The Perfect Crime

The argument that cost Bill and Opal Arnold their lives lasted exactly seven minutes. Their sixteen-year-old son wanted to borrow the family car to take his girlfriend to the drive-in theater on a Friday night in September 1958. They said no. Most teenagers would have slammed a bedroom door, sulked through dinner, maybe stormed out to a friend’s house. William Leslie Arnold walked to his father’s closet, retrieved a .22 caliber rifle, and shot both his parents dead in their Omaha, Nebraska home.

What happened next reveals a chilling capacity for compartmentalization that would serve Arnold well for the next fifty-two years. After killing his parents over permission to use the car, he took that very car and drove his unsuspecting girlfriend to the Sunset Drive-In for a double feature. They watched The Undead and another horror film while Bill and Opal Arnold’s bodies lay cooling in the basement of the family home on North 30th Street.

“He went to the movies,” retired criminal investigator Geoff Britton would later marvel, his voice still carrying disbelief decades after reviewing the case files. “He had just killed both parents because they wouldn’t let him use the car to go to the drive-in. Then he took the car, picked up his girlfriend, and watched horror movies like it was just another Friday night.”

But the performance had only begun.

Two Weeks of Normal

When young Leslie Arnold returned home from the drive-in that September night in 1958, he faced a problem that would have paralyzed most people: two dead bodies in his basement and a younger brother who would soon be home. His solution demonstrated a disturbing maturity and planning capability unusual for a sixteen-year-old.

First, he took his younger brother James to a neighbor’s house, claiming their parents needed them out of the way for some home repairs. Then, under cover of darkness, he dug a trench in the backyard—the same yard where he’d played as a child, where neighborhood kids rode bicycles, where his mother had planted tulips every spring. He wrapped his parents’ bodies and buried them in shallow graves, covering the disturbed earth carefully enough that casual observers wouldn’t notice.

For the next two weeks, William Leslie Arnold lived alone in the house and attended Omaha North High School as if nothing had changed. His neighbors described him as “high strung” but intelligent—a B-average student involved in ROTC, talented but temperamental. When friends asked where his parents had gone, he offered a simple explanation: they’d taken a sudden trip out of town. Business, he said vaguely, or maybe visiting relatives. The details changed depending on who asked, but the core story remained consistent enough that most people accepted it without question.

“He continued going to school, doing his homework, hanging out with friends,” Britton explained. “Nobody suspected anything was wrong. He was living in that house with his parents buried in the backyard, and he acted completely normal.”

It was a performance worthy of a psychopath, but even the best performances eventually end.

The Unraveling

After two weeks, the questions became more insistent. Bill Arnold owned the Omaha regional office of Watkins Products, a direct-sales company, and his unexplained absence was starting to concern business associates. Opal Arnold had missed several social obligations without explanation. Relatives who tried to reach the couple by phone got only their teenage son, offering the same vague reassurances about their mysterious trip.

Finally, on October 11, 1958, the pressure became too much. When confronted by increasingly suspicious adults, sixteen-year-old Leslie Arnold’s careful facade cracked. He confessed to the murders and led police to the backyard graves, standing between the officers in his teenage clothing as they exhumed his parents’ bodies from the earth he’d so carefully packed down two weeks earlier.

The black and white photographs from that day show a slender boy with dark hair, flanked by law enforcement officers, pointing to the ground where his mother and father lay buried. His expression in those photos is eerily blank—not defiant, not remorseful, just empty. As if the magnitude of what he’d done existed in some separate compartment of his mind that didn’t quite connect to his face.

The confession was straightforward and chilling in its simplicity. Yes, he’d killed them. Yes, over the car. Yes, he’d gone to the movies afterward. Yes, he’d lived in the house with their bodies in the basement and then in the backyard. No, he didn’t know why he’d done it. Or maybe he just didn’t want to explain the rage that could drive a teenager to murder over such a trivial slight.

Nebraska in 1958 didn’t have the death penalty for juveniles, but it did have life sentences. On his guilty plea, William Leslie Arnold was sentenced to two concurrent life terms in the Nebraska State Penitentiary. He was sixteen years old, and by all appearances, his life was over before it had really begun.

But Leslie Arnold had already demonstrated a remarkable capacity for playing the long game.

The Model Prisoner

The Nebraska State Penitentiary in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a fortress designed to hold men who’d committed the worst crimes imaginable. Surrounded by high walls topped with barbed wire, monitored by armed guards, it seemed escape-proof. Indeed, Leslie Arnold would eventually become the last person to ever successfully escape from the facility—a dubious honor that speaks to both his determination and the prison’s subsequent improvements to security.

