I said, I need to talk to the oldest records clerk you have available to you. So just getting records of this age was pretty interesting and difficult. It was also unique that we didn't use modern techniques where there were no cell phone records, cell phone tower dumps or cell phone extractions, no geolocation information. It was old historical data that isn't quite used so frequently anymore in modern day investigations. Detective Mallory eventually received documents from all over the country, including California, Oregon, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Kentucky. He

also received a birth certificate from California Bill. It was a picture of a photocopy of an original birth certificate from 1967. I had that birth certificate validated from the Kentucky Bureau of Vital Statistics and they told me that it is an accurate representation of what a real birth certificate would look like in 1967. So then I asked William Woods of Wisconsin for a birth certificate to show his birth validity. He sent me a birth certificate, which was a reprint that was created in 2012. That reprint birth certificate looked very strange from the state of Kentucky, but ultimately the Kentucky Bureau of Vital Statistics validated that that reprint birth

certificate was legitimate and correct for the period and time from 2012. They basically told me that both of those birth records were from the same file number and from the same birth record. At that moment, I know that both individuals had sent me essentially the same birth record. On both birth certificates, the name read William Donald Woods. But then Detective Mallory started looking at other documents and he noticed something strange. William Woods of Wisconsin, his middle name on his driver's license and our employment records at the University of Iowa was William David Woods. So immediately I wanted to know, well, why did someone send me a birth record with the middle name not being the same middle name as their driver's license? He decided to try and find William Woods' parents.

I originally tried finding the mother, but marriage or death or change of name would be that very difficult. I used some law enforcement and open source databases to search for William Woods's father's name in Kentucky. And I was ultimately able to find a telephone number and cold call Billy Don Woods, which is William Woods's father. And I got the correct guy on the first try and was able to communicate with him. He's an older fellow, so a couple of conversations had to take place. Billy Don Woods told Detective Mallory that he did have a son. He hadn't seen him in years, but they talked regularly. He said his son lived in California. But that was really never a solidifying answer for me and that really didn't complete the picture.

And I will admit that a part of me considered could California Bill be a sly criminal himself, would he be talking to someone misrepresenting his own identity as this guy in Kentucky's son when he really wasn't his son? So that ended up being the reason why I asked for some DNA. Ian Mallory contacted the police in Kentucky and explained the case. A detective went to Billy Don Woods' home and took a cheek swab that he mailed to Detective Mallory. The Kentucky detective also brought some photos with him. He asked Billy Don Woods if any were his son. Billy Don Woods picked out a picture of California Bill. Detective Mallory also asked California Bill to go to the Santa Monica Police Department.

A detective there took his DNA sample and sent it overnight to Detective Mallory. And I was able to take the two samples and then send them to our criminalistics laboratory in Iowa for the comparison. And what were the results? The results confirmed what I had suspected that California Bill was the biological son of the man listed on the birth certificate in Kentucky. That moment was a very exciting moment and a very challenging moment for me. It really invoked two things. Number one, it told us that California Bill had been wrongfully imprisoned. And it also told us 100% that Wisconsin Bill was not the person that he said he was. So who is this guy who is our employee and who has clearly been able to get away

with this for more than 30 years? Ian Mallory had shared the files he'd been getting about William Woods with Iowa's Division of Intelligence. And soon, someone there found something. A number for an FBI record attached to a fingerprint file for Wisconsin Bill. And when we ran that number alone, it came up with a new criminal history record for a person that I had not yet seen fingerprints for. It was attached to a criminal trespass case in Albuquerque and a forgery case in Louisville, both from the late 1980s. And so I went back to work in the phones and I got a very helpful detention records person at Louisville, Kentucky. Gave them the FBI record number, not the name and not the date of birth

because every time I gave the name and date of birth, I would get this kind of convoluted mess. And that detention records clerk was able to provide me a photograph and a 10-print fingerprint card. I believe it was from 1988. And as soon as I saw the picture, the facial features, the nose and the ears, I knew right away that William Woods of Wisconsin was really named Matthew David Kearns. We'll be right back. Stop.

Do you know how fast you were going? It's today explained what's going on, my boys and in some cases, gals? Recently, one of you emailed us with this request. You've got mail. Hello. I am an avid listener, and I strongly believe you should cover the story of Curtis Yarvin. It's important to explore who he is and how he has influenced the MAGA and the Tech Bros movement. Curtis Yarvin is a very online far-right philosopher whose ideas include the fascinating, the esoteric, the absurd, the racist, and so on.

