The strange story of William Leslie Arnold

2023-05-18 07:39:36 Written by By Chukwuebuka

William Leslie Arnold was only 16 years old when he killed his parents in 1958. He buried them in the backyard after they refused to let him borrow their car to take his girlfriend to a drive-in movie showing of The Undead.

Arnold went about his life in and around Omaha, Nebraska, telling everyone that his parents had taken a trip. Two weeks later, he was arrested, confessed to the killings, and led investigators to his parents’ makeshift gravesite.

 

 

The following year, he was sentenced to two life sentences in the Nebraska state penitentiary. However, in 1967, Arnold escaped from prison along with another prisoner, James Harding, using masks to fool guards who conducted daily head counts at the prison.

 

 

Arnold and James Harding managed to communicate with someone outside the prison in 1967 by placing newspaper ads in the Lincoln Journal Star. After serving just eight years of a life sentence, the two prisoners received assistance from a former parolee who provided them with the necessary equipment to escape. The parolee obtained masks that Arnold and Harding used to deceive the guards during daily head counts at the prison.

 

 

After escaping from prison with the help of a former parolee, Arnold and James Harding made it to Omaha and then took a bus to Chicago. However, they separated in Chicago, and Arnold's whereabouts became unknown. Although Harding was caught within a year, Arnold seemed to have disappeared without a trace.

 

The escape was considered one of the “cleanest” escapes in the warden’s experience, and Arnold went on the run for half a century.

 

Arnold lived as John Vincent Damon, a much-loved family man, marrying twice and fathering two children. He travelled to Chicago, Miami, California, New Zealand, and finally settled in Australia, where he worked as a salesman. The FBI worked on Arnold’s case into the 1990s, then handed it back to the Nebraska department of corrections, who passed it over to the US Marshals Service.

 

The Investigation

In 2020, the case was handed over to Matthew Westover, a deputy marshal in Nebraska. Westover read "The Mystery of Leslie Arnold," published in the Omaha World-Herald by reporter Henry Cordes in 2017.

 

The article portrayed Arnold sympathetically – as a good student who had a difficult relationship with his parents and shot them after an argument with his mother over his girlfriend. With some irony, the men’s escape was made through the window of the prison music room, and over a 12ft fence using a T-shirt slung over it to protect them from razor wire.

 

Westover worked the case for nine years from 2004 to 2013 and finally got a break when he received an alert of a match and an email from a man in Chicago who said he was looking for his biological father. Westover had uploaded Leslie Arnold's DNA and was tracking any match.

 

The man had asked not to be identified, but he told the investigators he knew his father as John Damon, and Damon had told him he was an orphan.

 

The man asked who his father was and why he’d been in prison. Arnold’s son told CNN that he was glad he now knows the truth about his dad.

 

According to investigators, Arnold and his wife moved to various cities, including Cincinnati, Miami, and Los Angeles, before divorcing in 1978. Records indicate that Arnold relocated to New Zealand in the 1990s and then to Australia later that decade, as confirmed by Westover. Britton mentioned that his family, including Arnold's second wife, had no knowledge of his past life.

 

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Spilled Milk: Based on a True Story

Disturbing story but a great read. A story of pain and hope and beauty and brokenness.

 

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Brooke Nolan is a battered child who makes an anonymous phone call about the escalating brutality in her home.

 

When social services jeopardize her safety, condemning her to keep her father's secret, it's a glass of spilled milk at the dinner table that forces her to speak about the cruelty she's been hiding. In her pursuit of safety and justice, Brooke battles a broken system that pushes to keep her father in the home.

 

When jury members and a love interest congregate to inspire her to fight, she risks losing the support of her family and comes to the realization that some people simply do not want to be saved.

Spilled Milk is a novel of shocking narrative, triumph, and resiliency.

Spilled Milk: Based on a True Story