On a sweltering Tuesday afternoon in October 1958, two coffins rested side by side at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Omaha. William and Opal Arnold, 42 and 40, had each been shot six times in the chest with a .22-caliber semi-automatic rifle. The shooter was their 16-year-old son.
Fifty-two years later and more than 8,000 miles away, mourners at Tamborine Mountain Cemetery in Queensland, Australia, buried a beloved father and successful businessman named John Vincent Damon. None of them knew that John Vincent Damon never really existed.
An Elvis fan on Poppleton Avenue
In 1958 Omaha had just been named an All-American City, and its stockyards were the largest in the world. At 6477 Poppleton Avenue, William Arnold, a manager at Watkins Products Company, and Opal, a homemaker, were raising two sons: Jim, 13, and William Leslie, 16, who went by Leslie. His records at Central High describe a polite, above-average student who ran track, wrestled, played clarinet and tenor sax, and slicked back his thick dark hair like Elvis. His only disciplinary mark was for showing up one day without a belt.
That September he quit the band. He had discovered girls, and one in particular: Crystal, whom everyone called Chris.
Six shots over the family car
On Saturday, September 27, 1958, Leslie wanted the family car so he could take Chris to the drive-in. He had recently lied about using it, and Opal said no. He kept pushing, she kept refusing, and Leslie went to his parents' bedroom closet and pulled out the rifle he knew was kept there. Some reports say Opal laughed and said, "what are you going to do? Shoot me?" He fired six shots at her heart. When William came through the door with his arms full of grocery sacks, he shouted, "what have you done?" and reportedly grabbed for the gun. Leslie shot him six times too.
What Leslie did next is almost harder to take in. He dragged the bodies to the basement, rolled up the bloody dining room rug and called a family friend with a made-up story: his grandfather, who had dementia, had wandered off a train in Wyoming, and his parents had rushed off to help find him. Could his little brother Jim stay with her? Then Leslie grabbed the keys to the no-longer-forbidden car, picked up Chris and her brother, and took in a double feature, No Time for Sergeants and The Undead, followed by burgers and malts at Tiner's.
The next night, with a shovel borrowed from a neighbor, he buried his parents in a shallow grave under a lilac bush in the backyard. For two weeks he kept up the lie. He went to school, dumped the bloody rugs in Papio Creek and told his father's office that William had been called away. He returned the shovel caked with mud and a darker brown substance. The neighbor's wife even showed him how to run the washing machine in the basement, standing just feet from where the bodies had lain while he washed his parents' blood out of his clothes.
A lilac bush, a barbed-wire fence
Worried relatives moved in, and a great-uncle, Ben McCammon, insisted on calling the police. "we'd waited long enough," he said later. On October 11, officers searched the property, and Leslie himself led them to the lilac bush. McCammon, who called Leslie a good boy, heard the news from an Omaha World Herald reporter on his doorstep: "How in the Sam Hill could Leslie conceal that and sleep?"
Leslie was tried as an adult, but psychological evaluations led prosecutor John Hanley to reduce the charges to second-degree murder. He told the court, "because of his background and that of his family, this boy merits consideration in this case." Leslie was sentenced to life.
On July 15, 1967, guards at the Nebraska State Penitentiary spotted a shirt caught on the 12-foot barbed-wire fence. Leslie Arnold, now 24, and a fellow inmate had slipped out of the trustee dorm, minimum-security housing earned through good behavior, sometime between the 5 a.m. bed check and 7:30. The warden called it "one of the cleanest getaways I've seen." Police caught the other man in Los Angeles within 10 months. Leslie was gone for good.
A boy who shot both his parents over the family car escaped prison and lived the rest of his life as a gentle father on the other side of the world. His real identity came out seven years after his death, when his own curious son mailed off a DNA test.
An orphan from Chicago
As John Damon, he married in Chicago, moved through Cincinnati and Miami, divorced, remarried in California and moved his new family to Australia. He told them he was an orphan from Chicago. Back in the States, his brother Jim spent decades struggling with shame, grief and nightmares. He found what peace he could by telling himself Leslie was dead.
Jim was right. U.S. Marshal Matt Westover took the case in August 2020 and persuaded Jim to give a DNA sample, a long shot since no DNA had ever been collected from Leslie. Then one of John Damon's sons in Australia, curious about his roots, took a consumer DNA test. It matched a man in Missouri named Jim Arnold. Westover said he was just "ecstatic." The son said, "there's no warning label on the DNA test kit telling you you might not like what you find," though he had no regrets about learning the truth.
The hole at the center
Why would a boy kill his parents over a car? The court-ordered evaluations described a very different home from the tidy one the neighbors saw. Opal was called domineering and controlling. She favored Jim, mocked Leslie's love of music, called Chris "trash" and threw Leslie out of the house at least three times. Once he slept in the stables at a nearby racetrack. She had been hospitalized twice for "nervous breakdowns," the catch-all label of the day for any mental health crisis. William mostly urged Leslie to get along. Jim didn't dispute those accounts but said Leslie's own behavior often started the trouble. One examiner called Leslie a "smoldering volcano" and concluded that "the mother's behavior toward the youth was a force in helping to precipitate his actions."
Plenty of people ended up shielding him. His boyhood friend Jim Child, who later became a Presbyterian minister, bought him a Greyhound ticket to Chicago on his first day out. He kept that secret even from his wife and never felt guilty about it: "Les Arnold was not a psychopath." Geoff Britton, who hunted Leslie for three decades, came to believe justice might be better served by leaving him free. He liked to picture him living a peaceful life far from Poppleton Avenue. Even Westover was relieved he'd never have to arrest a man in his 80s and take him away from his family.
