Case file 024Conspiracies, Hoaxes & FraudsModern (1980–today)

The Fifth Commandment

In 1958 an Omaha teen shot his parents over the family car, escaped prison and lived free for decades. His son's DNA test finally exposed him.

Jun 23, 202342 min
00:00 / 42:19
Or listen to this episode onApple PodcastsSpotifyYouTube
Share this episode

In this episode

  • What Leslie Arnold did the same evening he shot his parents, and what was playing at the drive-in
  • A shirt on the barbed wire: the 1967 prison break the warden called one of the cleanest he'd seen
  • The consumer DNA test that broke open a 55-year manhunt, and whose curiosity got it mailed in
  • Jim Child, the future Presbyterian minister who helped with the escape, and why he never felt guilty
  • Why the man who hunted Leslie Arnold for three decades came to hope he'd stay free

“there’s no warning label on the DNA test kit telling you you might not like what you find but I don’t regret doing it and I’m glad I now know the truth about my dad.”

The story

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.

The weird part

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.

The transcript

Chapters & full transcript5,815 words
Chapters
  1. 01:34Two funerals, 8,000 miles apart
  2. 07:29The boy on Poppleton Avenue
  3. 10:49Six shots over the family car
  4. 25:18A shirt on the barbed wire
  5. 30:21The marshal and the DNA match
  6. 34:51The smoldering volcano

This transcript was generated automatically from the episode audio and may contain errors. Times are approximate, since ad breaks can shift them by a minute or two.

00:02

Have you done one of those DNA tests, you know, like 23andMe or AncestryDNA? The ones where you spit into a little vial and drop it in the mail and then wait to discover what your genes say about who you are and where you come from. It can be so much fun learning that you're 12% Nordic or that your ancestors come from exotic places you've never dreamed.

00:28

Or maybe learning how much of you can be traced back to the Neanderthals, extinct now for at least 40,000 years. So fun! Until it isn't. Until the moment you learn that spitting into that little vial might reveal that you aren't exactly who you think you are. Because your mother or your father isn't who they claim to be.

00:57

And that knowledge, that knowledge might leave you holding a violent, unthinkable, tragic and terrible truth. And then they got a small beam of light again. True. Stuff. It was a double funeral that Tuesday afternoon in Omaha, October 21st, 1958. It had been hotter than usual, 90 degrees just a week earlier. Two coffins rested side by side.

01:50

Two freshly opened graves waiting, also side by side. The service was private, held at Forest Lawn Cemetery. Being laid to rest that sweltering afternoon was a married couple, William and Opal Arnold. But this isn't a story about growing old together, about a life well-lived and a hard-earned eternal rest. William was just 42.

02:15

His wife was only 40. Their lives were cut brutally short, shot to death in their own home. Six bullets each fired into their chests from a .22-caliber semi-automatic rifle. And even more shocking, who pulled the trigger. Fast forward now 52 years to another funeral. This one on the other side of the world in Queensland, Australia, August 2010.

02:49

It had been rainier than usual, even setting rainfall records in that part of the country. Mourners gathered at Tamborine Mountain Cemetery. This was a service for a beloved father, a successful businessman, and a person widely described to have lived a good, worthy life. His name was John Vincent Damon, and he was 67 years old when he passed.

03:14

What none of the grieving assembled at Damon's graveside knew was that John Vincent Damon was an invention, that he had a secret, one he tried to take to his grave. A secret that stretched more than 8,000 miles from Queensland's tropical islands and sandy beaches and volcanic craters to the endless plains and gently rolling hills of Nebraska.

03:43

But some secrets just won't stay buried. Of all the kinds of murder there are, and there are lots because, you know, people, one is very rare. It's called Parasite. Parasite is the deliberate murder of your own parents or another close family member. According to the Department of Justice, Parasite represents about 2% of all murders.

04:11

Now you might think that number should be higher based on news coverage and true crime shows, but it's just that cases of children killing their parents are so rare and so profoundly shocking that they tend to get a lot of attention and publicity. Like Lizzie Borden, who in 1892 famously took an axe and gave her mother 40 whacks.