But for nearly a decade, escape seemed to be the furthest thing from Arnold’s mind. Prison officials described him as a “model prisoner”—quiet, respectful, following all rules, causing no trouble whatsoever. He participated in educational programs, worked his assigned jobs without complaint, and showed such exemplary behavior that he could have qualified for early parole consideration.

“He was the kind of inmate that makes a warden’s job easier,” one official would later note. “No fights, no disciplinary infractions, just a quiet kid who seemed to be genuinely trying to rehabilitate himself.”

It was all a performance. For eight years, Leslie Arnold played the role of the reformed young man, the tragic case of a teenager who’d made one terrible mistake and was working hard to earn redemption. And all the while, he was planning.

The Conspiracy

In 1967, Leslie Arnold and fellow inmate James Harding began communicating with the outside world through an elaborate scheme involving classified ads in the Lincoln Journal Star newspaper. The ads were coded messages, seemingly innocent personal notices that actually contained instructions for a recently released parolee who was willing to help the inmates escape.

“I was able to pinpoint the individual who aided them in acquiring the tools for their escape—it was a former parolee,” Britton explained decades later, having painstakingly reconstructed the conspiracy from old newspaper clippings and prison records. “He provided the saw blades they needed to cut through the window bars, and the rubber masks they used to fool the guards during head counts.”

The plan was audacious in its simplicity. The parolee tossed the contraband into the prison yard during visiting hours, hidden among other items that wouldn’t raise immediate suspicion. Arnold and Harding retrieved the saw blades and masks, then began their meticulous preparation.

Over several weeks, they sawed through the bars of a window in the prison’s music room—a lower-security area where inmates were allowed some freedom to practice instruments and engage in cultural activities. But rather than removing the bars immediately, they used chewing gum to hold the sawed sections in place, maintaining the illusion of integrity while creating a secret exit they could use when the moment was right.

They fashioned crude dummies using pillows and clothing, then attached the rubber masks to create convincing decoys that could fool guards during nighttime head counts, at least for long enough to give them a head start.

And then they waited for the perfect night.

July 14, 1967: The Last Escape

The night they chose was warm and dark, with cloud cover that would help conceal their movements. At the appointed hour, Leslie Arnold and James Harding removed the pre-sawed window bars, slipped through the opening, and faced their greatest obstacle: a twelve-foot-high barbed wire fence surrounding the prison perimeter.

Using a T-shirt to protect themselves from the razor-sharp barbs, they scaled the fence in the darkness, dropped to the ground on the other side, and ran. Behind them, their pillow-and-mask dummies sat in their bunks, buying them precious hours before the alarm would sound.

By the time prison guards discovered the escape during the morning head count, Arnold and Harding were already halfway to Chicago on a Greyhound bus, leaving Nebraska behind and heading east toward the anonymity of big-city America.

The escape triggered a massive manhunt. Helicopters swept across four states. Fixed-wing aircraft joined the search. Law enforcement from Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri coordinated their efforts. Newspapers ran photos of the escapees, warning the public that two dangerous criminals were on the loose—one a murderer who’d killed his own parents, the other a violent offender with nothing to lose.

Three months later, the prison warden would describe it as the “cleanest” escape he’d ever witnessed—a grudging acknowledgment of how perfectly Arnold and Harding had executed their plan.

But the manhunt found nothing. It was as if Leslie Arnold had vanished into thin air.

The Vanishing

In Chicago, Arnold and Harding went their separate ways. Harding’s freedom lasted less than a year before he was recaptured, returned to Nebraska, and given additional sentences for the escape. He eventually served his time and was released decades later, just another ex-convict with a story about the one who got away.

Leslie Arnold, meanwhile, had learned from his teenage mistake. This time, there would be no confession, no cracking under pressure. This time, he would disappear completely.

He moved in with a woman on Chicago’s northwest side, found work through connections that didn’t require extensive background checks, and began building a new identity. Within three months of his escape, he was married—a quick ceremony that gave him legitimacy, a new name through marriage documentation, and a partner who knew nothing about the boy from Omaha who’d murdered his parents over a car.

The FBI worked the case aggressively through the 1960s and into the 1990s, following leads across the country. Rumors placed Arnold in South America, in Canada, in California. Every tip was investigated, every sighting checked. But none of them led anywhere solid.

“The trail just went cold,” Britton said. “We had nothing. It was like he’d learned how to be a ghost.”

