Pod Insights The Binge Crimes The Crimes of Margo Freshwater | 2. Bad Lead About this episode On the run with nothing but adrenaline and borrowed luck, Margo Freshwater vanishes into Baltimore while detectives waste precious time chasing the wrong trail.
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Transcript 5,755 words · 11 speakers
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0:26 Speaker 01 Listen to all episodes of The Crimes of Margo Freshwater ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and hit Subscribe at the top of the page, or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. The Binge: Feed your true crime obsession.
0:54 Speaker 01 All right, so this is actually happening. In T minus five minutes, I will be sitting down with Tanya McCarter, aka Margo Freshwater, for her first ever interview. And I truly cannot believe this.
1:14 Speaker 01 This has been a long time coming. For the past three years, we've been trying to find Margo Freshwater. And back in 2021, when this podcast was still a seed of an idea, we started plotting our approach. We knew this could take some time. A few of my colleagues pursued her over the years, but Margo Freshwater lived up to her reputation. She was really hard to track down. We tried going through the attorney who had once defended her. We thought if we could build trust with him, maybe he'd be our key to finding her. He took a call, but communication fizzled. Then somehow, word got back that we were trying to reach her.
1:57 Speaker 01 And one summer afternoon in 2025, my phone rang.
2:02 Speaker 01 I didn't record that very first call, but I did record the call I made the second I hung up with her, with my producer, Ben. So she gave me a call and-
2:13 Speaker 02 Wow, okay. What was it like getting her on the phone?
2:18 Speaker 01 I just wanted to say the right thing. And it was interesting, too, because, you know, when you hear her on the phone, she just sounds like your mom.
2:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, she sounds like anybody.
2:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I want to treat her like anybody.
2:34 Speaker 02 It's been a pursuit.
2:35 Speaker 01 And we weren't the only ones chasing her.
2:39 Speaker 01 Over the years, a lot of people wanted to get her to tell her story. Think Dateline, 2020, Good Morning America even. She turned them all down. But for some reason, she saw something in me. Even though I'm a heavily tattooed millennial who dresses like Adam Sandler half the time, she trusted me. And when I first sat across from her, it was hard to reconcile that the woman in front of me could be the same person who escaped prison, someone who'd been convicted of murder. Standing at around 5'1", her voice carries a maternal softness. She almost seemed shy. It all took me by surprise.
3:23 Speaker 01 When I hit record, it was tough to tell who was more on edge. I think one of the big questions here at the beginning is, you've never sat down and told your story on the record before. Why now?
3:37 Speaker 03 Now feels like the right time to do it. And I wanted to get my story out there, the way it really went down.
3:46 Speaker 01 Tanya is 77 now, and time isn't exactly on her side. If this story is ever going to be told by her, it's now or never.
3:55 Speaker 03 What a lot of people don't understand is when I created my new identity and had a new life, I had to put the life that I had known out of sight, out of mind. My life wasn't easy when I started.
4:17 Speaker 01 She didn't make it easy for investigators either, because everyone hunting her started in the wrong place. She'd already figured out something that people chasing her hadn't.
4:27 Speaker 03 I knew I could never contact my family.
4:31 Speaker 01 Last episode, we told you about Margot's mother, the one who kicked her out. But Margot was also a middle child. She had two brothers and a great aunt she adored. One call, one letter, one drop in could put them all in jeopardy.
4:48 Speaker 03 If they lied, then they would be in trouble for abating and abetting, or they would have to make the decision to turn me in. And so I could not in good conscience put him in that situation.
5:05 Speaker 01 Margot left home after she and her mother fought about her pregnancy, but she hadn't imagined she'd never go back. Becoming a fugitive meant just that, at just 22.
5:19 Speaker 01 To stay hidden, she had to vanish completely, leave every face, every name, and every piece of her old life behind.
5:30 Speaker 01 From Sony Music Entertainment and Glass Podcasts, this is The Crimes of Margo Freshwater. I'm Cooper Mall, episode two, Bad Lead.
5:48 Speaker 01 As soon as Margot scaled the fence, leaving Tennessee prison for women in the dust, she and her accomplice Fay Copeland didn't slow down.
