AF Deserter Sentenced to 18 Months : AWOL: Member of elite unit said he faked his death out of fears that he was becoming a child abuser, like his father.

An Air Force sergeant who said he faked his death in 1987 and deserted from an elite pararescue unit because he feared he was becoming a child abuser like his father has been sentenced to 18 months in prison.

When he deserted, Staff Sgt. James (Doug) Pou left a wife and two young sons who gave him up for dead. He was arrested in June in San Diego after he was turned in by a second wife, who also had two sons by Pou.

Government prosecutors said Pou, 32, had also abandoned his second wife and sons. While he was on the lam, Pou fathered a fifth child, a daughter, with a woman who lived next door to Pou and his second wife in San Diego.

Pou was sentenced by Air Force Judge Lt. Col. Willard Pope on Monday night after a court-martial that lasted about 14 hours at March Air Force Base in Riverside County. The sentence was less than the five-year maximum he could have received.

Air Force officials had agreed that Pou would serve no more than three years in exchange for his guilty pleas on counts of desertion and bigamy.

The Air Force had agreed to drop a count of larceny based on about $500,000 in benefits that Pou’s first wife, Suzy, and their two sons had received when the military declared him dead.

With credit for the five months that he has already served in custody and time off for good behavior, Pou could be released in less than a year.

The sentencing ended a remarkable odyssey for Pou, whom many in the small Air Force parachute rescue community considered a living legend before he deserted. Veteran Air Force Master Sgt. William Burton, a prosecution witness at the court-martial, described Pou as “always either the best or close to the best in anything we did.”

“(Pou) was by-the-book perfection. . . . He was a picture of perfection until the day he disappeared,” said Burton, who was stationed with Pou at Kirtland Air Force Base, near Albuquerque, N.M., at the time of his disappearance.

Burton was one of dozens of volunteers who helped search for Pou after he disappeared May 12, 1987. Pou staged a bicycle accident at a bridge that spans the Rio Grande, convincing investigators that his bicycle was struck by a vehicle and his body thrown into the river. The Air Force declared him legally dead 10 days later.

Burton and other Air Force volunteers continued searching the surrounding desert for Pou’s remains off and on until his arrest June 10. He was reported to Air Force officials by his second wife, Monica Marie Joyce, who had known about Pou’s secret past since October, 1988.

Pou, who was known as Christopher Keith Riggs in San Diego, married Joyce on Sept. 26, 1987, about four months after his disappearance in New Mexico.

At the court-martial, Pou was described as an overachiever. Dr. Daniel Schiele, a defense psychiatrist, and other defense witnesses described Pou as a man who was not a quitter.

Instead, Pou suffered from a “depersonalization disorder” caused in part by problems in disciplining his children, Schiele said. Pou blamed his actions on the fact that he was physically and sexually abused by his alcoholic father when he was a boy.