Ferdinand Waldo Demara (1921-1982), known as "The great impostor", masqueraded as many people from monks to surgeons to prison wardens.

Demara was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1921. A steadfast Roman Catholic, he tried unsuccessfully to enter a Trappist monastery in 1935. Two attempts later it seemed that the cloistered life did not agree with him and he joined the US Army in 1941.

The following year Demara began his new lives by borrowing the name of Anthony Ignolia, an army buddy, and went AWOL. After two more tries in monasteries he joined the Navy. He did not reach the position he wanted, faked his suicide and borrowed another name, Robert Linton French, and became a religiously oriented psychologist. Both Navy and Army caught him eventually and he served 18 months in prison - studying for his next job, of course. A string of pseudo-academic careers followed.

During his "careers", he was, among other things, a civil engineer, a sheriff's deputy, an assistant prison warden , a doctor of applied psychology, a hospital orderly, a lawyer, a child-care expert, a Benedictine and Trappist monk, an editor, a cancer researcher, and a teacher. One teaching job led to a six months in prison. He never seemed to get much monetary gain in what he was doing - just temporary respectability.

Many of his unsuspecting employers would have been satisfied in other circumstances. He was apparently able to memorize necessary techniques from textbooks. He worked on two cardinal rules: The burden of proof is on the accuser and When in danger, attack. He described his own motivation as "Rascality, pure rascality".

His most famous exploit, and the one that exposed him to public, was to masquerade as surgeon Joseph Cyr in the Canadian Navy during the Korean War. He managed to improvise successful surgeries and fend off infection with generous amounts of penicillin. Apparent removal of a bullet from a wounded man ended up in the papers back home and the real Joseph Cyr got suspicious. Demara was apparently honorably discharged and moved back to the USA.

After that he sold his tale to Life magazine and worked in short-time jobs but he was now widely known. He resorted to drinking. Only after he resorted to his old tricks and got faked credentials could he get another job in Huntsville prison, and yet again his past caught up to him. He continued to use new aliases but now it was harder than before.

In 1967 Demara received the Graduate Certificate in Bible from Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland, Oregon.

Demara died in 1982 due to heart failure. At the time he was a hospital priest in California.

Books

• The Great Impostor, by Robert Crichton

Films

• The Great Impostor (1962), a fictionalised version of his life starring Tony Curtis as Demara.

External links

• The Case of the Spurious Sawbones