There was a shocking story on Fox News about a young Nebraska boy who murdered his mom and dad in the 1950s and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

He and a fellow inmate would eventually escape, and the young man ended up in Australia where he successfully raised a family. It wasn’t until 2022 that DNA tests revealed his sordid past.

Leslie Arnold was 16 years old when he shot his mother and father in 1958 after they changed their mind and would not allow him to use the family car to take his girlfriend to a drive-in movie.

After killing his mother and father, Arnold took his girlfriend to the show, and later buried his mom and dad on their rural property.

For over a week, Arnold acted as if everything was normal. He dropped his younger brother at a family friend’s place stating that his parents had to leave suddenly because of a family emergency and returned to school.

However, it all fell apart when his Grandparents showed up at the family home looking for Arnold’s parents, leading him to confess to the crime.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

But he and a fellow inmate escaped the Nebraska penitentiary in 1967 using a saw blade and rubber mask a parolee had thrown over the prison wall.

They sawed through the bars of a prison window using gum to keep them in place until they were ready to escape. Then they used the facemasks to pretend that they were still in bed, and were long gone before authorities even found out they were missing.

Arnold would end up in Chicago, where he assumed the name of John Damon, complete with identity cards and a birth certificate and married a divorcee with four daughters.

After they divorced, he married a foreign exchange student and ended up moving to New Zealand and then to Australia in 1997 where he settled down. He earned a good income as a businessman and raised a family that included a son and daughter.

After Arnold died in 2010 at 68 years of age, his natural son submitted his DNA to databases to find out more about his dad’s family connections.

All Arnold ever told the family is that he was an orphan from Chicago. But there were hints of more as his father once said, he wished he could tell them more.

Meanwhile, police handling the cold case file in the US had submitted the DNA of Arnold’s younger brother to criminal databases in 2007 hoping for a hit but didn’t receive one.

It wasn’t until 2020, with the growing popularity of DNA databases through such organizations as Ancestry.com that the police submitted the brother’s DNA again leading to the connection with Arnold’s son in Australia in 2022.

Arnold’s son was shocked when he was told how his dad had murdered his parents. The family had no idea of his history and could only remember a caring and loving dad.

Though we are not told much about the family’s spiritual life, after he died, Arnold’s family decided to look through their dad’s Bible, the Omaha World-Herald reports.

They believed he had purchased the leather-bound Bible when he was in Chicago, and they said that over the years he had read it through, from Genesis to Revelation, several times.

But as they took a closer look at it, they found their dad had underlined numerous verses.

“There were lots of highlighted lines about sin, guilt and forgiveness,” Arnold’s son said. “I think it weighed on his mind for the rest of his life.”

I am not suggesting that Arnold became a Christian, only God knows.

But many of us struggle with shame and condemnation from things that happened in the past.

Most are much less serious than what Arnold did, but nevertheless, they still hang onto us.

They keep coming back to mind and beating us down.

Paul writes that there is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1 ESV)

According to Mounce’s Greek dictionary, the Greek word for condemnation means that we have no ‘punishment’ or ‘condemning sentence.’

Because we are in Christ, the Lord has paid the full price for our sins. But an important part of believing is forgetting.

Paul adds that we must also forget those things that are behind (Philippians 3:13-16), in order to push ahead to our high calling in Christ.

When condemning thoughts pop into our minds, we need to purposefully choose to forget them. We must literally push them down.

I suspect that the Apostle Paul was speaking from experience as he personally had to deal with the thoughts, guilt, shame, and condemnation for his participation in the martyrdom of Stephen (Acts 7:58, Acts 8:1).

READ: How DNA identified Australian family man as escaped US fugitive who murdered his parents AND Leslie Arnold mystery solved: Man who died in Australia was enigmatic Nebraska fugitive