5:57 Speaker 03 It was just minute by minute.
6:00 Speaker 01 The first trucker got them as far as a busy truck stop, then moved on. They waited only long enough to find another ride. The second driver agreed to take them to Baltimore, where Fay had extended family. They had no clear final destination, no money, just the belief that anywhere was better than a prison cell on the outskirts of Nashville.
6:23 Speaker 03 I knew we were going to her relatives and I just wasn't sure what I was gonna do.
6:28 Speaker 01 And the farther the highway stretched, the more unreal it felt. The two women rode with strangers in trucks until exhaustion set in. At some point, even fugitives need a place to catch their breath, to regroup before the next stretch of road.
6:44 Speaker 03 The second truck driver, because it was gonna be quite a ways to go, he stopped at a motel and he said, "Why don't you two get out, get cleaned up, and I'll come back in the morning and pick you guys up."
6:59 Speaker 01 The driver bought them a room. Inside, running water drowned out the fear of being hunted.
7:05 Speaker 03 I just took a shower and I was exhausted.
7:08 Speaker 01 That night, Fay and Margot slept side by side in double beds. For the first time in months, no clinging doors, just the hope of a trucker's promise and the thin walls of a borrowed night.
7:22 Speaker 01 The next morning, the trucker came back just like he said. He thought they were sisters. And before long, the two women were rolling into Baltimore, trusting that Fay's relatives would welcome them with open arms.
7:35 Speaker 03 When we got there, they were surprised to see her and she said, "I've got a friend with me."
7:40 Speaker 01 Showing up out of the blue with some random new friend? That's a situation with no polite script.
7:46 Speaker 03 I don't even think they knew we had been in prison.
7:50 Speaker 01 The Coplins let the two ladies stay, no questions asked. Margot kept her distance. This wasn't home, and she didn't plan on staying long. If she was gonna make it out from under their roof, she needed cash, fast. And within a week, she found her solution.
8:08 Speaker 03 I had gotten a job selling encyclopedias.
8:14 Speaker 01 The door-to-door gig got her out from under the Copeland Roof during the day, but it also meant seeing strangers, face to face, all day long. Sounds like risky work for someone trying not to be recognized.
8:27 Speaker 03 I would go to the post office because they'd have wanted posters up, but I never saw anything for me.
8:33 Speaker 01 Still, she knew she was working on borrowed time. And eventually, Margot told a coworker her future plan.
8:40 Speaker 03 I told her I wanted to get back to Ohio. She said, "Well, I've got family there."
8:48 Speaker 01 This single connection opened a narrow path westward, a lifeline that looked just stable enough to trust.
8:54 Speaker 03 I was saying, you know, "I don't have anywhere to stay, you know? I'd have to find someplace to stay, you know? And so I could get a job and everything."
9:04 Speaker 01 This woman barely knew Margot, but she was willing to help anyway.
9:08 Speaker 03 And she said, "Well, if you decide to go, I can let my parents know."
9:14 Speaker 01 And that was the plan. Once Margot saved enough scratch for a train ticket, she'd be on her way.
9:21 Speaker 01 This is crazy to me. Why in the world did Margot feel pulled back to Ohio, the one state where people might actually recognize her?
9:29 Speaker 03 I was hoping, because I knew our family's attorney, and I was hoping maybe, I hadn't really thought it out, that I could get some, some help that way.
9:42 Speaker 01 It makes almost no sense. Reaching out to the family lawyer while trying not to get them in trouble? But she was young, completely on her own, with no one to tell her it was a bad idea. No one to say, "Don't go back to Ohio." And in Baltimore already, trouble was closing in. While Margot was chasing a dream, Fay was chasing thrills.
10:06 Speaker 03 Fay was doing stuff that I knew was going to get us caught. So she was going out to bars, and I knew she was going to get caught.
10:14 Speaker 01 It was bold, to say the least. This woman had just escaped prison and was acting like it was just a bad dream she'd finally shaken loose. All it would take was one wrong person recognizing Fay and going to the cops. But Fay was almost flaunting herself.