04:36

And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41. Lizzie was acquitted of that gruesome crime. And the Menendez brothers, Lyle and Eric, who are currently serving life terms in prison for the 1989 shooting deaths of their parents. Then there's the horrific case of Brazil's Suzanne von Richthofen, who along with her 21-year-old boyfriend and his brother, savagely beat her mother and father to death on Halloween night, 2002.

05:09

She was sentenced to 39 years and 6 months in prison. And Suzanne was just paroled this year. These are crimes that leave us shaken and mystified. These are parents and their children. We think, what bond could be more profound? And yet, because we think there is something innately sacred about the parent-child bond, it follows that murder in these cases must be strictly for the insane.

05:41

But you know what? We're wrong about that. Same people do completely insane things all the time. And sometimes those insane things include parents murdering their children and children. Murdering their parents. So, what about those two grave markers we began with? Separated by more than 50 years and 8,000 miles? How in the world are they connected?

06:21

It all began in Omaha, Nebraska, back in 1958. Omaha had just earned the title, All-American City. 1958 also happened to be the year a young businessman named Warren Buffett purchased his first home in Omaha, the house he still lives in today. It was his first home in Omaha. It was a prosperous place. The Omaha stockyards were the largest in the world back then.

06:48

Livestock from 30 states and Canada flowed through the city. And on any typical day, about $2.5 million worth of livestock was handled. That's $18 million in today's money. Looking at old photos or films of the city back then, it's easy to believe that what you're seeing is the very model of 1950s American heartland wholesomeness.

07:15

The sunshine of nostalgia is so dazzling bright and so golden that it can blind us to the darkness and the cracks and the broken bits hiding just at the edge of the frame. In 1958, William and Opal Arnold were raising their two sons in Omaha in a modest house at 6477 Poppleton Avenue. The couple had been married since 1939.

07:44

Opal had been a June bride, radiant in what her hometown newspaper described as a floor-length pure white gown, her mother's pearls around her neck. William, the youngest son in his family, was dashing in a gray suit with spotless white shoes. After tossing her bouquet of pink tea roses wrapped in white satin ribbons, the couple honeymooned in Colorado Springs and then began their married life in booming Omaha.

08:12

These are the kinds of everyday details and humble little memories that have kind of a way of getting lost when the rest of the story is so violent, so bloody, and so sensational. William went to work every day at Watkins Products Company. Opal was a homemaker. In 1958, their younger son Jim was 13 years old. Their older son, William Leslie, he preferred to go by his middle name, Leslie, was 16.

08:42

Leslie Arnold was a student at Omaha's Central High School whose basketball team narrowly missed winning the state championship in the spring of that year. Leslie Arnold was described as polite, attentive, a quiet boy who liked science and wanted to go to college. His school records indicate that he had above-average intelligence and despite a history of being a rambunctious handful in elementary school, his high school years were mellow.

09:09

In fact, the only disciplinary note in his record was a dress code infraction. He came to school one day without wearing a belt. He was part of Central High's ROTC squad. He ran track, wrestled, and played baseball. He was an Elvis Presley fanatic, going so far as to slick his thick dark hair in an imitation of the king of rock and roll.

09:32

And like his hero, Leslie Arnold was considered a talented musician. He played both clarinet and tenor saxophone in the school band his freshman and sophomore years. But at the beginning of his junior year in high school, September 1958, he quit the band. Leslie Arnold had discovered girls. One girl in particular, her name was Crystal.

09:57

They called her Chris. And at 16, spending time with his girlfriend was Leslie's priority. You know how that goes. You also know that being a teenager is a pretty chaotic experience. Caught between childhood and adulthood in a body that's transforming itself like some kind of mad science experiment. Craving freedom and autonomy, but fenced in at every turn by rules and restrictions that can seem arbitrary and unfair and even insulting.

10:29

You can spray all the golden nostalgia on the 1950s you want, but you'll never be able to paint over human nature. I mean, gee whiz, wouldn't that be swell if you could? The truth is, Leslie Arnold just found himself in territory familiar to most of us. You're not the boss of me, Mom and Dad. And that's how it began. With an argument over Leslie being allowed to use the family car.

