'Escaped' killer nabbed 56 years later in Florida

An escaped Ohio convicted killer was nabbed after 56 years in Florida recently, thanks to his fingertips.

According to the U.S. Marshals Service, former Akron, Ohio, resident Frank Freshwaters, now 79, who had escaped from an Ohio prison farm in 1959, admitted to his true identity when authorities confronted him, Fox News reported.

It was after an old picture of Freshwaters surfaced after a week of surveillance, they confronted him in a rural area near Melbourne, and asked "Have you seen this man?" When they showed him the pic, he said he hadn't seen that guy in a long time, but then admitted saying "You got me."

At the time, Freshwaters had short, dark hair in his black-and-white mugshot, but now donned a white beard, a ponytail and glasses and lived in a weathered trailer in a remote area surrounded by palmettos and very few neighbors.

He was jailed under the name Harold F. Freshwater and has been living as William Harold Cox after his escape.

As per the statement, Freshwaters was convicted of manslaughter for killing a pedestrian with a vehicle in July 1957, and his initially suspended sentence of one to 20 years in prison was imposed in 1959 after he violated his probation by driving and getting a driver's license. He was imprisoned at the old Ohio State Reformatory before being moved to a lower-security camp near Sandusky, where he escaped in September 1959.

His time on the lam was interrupted in 1975, when he was arrested on the Ohio warrant by the sheriff's office in Charleston, West Virginia. When the governor there refused to send him back to Ohio, he was freed and disappeared again, the marshals said.

Freshwaters was ordered held without bond because of his status as an out-of-state fugitive.