10:29 Speaker 03 I was nervous the entire time. She just seemed so nonchalant about everything.
10:36 Speaker 01 Margo felt the clock speeding up. She'd only ever thought of Baltimore as a pause. But now, something inside of her said, "Run." Problem was, she was still broke and needed an immediate out. Then someone unexpected offered her a lifeline. Faye's brother.
10:56 Speaker 03 I had told him my fears, and he knew that we escaped.
11:02 Speaker 01 Faye's brother wasn't a snitch, and since he hadn't gone to the police knowing his family was harboring fugitives, Margo felt like she could trust him.
11:11 Speaker 03 And I told him my fears of getting caught. He was staying in an all-men's rooming house. And he said, "Well, just leave, and I'll put you up in the rooming house until you go back to Ohio and hide you out there."
11:34 Speaker 01 Margo was game. If Faye went down, she could not be dragged with her. And that meant severing whatever sisterhood escaped through that fence with them. Margo hurried to gather the few things she had to her name. Then, Faye interrupted her.
11:51 Speaker 03 She walked in on me, and she said, "What are you doing?"
11:57 Speaker 01 Busted. Margo had to think on her feet, fast.
12:01 Speaker 03 And I said, "Oh, well, I met someone, and we're going to California."
12:07 Speaker 01 There was some clever logic behind this lie.
12:10 Speaker 03 I thought when she got picked up, she would tell him where I was.
12:15 Speaker 01 Not bad for a split-second story. And Faye didn't question it. As far as she was concerned, Margo was heading west towards sunshine and a fresh start. But really, she was headed down the road to spend the night holed up in a men's boarding house.
12:31 Speaker 03 So her brother had me dress up like a guy and snuck me into the rooming house. My hair was pulled up, and he had me put on a hat and a trench coat.
12:42 Speaker 01 Another escape pulled off cleanly, hidden in plain sight.
12:48 Speaker 01 Upstairs, the room was small and dim. The walls felt close. Margot knew she could only stay there long enough to secure a way out. And that night, the cost of the next step revealed itself.
13:01 Speaker 03 Now, this part I'm ashamed of, but it bought me my freedom.
13:09 Speaker 03 He told me he would get me a train ticket to Ohio, but I had to allow him to have his way with me.
13:20 Speaker 03 So he bought me a train ticket.
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13:51 Speaker 01 Margot had split from Baltimore just in the nick of time. Faye was not so lucky.
13:58 Speaker 05 I sent up the leads up there. The agents did their investigation and caught her. Allegedly, they dismissed Margot by a few hours.
14:08 Speaker 01 When Faye and Margot broke free, the state of Tennessee asked the FBI to take the lead, and the file landed on a desk in Nashville. New to the bureau, new to the office, Richard Knudsen got assigned the case. You know him from the last episode.
14:23 Speaker 05 In 1970, I had been assigned to the Nashville Resident Agency Office of the FBI, and I had obtained an antifreeze flight to avoid confinement federal warrants for Margo Freshwater and Faye Copeland.
14:38 Speaker 01 His job was to bring the girls back from the lamb and in front of prosecutors.
14:43 Speaker 01 Knudsen was an old-school cop. Think Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. The kind of man who lives by the rules, but doesn't let them slow him down. So first, he felt like he had to understand what drove their great escape. He hadn't heard of anything like this before. Knudsen had to get the goods on Margot to understand her motivation. And the deputy warden handed over her personnel file.
15:06 Speaker 05 From that file, we'd obtained her background, a little bit about her case, a lot about relatives or friends, or where she had lived. Those kinds of things where I could set out leads trying to find her.
15:23 Speaker 01 In the 1970s, tracking a fugitive was a slower, more manual process. There were no digital databases linking local police to federal agencies. So communication often meant phone calls and mailed bulletins. Fingerprints had to be compared by hand, and investigators relied heavily on informants, paper records, and luck. Without GPS, credit card tracking, or surveillance cameras, once someone crossed a state line, they could vanish for years.
15:55 Speaker 01 In Ohio, agents knocked on doors, sat in living rooms, and worked through every name in Margot's past, hoping someone would point them in the right direction.
