fletchermarple: Leslie Arnold: The Boy that Got AwayLeslie Arnold was only 16 years old when he kill
fletchermarple: Leslie Arnold: The Boy that Got AwayLeslie Arnold was only 16 years old when he killed his parents, one Saturday afternoon in Omaha. It was September 27, 1958, and Leslie had asked to use the family car that night for a date with his girlfriend, Crystal. But Leslie’s mother Opal, a domineering woman who didn’t get along with her older son, didn’t approve of the relationship and told him no. That, paired with increasing frustration with his mother, set Leslie off.He took a .22 rifle from his parents’ closet and faced Opal in the kitchen. Leslie would later say that when she saw him wielding the gun, she laughed at him and said “what are you going to do, shoot me?”That’s exactly what he did. Shot her 6 times in the chest. “She seemed in pain, and I didn’t want to hurt her anymore, but I just kept shooting,” he confessed later. His father Bill arrived from the store shortly after and when he saw his wife dead in the floor, he lunged at Leslie, so the boy shot him too. Also 6 times, killing him.He then dragged the bodies to the basement and hid the blood soaked rug in the garage. He called a family friend called Rose Grossman and told her that his parents had to suddenly travel to help look for his senile grandfather, who had wandered off and got lost. Leslie asked Rose to take care of his younger brother Jim in the meantime.That night, while his parents’ bodies laid in the basement, Leslie took his girlfriend to the drive-in cinema. The next day, he went to church and later dug a hole in the backyard and buried the bodies.Eight days after the murders, Leslie’s story begun to crumble when his grandparents showed up looking for Opal and Bill after repeated failed attempts to contact them. Rose then found out that Leslie’s grandfather had never been lost and, suspicious, she called police.It didn’t take long for Leslie to confess and point them to the place where he’d buried his parents bodies.Leslie Arnold pled guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. He spent the next decade in the Nebraska State Penitentiary, where he was a model prisoner. And then, he vanished.The night of July 14, 1967, Leslie and another prisoner, Jim Harding, successfully escaped prison through sawed off bars. They headed to Chicago, where they went their separate ways. In May 1968, Jim was captured again by pure coincidence: a woman called police on him because she thought he looked like James Earl Ray, the killer of Martin Luther King Jr.However, they could never find Leslie and for five decades he has remained missing. In 2017, police found a registration card that showed that an american citizen called William Leslie Arnold had moved to Brazil, but it’s uncertain if he actually stayed there and if he’s still alive today. -- source link