Hunter
04/08/24
A former employee at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics has pleaded guilty to identity theft after living under another man’s name for decades and causing that man to be falsely imprisoned for identity theft.
58-year-old Matthew Keirans faces over 30 years in prison after being convicted of aggravated identity theft and making a false statement to a National Credit Union Administration institution last week.
Keirans was a systems architect in the UIHC’s IT department for nearly 10 years until he was terminated in July last year.
William Donald Woods worked with Keirans at a hot dog stand in Albuquerque New Mexico in 1988. Keirans began using Woods’ name to obtain employment, insurance and official documents. Over the years, he bought a car using bounced checks in Colorado, got married, had a child whose last name is Woods, and got a copy of Woods’ birth certificate from Kentucky using Ancestry.com information.
He started working remotely from Wisconsin at the UIHC in 2013, and obtained multiple vehicle and personal loans using the false identity between 2016 and 2022. He stashed a large sum of money in a national bank under the Woods name.
The real William Donald Woods was homeless in 2019 and discovered someone was using his credit. When he went to the bank, he provided his real Social Security card, his California ID, and wanted to close the account. Because Keirans put security questions on the account that Woods couldn’t answer, the bank contacted Keirans, who said no one in California should have access to his account.
Police arrested the real Woods and charged HIM with identity theft. Because he kept insisting that he was the real William Woods, a judge ruled he wasn’t mentally competent to stand trial and was sent to a mental hospital.
Woods eventually found out where Keirans was working under his name, and contacted UIHC security. U of I Police got involved in January 2023, and after their investigation, Keirans was arrested on July 18th. He was federally indicted in December on five counts of false statements to credit unions and two counts of aggravated identity theft; he reached a plea deal to reduced charges.
Keirans’ sentencing date has not yet been scheduled.