Six months into the Trump administration, there's evidence that he is influencing the MAGA movement and even President Trump. JD Vance knows him and likes him. Elon consulted him about this third party idea. Yarvin can take some credit for inspiring Doge. And as you'll hear ahead, one of Trump's most controversial, doesn't even begin to cover it, ideas may have come from Yarvin or someone who reads his sub stack. I can almost guarantee you that Trump does not.

Everything's computer. Today Explained, weekday afternoons. What did you find out about Matthew Kern's life? What did you find out about Matthew Kearns' life? Matthew Kearns was born in Southern California and was adopted by his adopted parents and had an adoptive brother. Basically, I learned only what people close to Matthew Kearns were able to tell me. But he had some contacts with law enforcement as a young man, teenager, early 20s for some kind of petty crimes, some thefts and some forgeries and didn't like to appear for court. And he just kind of was always on the run and living a life on the streets. Court records showed that Matthew Kierens had run away from home as a teenager. He'd also stolen a car.

Like William Woods, Matthew Kierns had moved around a lot. And in 1988, both William Woods and Matthew Kierns ended up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They worked at a hot dog stand together. William was telling me that he never really interacted with Matthew until like his wallet went missing. Brittany Mejia. And he was telling me, you know, he questioned Matthew Kieran's about that theft, but he was not responsive, was not like answering him about what had happened to his wallet. And then William's telling me, you know, I put my fist in his face and he gave me back my wallet.

And, you know, he said he looked inside of it, his Social Security card, his birth certificate were still there, so he kind of brushed it off, thought nothing of it, was kind of like, okay, well, all my stuff's still here, so I'm fine. But then, you know, as the years unfold, and it's in the record that, you know, after 1988, there was no record of Kieran's ever using his own name, date of birth, or social security number. In 1990, Matthew Kierens got an ID card in Colorado under the name William Woods.

He started working at a fast food restaurant. He bought a car, but his check bounced. The police issued an arrest warrant for William Woods. By 1994, Matthew Kearns had moved to Oregon. He met a woman, and six months later, they got married. They moved again to Kentucky for his wife to go to graduate school, and then to Wisconsin. He really hadn't had much education, I don't think, but he started taking, I believe, like, you know, computer classes and learning the IT field and started getting jobs that way.

Tresh Mahaffey, a reporter for the Gazette newspaper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And then, you know, landed the job with the University of Iowa hospitals, and which was a really good job. He was the systems lead, I believe, the IT lead. And so he was making like over 140,000 a year. And he gave the hospital fake ID documents, a fictitious I-9 form, fictitious social security number, date of birth. He builds this whole life for himself,

is working remotely from his home in Wisconsin. And, you know, between 2016 and 2022, he's getting vehicle and personal loans from credit unions under William Woods' name, totaling more than $200,000. So he's building a life for himself. Like, he has a salary job, he has a family. It was very different to the life that the real William Woods was leading. In July of 2023, Detective Mallory found out that Matthew

Kearns would be coming to Iowa soon for a work meeting. Several of the IT colleagues and professionals that work with Kearns were ushered into one room for this meeting. Just before Matthew Kearns was taken into that same room for the meeting, he was directed into an adjacent room where myself and one of my colleagues were waiting for him. I introduced myself to Matthew. I called him William, Bill at the time because that's what we were still relying on. I shook his hand. I said, my name is Ian. And as I shook his hand and held that handshake for a little while, I told him that he was under arrest.

Matthew Kearns was brought to the police station where he was photographed and fingerprinted. And then Ian Mallory began to interview him. They spoke for six hours. and Mallory began to interview him. They spoke for six hours. Matthew Kearns, the entire time that we spoke, from the moment that we met until several hours into interview, maintained his innocence, was confused about what this was all about and why we were talking to him,

and really played dumb. At one point in time, I said, Bill, did you ever think this day was going to come? And he said, what day? I don't know what you're talking about. What do you mean this day was ever going to come? Matthew Kierens called William Woods, quote, crazy, and said he should be locked up. The interview took its turn when I confronted Matt with the fact that previously in the interview and from William Wood's Wisconsin statements, he had told me that both of his parents were not alive. So, I told him a fact that he would not be able to scrit around and that he would have to address. And that was that I had found his father and his father was actually alive. And that moment was a

no-win situation for Matthew Kearns. I asked him what his dad's name was and he gave me his adoptive father's real name accidentally. He said John and he realized he slipped up and gave me the wrong father's name. He took a deep breath and he rest his head against the interview room wall and then looked back at me and then he changed it and said, my dad's name is Billy, Billy Donwoods. I was named after him. So that was the start of the moment of this dance where Matthew Kearns knew that I knew, that I knew, that he knew, that I knew and so on and so forth. And it was really a matter of it's just time to just say it. Ian Mallory told Matthew Kearns about the DNA test results. Ultimately, Matthew Kearns stopped the charade and just said,

