ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) ? A convicted killer escaped 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, Ohio, 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, Florida.
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 Major Tod Goodyear.
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"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.'"
Fingerprint ruse IDs Florida man as longtime Ohio fugitive - Yahoo News