“Who the hell are you?” a sergeant asked, staring at Jeremy's rap sheet.

“That, sir, is an excellent question,” he replied.

Jeremy's younger half sister, Mary Rybak, keeps a small repository she calls Jeremy's Box. It represents the last physical vestiges of her brother's life in Indiana. The contents included poetry their mother had written, as well as samples of her writing from college. There were also redacted reports from the time of Jeremy's arrest in 2010, after his six-month spree with Angela. “He is by all accounts just a very peculiar and thorough impostor,” a forensic report concluded. “Your case but I'd run him through Foggy Bottom [State] or Langley [CIA] to be sure.”

Jeremy ultimately pleaded guilty to four counts and was given an 81-month federal sentence for the frauds he perpetrated in 2009, during his six months running with Angela (she was never indicted for a crime). Over the subsequent years spent in prison, Jeremy fell out of touch with Angela and with his half sister, due in large part to his insistence that he's the son of an Irish Republican, not a lost soul from a broken family in Indiana.

Jeremy told me he was trapped, with little formal education, a long criminal history, unable to get any work on the outside save for the most menial jobs. He was smart, funny, charming, in the way of a confidence man, and he was aware of how crazy his stories sounded—but he couldn't let them go.

“I have no family,” he wrote. “No friends. No support. No resources. I am homeless. I have no ID. I can't access social services, without committing perjury or fraud. No one believes me.”

After he was convicted at his trial in 2017, Jeremy was sentenced to 7 to 14 years in New York. He was then extradited to Massachusetts to face charges for the crimes he'd allegedly committed in that state. In Massachusetts, he was charged as a habitual offender, which would mean a mandatory minimum of ten years, to be served after his term in New York. Even when those terms were done, Jeremy would potentially also have to serve out his remaining federal time for violating his supervised release.

Angela and Mary told me that they're convinced that Jeremy no longer knows the truth about himself, a view he described as “prescient”; he's too caught up in the intricate web of deception that he'd woven. Ensnared in an Alice in Wonderland conundrum—“Who in the world am I?”—Jeremy wrote to me from prison most recently to say he was now certain that this article could be decisive in determining his fate. His reasoning was paradoxical: If I portrayed him as an incorrigible impostor, he felt sure he would be treated ever more harshly by prosecutors, but if I believed him to be a killer and terrorist operative for the IRA, well, then perhaps he could, in turn, prompt a law-enforcement investigation and atone for his many sins.

Jeremy's knuckles bear the tattooed Gaelic words mair fior, which translates to “stay true”—but to whom, or to what? After all our letters and conversations over three years, I hope he finds a way to solve the mystery of his identity, but it occurred to me that the ultimate victim of his decades of lies might well be the con man himself; Jeremy's final mark was Jeremy. As of the time of this writing, no one knows who Jeremy truly is—not even Jeremy.

“I want to be who I am,” he wrote to me. “The son of Brian and Patricia. Anything else is a dream.”

Guy Lawson is the author of ‘War Dogs,’ the book upon which the film of the same name was based.

A version of this story originally appeared in the June/July 2019 issue with the title "The Grand Schemes of the Petty Grifter."