'Shawshank Redemption' repeat: Man re-arrested after 56 years on the run

A man convicted of manslaughter who had escaped from an Ohio prison farm in 1959 and then slipped away from law enforcement in 1975, has been put back in prison after a ruse to get his fingerprints led to his arrest in Florida this week, investigators said on Tuesday. Frank Freshwaters, 79, admitted his true identity, after running from law for 56 years, when authorities confronted him on Monday, according to the US Marshals Service and deputies in Brevard County, Florida. [caption id=“attachment_2234732” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Frank Freshwaters, then and now. AP[/caption] What makes Freshwater’s case interesting is the fact that he had stayed in the same prison where the iconic film Shawshank Redemption — also about a fugitive’s escape from prison — was shot. And the similarities don’t end there. The Telegraph reports that like the protagonist in the film, Freshwaters too had easily earned the trust of prison officials. Freshwaters was convicted of manslaughter for killing a pedestrian with a vehicle in July 1957, and his initially suspended sentence of one to 20 years in prison was imposed in 1959 after he violated his probation by driving and getting a driver’s license, according to the marshals and old court documents they provided. He was imprisoned at the old Ohio State Reformatory before being moved to a lower-security camp, where he escaped in September 1959, a statement said. The Telegraph, drawing comparisons between the film and this real life case says, “unlike the fictional Andy Dufresne, played by Tim Robbins in the film, who was last seen enjoying freedom on a beach in Mexico, Freshwaters has been caught by the authorities and returned to jail, after a ruse to get his fingerprints led to his arrest in Florida this week.” To arrest Freshwaters, Marshals in Ohio had sought help from deputies, and had created a ruse to get him to sign papers so they could check his fingerprints, which matched the decades-old arrest, said Major Tod Goodyear. “We couldn’t go with a picture and see if it’s that guy,” Goodyear said. “You look different than you do 50 years ago.” The man sent to the Ohio State Reformatory in 1959 had short, dark hair in his black-and-white mugshot. Now he has a white beard, a ponytail and glasses and lived in a weathered trailer in a remote area surrounded by palmettos and very few neighbors. He had retired from a job as a truck driver and was living off Social Security benefits, Goodyear said. He’d left clues about his identity over the past 56 years, and investigators traced those to his Florida doorstep, said US Marshal Pete Elliott in Cleveland. He wouldn’t discuss specifics. His time on the lam was interrupted in 1975, when he was arrested on the Ohio warrant by the sheriff’s office in West Virginia. When the governor there refused to send him back to Ohio, he was freed and disappeared again, the marshals said. An investigation by a deputy marshal assigned this year to target cold cases led authorities to Florida, where Freshwaters was living as William Harold Cox, the statement said. The Brevard County Sheriff’s Office said he was jailed under the name Harold F. Freshwater and was ordered held without bond because of his status as an out-of-state fugitive. Court records listed no attorney for him. He declined to talk to reporters and remained jailed Tuesday night, said Cpl. Dave Jacobs. Such cases of long-sought fugitives are not unheard of. A man who escaped from an Ohio prison in 1992 was arrested late last year at 71 in Indiana, where he lived under an assumed name. And in 2002, a convicted murderer who fled a Tennessee prison in 1970 was arrested in central Ohio after living under an alias there for three decades. A list of wanted felons on Ohio’s prisons website includes 15 people whose escapes date even farther back than Freshwaters’. With Associated Press inputs