The Two Lives of William Woods
July 22, 2025 at 03:19AMIt sounds like something straight out of Kafka: After having your identity stolen, you try to get justice, only to be arrested and involuntarily hospitalized. That’s what happened to William Woods. Or, rather, that’s what happened to the man who said he was William Woods. Was he the victim or the thief? You’ll have to read this bonkers story from Charlie McCann to find out.
People often assume that university police “aren’t real cops,” he told me. The man probably saw him as “a keychain-dangling flashlight-carrying security guard.” Mallory wanted to show him he could crack the case.
He set about getting his hands on everything he could find relating to William Woods from New Mexico and William Woods from Wisconsin. Soon he had a thick stack of documents: birth certificates, criminal histories, mug shots, fingerprint cards. The two men’s lives had been merged into one voluminous case file. Mallory set about trying to disentangle them.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/21/the-two-lives-of-william-woods/
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