The Disappearance of Leslie Arnold

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1:23This episode contains descriptions of violence. Please use discretion. What was Leslie Arnold like as a kid? Well, he was a troubled kid, for sure. Reporter Henry Cordes. I mean, as a very young boy, he was a very typical little kid, somewhat a little high-strung. But, I mean, his schoolmates would describe him as a very normal kid. In high school, William Leslie Arnold, who went by Leslie, was known as a quiet, somewhat mediocre student. He ran on his school's track team and was involved with ROTC. And he also played the saxophone. Which kind of became his thing in high school, was a talented saxophone player and played in the numerous bands at his high school, in Omaha Central High School.

2:20And they said he could really, really play. Leslie lived with his parents, Opal and Bill, and a younger brother, Jimmy. He tried to style his hair like Elvis, who'd already had huge hits like Heartbreak Hotel and Love Me Tender. In 1958, Leslie turned 16 and was entering his junior year of high school. He had a girlfriend named Crystal who went to a different school. And his mother simply did not approve. But his mother was kind of a very domineering personality. And his mother was very arbitrary. He would at times have plans to do something. And then his mother just at the last minute would say, no, you're not going to do that.

3:05And his mother, it does appear, was suffering from mental illness at the time. It seems like today they would say that she had kind of a bipolar disorder. And as a result, her emotion, she was capable of emotional swings. And with Leslie being a kid who maybe had a little bit of a temper, it became a bad mix. And psychologists who would later examine Leslie described him as, at that point, like a smoldering volcano. On a Saturday in late September, Leslie asked his parents if he could use the family car to take his girlfriend to the drive-in. At first, they said yes. But then after Leslie and his mother got in an argument about him being on the phone with his girlfriend, Leslie's mother said he couldn't take the car.

4:02And he spent the morning kind of feuding with his mother over that, tried everything he could think of to try to convince her otherwise, had the girl tried to call, and just was turned away in every effort. And they finally had a really big blow up. Leslie later said that he got a, quote, crazy idea in his head. And he went to his parents' bedroom where there was a.22 caliber rifle that he and his father often used to hunt rabbits. And he walked into the dining room with it. His mother was in the adjoining kitchen. And what he later said is that she kind of mocked him and told him to put the gun away.

4:48But he did not put the gun away. He raised it and he shot his mother in the chest. And as he later described it, he was kind of in a daze. His mother was on the floor in front of him moaning, and he said he didn't really know what to do, but he stood over her and he shot her five more times, each bullet in the chest, until she was dead. Then, according to Leslie, his father, Bill, walked in the door. And as Leslie put it, he took a wild swing at Leslie, who ducked it and moved to the other side of the room. And as his father came after him, he raised the rifle and fired it. It appears it struck his father in the shoulder.

5:45He also went down on the floor, and much like with his mother, he shot him five more times in the chest until he was dead. And suddenly, in a matter of moments, he was standing in the dining room of his home over the bodies of his mother and father. What does he do next? Well, he said he first went into the adjoining living room and lay down on the couch and cried. And he thought what to do. He said, how can I ever explain to anybody what happened here? And he said he laid there for about an hour, and then he basically said he hatched a plan. He first had the grisly task of dragging his parents' bodies down to the basement and trying to clean up the blood.

6:41There was a lot of blood. He knew his younger brother, Jimmy, would eventually come home, so Leslie called a family friend and told them a complicated story. He basically said, my grandfather, who's senile, is lost in Wyoming. He wandered off, and my parents hopped a train today to go to Wyoming to help find them. So would it be okay if Jimmy comes to stay with you, his 13-year-old little brother? And the family friend said, yeah, that'll be no problem to what you need to do. Leslie, when his little brother got home, he proceeded to meet him outdoors with a bag already packed for him and gave the same story about mom and dad having to run off.

