April 18, 2012 • 25 mins
Ferdinand Demara took on several bogus personas throughout his imposter career -- everything from a professor to a monk. Demara stole the identities of regular people, and often performed their job duties. Tune in to learn more about the Great Imposter.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to blame a Chuck Reporting and I'm Fair Dowdy
and we've covered several historical impostors on this podcast. Their
stories are actually some of our favorites to tell, and
(00:23):
with the ones we featured so far, a lot of
them at least Lambert Simnel, False Dmitri, Princess Caribou, or
some examples. There are usually some common themes running through
their stories. For example, the impostors are often pretending to
have some royal connection. There's almost always some sort of
motive behind their impostor scheme, sometimes a grand one. The
(00:45):
impostors are usually pretending to be someone specific, or at
least they're pretending to be one someone. That is not
the case though with today's podcast subject Ferdinand Waldo Demera,
who is often called the Great impostor. Demera took on
several bogus personas throughout his long and story twentieth century
(01:06):
impostor career. Something we talked about in those earlier ones
that you wouldn't be able to pull this off in
the twentieth century. Apparently you could um, and he would
pose with everything from a psychology professor to a monk
to a prison guard. Often he was stealing the identities
of actual people, but regular people, not royalty or celebrities.
(01:27):
And he wasn't just taking on their names and titles,
but he was taking on their actual jobs and performing
them their job duties. So we're going to take a
look at Demira's wildlife of deception, how he pulled off
these impostor identities, and of course his most famous charade
of all, which was pretending to be a surgeon on
a Canadian Navy ship. Sure we have everybody squirming in
(01:50):
their seats by now with that not your ability. So first,
of course, we need to tell you a little bit
about who Demera really was. He was born in Lawrence, Assachusetts,
in ninety one, and by most accounts, he seems to
have been a really, really smart kid. But according to
a nineteen fifty two Life magazine article by Joe McCarthy,
(02:10):
Demero really didn't apply himself at school, academically or otherwise,
So if he was smart, he didn't show up in
the classroom as a team. For example, he played on
the football team at Lawrence's Central Catholic high school, but
he was never one of the starters because he didn't
listen to the coach and although he read a lot
on his own, he didn't really put much effort into
(02:31):
his school work. It's interesting there's this picture of him
in that Life magazine article, and he just looks like
a total jock. I mean, he has kind of this
clean cut haircut, and he just has this kind of
smug look on his face. Um, you know, so he
looks like a regular kid. And in that Life story,
his father, who was a motion picture projectionist set of damera, quote,
(02:51):
I love the boy, but I don't know him. He's good,
and he's kind, and he has a really brilliant mind,
but I've never been able to understand him. I don't
think anybody else understands him either. And of course he
said this years later when Demara was older, but at
least it gives us a little insight into his parents
attitude toward him. So even though he wasn't a go
getter when it came to academic accomplishments, he does seem
(03:14):
to have had some ambition. He wanted to be somebody,
it just wasn't himself, and it wasn't him in his
current life, so by the age of sixteen, he ran
away from home and joined a Rhode Island monastery. But
after about a year there, the brothers decided that Demearro
just wasn't really cut out for the monastic lifestyle, and
(03:34):
they thought that instead he might be better suited as
a teacher, So Demearro moved on. He tried another monastery.
Apparently that didn't work out so great either, because by
about in forty one, he enlisted in the U. S. Army,
another venture that proved to be pretty short lived. Yeah,
he went a wall pretty soon after he enlisted, but
(03:55):
that wasn't the end of his military careers. You might
assume that it would be a week after for the
bombing of Pearl Harbor. He enlisted in the Navy without
ever notifying the Army that he was even around or
of this change. And while he was with the Navy,
they sent Demera to hospital school and he became a
medical corpsman. He soon tired of this role as well, though.
(04:15):
He tried to apply to officer candidate school after that,
and he did this by forging some documents and pretending
that he had a college education, which of course we
know he didn't even graduate from high school, but he
did a pretty bad job with the forgery. It was
one of his first one, so he wasn't very good
at it yet, and they rejected him, so he went
a wall again. So it was after ditching the Navy,
(04:36):
after ditching the army too, that Demera really began the
pattern of assuming other identities that he'd stick with for
pretty much the rest of his life. First, he decided
to become doctor Robert L. Finch, who was a man
who had a doctorate in psychology. Demera had never met Finch,
but he came across his name and credentials while trolling
through the course catalog of a college where Finch had
(04:59):
been a fact culte member. According to an article by
David Goldman in Biography, Dimira made this identity more official
looking by writing away to the college where Finch had
worked and getting a copy of his transcript, which ultimately
made it more credible when he approached people and applied
for jobs as doctor Finch that he had Dr Finch's
actual transcript, and that's eventually what he did, though initially
(05:22):
he tried his hand at the religious life again. First,
he lived for a short time as Finch at a
Trappist monastery near Louisville, Kentucky. Then he moved on to
an order of Catholic teachers in Chicago and took courses
and things like rational psychology and natural theology at DePaul University,
and he apparently made straight a's while he was there.
But he moved on right before he was supposed to
(05:43):
be ordained as a priest. In that life story, that
life article we mentioned earlier, he said that he couldn't
go through with it without telling others the truth. So
it's like he had some guilt, some guilt about becoming
a priest standard assumed identity. So at that point he
moved on to his first university job as Robert Finch
at Gannon College in Erie, Pennsylvania, and there he taught
(06:06):
general industrial and normal psychology. That quite a course load,
and pulled all of this off, he later explained, by
just reading up on the subjects and staying ahead of
the class. And he said that quote, the best way
to learn anything is to teach it. So it seems
like he kind of had it all figured out there.
