A Nebraska teenager who shot dead his parents in the 1950s before escaping from prison lived out his life in Australia as a successful businessman and beloved “family man”, DNA tests revealed.
William Leslie Arnold shot and killed his parents at the age of 16 in a dispute over using the family car and buried them in the backyard of their Omaha home.
The teenager kept on going to school for two weeks and acting as if nothing had happened before being arrested. He pleaded guilty to the slayings and in 1959 was given a life sentence in the Nebraska State Penitentiary.
Despite being viewed as a model prisoner, on 14 July 1967, Arnold and another inmate were involved in a jailbreak and went on the run.
Investigators say that Arnold moved to Chicago where he moved in with a woman and worked in the city before moving to California and then to Australia.
The FBI continued to investigate the case until the 1990s when they handed it back to the Nebraska Department of Corrections, who in turn gave it to the US Marshals Service.
Investigators eventually discovered that within three months of his escape, he had married and established an alias, John Damon.
He continued to use that identity when he moved with his second wife to New Zealand in 1992 and then to Australia in 1997, where he built a career as a salesman.
Arnold died in 2010 at the age of 67 from complications caused by blood clots leaving behind a wife and two children, as well as three stepdaughters from his first marriage.
Authorities say that all of the people in his life were completely oblivious to his criminal past.
“It’s a total shock,” Arnold’s stepdaughter Kelly told The Omaha World-Herald, calling the revelation “Mind-blowing.”
“A lot of things that didn’t make sense or were uncomfortable now make sense,” said another stepdaughter, Shawn. “We all need to work our way through it, and that’s what we’re doing.”
A US Marshals Service investigator recently received the results of a DNA comparison from a sample obtained from an Australian man believed to be Arnold’s son to a sample provided by a family member of Arnold. The results indicated a match.
“Even though it’s solved, it’s still a mystery,” said Deputy US Marshal Matt Westover, who cracked the case. “You want to fill in the other pieces of the puzzle.”