16:05 Speaker 05 Nobody in Ohio cooperated with us. They hadn't seen her. They didn't know, et cetera, et cetera.
16:11 Speaker 01 Remember, this was the same family that barely even made a phone call to Margot when she was wrapped up with Glenn Nash in Memphis. Why would they suddenly care about where she is now? And because boots on the ground in Ohio bore no leads, the FBI pivoted to the woman who might still be within reach.
16:27 Speaker 05 We were able to find out that Fay Copeland apparently had relatives up there in the Baltimore area.
16:34 Speaker 01 While the FBI spread out across Baltimore in search of Fay, Knudsen drove to Memphis to examine the case files himself and meet with local prosecutors. He wanted to understand how a teenage accomplice ended up serving the kind of time usually reserved for the trigger man. His first call was to the man Margo thought she could save, Alfred Schlereth. That boyfriend she was trying to help when she got involved with Glenn Nash in the first place.
16:58 Speaker 05 He was just a typical criminal, is what the best I can say. And he just kind of dismissed the whole thing. As far as he was concerned, he just turned that page. It was no great loss to him.
17:14 Speaker 01 Whatever remained of that relationship ended the moment she ran with Nash. Al later told investigators that the last time he saw Margo was when he was in jail in Tennessee. Here's Al speaking to a reporter in 1994 about that visit.
17:29 Speaker 06 We leaned forward just to the screen. But just as soon as the kiss was over, I knew that, well, that's the end of us. It's goodbye kiss.
17:41 Speaker 06 I just knew that I had lost.
17:44 Speaker 01 He stated that after it became clear to him that Margo was involved with Nash, he sent her a letter telling her to, quote, "kiss my ass." There would be no breadcrumbs from Al. Less than a month after Margo and Nash were caught, he was convicted of the armed robbery that set off this whole saga and shipped off to the state prison in Nashville, where he served his time before eventually heading back to Ohio. Knudsen's next play? Margo's more notorious associate, the one who avoided prison altogether, Glenn Nash.
18:16 Speaker 05 We cried, obviously, but he had an attorney. There just wasn't anything we could do.
18:22 Speaker 01 Which brought Knudsen back to the only person left in custody who might still help the investigation, the woman who Margo escaped with, Fay Copeland.
18:31 Speaker 05 Fay was middle, late 30s and had a much more of a commanding presence. And also she had a background in drug trafficking.
18:41 Speaker 01 Knudsen had a laundry list to go over with Fay, and she was ready to betray her friend. She was under the impression that if she could lead them to Margo, they'd cut her a break. Fay told them the exact same story that Tanya told me.
18:54 Speaker 05 I did at least one in-depth interview with Fay, and she always stuck to that story.
19:01 Speaker 01 When it came to where Margot was, Fay had less to offer. She gave him a name, and it wasn't Margot.
19:09 Speaker 05 It was Tanya. So we had that name, and I think that's what she was going by up there in Baltimore.
19:16 Speaker 01 But how would anyone who actually knew Margot know that she was going by Tanya? And how would anyone who knew her by Tanya know that she ever went by Margot? At the time, Knudsen didn't think this was a particularly useful tip, but he noted it anyway.
19:34 Speaker 05 Copeland said that last she knew that Margot had gotten tied up with a pimp in Baltimore. And as far as Fay was concerned, she had disappeared.
19:47 Speaker 01 Baltimore Vice checked every corner they could think to look.
19:50 Speaker 05 We felt we had a pretty good coverage there, and there's nothing, we can't find anything at all about Margot.
19:58 Speaker 01 We know Fay knew more than she let on to the cops. Margot had told her that she went to California. Why didn't she tell them that?
20:08 Speaker 01 For 10 years, Special Agent Richard Knudsen turned over every stone he could, all while Margot's whereabouts were parts unknown. The trail to Margot was thin from the start, and every time it circled back, it landed on her family. That was the one constant. But the Fresh Waters wouldn't talk, and without their help, Knudsen was left piecing together a puzzle with almost no pieces.
