Fingerprint ruse leads to capture of fugitive since 1959

Associated Press

ORLANDO, Fla.

A man convicted of manslaughter for killing a pedestrian with his car walked away from an Ohio prison farm in 1959, then was allowed to slip away from law enforcement in 1975 and disappeared until a ruse to get his fingerprints led to his arrest in Florida this week, investigators said Tuesday.

Former Akron resident Frank Freshwaters, now 79, admitted his true identity when authorities confronted him Monday, according to the U.S. Marshals Service and deputies in Brevard County, Fla.

Marshals in Ohio had sought help from deputies there, and they created a ruse to get him to sign papers so they could check his fingerprints, which matched the decades-old arrest, said Maj. Tod Goodyear. The sheriff’s office declined to give further details of the ruse.

“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.”

An old picture of Freshwaters came into play when, after a week of surveillance, they confronted him with a question as he left his trailer in a rural area near Melbourne: “Have you seen this man?”

“They showed him the pic, and he said he hadn’t seen that guy in a long time,” Goodyear said. “Then he admitted it and basically said, ‘You got me.’”

The young man sent to the Ohio State Reformatory in 1959 had short, dark hair in his black-and-white mugshot, but here he was with a white beard, a ponytail and glasses, living in a weathered trailer in a remote area.

He’d left clues about his identity over the past 56 years, and investigators traced those to his Florida doorstep, said U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott in Cleveland.