A former IT employee at the University of Iowa Hospital faces a lengthy prison sentence after pleading guilty to federal charges of living under a false identity for more than three decades.
Matthew David Keirans, 58, faces up to 30 years in prison following his conviction on charges of making false statements to an institution insured by the National Credit Union Administration, a federal crime. He was also convicted April 1 of aggravated identity theft, for which he faces two additional years in prison.
The audacious crime led to another man, William Donald Woods, being wrongly convicted for identity theft and sent away to a mental hospital after a judge ruled he wasn’t who he said he was.
Johnson County Jail, AP Photo/Ryan J. Foley, File
Matthew David Keirans (L), worked for years as a high-level administrator at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City, Iowa (R). Johnson County Jail)Keirans is currently in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service, while a sentencing date has yet to be scheduled, the Iowa Gazette reported.
Keirans was employed for a decade as a systems analyst in the hospital’s technology department, working there from June 28, 2013, to July 20, 2023, before he was fired for misconduct related to an investigation into identity theft.
Previously, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Iowa described Keirans as an administrator at the hospital, but the hospital has since clarified that he was not a senior leader during his time with the healthcare company.
When he took the job, Keirans gave his new employer the name William Donald Woods, an alias he had been using since 1988 — the year he met the real William Woods in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
At the time, the two men formed a partnership running a small hot dog stand.
Before long, Keirans began pretending to be Woods, taking jobs, purchasing insurance, signing official papers, and even filing his taxes with the man’s name, according to the plea agreement that Keirans signed last week.
In 1990, two years after befriending Woods, Keirans traveled to Colorado and got a fake ID with his photo, but with Woods’ name and birthday. Prosecutors said he used the bogus ID to get a job at a fast-food place and open a bank account that would never be traced back to him.
A year later, Keirans bought a car using Wood’s name, but the two checks he wrote for $600 bounced, and the vehicle was reported stolen.
But Keirans was already in the wind — he used the car to drive to Idaho, but on the way it broke down, so he left it on the side of the road, took all his money out of an ATM and vanished.
Back in Colorado, police issued an arrest warrant for Woods because of the stolen car, allowing Keirans to get away clean after he wrote two bad checks under a false name.
In 1994, six years after he started using Woods’ name, Keirans took his deception to a new level by marrying a woman under the alias, while he and his new bride also had a child together, who now bears the last name Woods.
Then in 2012, after getting away with the audacious ruse for 24 years, Keirans used information from Woods’ family he found on Ancestry.com to fraudulently obtain a copy of Woods’ birth certificate from the state of Kentucky, prosecutors said.
By 2013, Keirans had relocated to eastern Wisconsin and began working remotely for UI Hospitals in Iowa as an IT professional. Over his decade-long tenure, he amassed a salary exceeding $700,000. The hospital reported his final salary in 2023 as $140,501.
For a decade, Keirans also acquired numerous vehicle and personal loans from Iowa credit unions in Woods’ name, totaling more than $200,000 between 2016 and 2022. Additionally, he had funds deposited in a national bank under Woods’ identity, according to court documents.
Around 2019, the real William Woods was homeless and residing in Los Angeles when he found out that someone had been piling up debt on his credit, prompting him to visit a local bank branch to clear things up.
The extent of the fraud hit Woods like a ton of bricks. He immediately refused to assume responsibility for the debt and demanded the bank close any accounts in his name.
To verify his identity, Woods showed the bank his Social Security card and state-issued California ID, which matched the bank’s records. But since there was a significant sum of cash in the accounts, the banker asked Woods the security questions the bank had on file, but he couldn’t answer them.
The bank employee then called the phone number on the accounts, and Keirans picked up, claiming he was the real Woods.
To prove it, he correctly answered the security questions and claimed that nobody in California should have access to his accounts.
Smelling a rat, the bank contacted the Los Angeles Police Department.
When officers arrived, they spoke with Woods and talked to Keirans by phone.
Keirans played it cool, quickly faxing over the phony copies of Woods’ Social Security card and birth certificate, along with the fictitious driver’s license that Keirans obtained in Wisconsin using Woods’ name.
But the investigators immediately noticed a discrepancy.
The phony driver’s license had the name William David Woods while the name on the ID of the homeless man was William Donald Woods. As it turned out, Keirans used his actual middle name on the bogus license, but police didn’t know this initially. When police asked about it, Keirans explained that he sometimes used David as a middle name, but his real name was William Donald Woods.
The story tricked the officers and the real Woods was arrested on charges of identity theft and impersonation, while he was booked under the name Matthew Kierans, which was a slight mispelling.
Throughout the ordeal, Woods maintained that he was the real William Woods and not Matthew Kierans. As a result, in February 2020, a judge ruled that he was not mentally fit to stand trial and he was sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he received medication and other treatment.
In March 2021, Woods pleaded no contest to identity theft, for which he was convicted without having to admit guilt.
The judge sentenced him to two years in prison, considering the time he had already spent in jail and the hospital, after which he was released. In addition, Woods was fined $400 and ordered to stop using his own name, William Woods.
But Woods defied the court order and went to work to reclaim his identity.
He filed complaints with financial institutions to correct his credit report and contacted various law enforcement agencies, including the Hartland Police Department in Wisconsin, where Keirans, his former business partner, resided.
In January 2023, Woods found out where Keirans was employed and contacted the University of Iowa Hospitals’ security department. They then forwarded the complaint to the University of Iowa Police Department, where detective Ian Mallory took over the case.
The investigator tracked down the biological father listed on the duplicate versions of Woods’ birth certificate, and a DNA test conclusively determined Woods’ true identity.
For Woods, the nightmare ended, but for Keirans the jig was up.
On July 17, 2023, during an interview with Mallory, Keirans mistakenly gave his adoptive father’s name when the detective asked him who his dad was. Mallory then confronted Keirans with the evidence, leading Keirans to confess, saying “my life is over” and “everything is gone,” according to court records.
Keirans was arrested in Johnson County, Iowa, on July 18, 2023, and charged with false use of a birth certificate and providing false identification information.
On August 14, he pleaded guilty to the false use of a birth certificate, and the other charge was eventually dropped. He was sentenced to 20 days in Johnson County Jail, with credit for time served.
Two weeks later, however, Keirans was federally indicted on five counts of false statements to a National Credit Union Administration insured institution, and two counts of aggravated identity theft. He pleaded guilty to one count of each charge, and the other counts were dropped.
Keirans managed to live below the radar for decades, only having one other run-in with law enforcement many years before he stole Woods’ identity.
When he was 16, Keirans ran away from his adoptive parents’ home in San Francisco and stole a car, which he drove north to Oregon. There, he was taken into custody under his own name but he never appeared in court to face the charges, court documents said.
