[imagesource:usmarshals]

An Australian man Damon hoping to find out who his birth father was got a big shock when submitting his DNA to a genealogical database.

Instead of finding his papa, or getting bragging rights for being 1/77th indigenous Aboriginal, the poor dude was told his father was an escaped murderer from the US.

It turns out his dad was an escaped US prisoner William Leslie Arnold, who lived in Australia under the name John Vincent Damon. According to the US Marshall Service, Arnold was 16 when he murdered both his parents and buried them in the backyard.

Initially, the teenager claimed that his parent was on a trip, but after two weeks, the boy confessed to the murders and even showed police where the bodies were buried.

The young man received two life sentences in 1959, where he was reportedly a model prisoner for nearly ten years before breaking out along with another prisoner.

Arnold moved in with a woman in Chicago before they married and moved to California, and later to Australia. There he lived, worked, raised a family, and eventually died in 2010, all under the John Vincent Damon alias.

Arnold’s family never knew of his past and described him as a ‘great father’ who was orphaned as a child. It was therefore a shock when his son submitted a DNA sample to the ancestry database.

Unbeknownst to the son, his father’s DNA was submitted to the same database after the ‘cold case’ was taken over by Matthew Westover, a deputy United States Marshal in Nebraska, in 2020.

 “One of my buddies gave me this case, as kind of a joke, you know, like ‘you’re never going to find this guy.”

The DNA match appeared, and finally, Westover had a lead to the escaped killer. He eventually met young Damon and filled him in on his father’s grisly past, including that he was an orphan because he killed his parent.

“There’s no warning label on the DNA test kit telling you that you might not like what you find,” Arnold’s son said. “But I don’t regret doing it, and I’m glad I now know the truth about my dad.”

Talk about ou koeie uit die sloot grawe.

[source:ifls&usmarshals.gov]