10:54

He wanted to take his girl on a date to the drive-in movie. Leslie and his mother were home alone that afternoon when the quarrel began. Opal refused permission. Leslie had recently lied about using the car and she and William must have decided to hold firm and enforce a restriction on his driving privileges. It maybe seems like a small thing to us.

11:21

Something most of us have probably experienced either as a kid or as a parent. Rules are rules and consequences and all that. But tragedy can bloom from even the smallest seed. Leslie continued to insist that he be allowed to take the car. Opal continued to refuse and that was the moment he snapped. Call it blind rage.

11:48

Call it emotional overload. Call it reckless teenage impulsivity. Or maybe what you'll call it is evil. Because what happened next is this. Leslie went into his parents' bedroom opened their closet door and pulled out the .22 caliber semi-automatic rifle he knew was kept there. Opal was in the dining room of the house at 6477 Poppleton Avenue when Leslie took aim.

12:16

Some reports allege that she laughed at the sight of the boy holding the gun saying, what are you going to do? Shoot me? Leslie Arnold did. Leslie Arnold fired six shots at his mother's heart killing her almost instantly. Then his father, William Arnold came through the door. Home from work his arms full of paper grocery sacks he saw Opal on the floor and a spreading pool of blood and shouted, what have you done?

12:45

William allegedly tried to snatch the gun from his son but Leslie raised the rifle again shooting his father six times in the upper torso. Both Arnold's lay dead on the dining room floor, their blood draining into the carpet. The house suddenly terribly silent. It was Saturday, September 27th 1958. There are some stories that feel nearly impossible to imagine yourself in.

13:20

Killing your parents in cold blood over not being allowed to take the family car to the movies feels like that kind of story. And what's just as shocking and unthinkable though what Leslie Arnold did next. First, he dragged the bodies of William and Opal to the basement. Then he rolled up the blood soaked dining room rug and carried it out to the garage.

13:45

Then he picked up the phone and called a family friend Rose Grossman. He spun a tale of a grandfather with dementia, wandering off a train in Wyoming and getting lost. William and Opal, Leslie said, had left in a rush to go assist his grandmother in finding her missing husband. Would it be alright if Jim, his younger brother stayed with her until the Arnold's returned home?

14:11

Of course, replied Mrs. Grossman. I'm happy to help out. Now his younger brother, Jim, had been working as an usher for a rodeo at the nearby Axar Bend racetrack and arena. According to reports, Leslie remained in the family home until 4.30 that afternoon when he scooped up the keys to the no longer forbidden car and drove to fetch the younger boy.

14:38

He delivered Jim to the Grossman home telling his unsuspecting brother the made up story of their parents abrupt departure. Then, Leslie Arnold returned to the house at 64 77 Poppleton Avenue and he got ready for his movie date. He picked up Chris and her brother in the Arnold family car and the trio headed for the 84th and Center drive-in movie theater.

15:03

It was double feature night. The comedy, No Time for Sergeants starring Andy Griffith and Don Knotts and the Roger Corman horror flick, The Undead. Afterward, the three made their way to a drive-in burger and malt shop called Tiner's. Sounds like an episode of the sitcom Happy Days, doesn't it? Well, I mean, that is if on Happy Days, Ritchie Cunningham murdered Howard and Marion and then dumped his kid sister, Joni, off on the Fonz.

15:34

Soon enough though, it was time to take Chris and her brother home and now Leslie had nothing to distract him from his thoughts. He returned home to 64 77 Poppleton Avenue. It was at first unwilling to enter the house. He tried sleeping in the car but the night grew too cold so he crept inside closing himself in his bedroom and cranking the volume up on the radio.

16:03

What was it he was hoping to drown out? Some whisper from the bodies of his parents, William and Opal Arnold, lying beneath his bedroom in the dark basement. He attended church the next morning, though he didn't remain for the entire service. The sermon was about crime. Perhaps he thought it was a message from God meant entirely for him.

16:27

Who knows? What we do know is that later that afternoon, he approached a neighbor and asked if he could borrow a shovel. That night, Leslie Arnold dug a grave in the backyard of his family home. Six feet long, three feet deep, partially tucked under a lilac bush. Somehow, he managed to haul the bodies of his parents, William and Opal, up from the basement, through the back door, and into that freshly dug shallow trench.

