Pod Insights The Binge Crimes The Crimes of Margo Freshwater | 3. Undercover About this episode In a last-ditch gamble, Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation agents conceive an elaborate ruse to try to get Margo’s relatives to turn on her.
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Transcript 6,348 words · 10 speakers
0:02 Speaker 00 Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress. A hoodie slips beneath a blazer. An old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.
0:30 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.
0:56 Speaker 02 Why not? I think traditionally, people maintain contact with their families. And we were not convinced that she had not.
1:05 Speaker 01 That's Stephen Sheerholdt, retired BCI agent who eventually became Greg Costas's boss. Sheerholdt remembers that as long as Margot's fate was still unknown, Costas wouldn't stop until he found the answer.
1:17 Speaker 02 Greg was like a dog with a bone.
1:20 Speaker 01 Call it ego or call it grit, but Costas believed no secret could resist him forever. Every cop before him had pressed her relatives, hoping for a crack. But every attempt had collapsed into silence. So Costas knew he'd need a different way in.
1:36 Speaker 02 I thought, why couldn't I impersonate the baby that she gave up for adoption in 1966?
1:46 Speaker 01 Costas was 27 at the time, the exact age the baby would have been. It was a coincidence he could use, the perfect cover for getting close. And since the real child had been adopted as an infant, it's not like anyone would know what he grew up to look like.
2:03 Speaker 03 And I could approach the family members saying, hey, this is who I am. I'm trying to find my birth mother, Margo Freshwater.
2:13 Speaker 01 This was a pretty bold plan, ethically blurry for sure.
2:18 Speaker 03 Everybody thought it was a great idea. But you did have to tread lightly, okay? Because you're dealing with three other lives here, meaning the parents that adopted the kid and the kid himself, right?
2:31 Speaker 01 It was risky. Maybe this kid didn't know he was adopted. Maybe his parents had kept that from him. And if he didn't know, maybe he didn't want to know his biological family. Still, the scheme made sense. If Kostas played the part, he could slip right into their world without setting off alarms.
2:50 Speaker 03 In order to do that, though, I had to figure out who the boy was, his real identity. Because my fear was, what if this boy really did try to find his birth mother? And actually made contact with these people? And then here I come saying, hey, you know, I'm looking for my mom, Margot. And you're like, well, no, you know, he was already here. So I went through the probate court and subpoenaed the records. But you open up the file and there's nothing in there. It was just literally almost impossible to find out who adopted the kid. All you could really find was the birth certificate.
3:31 Speaker 01 There was no guarantee it would lead anywhere. But Kostas, he doesn't give up that easy.
3:44 Speaker 03 So one night I'm laying in bed and I'm watching TV and I'm watching the 11 o'clock news and there's a story on there about a girl who was reunited with her mother. And this girl used this company called Reunite. And what they do is they try to help adoptive kids find their birth parents or vice versa. So I thought, huh, I wonder if they can help me. I called them the next day.
4:11 Speaker 01 How in the world was he going to explain this? How do you call this well-meaning nonprofit and say, "Hey, I'm looking for a convicted murderer on the loose. Want to hop on the bandwagon?"
4:22 Speaker 03 They were concerned.
4:25 Speaker 01 You think?
4:26 Speaker 03 They thought I was somehow investigating them. And they're trying to tell me that everything they do is above board. And I said, "Look, that's fine. I need your help." So we set up a meeting and I basically told them the whole story.
4:41 Speaker 01 Kostas has got a silver tongue. The guy can talk his way through just about anything.
4:46 Speaker 03 I'm telling you, it was within three days, they had it narrowed down to like three kids. Everybody who was born on that day that was put up for adoption. And they had it narrowed down to three boys.
5:00 Speaker 01 Kostas had to figure out of the three, who was the one? Then something jumped out at him in the details Reunite provided on each boy.
5:08 Speaker 03 One of them said, "Father's occupation: hairdresser."
5:14 Speaker 01 Earlier, when he got his hands on the birth certificate, the father's occupation was listed as hairstylist.
5:20 Speaker 03 So when I saw hairdresser, I knew this is him.
5:24 Speaker 01 Bingo.
5:27 Speaker 03 His name was Michael and he lived up in Findlay, Ohio, which is up in northwest Ohio. So I pulled up his picture, his driver's license photo, and you can actually see a little freshwater in him. So now I know who the boy is. But now I have to talk to his adoptive parents, right? Because I didn't feel the need to tell somebody that his birth mother is a wanted fugitive for murder.
5:56 Speaker 01 It's funny where Kostas draws the line.
5:58 Speaker 03 So I thought, "Well, I'll talk to the adoptive parents." And it was a very difficult phone call.
