The Double

0:00Fall is here, and that means the pumpkin spice latte is back at Starbucks. It's the one we've been waiting for. So whether you're a fan of the original pumpkin spice latte or ready to mix it up with an iced pumpkin cream chai, the new iced pumpkin cream matcha, or the new iced pumpkin cream shaken espresso, you can find your favorite taste of fall only at Starbucks. Can you hear that? It's the calm, sugar, white, sandy beaches of St. Pete Clearwater. And if you listen closely, you'll hear the mmms coming from the epic restaurants. the cheers from sun-soaked music festivals, and the beat of our legendary nightlife scene.

0:39Before you hit play on your next song, text the group chat. It's time to plan a trip to St. Pete Clearwater. Learn more at visitspc.com.

0:52Had 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 an 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.

1:40That's really all I knew about him. A 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.

2:27So what did you think of these two stories? I mean, what did you think was going on? I really had no idea. At the onset of the investigation, when I was handed a stack of paperwork, basically, paperwork that William Woods from Wisconsin had submitted saying, 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.

3:10So someone clearly was not telling the truth. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

3:25Detective 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. L.A. 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.

4:11He 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. You know, he sells gemstones, gold scraps, or other items he found on the streets of downtown L.A.'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 L.A. branch of a national bank, tells them, you know, that he'd recently discovered someone was using his credit.

5:01So he is asking them, you know, 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.

5:39He correctly answered the security questions. 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'm 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.

6:14And so she saw kind of the outbursts that were going on. And he was kind of shouting out during court and talking about, like, the 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.

6:58In 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 ordered to a psychiatric hospital and ordered to receive psychotropic medication.

7:42But 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.

8:05We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus.

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9:19Fall is here, and that means the Pumpkin Spice Latte is back at Starbucks. It's the one we've been waiting for. So whether you're a fan of the original Pumpkin Spice Latte, or ready to mix it up with an iced pumpkin cream chai, the new iced pumpkin cream matcha, or the new iced pumpkin cream shaken espresso, you can find your favorite taste of fall only at Starbucks. 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.

10:02He 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,

10:45He 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.

11:26And 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. 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 another person could commit a crime on the other side of the United States.

12:07But 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.

12:48And 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.

13:35He 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 and he sent me a birth certificate which was a reprint that was created in 2012 and 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 in time from 2012.

14:32And they basically told me that both of those birth records were from the same file number and from the same birth record. So 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, 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?

15:15He decided to try and find William Woods' parents. I originally tried finding the mother, but marriage or death or change of name would make that very difficult. I used some law enforcement and open source databases to search for William Woods' 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' 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.

15:55He 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.

16:44The 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, it confirmed what I had suspected, that California Bill was the biological son of the man listed on the birth certificate in Kentucky.

17:30That 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.

18:13And 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 working 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.

18:56I 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.

19:12We'll be right back.

19:26Can you hear that? It's the calm, sugar, white, sandy beaches of St. Pete Clearwater. And if you listen closely, you'll hear the mmms coming from the epic restaurants, the cheers from sun-soaked music festivals, and the beat of our legendary nightlife scene. Before you hit play on your next song, text the group chat. It's time to plan a trip to St. Pete Clearwater. Learn more at visitspc.com. Hello. Look what TJ Maxx dragged in. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is now streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu. We are digital, we are downloadable, we are streamable. The fashion event of the year is certified fresh.

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20:27What 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. And 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 Kearans had run away from home as a teenager. He'd also stolen a car.

21:09Like William Woods, Matthew Kearans had moved around a lot. And in 1988, both William Woods and Matthew Kearans 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 Kearrens 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.

21:52So he kind of brushed it off, thought nothing of it. It was kind of like, OK, 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 Kearans 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 Kearans had moved to Oregon. He met a woman, and six months later, they got married.

22:39They 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. Trish Mahaffey, a reporter for the Gazette newspaper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And then, you know, landed the job with the University of Iowa Hospitals, 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, you know, a fictitious I-9 form, fictitious social security number, date of birth.

23:28He, you know, 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. And several of the IT colleagues and professionals that work with Kearns were ushered into one room for this meeting.

24:12And 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.

24:50Matthew 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.