Real Life Shawshank - Man Caught 56 Years After Escaping From Prison The Movie Was Set In

(CNN)For 56 years, Frank Freshwaters was a free man — though he shouldn’t have been. But not anymore.

The now 79-year-old’s life on the lam ended Monday, when he was taken into custody at his Melbourne, Florida, mobile home. Freshwaters, who was living under the alias of William Harold Cox, is being held in the Brevard County Jail pending extradition to Ohio, said Maj. Tod Goodyear of the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office.

Thus ends a journey that took Freshwaters though numerous states, where he held various jobs and assumed multiple identities, according to authorities.

That journey started in Ohio, where Freshwaters pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter charges stemming from a 1957 automobile accident. He initially got probation for that crime, only to be sentenced again in 1959 to up to 20 years at the Ohio State Reformatory after a parole violation.

The Ohio State Reformatory may look familiar to moviegoers familiar with “The Shawshank Redemption.”

While that 1994 film and the Stephen King novella that inspired it were set in Maine, it was largely shot at the Ohio State Reformatory. In fact, people in Mansfield, Ohio, can take tours to see key locales from the movie — like the prison warden’s office, parole board room, “the yard” and the escape tunnel used by main character Andy Dufresne that he took before fixing up his fishing boat in Mexico.

Dufresne, as played by Tim Robbins, benefited from being a favorite of Shawshank’s warden and prison guards. In that respect, his story resembles that of Freshwaters, who was “quickly able to earn the trust of the prison officials,” according to Peter Elliott, the U.S. marshal for the Northern District of Ohio

This trust helped to earn the Akron native a transfer to what’s called an honor farm, Elliott said. Freshwaters escaped from that honor farm, not the prison. While it took Dufresne nearly 20 years to dig his way out of prison, Freshwaters managed to escape from custody after only seven months. Authorities have not divulged details on how he did it.

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Real life Shawshank in the house. Sure the story kind of hits a snag when you find out he technically escaped from some auxiliary “honor farm” instead of the actual Shawshank but whatever, he got out, he successfully lived the majority of his life a free man, he didn’t Brooks himself. Sucks to get caught like this –

ORLANDO, Fla. – 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, 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 Major Tod Goodyear.

“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, authorities 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.'”

– But at least he made it to 79. Not much life left in that old Bronco anyway. Also not sure what he was doing living in a trailer park in Florida? Not exactly Zihuatanejo. If you’re going to re-enact a movie and escape from the actual prison it was set in you kind of have a responsibility to follow through with more of the plot line, in my opinion. Were you at least living next to a friendly black man who was a former contraband smuggler?

(Talking about a mobile home in Central Florida, apparently)

Big win for the marshals though that’s for sure. Not sure how anyone could sleep at night with a guy who, as a young kid, made a mistake and accidentally killed a pedestrian crossing the street, then was sent to jail for trying to get a driver’s license, escaped and was living peacefully for the past 50+ years posing no threat to society. Only seemed right to spend thousands of tax dollars to track him down and wheel him back into prison.

Just let it go man.