He figured out how to be a professor, but he
didn't stick around there either. He moved on to California,
(06:29):
where he worked as an orderly in a sanitarium, and
then moved on to Olympia, Washington and taught psychology again,
this time at St. Martin's College and Lacey. So he's
moving around a lot, but he's not really getting caught
so Life. In that article in Life magazine that we mentioned,
Demera told them a little bit about his tendency to
move on frequently and why he did so. He said, quote,
(06:52):
in this little game I was playing, there always comes
a time when you find yourself getting into deep. You've
made good friends who believe in you, and you don't
want them to get hurt and disillusioned. You begin to
worry what they'll think if someone exposes you as a phony.
And he said he even kept this little stash of
money to just, you know, as a little savings, a
(07:12):
little nest egg for when he needed to move on
out of town. Yeah, exactly, And he called it his
mad money, so he would keep that in the reserves.
So this is exactly what happened to him in Olympia.
He got exposed tomorrow, got into deep. He became part
of the community, was even made a special deputy to
the sheriff. And then one day the FBI showed up
(07:32):
and they charged him with desertion from the Navy. After that,
Demera served eighteen months in the U. S. Disciplinary Barracks
in California. So once he got out of the barracks,
he consulted his course catalogs, again a great place to
find a new identity, and this time chose the identity
of a biologist named Dr Cecil Hammond. And once again
he got the guy's college records, even his birth certificate,
(07:56):
things that would make this fraud a little more believable.
So once he was armed with Hammond's personal records, Demero
went on an occupation s pretty really similar to the
kind he had gone on as Finch. He studied law
for a year at Northeastern University in Boston, and then
he entered a seminarian Maine, where he told them he
was a prominent Boston physician, Dr Cecil B. Hammond. So
(08:19):
he wasn't just trying to lay low. He was promoting
himself as his new identity, really using the credentials exactly.
And after he was in the seminary, Demera took the
religious name of Brother John and was sent to study
theology in New Brunswick in Canada to prepare to take
his vows. And it's while in Canada that Demeri meant
the true owner of what would become perhaps his most
(08:40):
notorious identity. Dr Joseph Seer Sea was fresh out of
medical school and treating Brother Boniface, who Demera was studying
under Sea was pretty impressed to meet this guy who
supposedly had been such an eminent physician in the States,
and so he and Demarra became quite chummy with each other.
Sire even asked for his opinion treating Brother Boniface's rheumatoid arthritis,
(09:02):
and Demera suggested b venom, a treatment that he had
read about in a medical journal recently. And Sear also
wanted to become friends with Demera because he had this
great interest in getting license to practice in the United States.
He was networking exactly, and his good friend Brother John
offered to use his connections to help him out. Of course,
in order to do this, Brother John would need Sears
(09:25):
records and credentials to present to the medical board in Maine,
and that's how he got Sears personal records and information
and talking to Life magazine. He later said, I didn't
steal his papers. He gave them to me, and in
a way that was the truth. He probably had a
little more faith in him though, so. Of course, Demera
never presented Seer's papers to any medical board when he
(09:48):
returned to the United States. What he did do, though,
is ditched the seminary and then double back to Canada.
According to Barbara Smith's book Hoaxes and Hexes, Daring Deceptions
and Mysterious Curses, Demera showed up at the Royal Canadian
Navy's recruiting office in New Brunswick on March thirteenth, nineteen
fifty one and volunteer to services as a doctor. And
(10:10):
Canada was by then involved in the Korean War and
they really really needed medical officers. They were so desperate,
in fact, that they were willing, according to the CFB
Es schoolmalt Navy and Military Museum, to squish Demera's enlistment
process into just a couple of days. Normally, the enlistment
process would have taken months, but they fast tracked it,
(10:31):
and according to Smith's book, Demera later recalled that the
Medical Officer selection board seemed only to be concerned with
whether or not he was the type of doctor who
was into experimental medicine because they did not want any
Canadian sailers being guinea pigs, which is kind of funny
when we see what happens in a minute within a
few days, horrible money in a not funny way. But
(10:54):
after a few days, Demera was commissioned as a surgeon
lieutenant and received his first assignment at the Naval Hospital
and Halifax. He had never had anything beside some basic
first aid training at this point, so he'd been able
to fake his way through his scams before, but I
thought that it would be pretty much impossible at this point. However,
Demera quickly developed a strategy that got him through again.
(11:16):
According to Smith's book, he managed to get some books
and materials that covered treatment for some of the most
common illnesses and injury, so that was one thing. But
he also consulted with other doctors a lot. You might
think that this would expose how little he knew, but
he actually developed a good reputation as a guy who
worked with other doctors and valued other people's opinions, and
(11:38):
he pretty much go with whatever advice the other doctors
gave him, and he mostly got by in that way.
According to an article by Dorothy Grant in Medical Post,
Amira also had a go to treatment plan for anyone
who had something like a sore throat or a bad cough,
who would just give them a huge dose of penicillin.
So sorry if you don't happen to have a bacterial
(11:59):
infect it. That was something else that just got him by.
