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The Good Friend. Ferdinand never gave up. In 1955, he became a Dr. Benjamin Jones (who really was president of Northeast Mississippi Junior College), got himself a job as lieutenant of the guard in Texas' Huntsville Penitentiary. There, a prisoner recognized Ferdinand as the subject of a 1952 LIFE article on "The Master Impostor," but the agile fraud made a quick getaway.
Always a candid confesser when he was caught, Ferdinand never reasonably explained why he could not be satisfied with his own identity; yet he always played his roles with urbane authority and considerable skill. Thus, while most of his neighbors in North Haven thought that "Godgart" was a little strange, they thoroughly liked him. It was his closest North Haven friend, Schoolteacher William Hopkins, who became suspicious enough of Ferdinand—especially after he gave Hopkins and his wife a captionless LIFE photo of himself—to supply Maine police with a set of Ferdinand's fingerprints taken from a beer can.
The Goodbye. Typically, last week most of his friends in Maine were ready to defend Ferdinand, even if he was an impostor. Found guilty by a superior court judge, Ferdinand got a suspended sentence and a gentle lecture. "On each occasion," the judge admitted, "deliberately or otherwise, you were doing some good." Said Schoolteacher Hopkins: "I hope Demara can come back. After all, what has he done but use someone else's name? And all the good he has done must certainly outweigh the bad." Ferdinand himself was not so sure. "Under the circumstances," he remarked blandly, "it would be useless to go back. I would be much less effectual than I had been."
With that, the lovable fraud departed, saying that he was going to visit his mother in Lawrence, and after that, look into a job offer from a Canadian newspaper. But at week's end Ferdinand Demara had vanished like a pleasant dream. Now, nobody knows where he is. Or who.