Recent DNA evidence has revealed that a Nebraska teenager who fatally shot his parents in the Nineteen Fifties after which escaped prison lived his life in Australia as a successful businessman, devoted husband and loving father, whose family only learned of his dark past death.
Leslie Arnold, then 16, killed his parents after a dispute over the use of the family automobile, then buried their bodies in the front yard of their home in Omaha.
He went to highschool for over a week as if nothing had happened.
Nevertheless, suspicions quickly escalated and he confessed to a gruesome double murder before being sentenced to life in prison.
Lower than a decade later, he escaped from Nebraska State Prison.
On the trail of confused law enforcement officers, he secretly made a recent life for himself as John Damon.
In 2022, greater than a decade after his death, his son put his DNA into a public database and learned an astonishing truth.
“It was just absolutely shocking,” said Arnold’s son, who asked Fox News Digital to withhold his name. “It still doesn’t feel real.”
Murders
After Arnold’s mother Opal Arnold rescinded a suggestion to let him take his girlfriend Crystal in the recent Mercury family sedan to a drive-in, he became enraged.
Tensions over his relationship with a girl his mother called “white trash,” said Matthew Westover, a U.S. Sheriff’s deputy who solved the case greater than 50 years after Arnold’s daring escape from prison.
Arnold retrieved the rifle from his parents’ room on September 27, 1958, and confronted his mother.
“What are you going to do, shoot me?” she laughed.
The teenager responded with six trigger pulls.
A couple of minutes later, his dad, Bill Arnold, walked in with shopping bags under his arms.
The 2 fought and Arnold shot him.
Westover said the mother favored her youngest son, James, then 13, and was often harsh with Arnold.
There have been also reports that she suffered from mental illness.
After the bloodbath, Arnold took his girlfriend to the cinema, where they watched the horror film “Undead”.
He later left his brother at a neighbor’s house, claiming that his parents needed to go on an emergency trip to assist his grandparents.
The subsequent night, Arnold buried his parents’ bodies in the middle of the night in a shallow grave under a lilac bush.
Nevertheless, the horror was soon revealed when his grandparents showed up searching for Opal and Bill and he confessed to their murders.
Arnold, a gifted saxophonist and an completed student, was generally known as a respected kid in his Midwestern town, which made the heinous killings much more shocking to the locals.
Before Arnold pleaded guilty, he sent a letter of apology to his neighbor.
“[My parents] they were great people. I came upon about it too late and I’m sorry,” he wrote in an interview with the Omaha World-Herald. “How I ever went so unsuitable, I’ll never know.”
Escape
After serving only eight years behind bars, Arnold and fellow inmate James Harding devised an escape plan with the help of a recent parolee who threw saw blades and rubber masks into the prison yard.
The boys sawed off the window bars in the facility’s music room, then used chewing gum to carry them in place until they escaped.
They attached rubber masks to their pillows to idiot prison guards.
On July 14, 1967, the couple slipped out of a window and climbed a 12-meter barbed-wire fence.
They were halfway to Chicago before their disappearance was discovered, said Geoff Britton, a retired investigator with the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services who has spent years investigating the case.
Freedom
Arnold soon settled in Chicago and married a divorcee with 4 daughters lower than six months after eloping.
The fugitive obtained false IDs, assumed the name of John Damon, and have become a salesman.
Westover said the family moved to Cincinnati after which to Miami to avoid detection.
Nevertheless, the marriage soon fell apart, and Arnold severed all ties with his stepdaughters after the divorce.
He met his second wife in Los Angeles, a foreign exchange student with whom he had a son and a daughter.
The family moved to Recent Zealand in 1992 before settling in Australia in 1997.
Arnold earned a decent living and spared no expense in educating his children, his son noted.
“He was almost overly supportive,” he said. “He was passionate and wanted my sister and I to have the best experience and opportunity possible.”
Although Arnold was a gifted saxophonist, his son had never heard him play the instrument.
He told his family that he was an orphan from Chicago and kept a small circle of friends. “The whole lot he told us was at all times fragments of truth,” recalled his son.
Arnold died on August 6, 2010, after several years of battling thrombosis.
Investigation
Britton obsessed over Arnold’s case from 2004 to 2013, when he left his department.
Despite his diligence, Britton’s probe yielded few results.
His goal’s escape took place five years before Britton was born. “[Arnold] had a significant advantage,” Britton joked.
He obtained DNA from Arnold’s brother around 2007 and submitted a profile to varied criminal databases, but there have been no hits to relatives.
Public databases like 23andMe and Ancestry.com weren’t yet popular.
The case got here to Westover’s desk in 2020.
“It was form of like a joke,” he said. “Here is a closed case that may never be solved. But U.S. Marshals, we’re not giving up.”
Westover decided to submit James Arnold’s DNA sample, with his consent, to a public database in late 2020.
Nevertheless, there have been no even matches.
That modified in August 2022, when Westover received word that James’ DNA matched his nephew’s.
It was Leslie Arnold’s son.
“I could not imagine it. [The son] said his dad was an orphan from Chicago,” recalls Westover.
They exchanged a few messages before meeting via Zoom, and Westover pleaded guilty. He told Arnold’s son that he was a U.S. Marshal searching for his fugitive father.
“I said, ‘Well, he was actually an orphan. Your dad wasn’t lying about that. He was an orphan because he killed his parents,” Westover told him. “It was pretty hard at that time. He was just blown away.
Westover traveled to Australia to try to acquire a DNA sample of Arnold and take a photo of his grave.
Britton said the case modified his view of rehabilitation. “I’m not minimizing his crimes, but the view I once had of him has now modified,” he said.
Coping with the truth
Arnold’s son, who gave birth to his first child 4 months ago, has had almost a 12 months to process the stunning revelations about his father.
“I don’t desire to sweeten the story,” he said. “He was a great father and I feel very lucky for the life I’ve had, but I do know other people have suffered due to his actions.”
His uncle’s childhood was shattered after he suddenly lost each his parents and was raised by relatives he barely knew.
“I take into consideration this case almost day by day,” James Arnold told the Omaha World-Herald in 2017, adding that he had spent a long time crippled by shame, fear and guilt.
Arnold’s son said he believed his father, whom he described as very intelligent and motivated, felt remorse for what he had done and spent his entire life looking over his shoulder.
After Arnold died, his bible was found by his son. “There have been a lot of underlined lines about sin, guilt and forgiveness,” he said. “I believe it weighed heavily on his heart for the remainder of his life.”