DNA evidence obtained by US police officials in Nebraska showed that a man living in Australia under the name John Vincent Damon was actually US escaped convict William Leslie Arnold.
Arnold was 16 years old when he killed his parents and buried them in the backyard, US police officials said. Two weeks after their deaths, he told family members and others that their parents had gone on a trip, before confessing to the murders by showing authorities where they were buried.
The teenager, who was sentenced to two life sentences, was said to have been a model prisoner for nearly a decade at the Nebraska State Penitentiary in 1959. However, on July 14, 1967, he escaped from prison with another prisoner. As CNN reported, Arnold and his fugitive friend James Harding escaped over a high barbed wire fence, trying to trick the guards during the count using masks they obtained through a parolee.
Arnold moved in with a woman in Chicago, married, moved to California, and later went to Australia. He spent the rest of his life there, working, starting a family, and eventually died in 2010 as John Vincent Damon.
His family did not know about his past.
According to his son in an interview with the Omaha World Herald, his family never knew about Arnold’s background and only knew that his father was an orphan. Had Arnold’s son not submitted his DNA to a genealogical database, he would probably never have learned of their father’s background, which they describe as a “very good father.”
In 2020, Matthew Westover, the deputy chief of United States police in Nebraska, took over Arnold’s former case. “Someone has left and you have to hand over your cases [when you leave],” Westover told CNN. “One of my friends gave me this case as a joke, you know, like, ‘You’re never going to find this guy.’”
Westover could not find Arnold, but did find his brother, who agreed to give a DNA sample. Major business services don’t allow law enforcement to file DNA applications, but they did, with the brother’s consent, CNN reported.
A match turned out to be in 2022, with Arnold’s son submitting a DNA sample to the DNA database a few years later. So Arnold’s son learned that his father had been arrested and was orphaned because he had killed his parents. It turned out that Arnold, who was wanted as a fugitive for years, also died under a different name.
“There is no warning label on the DNA test kit that says you might not like what you find,” Arnold’s son, who has not been named, told CNN.
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