20:34 Speaker 05 I kept on sending stuff up there to Ohio, to our field office up there. And finally, the agent that got assigned that case got so disgusted with me that he was going to come down and beat me up.
20:48 Speaker 01 Everyone was tired of chasing a ghost, and Margot was making elite agents look like they were spinning in circles.
20:55 Speaker 05 They're pouring their hair out. They're trying to find her, and he keeps on being a dry hole.
21:02 Speaker 01 Knudsen made multiple overtures to Margot's mom and brother to no avail. And something about their silence began to feel intentional. Just because they didn't have the best relationship with her doesn't mean they thought what happened to her was fair. As they say, blood is thicker.
21:20 Speaker 05 The family was convinced that this had been a tremendous miscarriage of justice for their sister, her daughter. And if she could escape, as far as they're concerned, that was great. And they would have done whatever they could to hide and shelter her. And if she could get away from it, if she could beat the system, good for her.
21:39 Speaker 01 And they were simply getting sick of the FBI asking questions they didn't know the answers to. Can't blame them. I'd be annoyed too.
21:47 Speaker 05 They felt like I was harassing them, or the FBI was. We weren't, but that was the only place we could turn. And we couldn't persuade them to surrender her, or get her to surrender, get her back into the system. And so we were at a loggerhead. There was nothing.
22:04 Speaker 01 And soon there was no one. In 1984, the family buried Margot, on paper anyway. They had her legally declared dead. The investigation died quietly.
22:18 Speaker 05 We've done everything we can. So reluctantly, I closed the case from the FBI standpoint.
22:24 Speaker 01 It was a disappointing but practical decision, especially for a guy who doesn't like to stop until the job is done right. Margo Freshwater's name faded from the wanted lists, and it would stay that way until someone decided to look again.
22:40 Speaker 07 When I first started this job, I wanted to get my paycheck back every two weeks. But what made me a dogged investigator, I don't know. I guess that's just how I'm wired. Some of these cases I've worked in my career, I've actually had supervisors tell me, you're never going to solve it. And that just gives me more motivation.
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23:47 Speaker 07 We got the request from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation in 1993.
23:54 Speaker 01 That's Greg Costas. Tennessee was calling him because he was out of Ohio. He was an agent with their Bureau of Criminal Investigation, known as the BCI.
24:04 Speaker 07 America's Most Wanted wanted to profile Margo Freshwater. But while the show was in production, TBI reached out to BCI because Margot was originally from Columbus.
24:17 Speaker 01 America's Most Wanted was one of the OG true crime television shows. It blended crime storytelling with civic action, urging viewers to call in tips, and those calls directly led to the capture of hundreds of suspects.
24:30 Speaker 07 And I remember my boss coming to me at the time and asking me if I wanted to work a fugitive case, and I'm like, "Yeah, sure." I mean, I actually thought that it was somebody local that had a warrant out for their arrest and I could go in arrest to take to jail.
24:45 Speaker 01 Costas couldn't have known that chasing Margot would take up the better part of his young adulthood. When he first heard about her, he had just got tapped for a new statewide task force, the Special Investigations Unit, the crew that handled the big stuff: corruption, cold cases, and fugitives.
25:04 Speaker 07 So he hands me the case file, and I get to looking at it, and I realize that this woman escaped from prison in 1971. And I remember saying to him, "Do you realize that this woman's been on the run since, you know, I was five years old?" And he started laughing and said, "Yeah, just kind of go through the motions."
25:29 Speaker 01 At this point, it'd been nearly 15 years since the FBI closed the book on Margo Freshwater. Even though she'd been on the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation's top 10 Most Wanted list, no law enforcement agency had been devoting resources to finding her. And Costas's impression that this was gonna be a humdrum, busy work assignment quickly fell away as he started reading the file.
25:51 Speaker 07 And I'm like, "What the fuck?"
25:54 Speaker 01 I've met a lot of cops in my work, and most of them are pretty buttoned up, careful with every word. But Costas? Talking to him feels like standing next to a live wire. You never quite know what's coming next.
