A former Hammond pastor who claimed he was abducted by Satanists in the 1970s and later abandoned his family in Northwest Indiana has been charged with forging documents while he served as mayor of a town in Arkansas.

Ken Williams, 68, who was known as Donald LaRose when he served as pastor of Hessville Baptist Church in 1978, was charged Thursday with felony forgery in Benton County Circuit Court in Arkansas.

After his disappearance from Hammond in 1980, Williams was elected for two terms as mayor of Centerton, Ark., where he signed various official public records under the assumed name "Bruce Kent Williams" from 2000 to 2007.

"I think he deserves this for what he's done," said Bob Hofstra, a Munster man formerly married to Williams' daughter. "I've seen the damage (his disappearance) has caused."

The criminal charges say Williams fraudulently signed tax returns, election documents, and other "government documents."

Williams is eligible for 10 years in prison, although first-time forgery offenders often receive probation, Benton County Prosecuting Attorney Van Stone said Monday.

Stone said the single felony charge against Williams could encompass a wide range of activity that includes forgery, assuming a false identity, and using a false Social Security number.

Records say Williams was born in Allentown, Pa. under the name Donald LaRose in March 1940. The Social Security number he was using in Arkansas belonged to a Norwich, New York man who died in a car crash in 1958.

His long-running ruse posing as Ken Williams in Centerton was exposed last November after the Benton County Daily Record confronted him using photographs that were published in The Hammond Times around the time of his disappearance.

After his fake identity was exposed on Nov. 20, 2007, Williams told The Times he never reached out to his family in Northwest Indiana because he feared for their safety.

Williams told his Hessville parishioners in the late 1970s that he had been abducted in 1975 from a church in Maine, N.Y., by Satanists who erased his memory and dumped him in Minneapolis with a new identity. Just before he disappeared for the second time in 1980, he said shadowy figures were again closing in on him.

But New York police accused him of faking his first abduction, and Williams now claims that his second disappearance was motivated by fear of the criminal underworld, and not Satanists.

Williams' attorney, Doug Norwood of Rogers, Ark., declined to comment about the charges Monday.