Demera was comfortable with the strategy at the hospital, but
after a couple of months he got transferred to the
sick bay on the aircraft carrier Magnificent. There he didn't
perform quite as well as he had in the hospital
in Halifax. According to Grant's article. His commanding officer even
said in one of his reports that he quote lacked
(12:21):
training in medicine and surgery, especially diagnosis. Then, when the
Magnificent was docked in Halifax, Demera, opposing a steer, had
what was for him a really unique experience. He fell
in love. According to Smith's book, the young lady's name
was Catherine, and she wanted to marry Demera. She tried
to arrange a meeting between him and her family in Montreal,
(12:43):
but while Demera boarded the train to get there, and
went all the way to Montreal. He chickened out when
he was supposed to get off the train, and he
couldn't bring himself to actually come out and face them,
which is kind of strange considering how easy it usually
was for him to deceive people. It also goes back
to his though that he didn't like getting into deep
and starting to hurt people and disappoint them. But they
(13:06):
did stay together a little bit after this failed meeting,
but Demera, as Dr. Sear, soon got his next posting
as the medical officer on board the destroyer h m
c S Cayuga, which was bound for Korea, and Demara's
first challenge aboard the Cayuga came right away. The captain
(13:26):
had a painfully infected tooth and he wanted it pulled immediately.
So you can imagine treating people's sore throats up until
this point and suddenly you have a gross infected tooth
and you're in charge of it. Yeah, And he didn't,
I mean, he didn't know anything about practicing medicine, but
he at this point he had at least done a
little bit of stuff in the hospital at Halifax. But
when he got on the ship and into this situation.
(13:48):
He hadn't ever experienced anything with dentistry before, so he
had to buy himself a little bit of time, and
he excused himself to his cabin to consult some medical
books and try to figure out if there was an
no vacaine on the ship. Luckily there was, and he
was able to extract the tooth successfully, and after that
things went smoothly for a while. Demera was actually really
(14:09):
popular with the other guys on the ship, but once
they made it to them, Once they made it into
the North Korean battle front, there was a lot more
for him to do, stuff that went way beyond treating
colds and pulling teeth. The best example of this is
when they came by a boat carrying three critically wounded
South Korean soldiers and the one who was wounded the
worst had a bullet lodge right next to his heart,
(14:31):
and Demera had to open up his chest to remove it.
Yeah well, and he supposedly did this with a room
full of people looking on, so there was no way
he could hesitate or act like he didn't know what
was going on. There was also supposedly a pretty rough
storm going on at the time that was pitching the
ship from side to side. As the story goes, the
surgery was a success, and Demera went on to perform
(14:54):
a few other really major surgeries, including a lung reflection
or removal, which he had read about in the British
journal The Lancet. According to that Medical Post article, though
there's some considerable debate about whether or not any or
all of these major surgeries ever took place, but something
must have gone on because a Navy public information officer
(15:17):
aboard the Cayuga decided that they needed to brag on
their awesome surgeon a little bit. Demara said later in
the Life magazine article that he tried to talk the
guy out of it, after all, publicity was the last
thing that a person like him would want, but it
didn't work. The story was prepared and sent out to
the press back in Canada, and Demera spheres did come
to fruition. One of the people who read the story
(15:39):
was Mary Sear, the real Dr Joseph sears mom. She
immediately contacted her son to tell him someone was impersonating him,
and doctor Sear in turn got in touch with the
Canadian Navy, so in November twenty one one, the Kyugas
captain received a radio message that said, quote, we have
information that Joseph C. Fear, Surgeon Lieutenant is an impostor
(16:01):
removed from active duty. Immediately repeat, Immediately, conduct investigation and
report the fact. Chief of Naval Staff for the captain,
the same guy who had had his tooth pulled by Sierra,
didn't want to believe this news. He even called Demera,
whom he just called Joe, and told him that it
was quote a lot of rot, and even told him
(16:22):
to quote carry on with your duty while he figured
it out. But sure enough, Demera was sent back to
Canada a few days later, and the Royal Canadian Navy
was so embarrassed by the situation they didn't want to
create a big stink and let's have even more publicity
around it, so they discharged Amera honorably, gave him whatever
(16:42):
back pay he was owed, which amounted to I think
nearly one thousand dollars, and they turned him back over
to the US. Interesting thing is, even after they realized
that they had been duped, his former shipmates still really
loved Amera. They even sent him a Christmas card later
on a poem called quote because he's our friend in it.
(17:04):
Part of it went like this, he may be six
kinds of a liar, he may be ten kinds of
a fool. He may have faults that are dire and
seeing without reason are rule, But we don't analyze. We
just love him because, well, because he's our friend. So
Demera really seemed to inspire this sort of affection no
matter who he was pretending to be, and as far
(17:24):
as fraud's go, he really was quite lovable, or he
seemed to be. After a short break during which he
was interviewed for that Life magazine article in nineteen fifty
two that we've mentioned a few times, he did go
back to his impost ways for a little while. At
least it seems almost impossible that he would be able
to do so again, especially after being exposed in such
a way and doing this very public article. But in
(17:46):
nineteen he became Dr Benjamin Jones, yet again, a real
person who was president of the Northeast Mississippi Junior College,
and as Dr Jones, he got a job as a
Lieutenant of the Guard in Texas Huntsville Penitentiary. While he
was there, he really did a lot of good work.
He organized sports tournaments, schooling, he helped defuse confrontations between prisoners,
(18:10):
and according to Goldman's article, a prison official later said
that Demera was quote one of the best prospects ever
to serve in this prison system. If he could only
appear again with some legitimate credentials, I'd be proud to
hire the man again. But ultimately Demera saw a prisoner
reading the Life article and realized that the jig was up,
so he left. I guess he had some of that
(18:32):
mad money on hand, and when he cashed a check
in Jones's name, though, the police caught up with him
and he spent some time in jail yet again. By
September of nineteen six, though, he'd shown up in North Haven,
Maine as Martin Gojert with a school teacher's certificate, and
he got a job teaching at the local high school.