my life is over, isn't it? Matthew Kearns said, Ian, my name is Matthew David Kearns. He provided me his real birth date and said, I have a social security number, but I don't remember what it is. Ian Mallory later learned that Matthew Kearns had looked up William Woods's family on Ancestry.com. He used the information to get a copy of William Woods's birth certificate. He needed it to get a driver's license, but on the application,

he had used his real middle name, David, instead of Donald. Did you get a sense of why he did this? No. Matthew Kearns is a professional manipulator, and he has been lying and manipulating for most of his adult life, if not all of his life. He gave reasons in interview of why he had been living a false identity. Things like he didn't like his childhood, he didn't like the person that he was and he was growing up and he wanted to escape poor family dynamics and the best way for him to do that is to just start over with a new life. Matthew Kierens later said he felt relieved it was finally over. I think for William Woods, the arrest of Matthew Kierans was, I just feel like he had been striving for that for years. He had been waiting for someone to finally listen to him

and, you know, actually believe that he was who he said he was. And in my speaking with him, it was just a relief. I think he was just like, finally, someone listened to me. Finally, someone heard me. And so in some sense, yeah, it's a relief. But in the other, it's kind of like frustration, I think, I got from him that no one would listen. Matthew Kierens was charged with lying to a credit union, an aggravated identity theft. He pleaded guilty. Trish Mahaffey went to the sentencing hearing.

The judge really, he really said that Karens was just callous and ruthless for his manipulation of the criminal justice system. He said that, I mean, basically that he blamed Matthew Curens for keeping it up. Every time they would call Matthew Curens about this, he would just say that he was the real Bill Woods and this other guy had been lying about it for years. Federal prosecutors described the case as a Kafkaesque plot that resulted in the false imprisonment, involuntary hospitalization, and forced medication of the real William Woods. The judge said, quote, what the victim was deprived of here was priceless, its freedom. William Woods was also at Matthew Kieran's sentencing hearing.

I was not expecting to see him or meet him when I had the opportunity to. We were literally walking to the courtroom for sentencing. I wish I could have had some more time to catch up with him and to converse with him. So it was a very quick rushed initial meeting. I gave him a hug, shook his hand. He had a huge smile on his face. At the hearing, Matthew Kieran spoke briefly. He said, my intentions were not to hurt anyone. I mean, that was what was so, I guess, disappointing to me because I thought, you know, he would, we would finally hear maybe something from him. But he, he kind of, he apologized and he said he never wanted, it was never his intention to hurt anyone. But he didn't apologize to Bill Woods. He

never brought him up even. He had a moment in front of everyone where he could have done the right thing and he chose not to. I kept watching Matthew Kieran's, but I never saw him really look at Bill Woods. Matthew Kieran's wife and son did not attend the hearing, but wrote letters of support for him. His wife described him as a hard worker. She said that he was motivated to create the family and home he did not have in his youth. She wrote that he was spending his time in jail reading. He had asked her for books to help him become a more virtuous person.

She also wrote, as his wife, as the one person who has been at his side the longest, Matt is still mystifying to me. Had I known, we could and would have righted his wrongs decades earlier. Matthew Kierans was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison. He was also ordered to pay restitution to William Woods. He's appealing his sentence. William Woods told a reporter after the hearing, I was sent to jail for nothing, for being myself.

The truth is important, and now the truth is known. I mean, this is a real nightmare scenario that you go in to say, wait a second, someone's stealing my stuff and they say, oh a second, someone's stealing my stuff, and they say, oh, no, no, you're the one who's lying. Yeah, this is definitely just a nightmare situation. I just can't imagine living in a situation where no one believes that I'm me. Like, I feel that, unfortunately,

William Woods was kind of the perfect victim, if that makes sense. This is someone who is unhoused, who's vulnerable, appeared to be dealing with, like, mental health issues. And it was someone that basically people wouldn't believe. How is William doing now? So, what's interesting is when I connected with William, I just got the sense when I had called him,

even after, with Kieran's in prison at the time, you know, William's telling me like he's still struggling. Like he, at the point when I talked to him, had moved to Albuquerque, you know, he's living in a hotel. Then he, you know, wound up living in a van in El Paso. And, you know, when I talked to him, he was just like still bouncing around. And I guess there's an expectation that things will fall into place now that he has identity back. And I don't know. I think he is really grappling with starting over and what his life is going to look like

from this point. In 2024, the district attorney's office in Los Angeles vacated William Woods' conviction for identity theft and false impersonation. They apologized for the unfathomable hardship he has endured. The Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Cedrico, Lily Clark, Lena Silison, and Megan Kineane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti.

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I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.