7:29And then Leslie took the car, picked up his girlfriend, and went to the movies. They went to see the horror movie, The Undead. Now it would be later interpreted by people that, particularly in the press in days to come, that he just very callously killed his parents and then went and took his girlfriend to the drive-in, like this was the goal all along. And he would later describe that night as an awful night. He felt haunted by what he had done, felt at one point like his mother's ghost was following him as he and his girlfriend drove down the road and was completely distracted. He knew, you know, in the back of his head, he knew that this can never last.

8:18The next night, Leslie buried his parents in the backyard. Over the next two weeks, Leslie Arnold continued to go to school and to church. He helped run his father's direct sales business, telling the employees the same story about his parents going out of town. But then his grandfather, who Leslie had told everyone was missing, came to town with Leslie's grandmother. They lived three hours away and had been trying to get in touch with Leslie's parents. When they couldn't, they came to town to see what was going on. And Leslie said he was thrown into a panic when he saw that his grandfather was there.

8:59He had to kind of give them a different story. He told them his parents went out of town. But he was just very evasive with them. And the grandparents and other family in Omaha started to become very, very suspicious of Leslie. They were having conversations about what to do and when to do it. And then on October 10, 1958, Leslie took his girlfriend out again to a football game. And at that point, that's when the family decided to go to the police. And by that Friday night, police knew pretty much who they needed to talk to in the disappearance of Opal and Bill Arnold. So Saturday morning, while Leslie was again off at his dad's workplace kind of helping out, police officers showed up and took him to the police station.

9:51Once he started talking, the whole thing spilled out. He led the police to his parents' bodies, buried beneath a lilac bush in their yard. The officers started digging, and they said it only took a few shovelfuls of dirt before they unearthed a human hand. And there was a huge spectacle in the Arnold's neighborhood as people were gathered around. The next day, the Omaha World Herald ran a story with the headline, Youth Called Quiet, Polite, School Shocked by Story. It noted that the only time Leslie had gotten in trouble at school was when he didn't wear a belt one day. An uncle said about Leslie, Leslie always did have a violent temper, but he didn't smoke or drink.

10:39A neighbor told a reporter that Leslie's mother had recently told her that she was planning to get rid of the family's gun because she was worried about having it around. Leslie was evaluated by psychiatrists who all found him to be, quote, sane. One noted that he seemed remorseful. He wrote a letter to his grandparents. It said, how I ever went so wrong, I'll never know. I've got a lot of making up to do. He was charged with first-degree murder. The prosecutor doesn't seem necessarily believed Leslie when his account of things thought that maybe there could have been some premeditation involved.

11:22At first, Leslie pleaded innocent. But when the charges were reduced to second-degree murder, he changed his plea to guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison at 16 years old. At the time, life meant life. The only way he would be able to be paroled is if the governor and the pardons board voted to commute his life sentence to a number of years. And yes, that would then allow him to be paroled. And that was, frankly, fully the expectation at the time. At the time, it was a much more merciful time. In the 1950s, it was very common for a person to be convicted of murder, maybe serve 15 to 20 years, and be paroled.

12:09In fact, the prosecutor told Leslie, it's not going to be for life, Les. His full expectation was that he would serve about 10 years, especially given his youth. And so he went to prison with a life sentence, but knowing that if he behaved himself and used his time well there, that there was a pretty good chance that within 10 years that he would have a chance for parole. And by all accounts, that's the way he lived in prison for the first four or five years. He was a model prisoner. He studied to become a dental technician. And he played in the prison band, which was called the Felonaires. And everyone I spoke to who knew Leslie in prison, by all accounts, they thought he was well on his way to that parole.

12:59But then, in 1967, that all changed. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

13:12We'll be right back.

13:32Thank you.

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14:08Raise the rudders! Raise the sails! Raise the sails! Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over. Roger. Wait, is that an enterprise sails solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more. Start converting your B2B audience today. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started today at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. In 1965, under a new Nebraska post-conviction law, Leslie Arnold tried to have his case looked at again. He'd been in prison for six years.