By the time the FBI finally scaled back their investigation in the 1990s and handed the case to the Nebraska Department of Corrections, and eventually to the U.S. Marshals Service, Leslie Arnold had been free longer than he’d been imprisoned. The boy who’d killed his parents at sixteen was now in his fifties, living somewhere under a name nobody knew, with a past he’d successfully buried deeper than the bodies in that Omaha backyard.

Investigators refused to give up entirely, but resources dwindled. The case became a cold file, reviewed periodically but generating no new leads. The only people who still thought about William Leslie Arnold regularly were his younger brother James—who’d been at a neighbor’s house the night of the murders—and the aging detectives who couldn’t quite let go of the one that got away.

None of them knew that Leslie Arnold hadn’t fled to South America or hidden in some remote wilderness. He’d done something far more effective: he’d become John Vincent Damon, a businessman and family man living in plain sight on the other side of the world, in a country so far from Omaha that nobody would ever think to look there.

He’d gone to Australia. And there, he’d built a perfect life.

The Man Who Never Existed

A New Life, Half a World Away

When John Vincent Damon stepped off the plane in Auckland, New Zealand in 1978, he was thirty-six years old and carrying a past he’d successfully buried for eleven years. He’d spent the decade after his escape moving strategically—Chicago to California to Florida, always staying mobile, always keeping connections loose enough that he could disappear if necessary.

But by the late 1970s, Leslie Arnold had perfected the art of being John Damon. He had documents, a work history, references from employers who knew him only as the hardworking American expat looking for a fresh start in the Pacific. He had a believable backstory: orphan from Chicago, raised in the foster system, no family to speak of, just a man trying to build something from nothing.

New Zealand offered what he needed most—distance from America and the chance to truly start over. The country was English-speaking but culturally distinct enough that his American accent and mannerisms wouldn’t raise questions. It was modern enough for opportunity but remote enough for anonymity.

He found work as a salesman, a profession that suited his charm and ability to read people. The same skills that had allowed a sixteen-year-old murderer to convince neighbors his parents were on vacation, that had made him a model prisoner for eight years while planning an escape, now helped him sell products and build relationships with people who would never suspect the darkness in his past.

Within two years, he’d met his second wife, a woman who saw in John Damon exactly what he wanted her to see: a self-made man with a difficult past who’d overcome the tragedy of growing up without family. She didn’t question the story too deeply. Why would she? The man she fell in love with was kind, reliable, and devoted.

The Family Man

By the early 1980s, John Damon had crossed the Tasman Sea to Australia, settling eventually in the lush, mountainous region of Tamborine Mountain in Queensland. The area was known for its natural beauty, its tight-knit community of artists and retirees, its distance from the chaos of cities like Sydney or Melbourne.

He and his second wife built a life there. They had children—part of the six children Arnold would father across two marriages. He became the father he’d never had himself, or perhaps the father he’d murdered in that Omaha basement twenty-two years earlier.

Those who knew John Damon in Tamborine Mountain describe a man who was deeply involved in his children’s lives. He attended school events, helped with homework, taught his kids to appreciate music—particularly the saxophone, which he’d learned to play during those eight years as a “model prisoner” in Nebraska.

“He was a great father,” neighbors would later say when journalists came asking questions after the truth emerged. “He loved those kids. He was always there for them.”

The irony was almost unbearable. William Leslie Arnold had killed his own parents in a rage over something as trivial as car keys. Now, as John Damon, he was raising children with patience and care, showing up day after day to be the steady presence in their lives that he’d violently rejected in his own youth.

He worked as a businessman and salesman, cultivating relationships with local clients and building a reputation as someone you could trust. He played his saxophone in local gatherings, became a familiar face at community events, contributed to the fabric of Tamborine Mountain life.

And through it all, he maintained the fundamental lie: that he was an orphan, that his family history began when he emerged from Chicago’s foster system, that there was nothing to know about his past because there was nothing to tell.

The Weight of Secrets

What must it have been like to live that lie for forty-three years? To celebrate Father’s Day knowing you’d murdered your own father? To tuck your children into bed at night with the same hands that had pulled a trigger and buried bodies in a backyard garden?

Psychology tells us that most people who commit terrible crimes and then reinvent themselves live in a state of compartmentalization—separating their past actions from their present identity so completely that they can function as if they’re two different people. The sixteen-year-old killer named Leslie Arnold existed in one sealed mental compartment. The loving father and community member named John Damon existed in another. And never the two shall meet.

