His son uploaded a DNA sample to Ancestry.com trying to learn about his father's mysterious past. He didn't expect to get a call from a US Marshal.
A Drive-In Movie, and Two Deaths
On the night of September 27, 1958, sixteen-year-old William Leslie Arnold asked his parents, Bill and Opal, if he could borrow the family car to take his girlfriend to see a drive-in showing of The Undead in Omaha, Nebraska. They said no — his mother had reportedly also disapproved of the girlfriend, calling her "white trash." The argument escalated, and Arnold shot both his parents inside their home.
He buried their bodies in the backyard. For two weeks, he told family, friends, and neighbours that his parents had gone on a trip. When his grandparents eventually became suspicious and pressed him, he confessed and led investigators to the graves on October 11, 1958.
He pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison at the Nebraska State Penitentiary in 1959. Prison officials described him as a model inmate who excelled in academic and vocational programs.
The Last Successful Escape
On July 14, 1967, Arnold and a fellow inmate, James Harding, escaped from the Nebraska State Penitentiary by cutting through bars in the prison's music room and scaling a twelve-foot barbed wire fence. They had coordinated the escape partly through coded newspaper ads placed in the Lincoln Journal Star. A former parolee had helped obtain equipment from outside.
The two men traveled together to Chicago, then separated. Harding was recaptured within a year. Arnold disappeared. He remains, to this day, the last inmate to successfully escape from the Nebraska State Penitentiary.
A New Life, a New Name
Within months of his escape, Arnold had adopted the alias John Vincent Damon and married his first wife in Chicago. He worked in a restaurant, then moved west through Cincinnati, Miami, and Los Angeles over the following decade before that marriage ended in divorce in 1978.
He married again and, with his second wife, immigrated first to New Zealand in the 1990s, then to Australia, eventually settling on Tamborine Mountain in Queensland. He worked as a businessman. His children knew only that their father was an orphan from Chicago who didn't talk about his past. Those who knew him described him as a warm, devoted father and a respected community member. His son later told CNN his father had instilled in him a love of music and "a drive to always be the best person I can be."
William Leslie Arnold — alias John Vincent Damon — died on August 6, 2010, from complications related to blood clots. He was 67 years old. He was buried in Australia, thousands of miles from the Nebraska penitentiary where he had been sentenced to spend his life.
A Cold Case That Took Fifty-Five Years
The case never fully closed. The FBI pursued it through the 1990s, then handed it to the Nebraska Department of Corrections, which eventually passed it to the US Marshals Service. Criminal investigator Geoff Britton worked the file through his entire career and obtained a DNA sample from Arnold's younger brother James in 2007, uploading it to criminal databases without a match. When Britton retired in 2013, he handed the case to Deputy US Marshal Matthew Westover in 2020.
Westover uploaded Arnold's brother's DNA to a public genealogy database. In August 2022, a match came in — not through law enforcement channels, but through Ancestry.com. Arnold's son, trying to learn more about his mysterious father, had submitted his own sample. When the DNA matched the brother's, Westover received an alert alongside an email from the son that read: "Hey, I'm trying to find out more information about my father. He was an orphan from Chicago."
"I noticed right away that I had a match that was way higher than anything I'd had before," Westover said. "I was like, 'This is the guy. There's no way this isn't the guy.'"
Westover traveled to Australia to collect a sample from Arnold's grave. DNA analysis confirmed in 2023 that John Vincent Damon and William Leslie Arnold were the same person. The case was formally closed — fifty-five years after the prison escape, and thirteen years after Arnold had already died.
What His Family Said
Arnold's son, who declined to be publicly identified, responded to the revelation with measured words: "There's no warning label on the DNA test kit telling you that 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."
He added: "It was shocking to know that his life began with a terrible crime. His legacy is so much more than that. I want him to be remembered for being a good father and provider to us."
Whether the man who buried his parents in an Omaha backyard at sixteen and the man who raised that family in Queensland were the same person in any meaningful sense is not a question law enforcement gets to answer. The case is closed. Arnold beat the system — and didn't live to find out how close it came to catching him.
Sources
William Leslie Arnold: Loving father exposed as convicted killer — CNN
US Marshals Use DNA Evidence to Close 55-Year-Old Cold Case — US Marshals Service
DNA Test Exposes Australia Family Man as Escaped Nebraska Con — Investigation Discovery