‘Dead’ Air Force Deserter Could Not Outrun His Past : Military: Decorated sergeant who faked his death left behind two families and a web of intrigue, deception, romance and infidelity.

Doug Pou knew that his years on the run as an Air Force deserter were over the day a Bell Ranger helicopter hovered over his house to take photographs.

The staccato blast of the chopper’s engine was the final clue. Soon, the world would know all the sordid details surrounding the disappearance and “death” of Staff Sgt. James Douglas Pou, member of an elite rescue unit, and a man who was once considered a living legend in the Air Force.

The Air Force had pronounced him dead May 22, 1987, 10 days after he faked his death in New Mexico, where he abandoned his first wife, Suzy, and two young sons.

The helicopter was not the first sign that his run from identity was over. The strangers parked in Chrysler K cars outside his house who followed him around town offered Pou the first hint that he had been betrayed.

He knew who his betrayer was. But Pou held no animosity toward his second wife, Monica Marie Joyce, who reported him to Air Force officials. In fact, he later told officials that he was glad the end was finally at hand.

“I was ready for this to happen,” Pou said. “It was difficult living the way I lived.”

A few days after he saw the helicopter, on June 10, 1992, after his customary early morning swim with his dog, Pou drove home, where a squad of law enforcement officials awaited him.

“Two marshals, a male and a female, came in,” Pou said at his court-martial. “I reached out and shook their hands. . . . I told them I knew why they were here and turned around so they could handcuff me. It was a very gentle scene.”

Even so, Pou made one last attempt to deceive the arresting officers. When they asked him his name, Pou said it was Christopher Keith Riggs, the phony identity he had been using since 1987.

Last Monday, Pou, 32, offered new details about his secret life at his court-martial at March Air Force Base in Riverside and explained what prompted him to so convincingly stage his death.

Testimony by several witnesses, including his second wife, painted a web of intrigue, deception, romance and infidelity, spiced with true tales of bravery by Pou. The stories of derring-do by Pou, told by him and an Air Force master sergeant, made the celluloid exploits of Sylvester Stallone look wimpy by comparison.

Hollywood knows a good story when it sees one. After Pou’s arrest in June, his family and wives were besieged by offers for the rights to the story.

At least six movie production companies were represented at the court-martial, where each representative hoped to acquire movie rights from Pou, his family and Joyce.

A few days later a Hollywood trade paper announced that Pou, his family and some friends had received $500,000 for their movie rights from a production company affiliated with actor Martin Sheen. But according to Darrell Sedlair, a friend of Pou’s who was at the court-martial, Pou received only a penny for his rights.

Hollywood could not have written a better script for the court-martial. An accommodating Pou would walk out during court recesses and pose for photographers in front of a chapel that had been converted into a courtroom.

There was no doubt that he was enjoying himself. Wearing the red beret commonly worn by airborne troops throughout the world, Pou stood at ease, smiling at the clicking cameras.

He presented a splendid image of an American warrior, in his blue dress uniform, spit-shined paratrooper’s boots and bloused pants. The tucked pants, folded neatly into calf-length boots, represent a special status accorded only to elite airborne troops.

Pou’s warrior image, however, was badly tarnished.

The four rows of ribbons above his left breast pocket represented the man Pou used to be. The meritorious achievement ribbon, issued “posthumously” by the Air Force, was symbolic of the lie that he had lived since 1987.

Before the day was over, Pou pleaded guilty to counts of desertion and bigamy. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison, given a dishonorable discharge and reduced to the lowest rank.

The memories of daring rescues in Iceland, the North Sea and other parts of the world were the only things remaining from Pou’s Air Force career, which some officials said is still the standard by which pararescuers are judged.

Pou’s story of deception began on a Friday night in October, 1986, when he was training with the Navy SEALs in Coronado. It was during his last week of training that he met Joyce at a Bonita restaurant-bar.

Joyce was quickly smitten by the handsome, smooth-talking rescuer. According to Joyce’s court-martial testimony, Pou said he was a “special forces type” who “went on long, dangerous missions all over the world.”

The fateful October meeting led to a weeklong romance.

“He said that he really didn’t have a home. When he was finished (with his missions) he would take vacations,” Joyce testified at the court-martial.

She added that the two of them “were getting along really, really good” the night they met. He also said his name was Doug Pou.

“I met him Friday night and saw him every night for a week. . . . On the second night I remember saying: ‘Well, if you quit your job I’m yours,’ ” Joyce said.

That same night, Pou told her he could not have children because he was injured in a mine blast in Vietnam, she said. Pou was 13 years old when the last U.S. troops left Vietnam in 1973.

At the time, Joyce did not know that Pou had a wife and two young sons near Albuquerque, N.M., where he was stationed at Kirtland Air Force Base.