6:06 Speaker 01 They seemed pretty confused at first, but he told them straight. He just wanted to know if anyone had ever reached out about their son or if their son had ever tried to find his birth mother.
6:17 Speaker 03 No, nobody had ever tried to find him. And no, he's never had any interest in finding his birth parents. So now I know I'm good to go.
6:29 Speaker 01 The plan was set. He'd built himself a new identity. Not a cop, not a fed, a son. Greg Costas would become Michael, the child Margo Freshwater never got to keep. From Sony Music Entertainment and Glass Podcasts, this is The Crimes of Margo Freshwater. I'm Cooper Mall. Episode Three, Undercover.
7:05 Speaker 03 As part of the cover, my partner, you know, at the time, was about seven or eight years older than me. And we decided he was going to pose as my private investigator that I hired to find my birth mother.
7:20 Speaker 01 Together, Costas and his partner David Meyer spent weeks designing an illusion. David Meyer declined to participate in this podcast, but Costas remembers it like it was yesterday.
7:32 Speaker 03 We had to create a fictitious private investigation company. So we came up with the Great Lakes Investigations. And of course, that's because the Great Lakes are freshwater.
7:47 Speaker 01 Even special agents have inside jokes.
7:50 Speaker 03 We had business cards, letterhead.
7:54 Speaker 01 And the phone number on them.
7:56 Speaker 03 There was a little satellite office in Cincinnati that had a hard line, a landline, that nobody ever used. And if you called it, you got an answering machine saying, "You have reached the Great Lakes Investigations. You know, nobody is available right now, blah, blah, blah."
8:15 Speaker 01 These guys went the whole nine. Costas gave me a copy of the letterhead and business card. And I gotta say, if someone handed me this stuff, I wouldn't assume it was fake. They were already tracking the family's phone calls and mail.
8:29 Speaker 03 We were hoping it would generate some activity where they would pick up the phone and start making phone calls. So we were keeping an eye on that.
8:38 Speaker 01 Costas had already honed in on the three surviving family members: Margot's half-brother Tim, her brother Tommy, and her great-aunt Leona. Now they just had to decide which order they'd approach them in.
8:49 Speaker 03 We thought, well, let's start with Tim White.
8:54 Speaker 01 But he had nothing. He told them he barely knew her, never knew she was pregnant, and couldn't help them.
9:01 Speaker 03 We thought, well, okay, that didn't go well. So the next person we talked to was Aunt Leona. Aunt Leona was probably, at this time, she had to be pushing 80. She lived in the same apartment for, gosh, I don't know, 20, 30 years. I mean, she was in that same apartment when Margot had that baby.
9:20 Speaker 01 After Margot gave birth, she couldn't go home. And Aunt Leona allowed her and the newborn baby to stay with her. It was at Aunt Leona's home where Margot decided she wasn't cut out for motherhood yet. She was a broke teenager with no family support and no baby daddy in the picture. Aunt Leona had met baby Michael when he was just days old. If anything was going to break through, it would be this visit. An old woman, a lost great nephew, and a story designed to pull at the heart.
9:51 Speaker 03 I decided I'm going to go up with my partner so I could be standing there.
9:55 Speaker 01 They rehearsed the story one last time in the car. Every word meant to sound casual and believable.
10:01 Speaker 03 We get there, we knock on the door. This little old lady comes at a door, you know, are you Leona Julius? And she says, yes. And my partner introduces us and says, you know, this is Michael. He hired me to find his birth mother, and his birth mother is Margo Freshwater. And we know that you are her aunt.
10:21 Speaker 01 For a split second, Kostas thought the whole thing might fall apart. After all, Margot's family had investigators snooping around before him. She could have seen through it, slammed the door, called the cops even. Instead, she just stared at him, studying his face like she was searching for someone she'd lost.
10:43 Speaker 03 She looked at me and said, honey, I've always wondered what happened to you, and invited us into her apartment. We sit down on her couch. She says, let me go get some pictures of your mom. She goes upstairs.
11:03 Speaker 01 They looked around. The place felt untouched by time. Lace curtains, family photos, the faint smell of old furniture and dust. Kostas could feel the weight of their deception settle in as they sunk into the well-worn couch.
11:17 Speaker 03 It was right about that time my partner looked at me and said, you know, you're going to hell, right? And I said, "Well, you know, Margot is a murderer."
11:27 Speaker 01 Then footsteps on the stairs cut the moment short.
11:30 Speaker 03 Leona comes back down with pictures of Margot, most of which I had never seen because they were taken at the Tennessee Prison for Women when Leona went down to visit her.
11:43 Speaker 01 Costa showed me this photo. Aunt Leona let him keep it, something to remember his mom by. Margot's hair is perfectly coiffed, her brown blazer is buttoned up to her neckline. Think Jackie O without the charismatic first lady smile. She is in prison.
