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That's Freedom. From the moment Fred realized he was in, he had only one thought: how to get out. One day he stole credentials belonging to a bunkroom buddy, went quietly over the hill and presented himself at a Trappist cloister under the first of his false identities: Anthony Ingolia. Demara was well aware that he had committed a crime, but at first he felt no guilt. Later, he was deeply disturbed by the Pearl Harbor attack. "I wanted to do my part," he has explained. "I like this country, you know. Where else but in America could a man do all I've done? That's what I call freedom!" He left the monastery, joined the U.S. Navy, faked some college credentials and presented himself as a candidate for commission. When the security section started to investigate, Fred started to pack. He rejoined the Trappists, this time under the alias of Dr. Robert Linton French, a doctor of psychology whose search for truth had led him to abandon the world. But, as the brothers soon discovered, big, beefy Dr. French was not ready to abandon all of the world. He was caught "talking constantly," revealed gobbling grapes from the monastery's vines in defiance of the dietary regulations, and was advised to try another order.
And so Demara went—on and on around the monastery circuit. In his 205, he was caught by the FBI and tried by the Navy for desertion in wartime. Demara conducted his own defense, drew a six-year sentence, and with time off for good behavior, he went free in 18 months.
Even after that, the military life held a fascination for Fred, and in 1951 it offered him his most memorable role: Surgeon Lieut. Joseph Cyr of the Royal Canadian Navy. Demara's medical training consisted of a basic course in the U.S. Navy's hospital school, ten months as a hospital orderly in Boston, amplified by voracious reading of medical texts. Nevertheless, when assigned to Korean waters aboard the destroyer Cayuga, he performed such prodigies of battle surgery —an emergency amputation, the extraction of a bullet from the heart sac itself —that Cyr's story was published in Canadian newspapers. The real Dr. Cyr heard about it, and the jig was up.
Pure Rascality. After that, Demara promised himself to straighten out and make a new man of himself: Demara. But somehow it seemed terribly dull to be only one person at a time, and before long the unemployed impostor had another job. In the last two years he has had at least five of them: he served as a lieutenant warden in a Texas prison, a teacher among the Eskimos, a civil engineer in Yucatan, a couple of high school teachers. And in recent months, says Crichton, Demara has been working on what he gleefully calls "the biggest caper of them all"—for details, watch your local newspaper.