He was teaching English, Latin, and French. According to a
(18:53):
nineteen fifty seven Time magazine article, Demera again became a
big part of his local community. He formed a Sea
Scout true, he ran Sunday school classes at the local
Baptist church and basically played Santa Christmas time. He set
up a po box in Santa Claus's name and all
the kids with some letters there, and he would reply
to each and every one of them. By February of
(19:15):
nine fifty seven, though, Demira was exposed again through the
Life magazine connection, and once again the friends that he'd
made were totally shocked. They even wanted to defend him
in court because they liked him so much. Ultimately, Demira
ended up getting off easy with a suspended sentence, and
the judge even said to him, quote on each occasion,
referring to each occasion of fraud, deliberately or otherwise, you
(19:39):
were doing some good, which I guess is an interesting point. Yeah,
it is. I mean, I don't know if that cancels
out stealing someone's identity, but it is an unusual thing
to do if you're in the business of stealing people Gydatically,
it's true. I mean, usually you think you'd be stealing
a bunch of money from people or something. But he
actually seemed to try to accomplish things, and a lot
(20:02):
of these he did so. For the last twenty or
so years of his life, though Demera gave up on
stealing identities, he lived as his as himself under his
own name, even though he still switched jobs a bit,
and for a while he worked as a chaplain at
a hospital in California, where strangely, he ran into the
real doctor Joseph Seer again. Yeah. Dr Seer had finally
(20:26):
gotten that license to practice in the States, and he
looked up one day when he was in an operating
room in California, and according to that Medical Post article,
he recognized the merit even though most of his face
was hidden by a surgical mask. Demera eventually died of
a heart attack in nine two, at the age of sixty.
According to his New York Times obituary, he was miserable
(20:47):
for most of that latter part of his life. According
to his doctor, it seemed like he was really happiest
when he was pretending to be other people. But to
this day, no one can really figure out what his
motivations were. Is it boredom, sword attention span, or was
it just that he had a mental illness. I think
most people probably go with the latter. Regardless of why
(21:08):
he did this, though, it has made her a fascinating story.
Author Robert Crichton wrote two books on Demera, and one
of them, The Great Impostor, was made into a film
starring Tony Curtis in nineteen sixty one on the question
of motives. Demera once told Crichton of himself, quote, I'm
a rotten man. Then he said that his actions were
(21:29):
instigated by rascality. Sheer rascality. So he clearly had a
different view of himself than a lot of people who
got to know him. And we're saying, no, this is
really a good guy, let's go easy on him. Um,
he didn't seem to think much of himself. Additionally, and
on a different note, some of the institutions that he
duped into giving him other people's credentials contacted Demera after
(21:52):
his story was exposed. They wanted to know how he'd
done it so that it didn't happen again. According to
that Life article, he refused to completely divulge his methods
in this respect. However, he once still said to Crichton, quote,
I don't mean to be boasting, but my learned example
has been instrumental in getting colleges and businesses to change
(22:14):
their sloppy ways of handling confidential information and records. In
other words, your privacy and your records are safer today
because of me. I have to say, I certainly hope
that that's the case. I hope that our records are
much safer than that, and that you can't just right
away and get someone's birth certificate, for example, or pick
an identity in a course catalog. It's kind of a
(22:37):
horrifying pot. Yeah, it's interesting, though, I mean, you have
to wonder why people didn't catch onto this more often,
or why they did kind of continue to like him
even though he had this perception of himself and and
he once said Demea once said that it had to
do with people kind of allowing themselves to be fooled,
(22:58):
like he could fool them because they let him. And
it sort of reminded me, and I think I mentioned
this reminded me a little bit of the H. Cholms podcast,
where we were talking about how people didn't want to
come forward and say that they thought something felt wrong
or they felt creepy, didn't want to shake things up
exactly in the way Demera put it is. I think
he said something like people would rather be liked than right, um,
(23:21):
which is sort of a sof's a less creepy, yeah much, Yeah,
less dangerous. H. Cholms, maybe we should say, But I'm
interested to know what other people think of this. I mean,
he said that he thinks our records are safer now.
But one I think in that biography article that I read,
the author kind of conjectured, I wonder what he would
(23:42):
have done in this day and age with the Internet
at his disposal. So I'm kind of curious to know
whether our listeners think that something like this, you know,
every other day, they happen all the time. Credit card
security breach. Yeah, no, that's true. Um, that's true. I
mean we always think of it now in terms of
financial stuff, but you have to wonder next time you
sit in your den just chair. Well, I know my
(24:03):
dentist has her diplomas on the wall, but I guess
he could have always he could have, I mean, birth
certificate on the wall or something like that. But um,
I don't know. It gives us something to think about anyway,
and I think with that we will wrap up on
this episode. If you have any ideas for us, or
any thoughts about being an impostor or this sort of fraud,
(24:27):
or any kind of anything that you want to share
with us, or a new topic that you want to
suggest that has absolutely nothing to do with us, Because
maybe you're tired of hearing of impostors even though we're not.
