A man did a DNA test and learned the dark reason his dad was an orphan. He said he can't be angry at his father.

• A man who did a DNA test in 2022 accidentally helped to solve a cold case of an escaped murderer.
• It turned out Andrew's father had killed his own parents and escaped prison in 1967.

An Australian man who thought his father grew up in an orphanage in Chicago did a DNA test and learned his past was darker than he could have imagined.

Andrew, who didn't give his real name to protect his privacy, told the BBC podcast "The Gift" that he didn't know much about his father, a sales executive called John Damon, when he died in 2010 at the age of 69.

After doing an at-home DNA test in 2022, Andrew found out that his father's real name was William Leslie Arnold. And he was in fact an orphan, but only because he had fatally shot both his parents when he was 16 and buried them in his back yard. Insider previously reported on Arnold's case.

Arnold was a "model prisoner" for eight years according to a 2023 U.S. Marshals Service press release. But in 1967 he escaped prison, and managed to evade capture for the rest of his life, eventually settling down and having children with his second wife, Andrew's mother, The New York Times reported. The family moved to Australia, where Andrew now lives.

Arnold's case went cold until Andrew, inspired by a TV program about DNA testing, did a test himself to find out about his heritage on his orphaned father's side. His results identified him as the son of a fugitive who US police had been looking for for over 50 years.

Andrew isn't angry at his father, and said 'a person can change.'

On the podcast, Andrew said: "I don't think I've ever felt angry about him or knowing the truth. Obviously it's a very strange situation because it's a terrible crime that's happened. Two people lost their lives and other people have been seriously traumatized by the events. But the person I knew was very different and the life I have now is directly because of his being my father and raising me and providing for me."

Addressing his father's character, he said: "I would never have described my dad as violent at all. I knew him to be very intelligent and very supportive.

"I described him to someone as overly supportive, too encouraging sometimes. So over decades I can understand how a person can change and I can attempt to understand how those events may have occurred in a perfect storm, so to speak."

Geoff Britton, a former Nebraska Department of Correctional Services investigator who worked on the case between 2004 and 2013, told the podcast that he thinks Arnold "basically rehabilitated himself."

DNA tests can reveal all sorts of unexpected truths

Modern DNA testing can reveal other things that would otherwise never come to light, not just secret criminal records.

Insider previously reported on three people who found out that they were a different race, and on one family who discovered that their son's biological father was not the dad he grew up with, because another man's sperm had been used in his mother's fertility treatment.