14:50He wrote that, among other things, he was arrested without a warrant and pressured by the county attorney's office to plead guilty. He submitted it to the court. And it was pretty summarily dismissed. But Leslie, who also around that time kind of started to have some problems in prison. He got written up for really minor infractions. But these were the first write-ups he'd ever had. He was working as a cook, and he cooked himself up some food that he wasn't supposed to. And he got fired from his job in the dental office because they thought he had a bad attitude. And he was just not the same person who had first arrived in prison.

15:35And however many years he was supposed to serve in prison, he eventually decided that was too much. Then, Leslie met a fellow prisoner at the Nebraska State Penitentiary named Jim Harding. Jim Harding was eight years older than Leslie and was in prison for murdering a man during an armed robbery. There was an older inmate who knew both of them, and he got them together. And Harding met Leslie, didn't really care for him, thought he was kind of standoffish. But he also could see that he was really smart and really creative. And they made a pact that they would work together to try to break out of prison.

16:23They worked with a recently released inmate. And one day, this inmate drove by the prison and tossed a cardboard tube over the fence, which Harding went to retrieve before anyone noticed. And the tube only had two things in it, some saw blades and two rubber masks. And as Harding later described it to me, he said, that's all we needed. Jim Harding and Leslie Arnold both lived in a prison dorm that was reserved for inmates who had earned special privileges called trustees. There was a music room in the dorm where Leslie practiced his saxophone. And it was an enclosed room that had a door. Well, that room also had a window on it that was covered with bars.

17:13And Harding said both he and Leslie took turns hanging out in the music room when they had free time and started sawing through those bars. And it took a number of days to do it. But each time they sawed through a bar, they used chewing gum to put the bar back in place. And once they had the bars all sawed through, their potential path to escape was there. On July 5th, 1967, an ad was placed in the Omaha World Herald classified section. It read, NOF arrives July 14. Investigators later said NOF might have stood for Night of Freedom. It was a message from Leslie and Jim's accomplice on the outside.

18:02And so that night rolled around. At the trusty dorm, it was kind of lights out at 11, and then they would be secured in this room. And so just before 11, Leslie and Harding took those rubber masks. And with additional blankets they had collected, they basically stuffed the masks and formed bodies within their beds to make their beds appear that they were occupied. And then they, just before 11, they slipped out of the room before the lights went out. And they made their way down to the music room. And Harding said it all happened very quickly then. And they knocked out the bars, were careful to replace them, though, to, again, provide themselves some cover.

18:51Then they still had to escape the prison grounds. There was a fence topped with barbed wire. It was a 14-foot fence. They scaled it and threw a jacket over the top to cover up the barbed wire. And they both scrambled over the top. and they fled to an adjoining field and there was their recent parolee friend there waiting in a car. They climbed in and they were off. It was absolutely a perfect escape because the night watchman who was coming along every hour and peering into the dorm room where Leslie and Harding were supposed to be staying never noticed the dummies. The beds appeared occupied.

19:36So it wasn't until 7 a.m. the next morning when the head count was taken that it was noticed that there were two people short. But because of the fact that the night watchmen had, you know, swore that their beds had been occupied all night, the thought was that they had just escaped that morning. And the reality that they had been gone at that point for more than eight hours. And so they got a huge head start on the authorities. Leslie Arnold, Jim Harding, and the other recently released inmate drove to Omaha. They went to a bowling alley not far from where Leslie had grown up. Leslie made a phone call to an old friend.

20:17And basically told him, hey, you know, I'm here, and I just escaped, and I need your help. And this friend, his name was Jim Child, who I later spoke to, who later admitted his role in all this. basically said, I'll be right there. Jim Child brought Leslie and Jim some clothes and money. He drove them to the bus station and bought them some tickets to Chicago. So by the time that they were even discovered missing, they were already halfway to Chicago by that time. Jim Harding later told reporter Henry Cordes that he and Leslie spent their first night in Chicago at the YMCA. and the next day they both went out looking for jobs.