But there must have been moments. A news story about a murder case in Nebraska. An American accent that sounded like home. The smell of turned earth that triggered unwanted memories. Did John Damon ever wake in the middle of the night in his comfortable Australian home, heart pounding, convinced that the past had finally caught up with him?

If he did, he never let it show. His children would later say they had no indication whatsoever that their father was anything other than what he claimed to be. The performance was complete, sustained across decades, unbroken until his death.

In 2010, at the age of sixty-seven, John Vincent Damon died in Tamborine Mountain from complications related to blood clots. His obituary told the story of a beloved father, grandfather, friend, and community member. There was grief at his funeral—real grief from people who’d known him for decades, who’d trusted him, who’d loved him.

His children mourned a father who’d been present and caring. His wife mourned a husband who’d been devoted. His friends mourned a good man they’d been privileged to know.

And halfway around the world in Nebraska, James Arnold—Leslie’s younger brother who’d been at a neighbor’s house the night of the murders—didn’t know his brother was dead. The investigators tracking the cold case didn’t know either. As far as anyone in America was concerned, William Leslie Arnold was still out there somewhere, a ghost who’d successfully evaded justice for forty-three years.

The perfect crime, it seemed, had stayed perfect until the very end.

The Son Who Wanted Answers

But John Damon’s death in 2010 planted the seed that would eventually unravel everything he’d built. His son—one of the children who’d grown up believing his father was an orphan—was nineteen years old when John died. Old enough to grieve, but also old enough to want answers about the family history his father had always claimed didn’t exist.

For several years, those questions remained dormant, buried under the immediate practicalities of loss and the process of moving forward. But they never quite went away. Why had his father been so vague about his childhood? Why were there no photos from before his twenties? Why did his father’s stories about growing up always have this hazy, unspecific quality, lacking the kind of concrete details that real memories contain?

In 2018, eight years after his father’s death, John Damon’s son decided to pursue the questions more actively. He traveled to Chicago—the city his father had claimed as his birthplace and childhood home. He went to city records offices, searching for a birth certificate for John Vincent Damon born in the early 1940s.

What he found was deeply unsettling: the birth certificate existed, but officials told him it appeared to be falsified. The document was there, but the details didn’t check out against other records. It was as if someone had created the paperwork to support an identity that didn’t have genuine roots.

The son returned to Australia with more questions than answers. His father hadn’t been lying about being an orphan—he’d been lying about everything. John Vincent Damon hadn’t existed as a real person until William Leslie Arnold needed him to.

The DNA Test That Changed Everything

By 2022, at-home DNA testing had become commonplace. Services like Ancestry.com and 23andMe offered not just genetic health information but also family connections—distant cousins, unknown relatives, the chance to build a family tree that stretched back generations.

For John Damon’s son, now in his early thirties, the appeal was irresistible. If his father’s identity was fabricated, maybe DNA could tell him the truth. Maybe somewhere in a database of millions of genetic profiles, there were people who shared his DNA—people who could tell him who his father really was.

He ordered a kit, swabbed the inside of his cheek, sent it back, and waited for the results.

What he didn’t know was that three years earlier, in 2020, U.S. Marshals investigating the William Leslie Arnold cold case had approached James Arnold—Leslie’s younger brother, now an elderly man who’d lived his entire life with the trauma of what his older brother had done. They’d asked James to submit his DNA to a genealogy database, hoping that if Arnold had children somewhere, their DNA might eventually create a match.

It was a long shot. Arnold had been on the run for fifty-three years at that point. He could be dead. He might never have had children. And even if he had, there was no guarantee those children would ever take a DNA test and upload the results to a database that law enforcement could access.

But genetic genealogy had been solving cold cases across America—identifying the Golden State Killer, finding Baby Holly’s family, connecting adoptees to biological relatives. It was worth trying.

When John Damon’s son’s DNA results came back in 2022, they showed something unexpected: a close family match to someone in the United States. Not a distant cousin, but someone with enough shared DNA to indicate a direct familial relationship.

The Ancestry database flagged the connection and, as per protocol for law enforcement requests involving serious crimes, notified the U.S. Marshals Service that they had a potential match to the DNA sample James Arnold had provided.

The Investigation Closes

Deputy U.S. Marshal Matt Westover in Nebraska received the notification in late 2022 or early 2023. After decades of dead ends, false sightings, and cold trails, they finally had something solid: genetic proof that William Leslie Arnold had made it to Australia, had lived there under an assumed name, and had fathered children who knew nothing about his past.