16:57

We don't know how he spent that second night alone in the house, William and Opal's makeshift grave just yards from his bed. Maybe it was a dreamless sleep, the bodies exhaustion a gift. And when he opened his eyes the next morning, Monday, September 29th, how long before the horrors of the past two days washed over him all over again?

17:21

Five seconds? Thirty? A full minute? Records show he was very late for school that day. For the next two weeks, Leslie Arnold maintained the fiction that his parents were away. He kept to his usual routines, absent just one day from his classes at Central High. He took the rolled up 8x10 rugs soaked with the blood of his slain parents, along with two more blood-spattered throw rugs, and threw them all into the nearby Papio Creek.

17:55

Knowing that his father typically unlocked the office first thing every morning for the sales team at Watkins Products Company, Leslie reached out to an employee, explained that William Arnold had been called out of town, and met that employee, Walter Oviatt, at the workplace. William Arnold had been a manager at Watkins for 15 years. His failure to appear at work or to communicate in any way was worrisome and out of character.

18:21

Leslie explained that his father had been called away on a family emergency and could one of his assistants please take over? Next, Leslie returned the borrowed shovel. The neighbor, a Mr. Al Vicanti, later told police that he was irritated because the shovel came back caked with mud and some other dark brown substance.

18:43

His wife later told police that she had helped Leslie with the laundry, describing the boy as agitated, something he chalked up to his concern about being unable to wash his clothing. Apparently he didn't know how to operate the laundry machines. So Mrs. Vicanti accompanied him to the basement at 6477 Poppleton Avenue.

19:03

The woman had no idea that as she was instructing Leslie Arnold on how to clean the blood of his murdered parents from his clothing, she was standing mere feet from where their bodies had lain. Things went on like this for several days, Leslie Arnold going about his business. Neighbors reported seeing the younger brother, Jim, at the house a few times.

19:26

Nothing seemed amiss, though Leslie's English teacher later shared that at the time he seemed pale and unwell and his work was slipping. Relatives, though, were increasingly concerned by the abrupt departure of William and Opal and their failure to make contact with anyone. By the beginning of the second week of their absence, William Arnold's elderly parents made the trip to Omaha from their home in North Loop, Nebraska and moved in to 6477 Poppleton Avenue to look after the two boys until their parents might be located.

20:05

And as the hours and days stretched on, the family could no longer contain their fears that something terrible had befallen William and Opal. William's mother did not want to bring the police into the matter, but other family members, led by a great uncle named Ben McCammon, felt that it was past time to seek help from the authorities.

20:28

So on Friday night, October 10th, all of the relatives gathered at 6477 Poppleton Avenue to speak to Leslie Arnold. He was real late getting home that night. He'd been in the bleachers for the Central Tech football game and was described by the family as unconcerned when questioned. But Ben McCammon later told reporters, we'd waited long enough.

20:52

Saturday morning, October 11th, 1958, Ben McCammon was told that police were on their way to 6477 Poppleton Avenue to conduct a search. McCammon immediately went to the home and persuaded the Arnold grandparents to leave. They reluctantly agreed, though Grandma Arnold had just finished hanging a load of clean laundry outside to dry. The basket of wet clothing and wooden laundry pins had been resting on the ground near the lilac bush, just a few feet from where the bodies of her son and daughter-in-law were buried.

21:31

Throngs of neighbors and onlookers watched as law enforcement fanned out across the property. And then Leslie Arnold himself led police to the lilac bush in the backyard. It didn't take long for officers wielding shovels and spades to carefully unearth the bodies of William and Opal Arnold. Opal's legs had been lashed together with a belt.

21:55

Grainy photos tell the story. The suburban backyard framed by chain-link fencing, the soil dark and rich, the uniformed patrol officer bent over his shovel, his face shadowed and unreadable. Not far away, in another tidy Omaha frame house, Ben McCammon answered a knock on the door. It was a reporter and a photographer from the Omaha World Herald.