21:04Soon, Leslie told Jim that he'd gotten a job at a restaurant. It was the last time they ever saw each other. Jim Harding eventually left Chicago and went to Los Angeles. And in 1968, he was arrested. Someone mistook him for James Earl Ray, another prison escapee who was eventually convicted of assassinating Martin Luther King Jr. year. The police officers came and interviewed Harding. They saw he was not Ray, but they remained very suspicious of him. And they did their detective work. And looking through FBI wanted photos, they quickly recognized him as a man who had escaped from prison in Nebraska a year before.

21:49The next day, they went and arrested him. Harding didn't put up a fight. He was extradited to Nebraska. And again, when I talk about it being a more merciful time, so not only had he committed murder, now he had escaped too. By 1976, Harding had done his time and he got that commutation from the pardons board and was paroled and by all accounts went on to live a fairly law-abiding life for the rest of his life. But the police couldn't find Leslie Arnold. The FBI looked for Leslie very hard for about 10 years. And they pursued every angle. They were very suspicious of his relatives. They were suspicious of his brother.

22:35But frankly, none of them knew anything about what had happened. So they never, ever caught on to Leslie's trail at all. They were always very suspicious of his saxophone playing. One of the theories was that he was probably working as a professional saxophone player somewhere, so they pursued those angles. But it never brought them to Leslie Arnold. Leslie Arnold is the last person to have successfully escaped from the Nebraska State Penitentiary. Eventually, the FBI handed the case over to the Nebraska Department of Corrections, where an investigator named Jeff Britton started looking into the case.

23:17He later said it became his hobby. He even had a license plate made with the name Arnold on it. He looked for Leslie for years. Once he found someone with a similar name and appearance and the same birthday as Leslie, who was living four states away. He also traced searches for Leslie's name and inmate number that had been done on the Nebraska Department of Corrections website. One seemed to be coming from South America. But he didn't find Leslie. And then, in 2020, Deputy U.S. Marshal Matt Westover learned about the case. A friend of mine basically put it on my case log, kind of like a little joke, like as if, you know, nobody's ever going to figure this one out.

24:03But when Matt Westover read more about Leslie Arnold's story, he was intrigued. He reached out to Jeff Britton, who by then had left his job at the Nebraska Department of Corrections. They started to work together on finding Leslie Arnold. How much time are you devoting to the case? Oh, man. Way a lot. That was, it was a lot of hours. Most of it, my wife was not happy because a lot of it was at home. Matt Westover requested access to an old FBI file. Next thing you know, I'm getting CDs and DVDs worth of like thousands of documents. And so I'd spent a good probably two weeks every night, probably five hours at night with a bourbon.

25:02and just hanging out on the couch while my wife was watching, like, below deck, I believe, and I was just in it. He says he and Jeff started tracking down possible aliases that Leslie might have used. And then you go to, like, Ancestry, and you go to, like, different documents, and you try to find these different names and yearbooks of, like, old schools, and we'd find people, and we'd like, I think this is it. And then we'd say, well, no, the mole's not there. No, the ears are too big. Or no, there's no way because they have a brother that's X amount of age and it just wouldn't work. So I caught William Leslie Arnold like 15 times.

25:46It just never really was Leslie Arnold until it was. We'll be right back.

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27:15In 2017, an investigator working on finding the so-called Golden State Killer got an idea. He decided to run DNA collected from victims through genealogy databases where people had submitted their DNA to learn more about their family's histories. Police were able to find distant relatives of the person they believed was the Golden State Killer, and eventually they constructed a family tree. It led them to a man in his 70s, Joseph James D 'Angelo. They followed him and were able to test his DNA from things like a door handle he'd touched and a used tissue. His DNA was a match, and Joseph James D 'Angelo eventually pleaded guilty to murdering 13 people and raping more than 50 women.