The Marshals initiated contact with John Damon’s son through official channels, carefully and respectfully. This was a young man who’d lost his father twelve years earlier and was simply trying to learn more about his family history. He didn’t deserve to have that curiosity punished with shocking revelations delivered carelessly.

But the truth had to be told: his father, John Vincent Damon, had actually been William Leslie Arnold, a convicted murderer who’d escaped from a Nebraska prison in 1967 and successfully evaded capture for forty-three years until his natural death in 2010.

The man he’d known as a loving, present father had killed his own parents at sixteen over a dispute about car keys, buried them in their backyard, and lived in their house for two weeks before being caught. He’d served only eight years before escaping and building an entirely fabricated identity that he’d maintained perfectly until his death.

On May 10, 2023, the U.S. Marshals Service issued a press release officially closing the case. Scott E. Kracl, U.S. Marshal for the District of Nebraska, stated: “This case is not only a great example of how modern technology helps us solve cases and find people, but it also illustrates the tenacity of this agency in its relentless pursuit of justice.”

“I want to commend the Deputy U.S. Marshals and our law enforcement partners who put in long hours over the years to bring this story to an end,” Kracl continued.

But for John Damon’s family, this wasn’t an ending—it was a devastating revelation that reframed their entire lives.

The Aftermath: Living With the Truth

How do you process the discovery that your loving father was actually a murderer who’d been running from justice your entire life? How do you reconcile the man who helped with your homework and attended your school events with the teenager who shot his parents and went to the movies?

John Damon’s children have largely remained silent in the media, protecting their privacy as they grapple with an impossible psychological burden. The father they knew was real—his love for them was real, his presence in their lives was real. But the foundation of that life was built on lies, murder, and a decades-long escape from consequences.

The neighbors and friends in Tamborine Mountain who’d known John Damon struggled with similar cognitive dissonance. “He was a great father,” they insisted to journalists. How could a great father be a murderer? How could a murderer be a great father?

But perhaps the most tragic figure in this entire story is James Arnold, the younger brother who was at a neighbor’s house the night his parents were killed. He’d lived for seventy years with the trauma of what his brother did, the loss of his parents, and the knowledge that Leslie had escaped justice.

When the Marshals asked him to provide DNA in 2020, it reopened wounds that had never fully healed. And when the match was confirmed in 2023, he learned that his brother had lived free for forty-three years, had raised a family, had died peacefully of natural causes without ever facing the consequences for what he’d done to their parents.

Was there justice in finally identifying William Leslie Arnold? In a technical sense, yes—the case was closed, the fugitive was found, the mystery was solved. But Arnold had died thirteen years earlier, having lived most of his life as a free man, loved by people who never knew his true identity.

The Questions That Remain

The case of William Leslie Arnold raises uncomfortable questions about identity, redemption, and justice. If a murderer escapes, assumes a new identity, and lives the rest of his life as a good person—a loving father, a contributing member of society—does that constitute redemption? Or does it simply prove that the capacity for compartmentalization is deeper than we want to believe?

Could Leslie Arnold have become genuinely different from the violent teenager who murdered his parents? Or was John Damon simply another performance, as calculated as the two weeks he spent pretending his parents were on vacation while their bodies decomposed in the backyard?

We’ll never know. Arnold took those answers to his grave in 2010, leaving behind children who mourn a father they loved but never really knew, and a brother who lost his parents to violence and his brother to successful escape.

What we do know is this: William Leslie Arnold committed a horrific crime at sixteen, served only eight years of a life sentence, executed a nearly perfect escape, and successfully evaded one of the world’s most sophisticated law enforcement systems for forty-three years. He became someone else so completely that his own children never suspected. And he died peacefully, surrounded by people who loved the person he pretended to be.

It took a DNA test—a simple mail-order kit purchased by a son trying to understand his father’s mysterious past—to finally bring the truth to light, more than sixty years after the murders in that Omaha backyard.

The last successful escapee from the Nebraska State Penitentiary had been found. But the justice William Leslie Arnold evaded in 1967 would never be served. He’d beaten the system, buried his past deeper than he’d buried his parents’ bodies, and disappeared into a new life with a thoroughness that would have been impossible in today’s interconnected, digitally-surveilled world.

His story stands as a testament to the limits of justice, the possibilities of reinvention, and the dark truth that sometimes the people we love most are also complete mysteries to us—strangers wearing familiar faces, living entire secret lives behind eyes we thought we knew.