You can write us a history podcast at Discovery dot com,
or you can look us up on Facebook or on
Twitter at this industry. And if you want to learn
a little bit more about the more modern problems we
were talking about, we do have an article called how
(24:50):
identity theft works. I probably won't get too much into
you think worse catalogs to to steal a name, but
should teach you some things. You can look for it
by searching for identity theft on our home page at
www dot How staff works dot com. Be sure to
(25:10):
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to blame a Chuck Reporting and I'm Fair Dowdy
and we've covered several historical impostors on this podcast. Their
stories are actually some of our favorites to tell, and
(00:23):
with the ones we featured so far, a lot of
them at least Lambert Simnel, False Dmitri, Princess Caribou, or
some examples. There are usually some common themes running through
their stories. For example, the impostors are often pretending to
have some royal connection. There's almost always some sort of
motive behind their impostor scheme, sometimes a grand one. The
(00:45):
impostors are usually pretending to be someone specific, or at
least they're pretending to be one someone. That is not
the case though with today's podcast subject Ferdinand Waldo Demera,
who is often called the Great impostor. Demera took on
several bogus personas throughout his long and story twentieth century
(01:06):
impostor career. Something we talked about in those earlier ones
that you wouldn't be able to pull this off in
the twentieth century. Apparently you could um, and he would
pose with everything from a psychology professor to a monk
to a prison guard. Often he was stealing the identities
of actual people, but regular people, not royalty or celebrities.
(01:27):
And he wasn't just taking on their names and titles,
but he was taking on their actual jobs and performing
them their job duties. So we're going to take a
look at Demira's wildlife of deception, how he pulled off
these impostor identities, and of course his most famous charade
of all, which was pretending to be a surgeon on
a Canadian Navy ship. Sure we have everybody squirming in
(01:50):
their seats by now with that not your ability. So first,
of course, we need to tell you a little bit
about who Demera really was. He was born in Lawrence, Assachusetts,
in ninety one, and by most accounts, he seems to
have been a really, really smart kid. But according to
a nineteen fifty two Life magazine article by Joe McCarthy,
(02:10):
Demero really didn't apply himself at school, academically or otherwise,
So if he was smart, he didn't show up in
the classroom as a team. For example, he played on
the football team at Lawrence's Central Catholic high school, but
he was never one of the starters because he didn't
listen to the coach and although he read a lot
on his own, he didn't really put much effort into
(02:31):
his school work. It's interesting there's this picture of him
in that Life magazine article, and he just looks like
a total jock. I mean, he has kind of this
clean cut haircut, and he just has this kind of
smug look on his face. Um, you know, so he
looks like a regular kid. And in that Life story,
his father, who was a motion picture projectionist set of damera, quote,
(02:51):
I love the boy, but I don't know him. He's good,
and he's kind, and he has a really brilliant mind,
but I've never been able to understand him. I don't
think anybody else understands him either. And of course he
said this years later when Demara was older, but at
least it gives us a little insight into his parents
attitude toward him. So even though he wasn't a go
getter when it came to academic accomplishments, he does seem
(03:14):
to have had some ambition. He wanted to be somebody,
it just wasn't himself, and it wasn't him in his
current life, so by the age of sixteen, he ran
away from home and joined a Rhode Island monastery. But
after about a year there, the brothers decided that Demearro
just wasn't really cut out for the monastic lifestyle, and
(03:34):
they thought that instead he might be better suited as
a teacher, So Demearro moved on. He tried another monastery.
Apparently that didn't work out so great either, because by
about in forty one, he enlisted in the U. S. Army,
another venture that proved to be pretty short lived. Yeah,
he went a wall pretty soon after he enlisted, but
(03:55):
that wasn't the end of his military careers. You might
assume that it would be a week after for the
bombing of Pearl Harbor. He enlisted in the Navy without
ever notifying the Army that he was even around or
of this change. And while he was with the Navy,
they sent Demera to hospital school and he became a
medical corpsman. He soon tired of this role as well, though.
(04:15):
He tried to apply to officer candidate school after that,
and he did this by forging some documents and pretending
that he had a college education, which of course we
know he didn't even graduate from high school, but he
did a pretty bad job with the forgery. It was
one of his first one, so he wasn't very good
at it yet, and they rejected him, so he went
a wall again. So it was after ditching the Navy,
(04:36):
after ditching the army too, that Demera really began the
pattern of assuming other identities that he'd stick with for
pretty much the rest of his life. First, he decided
to become doctor Robert L. Finch, who was a man
who had a doctorate in psychology. Demera had never met Finch,
but he came across his name and credentials while trolling
through the course catalog of a college where Finch had
(04:59):
been a fact culte member. According to an article by
David Goldman in Biography, Dimira made this identity more official
looking by writing away to the college where Finch had
worked and getting a copy of his transcript, which ultimately
made it more credible when he approached people and applied
for jobs as doctor Finch that he had Dr Finch's
actual transcript, and that's eventually what he did, though initially
(05:22):
he tried his hand at the religious life again. First,
he lived for a short time as Finch at a
Trappist monastery near Louisville, Kentucky. Then he moved on to
an order of Catholic teachers in Chicago and took courses
and things like rational psychology and natural theology at DePaul University,
and he apparently made straight a's while he was there.
But he moved on right before he was supposed to
(05:43):
be ordained as a priest. In that life story, that
life article we mentioned earlier, he said that he couldn't
go through with it without telling others the truth. So
it's like he had some guilt, some guilt about becoming
a priest standard assumed identity. So at that point he
moved on to his first university job as Robert Finch
at Gannon College in Erie, Pennsylvania, and there he taught
(06:06):
general industrial and normal psychology. That quite a course load,
and pulled all of this off, he later explained, by
just reading up on the subjects and staying ahead of
the class. And he said that quote, the best way
to learn anything is to teach it. So it seems
like he kind of had it all figured out there.