26:08 Speaker 07 Like, just the whole story of boyfriend needs help, she goes to Memphis to help him, the attorney she retains, they end up banging, you know, they end up in a romantic affair while dude's in jail. And then the three-state murder spree. And then poof, in the air. And I remember saying at the very beginning, like when I read this, like, "My god, this sounds like it was like a made-for-TV movie." I was like, "This is fucked up."
26:43 Speaker 01 Costas still has that old case file, nearly 18 inches thick. When I started talking to him earlier this year, I knew I wanted to see it for myself. At that point, Tanya wasn't talking to me yet, so I was hoping to learn more about her through him.
27:05 Speaker 01 A few days later, I was on a plane to Tucson, where he lives these days, ready to dig through it with him, page by page.
27:14 Speaker 01 By the time I finally landed, after a mess of canceled flights and travel snafus, the sight of those saguaros stretching toward a huge, empty sky was a welcome one. When I pulled up to his stucco house, the first one to greet me wasn't Costas. It was his clumsy, golden doodle puppy, Theo.
27:33 Speaker 01 Hi!
27:35 Speaker 10 Hey!
27:36 Speaker 01 Hey, how are you?
27:37 Speaker 10 How are ya?
27:37 Speaker 01 Good to see you!
27:38 Speaker 10 Nice to meet you!
27:39 Speaker 01 Nice to finally meet you, yeah.
27:41 Speaker 10 That's Theo!
27:42 Speaker 01 Hi, Theo! Wow! You're adorable.
27:47 Speaker 10 Thank you. Oh, you're talking about Theo?
27:51 Speaker 01 I'm gonna grab my stuff.
27:52 Speaker 10 Alright, you found it okay?
27:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:55 Speaker 10 Come on, Theo.
27:57 Speaker 01 Costas wasn't kidding. When I walked into his house, there on the kitchen counter were two brown accordion folders bursting at the seams. We started at the beginning. I wanted to know the specifics of the request from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the TBI.
28:13 Speaker 07 The request was, try to establish if she has any living relatives, and if so, try to determine whether or not there was ever contact made.
28:23 Speaker 01 But this time, this wasn't just about asking questions and taking the family's word for them. Costas wanted harder proof, to see if Margot was really calling or writing. But the FBI had hit a wall, and Margot had been declared dead. I had some questions about that. If this woman was declared dead and did not seem to be actively committing crimes, why was she worth his time? When someone on the run is declared dead, that usually brings the whole case to a stop. You can't prosecute a dead person, so the criminal case just ends. But it turns out, Costas wasn't entirely sold on the idea Margot was dead. Because when the family made it official,
29:07 Speaker 01 it was just a probate court ruling to settle her grandmother's will. They wanted to distribute the money evenly between the people who were still around. And Margot wasn't. Her death was a bureaucratic judgment, not one based in fact. There wasn't a coroner involved or anything like that, which meant there was still a chance she could be out there, alive. I had another nagging question for Costas. I couldn't fully understand why they'd be barking up this tree again, all for America's Most Wanted.
29:41 Speaker 07 The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation just put together a 10 Most Wanted list. They've never done it before. And number one on their 10 Most Wanted list was Margo Freshwater.
29:54 Speaker 01 Law enforcement agencies like the FBI and local police send cases to America's Most Wanted because the show is a useful tool for catching fugitives.
30:02 Speaker 07 And America's Most Wanted accepted the case.
30:06 Speaker 01 That kind of exposure could put Margot's case back on the map again, giving it the kind of national attention it hadn't seen in decades.
30:13 Speaker 07 Everything that we were doing, really at the time, was geared toward the show. Because we were hoping that the show would shake the bushes and create some chatter. And we wanted to make sure that we were in place in case that happened.
30:27 Speaker 01 And the clock was ticking.
30:28 Speaker 07 The show was in production. And I was trying to think of everything possible that we could do to see if there was any contact. So when I started looking at it, we were able to determine that she had three relatives that we were able to identify. One was Leona Julius, who was an elderly woman and was Margot's aunt. The other one was Tim White, who was the oldest of the family. And he was Margot's half-brother. And then she had a full-blooded brother, Tommy Freshwater.
