An Ohio man who escaped corrections officers while serving time at the “Shawshank Redemption” prison, and who later was on the lam for 56 years, will soon be released on parole.
The Ohio Parole Board decided Wednesday to grant parole to Frank Freshwaters this April, said JoEllen Smith, spokeswoman for the board.
In 1959, Freshwaters, now 79, was sentenced to up to 20 years at the Ohio State reformatory after he pleaded guilty to voluntarily manslaughter charges related to a 1957 automobile accident.
His attorney told the board his client lived a clean life and never forgot the accident, CNN affiliate WSYX reported.
The Ohio State Reformatory where Freshwater served time may sound and look familiar to moviegoers familiar with “The Shawshank Redemption.”
That 1994 film and the Stephen King novella that inspired it were set in Maine, but the movie was largely shot at the Ohio prison.
While there, Freshwaters was “quickly able to earn the trust of the prison officials,” Peter Elliott, the U.S. marshal for the Northern District of Ohio, said.
This trust helped to earn the Akron, Ohio, native a transfer to what’s called an honor farm, Elliott said.
He managed to escape from that honor farm, not the prison. Authorities have not divulged details of how he was able to escape.
The next 56 years took him on a journey through numerous states, where he held various jobs and assumed multiple identities, according to authorities.
Freshwaters was caught and taken into custody at his Melbourne, Florida, mobile home in May of 2015.
Police: Freshwaters was rearrested in 1975 but released
Freshwaters lived in several states after his escape and worked some as a truck driver, the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office said.
His time on the run almost came to an end in 1975 when authorities in West Virginia’s Kanawha County found him living under an assumed name and arrested him, having determined his real identity, on an Ohio warrant seeking Freshwaters’ return. But he was released after West Virginia’s governor declined to extradite him, the U.S. Marshals Service said.
From what investigators can gather, the rationale to let Freshwaters go in West Virginia was that he’d been a good citizen during his time in the state, Elliott said.
Still sought by Ohio authorities, Freshwaters went back into hiding, Elliott said. He is believed to have settled in Florida’s Brevard County about 20 years ago, according to the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office.
His arrest in 2015 came after the Marshals Service created a cold case unit in northern Ohio. Ohio parole officials asked the unit to help find Freshwaters, and after some weeks of digging, the unit found information that led it to believe Freshwaters was living in Florida’s Melbourne area.
Elliott declined to specify what led to the discovery. He said these types of investigations typically check a fugitive’s possible links to other people; he added that no one tipped investigators to Freshwaters’ location.
“It was just good police work,” Elliott said.
U.S. marshals in Florida joined the investigation and helped confirm that Freshwaters was there, leading to his arrest Monday, the service said.
When investigators went to his mobile home to make the arrest, one of them showed Freshwaters a 1959 picture of the fugitive and asked him if he’d seen that person, Goodyear told News 13 of Orlando. Freshwaters replied that he “hadn’t seen him in a long time.”