He figured out how to be a professor, but he
didn't stick around there either. He moved on to California,
(06:29):
where he worked as an orderly in a sanitarium, and
then moved on to Olympia, Washington and taught psychology again,
this time at St. Martin's College and Lacey. So he's
moving around a lot, but he's not really getting caught
so Life. In that article in Life magazine that we mentioned,
Demera told them a little bit about his tendency to
move on frequently and why he did so. He said, quote,
(06:52):
in this little game I was playing, there always comes
a time when you find yourself getting into deep. You've
made good friends who believe in you, and you don't
want them to get hurt and disillusioned. You begin to
worry what they'll think if someone exposes you as a phony.
And he said he even kept this little stash of
money to just, you know, as a little savings, a
(07:12):
little nest egg for when he needed to move on
out of town. Yeah, exactly, And he called it his
mad money, so he would keep that in the reserves.
So this is exactly what happened to him in Olympia.
He got exposed tomorrow, got into deep. He became part
of the community, was even made a special deputy to
the sheriff. And then one day the FBI showed up
(07:32):
and they charged him with desertion from the Navy. After that,
Demera served eighteen months in the U. S. Disciplinary Barracks
in California. So once he got out of the barracks,
he consulted his course catalogs, again a great place to
find a new identity, and this time chose the identity
of a biologist named Dr Cecil Hammond. And once again
he got the guy's college records, even his birth certificate,
(07:56):
things that would make this fraud a little more believable.
So once he was armed with Hammond's personal records, Demero
went on an occupation s pretty really similar to the
kind he had gone on as Finch. He studied law
for a year at Northeastern University in Boston, and then
he entered a seminarian Maine, where he told them he
was a prominent Boston physician, Dr Cecil B. Hammond. So
(08:19):
he wasn't just trying to lay low. He was promoting
himself as his new identity, really using the credentials exactly.
And after he was in the seminary, Demera took the
religious name of Brother John and was sent to study
theology in New Brunswick in Canada to prepare to take
his vows. And it's while in Canada that Demeri meant
the true owner of what would become perhaps his most
(08:40):
notorious identity. Dr Joseph Seer Sea was fresh out of
medical school and treating Brother Boniface, who Demera was studying
under Sea was pretty impressed to meet this guy who
supposedly had been such an eminent physician in the States,
and so he and Demarra became quite chummy with each other.
Sire even asked for his opinion treating Brother Boniface's rheumatoid arthritis,
(09:02):
and Demera suggested b venom, a treatment that he had
read about in a medical journal recently. And Sear also
wanted to become friends with Demera because he had this
great interest in getting license to practice in the United States.
He was networking exactly, and his good friend Brother John
offered to use his connections to help him out. Of course,
in order to do this, Brother John would need Sears
(09:25):
records and credentials to present to the medical board in Maine,
and that's how he got Sears personal records and information
and talking to Life magazine. He later said, I didn't
steal his papers. He gave them to me, and in
a way that was the truth. He probably had a
little more faith in him though, so. Of course, Demera
never presented Seer's papers to any medical board when he
(09:48):
returned to the United States. What he did do, though,
is ditched the seminary and then double back to Canada.
According to Barbara Smith's book Hoaxes and Hexes, Daring Deceptions
and Mysterious Curses, Demera showed up at the Royal Canadian
Navy's recruiting office in New Brunswick on March thirteenth, nineteen
fifty one and volunteer to services as a doctor. And
(10:10):
Canada was by then involved in the Korean War and
they really really needed medical officers. They were so desperate,
in fact, that they were willing, according to the CFB
Es schoolmalt Navy and Military Museum, to squish Demera's enlistment
process into just a couple of days. Normally, the enlistment
process would have taken months, but they fast tracked it,
(10:31):
and according to Smith's book, Demera later recalled that the
Medical Officer selection board seemed only to be concerned with
whether or not he was the type of doctor who
was into experimental medicine because they did not want any
Canadian sailers being guinea pigs, which is kind of funny
when we see what happens in a minute within a
few days, horrible money in a not funny way. But
(10:54):
after a few days, Demera was commissioned as a surgeon
lieutenant and received his first assignment at the Naval Hospital
and Halifax. He had never had anything beside some basic
first aid training at this point, so he'd been able
to fake his way through his scams before, but I
thought that it would be pretty much impossible at this point. However,
Demera quickly developed a strategy that got him through again.
(11:16):
According to Smith's book, he managed to get some books
and materials that covered treatment for some of the most
common illnesses and injury, so that was one thing. But
he also consulted with other doctors a lot. You might
think that this would expose how little he knew, but
he actually developed a good reputation as a guy who
worked with other doctors and valued other people's opinions, and
(11:38):
he pretty much go with whatever advice the other doctors
gave him, and he mostly got by in that way.
According to an article by Dorothy Grant in Medical Post,
Amira also had a go to treatment plan for anyone
who had something like a sore throat or a bad cough,
who would just give them a huge dose of penicillin.
So sorry if you don't happen to have a bacterial
(11:59):
infect it. That was something else that just got him by.