31:05 Speaker 01 The one who wouldn't cooperate with the FBI in the early days. It wasn't much of a family tree to work with.
31:11 Speaker 07 Mother was dead, and father had been dead for a long time.
31:16 Speaker 01 Talking to a fugitive's family can be a huge help for investigators. After all, our families often know things like where we might go, who we trust, and how we think. That emotional connection can also be a weak spot. People on the run almost always reach out to loved ones eventually. But it didn't seem like Margot's family knew much about her back in the 70s. So why would they know anything now? Kostas couldn't leave that to chance.
31:42 Speaker 07 Tim was about 10 years older than Margot. So I think he was kind of grown and gone. It was just Margot and Tommy and the mother. There was always police activity at the house, but it mostly focused on Tommy. Tommy was always in trouble.
32:03 Speaker 01 Kostas started knocking on doors, beginning with the Worthington Police Department, where the family name still rang a bell.
32:10 Speaker 07 He was very familiar with the Freshwater family. They didn't have any run-ins with Margot, but everybody had heard about Margot. She was almost like an urban legend.
32:18 Speaker 01 But Costas was a pro with something to prove. If he could crack a legendary case featured on primetime television, it could make his career.
32:27 Speaker 07 I was able to find a address for Tim and an address for Leona. I could not find an address for Tommy. I finally found Tommy. Tommy happened to be in prison, which is why it was so difficult finding him. So now we know where all three are at.
32:50 Speaker 01 It was time to tighten the net. Costas shifted from finding family to watching them. His opening move is to place federal mail covers on the homes of Tim White and Leona Julius, having the Postal Service document all incoming and outgoing mail and send the reports straight to him. But letters could take days. Phone calls were instant. If Margot ever reached out, that's where the tremor would show first.
33:17 Speaker 07 We also put on Leona's phone and Tim White's phone what's called a pen register.
33:25 Speaker 01 You had to get a judge to sign off on it, but basically it logged every call that went in or out of the house. And remember, this was back when everyone still had landlines.
33:36 Speaker 07 We could take all the numbers, do an analysis of them, and then find out through subpoenas who the phone numbers belonged to.
33:44 Speaker 01 There wasn't one peep from Margot. Silence on the wire didn't mean she was gone. It just meant he had to look for her another way.
33:52 Speaker 07 And then, of course, we did a lot of drive-bys, a lot of surveillance, a lot of pulling license plates, running license plates.
33:59 Speaker 01 This was real pre-digital revolution gumshoe stuff.
34:03 Speaker 07 We actually went through their garbage.
34:06 Speaker 01 Costas turned to the one thing he hadn't tried yet: talking to the surviving Freshwaters face to face.
34:13 Speaker 07 I wanted to interview the family members, but could not figure out how to make contact with them.
34:21 Speaker 01 That was the hard part: figuring out how not to blow his cover.
34:25 Speaker 07 Because in my opinion, even if they had contact with her, either way, the minute they see a badge, they're not saying anything.
34:34 Speaker 01 He actually used to do undercover drug busts, so that got him thinking.
34:39 Speaker 07 I was racking my brain and racking my brain and racking my brain.
34:42 Speaker 01 Costa started thinking less like a cop and more like a con man.
34:47 Speaker 07 I thought about when, before Margot went to Memphis to try to get Al Schlereth out of jail. She had a baby in August of 1966. I was born in September of 1966. She gave that baby up for adoption and it just kind of hit me.
35:13 Speaker 07 Why couldn't I pose as the boy that she gave up for adoption?
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35:51 Speaker 01 The Crimes of Margo Freshwater is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and Glass Podcasts. It was hosted and reported by me, Cooper Mall. Maura Walls is our story editor. Our executive producers are Catherine St. Louis, Jonathan Hirsch, Nancy Glass, Ben Fetterman, and Andrea Gunning. Sound design and editing by Anna McLean. Mixed and mastered by Matt Del Vecchio. Our theme music was composed by Oliver Baines. We use music from MIB and Epidemic Sound. Our production managers are Sammy Allison and Kristen Melchiori. Our lawyer is Michael Belkin. Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rasek, and Carrie Hartman. Please rate and review The
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