Although Pou left San Diego a week after meeting Joyce, he returned two weeks later to spend a couple of days with her, she testified. Joyce did not hear from him again until Dec. 12, 1986, when she received a letter.

“He said he would be on a mission for about a year and to remember that he really loved me, if I never saw him again,” Joyce said.

The letter was followed by a Christmas present, and a phone call on New Year’s Day, 1987. After that, Pou called her once a month, Joyce testified.

“He would say he loved me, and I remember one time he said he was looking at wedding rings,” she said.

On May 12, 1987, Pou faked his death, planning it so elaborately that Air Force officials declared him dead 10 days later. The death certificate enabled Pou’s first wife, Suzy, and their two sons to collect about $500,000 in benefits.

Pou, 6 feet, 3 inches and a rock-hard 195 pounds, was a workout fanatic. The physically demanding life of an Air Force pararescuer fit him perfectly. And he relied in part on those physical skills to escape his domestic life.

On the day he disappeared, Pou said, he set out at 3:30 a.m. on his customary bike run--an early morning 11-mile bike trip, followed by a run eight miles up a mountain and back down, followed by a bike ride home.

“The route took me over the Rio Grande (on the Rio Bravo Bridge, near Albuquerque),” Pou testified at the court-martial. At that point, he said, he was upset about his ongoing problems in disciplining his young sons. He had been sexually and physically abused by his alcoholic father, he said, and was afraid that he would become like his father and abuse his sons. (His father testified at the court-martial that he did not abuse his children.)

Pou decided to desert the military and fake his death, intentionally crashing his bike and jumping off the bridge.

Pou said he then worked his way downstream, to a “sparsely wooded area about 800 meters from the bridge.”

“I really hadn’t given it any thought at the time, but I did have intent at the time to go away,” Pou testified.

After walking out of the river, Pou made his way to a bus station in Albuquerque, where he used his last $50 to buy a ticket for San Diego. Three days later, on the night of May 15, 1987, he appeared outside Joyce’s bedroom window.

“He was throwing little pebbles at my window,” Joyce said.

She looked out to see a smiling and disheveled Pou, with only the clothes he was wearing, and, she learned later, 87 cents in his pocket.

“He said he was no longer on a mission. He said he was out (of the military),” Joyce testified.

Under questioning by the prosecution, Joyce admitted that she knew him as Doug Pou. However, the couple were married four months later, and the marriage license listed him as Christopher Keith Riggs.

The real Christopher Riggs was a 10-year-old boy who was killed in a bicycle accident several years ago, according to a source familiar with the case. The source said that Pou chose the name while scanning newspaper articles at a library.

After his arrival in San Diego, Pou said, he did not necessarily intend to stay or remain a deserter. But back in New Mexico, Air Force investigators had concluded that Pou had been hit by a vehicle while riding his bicycle and his body thrown into the Rio Grande, where it was swept downstream.

“The first two months I was living in San Diego I went to a large library and read newspapers from Albuquerque. . . . I saw I was pronounced dead by the Air Force. At that time I decided it wasn’t in my best interest to go back,” he testified.

Pou and Joyce had two sons together. Joyce testified that Pou told her about his secret life in October, 1988, about one year after their marriage.

Although Pou claimed that he was unable to father children when he met Joyce, he testified that she “threatened” him into having children. Instead of being injured in Vietnam, as he had originally told Joyce, Pou said he had a vasectomy.

Joyce pressured him to have a reversal and threatened to report him to Air Force authorities unless he got her pregnant, said Pou, who added that he was afraid of her.

“She knew. She was the only person on Earth who knew. I walked on eggshells around her,” he said.

Pou got a neighbor pregnant while he was married to Joyce, an incident that he characterized as “an accident.” The woman gave birth to a daughter.

Pou left Joyce and their two sons. His expert witnesses said he left his second family for the same reason that he abandoned his first family: He was afraid of becoming an abusive father.

Friends said Pou had already left Joyce when he got the neighbor pregnant.

In May, five years after Pou’s disappearance and about six months after he left her, Joyce informed Air Force officials that he was alive.

Barbara Friedman, a psychotherapist who testified on Pou’s behalf, said emotional trauma inflicted on Pou by his father was so overwhelming that he attempted to battle it through overachievement.

He excelled in the military and pushed himself to great physical limits because “his father had made him feel worthless” when he was a child, she said. Pou’s parents divorced when he was 12.

When the stress became unbearable, Pou could no longer deal with his battered emotions and fears of becoming an abusive parent like his father, Friedman testified.

“He left one life because he didn’t know how to make it livable,” she said. “When he left, in his mind he really was dead. When he arrived in San Diego, he really was somebody else.”

Pou, who has served about five months in Air Force custody, is expected to be released from prison in less than a year.