22:22

They were the ones to break the news that the bodies of the Arnolds had been found and their 16-year-old son Leslie had confessed to their murders. Standing outside with the two members of the press, McCammon insisted on protecting the family members inside the house from hearing a word until police made it official. Calling Leslie a good boy whom he knew well, 59-year-old McCammon said he felt sick inside. He said, How in the Sam Hill could Leslie conceal that and sleep?

22:56

At that moment, a phone inside the house began ringing. The reporter and photographer watched through a window as Ben McCammon took the receiver and collapsed into a chair. It was now official. William and Opal Arnold were gone, shot dead by their firstborn son. Leslie Arnold was arrested and jailed. On Sunday, October 12th, his girlfriend visited him there. Something he said made him feel just a whole lot better.

23:28

The couple had planned to attend church that morning, but his confession of murder had thrown a wrench into those plans. He was also visited by two uncles, one of whom was Ben McCammon. McCammon made the boy promise to not speak of what he'd done. Then the jail chaplain spent some time in Leslie's cell, and a reporter was allowed in that evening.

23:49

Leslie begged the reporter to stay longer, to keep talking with him. It was only his first day behind bars, and already Leslie Arnold found life in lockup intolerably lonely. Leslie Arnold was held without bond, and despite having confessed to the killings, he entered a not-guilty plea in municipal court. The chief deputy county attorney John Hanley said there was no question of this being a matter for district, and not juvenile court. And so an arraignment in district court was scheduled for early January 1959.

24:25

The charges were two counts of first-degree murder. Psychological assessments of Leslie Arnold were ordered by both the prosecution and the After multiple postponements, Leslie Arnold finally had his day in court on June 2, 1959. The same chief deputy county attorney John Hanley, who'd made the decision to try him as an adult, amended the charges to second degree murder, malicious and with purpose, but without premeditation.

24:58

Hanley told the court, quote, because of his background and that of his family, this boy merits consideration in this case. Sixteen-year-old Leslie Arnold was then immediately sentenced to life in prison in the Nebraska State Penitentiary. Fast forward eight years later, July 15, 1967, with the sun dawning on a scorching Saturday morning.

25:28

Prison guards at the Nebraska Penitentiary saw something unexpected. A shirt snagged on the 12-foot-high barbed wire top perimeter fencing. An inmate headcount revealed the two prisoners were missing. James Edward Harding, age 32, and William Leslie Arnold, age 24. The two men had earned their way into a trustee dorm, minimum security housing for inmates who would demonstrate a good behavior. Both men had been marked present at the 5 a.m.

26:00

bed check. Both had vanished by 7.30 a.m. An air and ground manhunt was launched covering Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, and Missouri, but there was no sign of either man. Days went by, and then weeks, and then months. Nebraska Penitentiary Warden Maurice Sigler called the escape, quote, one of the cleanest getaways I've seen.

26:29

It took police 10 months to locate James Harding. He was arrested in Los Angeles and returned to prison with an extra year tacked onto his sentence. But Leslie Arnold was in the wind. Despite dozens of tips, sightings ranging from Oregon to Mexico, Canada to Brazil, he continued to elude capture. The FBI was brought into the case, and still no sign of Leslie Arnold.

26:57

And as the months melted into years, speculation about Arnold's whereabouts only grew. One official said that Leslie Arnold must be dead, because there was simply no chance he could have managed to conceal his true identity for so long. But another disagreed, saying he had a gut feeling that Leslie Arnold had started a new life and made a family of his own somewhere.

27:26

Which turned out to be true. First in Chicago, where under the name John Damon he met and married a woman with daughters. He stayed on the move landing briefly in Cincinnati and Miami before the marriage foundered and the couple divorced. Arnold slash Damon then made his way to California where he remarried. The couple had children and then the family emigrated to Australia.

27:55

Very few escaped fugitives managed to remain free, as Leslie Arnold's prison break accomplice James Harding learned when he was captured less than a year after running away. 90% or more of all fugitives end up right back where they started, just with longer sentences. Leslie Arnold, against all odds, not only remained free, he also managed to leave the country and start an entirely new life in Australia.

28:25

But back home, his only brother Jim, had not fared so well. He struggled with shame, grief guilt, anger and nightmares. It was years before he could bring himself to tell his own children the truth about his past and family. Years before he could bring himself to even return to the house at 6477 Poppleton Avenue. Something he did in 2008 50 years to the day that his big brother gunned down their parents.