Demera was comfortable with the strategy at the hospital, but
after a couple of months he got transferred to the
sick bay on the aircraft carrier Magnificent. There he didn't
perform quite as well as he had in the hospital
in Halifax. According to Grant's article. His commanding officer even
said in one of his reports that he quote lacked
(12:21):
training in medicine and surgery, especially diagnosis. Then, when the
Magnificent was docked in Halifax, Demera, opposing a steer, had
what was for him a really unique experience. He fell
in love. According to Smith's book, the young lady's name
was Catherine, and she wanted to marry Demera. She tried
to arrange a meeting between him and her family in Montreal,
(12:43):
but while Demera boarded the train to get there, and
went all the way to Montreal. He chickened out when
he was supposed to get off the train, and he
couldn't bring himself to actually come out and face them,
which is kind of strange considering how easy it usually
was for him to deceive people. It also goes back
to his though that he didn't like getting into deep
and starting to hurt people and disappoint them. But they
(13:06):
did stay together a little bit after this failed meeting,
but Demera, as Dr. Sear, soon got his next posting
as the medical officer on board the destroyer h m
c S Cayuga, which was bound for Korea, and Demara's
first challenge aboard the Cayuga came right away. The captain
(13:26):
had a painfully infected tooth and he wanted it pulled immediately.
So you can imagine treating people's sore throats up until
this point and suddenly you have a gross infected tooth
and you're in charge of it. Yeah, And he didn't,
I mean, he didn't know anything about practicing medicine, but
he at this point he had at least done a
little bit of stuff in the hospital at Halifax. But
when he got on the ship and into this situation.
(13:48):
He hadn't ever experienced anything with dentistry before, so he
had to buy himself a little bit of time, and
he excused himself to his cabin to consult some medical
books and try to figure out if there was an
no vacaine on the ship. Luckily there was, and he
was able to extract the tooth successfully, and after that
things went smoothly for a while. Demera was actually really
(14:09):
popular with the other guys on the ship, but once
they made it to them, Once they made it into
the North Korean battle front, there was a lot more
for him to do, stuff that went way beyond treating
colds and pulling teeth. The best example of this is
when they came by a boat carrying three critically wounded
South Korean soldiers and the one who was wounded the
worst had a bullet lodge right next to his heart,
(14:31):
and Demera had to open up his chest to remove it.
Yeah well, and he supposedly did this with a room
full of people looking on, so there was no way
he could hesitate or act like he didn't know what
was going on. There was also supposedly a pretty rough
storm going on at the time that was pitching the
ship from side to side. As the story goes, the
surgery was a success, and Demera went on to perform
(14:54):
a few other really major surgeries, including a lung reflection
or removal, which he had read about in the British
journal The Lancet. According to that Medical Post article, though
there's some considerable debate about whether or not any or
all of these major surgeries ever took place, but something
must have gone on because a Navy public information officer
(15:17):
aboard the Cayuga decided that they needed to brag on
their awesome surgeon a little bit. Demara said later in
the Life magazine article that he tried to talk the
guy out of it, after all, publicity was the last
thing that a person like him would want, but it
didn't work. The story was prepared and sent out to
the press back in Canada, and Demera spheres did come
to fruition. One of the people who read the story
(15:39):
was Mary Sear, the real Dr Joseph sears mom. She
immediately contacted her son to tell him someone was impersonating him,
and doctor Sear in turn got in touch with the
Canadian Navy, so in November twenty one one, the Kyugas
captain received a radio message that said, quote, we have
information that Joseph C. Fear, Surgeon Lieutenant is an impostor
(16:01):
removed from active duty. Immediately repeat, Immediately, conduct investigation and
report the fact. Chief of Naval Staff for the captain,
the same guy who had had his tooth pulled by Sierra,
didn't want to believe this news. He even called Demera,
whom he just called Joe, and told him that it
was quote a lot of rot, and even told him
(16:22):
to quote carry on with your duty while he figured
it out. But sure enough, Demera was sent back to
Canada a few days later, and the Royal Canadian Navy
was so embarrassed by the situation they didn't want to
create a big stink and let's have even more publicity
around it, so they discharged Amera honorably, gave him whatever
(16:42):
back pay he was owed, which amounted to I think
nearly one thousand dollars, and they turned him back over
to the US. Interesting thing is, even after they realized
that they had been duped, his former shipmates still really
loved Amera. They even sent him a Christmas card later
on a poem called quote because he's our friend in it.
(17:04):
Part of it went like this, he may be six
kinds of a liar, he may be ten kinds of
a fool. He may have faults that are dire and
seeing without reason are rule, But we don't analyze. We
just love him because, well, because he's our friend. So
Demera really seemed to inspire this sort of affection no
matter who he was pretending to be, and as far
(17:24):
as fraud's go, he really was quite lovable, or he
seemed to be. After a short break during which he
was interviewed for that Life magazine article in nineteen fifty
two that we've mentioned a few times, he did go
back to his impost ways for a little while. At
least it seems almost impossible that he would be able
to do so again, especially after being exposed in such
a way and doing this very public article. But in
(17:46):
nineteen he became Dr Benjamin Jones, yet again, a real
person who was president of the Northeast Mississippi Junior College,
and as Dr Jones, he got a job as a
Lieutenant of the Guard in Texas Huntsville Penitentiary. While he
was there, he really did a lot of good work.
He organized sports tournaments, schooling, he helped defuse confrontations between prisoners,
(18:10):
and according to Goldman's article, a prison official later said
that Demera was quote one of the best prospects ever
to serve in this prison system. If he could only
appear again with some legitimate credentials, I'd be proud to
hire the man again. But ultimately Demera saw a prisoner
reading the Life article and realized that the jig was up,
so he left. I guess he had some of that
(18:32):
mad money on hand, and when he cashed a check
in Jones's name, though, the police caught up with him
and he spent some time in jail yet again. By
September of nineteen six, though, he'd shown up in North Haven,
Maine as Martin Gojert with a school teacher's certificate, and
he got a job teaching at the local high school.
