Cracking a 56-Year Cold Case: the Dna Trail That Exposed Fugitive William Leslie Arnold
By Robert Thorne
The turning point arrived when Deputy US Marshal Matt Westover inherited the cold case file in 2020. Refusing to leave it dormant, Westover recognized that traditional investigative techniques would never catch a fugitive who had vanished half a century earlier. He turned to forensic genetic genealogy.
Westover located Arnold’s biological brother, James Arnold, who had survived the 1958 tragedy. With James’s cooperation, Westover obtained a DNA reference sample and had forensic analysts extract the genetic profile, uploading it to public genealogy databases like GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA.
Thousands of miles away, in Australia, a man named James Damon was trying to build out his own family tree. His father, John Vincent Damon, had died in 2010 at age 67. Curious about his paternal roots, which his father had always kept curiously vague, James submitted his DNA to commercial testing services. In late 2022, the database produced a mathematical match that stunned federal agents: the Australian man’s DNA showed an immediate father-son kinship with the Nebraska fugitive profile.
Robert Thorne covers electric vehicle innovations, autonomous driving systems, global mobility trends, and automotive engineering developments.
