The Shawshank Fugitive

If you’d like to read a true crime story in less than an hour, you’ll be interested in the case of Frank Freshwaters, who escaped from prison and lived for 56 years under a different identity. He lived in different states, fathered children, and eventually became the subject of “the longest capture in the history of the U.S. Marshals.”  

Frank Freshwaters was a baby-faced 21-year-old newlywed — with no criminal record and a job in the booming rubber industry — when his speeding car slammed into a father of three who was walking home in the pre-midnight darkness on July 3, 1957.
That crash on South Arlington Street in southeast Akron ended one man's life and — for Freshwaters — set into motion a sequence of events seemingly lifted straight from a Hollywood screenplay.
A story whose twists and turns — incarceration at the infamous prison featured in "The Shawshank Redemption," an escape from a prison farm, life on the run using a fake identity, a new shot at freedom personally granted by West Virginia's governor — culminated in a simple knock on a trailer home door in Melbourne, 56 years later.

Captured in May of 2015, Freshwaters is now 79 years old, and awaiting a decision on his fate. Florida Today has a three-part series on his initial crime, incarceration, and years on the lam. Part one is here.