28:58

Jim Arnold told a reporter in 2017 that he'd found what peace he could by convincing himself that his brother was dead. That even though he'd somehow forgiven Leslie for the murders he had no desire to ever see him again. As it turns out Jim Arnold was right. In 2017 Leslie Arnold was dead and had been for 7 years. His grave marker in the Tamborine Mountain Cemetery in Queensland, Australia though was carved with a different name John Vincent Damon.

29:36

And it's only thanks to consumer DNA testing and one dogged, obsessed US Marshal named Matt Westover that the real and true story of John Vincent Damon's life was unraveled. When Leslie Arnold emigrated to Australia he settled into life as the kind of husband, father and neighbor that no one would ever suspect of harboring a secret.

30:04

Much less a secret as dark and disturbing as murdering your own parents escaping prison becoming a fugitive and what did that family in Australia know about his past? Matt Westover was assigned to the Leslie Arnold case in August 2020. Three months later he tracked down Leslie's brother Jim, now living in Missouri and persuaded him to provide a DNA sample.

30:34

It was a little bit of a long shot since Leslie Arnold's arrest and incarceration predated DNA. There were no samples of his DNA on file. And despite what you may think about like 23andMe or AncestryDNA law enforcement does not have free, unlimited access to these private databases. AncestryDNA demands search warrants and subpoenas.

31:02

23andMe bluntly states that quote, we do not share customer data with any public databases or with entities that may increase the risk of law enforcement access. Hmm. So if that's the reality why are we always hearing about cold cases being solved this way? Cold cases like the Golden State Killer for example. Investigative genetic genealogy solved that one, right?

31:30

Right, it did. And it's about to solve this case too. It's just a little bit of a dance to get there. One that requires patience persistence and so much luck. Because before we can use genetic genealogy to connect the dots and solve the case we need some genetic relatives out there to start spitting into vials and sending them off in the mail.

31:59

And that's exactly what happened here. One of Leslie Arnold slash John Damon's sons in Australia was curious about his heritage. His father had explained his past to the family by saying that he was an orphan from Chicago. And when that Australian man's DNA hit the databases it pinged a match to one Jim Arnold in Missouri, USA.

32:28

So how did Leslie Arnold slash John Damon's son feel about the discovery that his father was both a killer and a fugitive? Requesting that his anonymity be respected he told CNN quote, there's no warning label on the DNA test kit telling you you might not like what you find but I don't regret doing it and I'm glad I now know the truth about my dad. Then he spoke of the true legacy his father had given the family saying quote, I wanted to be remembered for being a good father and provider to us and instilling me a passion for music and a drive to always be the best person I can be.

33:07

U.S. Marshal Matt Westover who had been waiting and watching and hoping till the New York Times quote, it was thrilling. I won't say it's like hitting the lottery cause I've never hit the lottery. I'm sure that's a pretty good feeling. But I was just ecstatic. Ecstatic sounds like the right word. 64 years after the murder of William and Opal Arnold 55 years after Leslie Arnold's astonishing escape from the Nebraska penitentiary the marshals finally had their man and a family in Queensland Australia had a reckoning of biblical proportions to deal with.

33:49

Westover was sympathetic they knew nothing about Leslie Arnold's true past the man they grieved was a good father, gentle and loving. Westover spoke of how relieved he was that the man was dead how he would not have relished arresting a man in his 80s nor taking that man from his family Matt Westover even made the trip to Queensland and took a photo of Leslie Arnold slash John Damon's grave marker adding a wanted poster and his own badge to commemorate the moment. And you can see that photo right now at trueweirdstuff.com along with others from this case.

34:30

It's quite a story isn't it? But there's a deep black hole at its very center the why who kills their parents in cold blood over not being allowed to drive the family car to the movies let's go all the way back to when it happened. Remember those court ordered psychological evaluations of the teenage Leslie Arnold? The picture that was painted of life at 6477 Poppleton Avenue is a very different family portrait from the one that graced the living room wall Leslie's mother Opal was described as domineering controlling and it was alleged that she showed clear and obvious favoritism for her youngest son Jim that she frequently mocked Leslie's passion for music called his girlfriend Chris trash and kicked Leslie out of the house at least three times on one of those occasions the boy slept in the stables at the nearby Axar Bend track Opal had been hospitalized twice for what were labeled nervous breakdowns. The umbrella term back then for any and all mental health crises. Leslie's father William did little to intervene on the boys behalf instead urging him to just try to get along for the sake of the family.

