Fugitive finally found in Florida
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/05/2015 (3832 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
ORLANDO, Fla. — When Frank Freshwaters escaped from an Ohio prison in 1959, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president of the United States, and Fidel Castro had just taken power in Cuba.
By the time deputy sheriffs in West Virginia found Freshwaters in 1975, Gerald Ford was president, Watergate conspirators were headed to prison and Bill Gates was co-founding an upstart company called Microsoft. But the fugitive wasn’t in custody for long. He was released after West Virginia’s governor refused to extradite him, and he soon went into hiding.
Freshwaters’ 56 years of freedom ended at a remote Melbourne, Fla., trailer Monday when officials with the U.S. Marshals Service and the county sheriff’s office showed up with an old mug shot.
“We showed him the picture and said, ‘Hey, have you seen this guy?’ and he looked at it and said, ‘Not in a very long time,’ ” said Maj. Tod Goodyear with the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office.
“At that time, they confronted him with the information they had, and he admitted to them that they were right,” Goodyear said.
Freshwaters, 79, had been living under a fake name — William H. Cox. Before he assumed that identity, he was arrested as a 21-year-old in Akron, Ohio, after a fatal auto-pedestrian accident in 1957 that led to manslaughter charges against him. He had been speeding by about 25 km/h and killed Eugene Flynt, 24, the indictment against him states.
After first telling a judge he was innocent, Freshwaters pleaded guilty and received five years’ probation. In 1959, he got up to 20 years in prison for violating the terms of his probation by purchasing a car and getting a driver’s licence, prison records show.
After spending seven months at the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield — where the 1994 movie The Shawshank Redemption was filmed — Freshwaters was transferred to a lower-security prison.
He escaped from the Sandusky Honor Farm in September 1959 and forged a new life.
Freshwaters lived in several states and worked as a truck driver, Goodyear said. He has been in Brevard for about 20 years. It appeared as though he lived alone in the trailer with few neighbours near his large plot of land, Goodyear said.
Freshwaters had been considered one of Ohio’s most-wanted fugitives, the U.S. Marshals said in a news release..
A U.S. Marshals cold-case unit took on the case when it was created three months ago. The Brevard Sheriff’s Office had been working on the case for about a month, Goodyear said.
Freshwaters is in jail awaiting extradition to Ohio.
— Orlando Sentinel