The good father who killed his own

The secrets are not even safe in the grave.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
22 May 2023 Monday 10:45
13 Reads
The good father who killed his own

The secrets are not even safe in the grave.

In the photographs you can see the plaque that identifies the place where John Vincent Damon (August 1, 1941-August 6, 2010) rests, buried in Brisbane, Australia, the country to which he emigrated from the United States in the decade of the nineties

Until he died at age 69, his family and friends considered him a successful businessman and a good father to his children. He always exemplary and discreet. Precisely the desire of one of his descendants to find out more about him, beyond the fact that he had been told that he was "an orphan from Chicago", has led to a discovery never imagined by that son.

In his investigation he went to a private DNA bank and was right. A correspondence ensued. He was unaware that behind this coincidence was the deputy chief of the Nebraska marshal's office, Matthew Westover, a bloodhound obsessed with finding the whereabouts of an inmate who escaped from the state penitentiary in 1967, an open case that was considered lost.

Westover explained to CNN that, on a video call with Australia, it was hard to explain the truth to that man. "Damon was an orphan, he didn't lie about that, but he was an orphan because he killed his parents and escaped from jail," he informed her.

The one who is buried in the Tamborine Mountain Cemetery, in Queensland, is not named as the plaque says. His real name is William Leslie Arnold, sentenced in 1959 to double life imprisonment.

The Arnolds resided in the Omaha area. In 1958, at the age of 16, William asked his parents to let him have the car to go to the movies with his girlfriend. They were going to screen The Undead, a title by Roger Corman. When he answered that no, that he should forget about the car - everything indicates that, in addition, the mother ranted about his girlfriend -, the son shot them to death. He buried them in the garden and went to the movies with his girl.

He told relatives and neighbors that his parents had gone on a trip. She put up with the lie for two weeks when, on a visit from his grandparents, she collapsed. He confessed to his crime and led the police to the two corpses.

At trial, he pleaded guilty. In jail he applied himself to the music studio and was considered "an exemplary inmate", which, given his youth, could have earned him parole, although that was far away.

Thanks to the help of an express, Arnold and his colleague James Harding escaped on July 14, 1967. In the style of the famous Alcatraz escape, they used masks to confuse officials at count time. They had a saw to cut the bars of the music room window and lined the spikes on the perimeter fence with T-shirts.

Harding was caught within a few months, but Arnold disappeared. FBI investigators received numerous leads, all to no avail. Now it has been learned that his first destination was Chicago, where he adopted his new identity and married a woman who had four daughters. They moved to Cincinnati and Miami. They divorced and he settled in California and remarried, had two children and they went first to New Zealand and finally to Brisbane where he built a prosperous existence after starting out as a salesman.

The FBI gave up its investigations and the case passed to the service of the marshalls. After several unsuccessful efforts, the case came to Westover's table in 2020. He started reading the material and was hooked on that story.

He had an occurrence. She traveled by car to Missouri to meet with James, Arnold's younger brother, who was not at home that tragic day in 1958. After more than half a century, James willingly accepted the request to provide a DNA sample and authorized that it could be used in private banks.

The initiative did not seem to bear fruit and the researcher had almost forgotten, until a few months ago an alert went off. He also received an email from a person who claimed to be looking for information on his father. Upon check, it was clear that the man's father was the fugitive. Westover traveled to Australia. He case closed.