35:55

His brother Jim did not dispute these accounts but did suggest that there were many occasions where Leslie's bad behavior was the trigger and that Opal was being unfairly blamed the psychiatric evaluation that ultimately made it to court. The evaluation that led the prosecutor in the case to reduce Leslie's charges to second degree murder noted that the circumstances of the boy's home life argued for leniency the report described Leslie as a smoldering volcano and it concluded quote it is this examiner's opinion that the mother's behavior toward the youth was a force in helping to precipitate his actions.

36:41

If this sounds like wow throw back to Freud and let's blame the mother for everything I get it raise my hackles too. But we do have to remember the time and the context. Back then and it's not all that much better now for being honest mental health issues were poorly understood and stigmatized in the extreme. Even as a child Jim Arnold knew that his mom was sick in some way but what that meant he was not exactly sure and while the Arnold's extended family and community also seemed to know that things that 6477 Poppleton Avenue were volatile and not quite right they minded their own business they were tight-lipped and as you're about to find out protective of Leslie Arnold before and after the murders of William and Opal. That prison escape so unlikely to succeed how did he pull it off? The answer is he had some help it was a boyhood friend named Jim Child a boy who grew up to be a Presbyterian minister and a man with no regrets about the role he played in the story of a fugitive escaping justice for the crime of double murder. The two boys grew up playing football together building model airplanes roughhousing picture an episode of Leave it to Beaver it was Jim Child that Leslie Arnold called on that first day of stolen freedom it was Jim Child who purchased the ticket and put Leslie Arnold on a Greyhound bus to Chicago in July 1967 that was the last time the two friends ever saw each other and though Jim Child told a reporter in 2017 that he was a little bit hurt and even resentful that he never heard from Leslie again he wished him the best and hoped he'd found happiness the retired minister said that he was aware he'd committed the crime of aiding and abetting a fugitive and that he kept it a secret from everyone including his wife but that he felt no guilt for his actions he described Leslie as a good person caught in a terrible situation the kind of person who would not go on to commit further crimes he said it was simple Les Arnold was not a psychopath and even Leslie Arnold's longest and most fervent pursuer a man named Geoff Britton came to feel just so ambivalent about finding the man and returning him to prison Britton spent three decades hunting for Leslie Arnold but he came to believe that justice might be better served by allowing him to remain free Britton felt his age at the time the murders were committed the fact that he proved to be a model inmate the number of years that had passed since the escape all added up for him to I don't know maybe he just let sleeping dogs lie Britton who's now chief of the office of law enforcement support for the state of California said that he liked to imagine Leslie Arnold living a peaceful life one far far away from the strained and painful reality he'd known at 6477 Poppleton Avenue a home that presented such a tidy and cozy and perfect face to the outside world but where the darkness inside had driven a troubled boy to next time on

40:44

true weird stuff everybody loves dinosaurs right you haven't known about them for all that long and it's a wonder we know about them at all because at the very heart of the discovery of dinosaurs were a couple of dudes fighting and feuding and trying to destroy each other phone wars on the next true weird stuff and if you listen to us on apple podcast hit the plus button in the top right corner and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered and we really appreciate it if you subscribe rate and review true weird stuff hit our website true weird stuff dot com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content everything true weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff dot com and follow true weird stuff on instagram and twitter true weird stuff is a Now! Media production our executive producer is anthony garcia the show is written and hosted by me Sheri Lynch along with my deeper weird director Max Sweeten our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser additional production by the mysterious steven call our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr original graphics by kevin nash original artworks by Olivia Axland true weird original music composed and performed by jack griffin and same nash copyright 2023 Now! Media all rights reserved all wrongs remember you

One new weird tale a week.

The strangest true stories in history, in your inbox.

Unsubscribe anytime. Privacy policy.