He was teaching English, Latin, and French. According to a
(18:53):
nineteen fifty seven Time magazine article, Demera again became a
big part of his local community. He formed a Sea
Scout true, he ran Sunday school classes at the local
Baptist church and basically played Santa Christmas time. He set
up a po box in Santa Claus's name and all
the kids with some letters there, and he would reply
to each and every one of them. By February of
(19:15):
nine fifty seven, though, Demira was exposed again through the
Life magazine connection, and once again the friends that he'd
made were totally shocked. They even wanted to defend him
in court because they liked him so much. Ultimately, Demira
ended up getting off easy with a suspended sentence, and
the judge even said to him, quote on each occasion,
referring to each occasion of fraud, deliberately or otherwise, you
(19:39):
were doing some good, which I guess is an interesting point. Yeah,
it is. I mean, I don't know if that cancels
out stealing someone's identity, but it is an unusual thing
to do if you're in the business of stealing people Gydatically,
it's true. I mean, usually you think you'd be stealing
a bunch of money from people or something. But he
actually seemed to try to accomplish things, and a lot
(20:02):
of these he did so. For the last twenty or
so years of his life, though Demera gave up on
stealing identities, he lived as his as himself under his
own name, even though he still switched jobs a bit,
and for a while he worked as a chaplain at
a hospital in California, where strangely, he ran into the
real doctor Joseph Seer again. Yeah. Dr Seer had finally
(20:26):
gotten that license to practice in the States, and he
looked up one day when he was in an operating
room in California, and according to that Medical Post article,
he recognized the merit even though most of his face
was hidden by a surgical mask. Demera eventually died of
a heart attack in nine two, at the age of sixty.
According to his New York Times obituary, he was miserable
(20:47):
for most of that latter part of his life. According
to his doctor, it seemed like he was really happiest
when he was pretending to be other people. But to
this day, no one can really figure out what his
motivations were. Is it boredom, sword attention span, or was
it just that he had a mental illness. I think
most people probably go with the latter. Regardless of why
(21:08):
he did this, though, it has made her a fascinating story.
Author Robert Crichton wrote two books on Demera, and one
of them, The Great Impostor, was made into a film
starring Tony Curtis in nineteen sixty one on the question
of motives. Demera once told Crichton of himself, quote, I'm
a rotten man. Then he said that his actions were
(21:29):
instigated by rascality. Sheer rascality. So he clearly had a
different view of himself than a lot of people who
got to know him. And we're saying, no, this is
really a good guy, let's go easy on him. Um,
he didn't seem to think much of himself. Additionally, and
on a different note, some of the institutions that he
duped into giving him other people's credentials contacted Demera after
(21:52):
his story was exposed. They wanted to know how he'd
done it so that it didn't happen again. According to
that Life article, he refused to completely divulge his methods
in this respect. However, he once still said to Crichton, quote,
I don't mean to be boasting, but my learned example
has been instrumental in getting colleges and businesses to change
(22:14):
their sloppy ways of handling confidential information and records. In
other words, your privacy and your records are safer today
because of me. I have to say, I certainly hope
that that's the case. I hope that our records are
much safer than that, and that you can't just right
away and get someone's birth certificate, for example, or pick
an identity in a course catalog. It's kind of a
(22:37):
horrifying pot. Yeah, it's interesting, though, I mean, you have
to wonder why people didn't catch onto this more often,
or why they did kind of continue to like him
even though he had this perception of himself and and
he once said Demea once said that it had to
do with people kind of allowing themselves to be fooled,
(22:58):
like he could fool them because they let him. And
it sort of reminded me, and I think I mentioned
this reminded me a little bit of the H. Cholms podcast,
where we were talking about how people didn't want to
come forward and say that they thought something felt wrong
or they felt creepy, didn't want to shake things up
exactly in the way Demera put it is. I think
he said something like people would rather be liked than right, um,
(23:21):
which is sort of a sof's a less creepy, yeah much, Yeah,
less dangerous. H. Cholms, maybe we should say, But I'm
interested to know what other people think of this. I mean,
he said that he thinks our records are safer now.
But one I think in that biography article that I read,
the author kind of conjectured, I wonder what he would
(23:42):
have done in this day and age with the Internet
at his disposal. So I'm kind of curious to know
whether our listeners think that something like this, you know,
every other day, they happen all the time. Credit card
security breach. Yeah, no, that's true. Um, that's true. I
mean we always think of it now in terms of
financial stuff, but you have to wonder next time you
sit in your den just chair. Well, I know my
(24:03):
dentist has her diplomas on the wall, but I guess
he could have always he could have, I mean, birth
certificate on the wall or something like that. But um,
I don't know. It gives us something to think about anyway,
and I think with that we will wrap up on
this episode. If you have any ideas for us, or
any thoughts about being an impostor or this sort of fraud,
(24:27):
or any kind of anything that you want to share
with us, or a new topic that you want to
suggest that has absolutely nothing to do with us, Because
maybe you're tired of hearing of impostors even though we're not.
You can write us a history podcast at Discovery dot com,
or you can look us up on Facebook or on
Twitter at this industry. And if you want to learn
a little bit more about the more modern problems we
were talking about, we do have an article called how
(24:50):
identity theft works. I probably won't get too much into
you think worse catalogs to to steal a name, but
should teach you some things. You can look for it
by searching for identity theft on our home page at
www dot How staff works dot com. Be sure to
(25:10):
check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join How staff Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works
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