12:01 Speaker 01 After a few minutes of small talk, the conversation shifted to what they were really there for: locating a fugitive. Turns out, Leona held on to more than just pictures. She still carried her own version of the story, one where Margot wasn't a killer at all.
12:18 Speaker 03 She had told me that she didn't believe that Margot was guilty.
12:23 Speaker 01 And last she'd seen Margot was when that photo was taken.
12:28 Speaker 03 She had heard that Margot escaped.
12:30 Speaker 01 But that was it.
12:32 Speaker 03 So we left. I had the pictures and then me and Aunt Leona became kind of pen pals for a little bit.
12:40 Speaker 01 I asked Costa's why he kept up with Aunt Leona, and he didn't really have a rationale. Could his conscience have crept up on him? Did he feel sorry for her? He told me that he didn't even totally understand it, and it didn't help him in his search because beyond warmth and nostalgia, she knew nothing. No trace of where Margot had gone.
13:04 Speaker 03 So the next person, obviously, was Tommy.
13:08 Speaker 01 Margot's full-blooded brother, who happened to be in prison at the time.
13:12 Speaker 03 And I actually made a colossal mistake, a rookie mistake, if you will.
13:19 Speaker 01 I'll let Costa's explain.
13:21 Speaker 03 So I called the prison and I talked to the investigator. I didn't tell them what we were doing. I just said that we needed to interview Tommy Freshwater and we needed privacy. So me and my partner show up. We're sitting in the warden's office and they bring in Tommy. We introduce ourselves to Tommy. My partner says, you know, introduces himself, "This is Michael, and he hired me to find his mother."
13:50 Speaker 01 Turns out, Tommy had gotten a heads up, and he was savvy like his sister.
13:56 Speaker 03 Tommy looks at me and says, "Yeah, my brother Tim White wrote me a letter and said, 'Somebody claiming to be Margot's son may be coming to visit you.'" So Tommy says, "So I said to my cellie, 'Damn, man, I may have a nephew out there that I didn't know about.'" And he says, "And then I told him, 'If the dude writes me, he's legit. If he comes to visit me in person, they're the police.'"
14:27 Speaker 01 Kostas exchanged a quick look with his partner. Now here they were, standing right in front of him, exactly the way a cop would.
14:36 Speaker 03 We're both trying to play it off. And he says, "Well, then answer me this. If you're not the police, why are we inside the warden's office?"
14:48 Speaker 01 Meyer took the lead on the damage control.
14:50 Speaker 03 So my partner, thinking on his feet, said, "Well, that's on me. I happen to know the warden, and I asked him to do me a favor because of how sensitive this is, and that's why we're here." I chimed in and said, "Look, I'm just trying to find out who my family is. I'm not a cop, you know? I'm just a small-town boy from northwest Ohio."
15:16 Speaker 01 For a moment, neither of them knew which way it would go.
15:20 Speaker 03 Well, we convinced him that I was legit, and he added me to his visitation list at the prison.
15:30 Speaker 01 But this final hail mary, it didn't pay off. All it bought him was access, his fake name on a visitor list, nothing else. Tommy didn't have anything new to give him, just hazy memories of growing up with Margot.
15:45 Speaker 03 You know, when we left there, we were convinced, after speaking to all three of them, that there was no contact whatsoever between Margot and the family.
15:56 Speaker 01 If the family couldn't give them that break, maybe putting Margot's story back in the spotlight could. And there was one show with national reach and a knack for catching fugitives on the lam: America's Most Wanted.
16:12 Speaker 00 Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress. A hoodie slips beneath a blazer. An old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.
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16:59 Speaker 05 Margo Freshwater had served just 18 months of a 99-year sentence when she escaped in 1970. Today, she could be hiding as someone's wife, a mother, even a grandmother. Maybe tonight, you've got the answer that authorities have been looking for for nearly 25 years.
17:17 Speaker 01 On July 30, 1994, America's Most Wanted brought Margo Freshwater's story to the screen. The episode was pure 90s television: quick cuts, ominous narration, and reenactments that played out like a crime noir short film. Actors retraced her romance and crime spree with Glenn Nash from Memphis to the Gulf, flashing back to the liquor store murder, the jailbreak, and the decades-long mystery of where she'd gone.
17:43 Speaker 05 Freshwater was 22 when she escaped. Then the FBI has enhanced this photo with different hairstyles to show you how she might look today at age 46.
17:54 Speaker 01 In this segment, their producers talked to a lot of people I have in my own reporting, and some I couldn't, because they're long dead. Notably, Glenn Nash, Margot's co-conspirator, gave them an exclusive phone interview.
18:07 Speaker 06 I think that it would be to Margo Freshwater's best interests to go ahead and turn herself in. A lot of time has passed, and it's really time that she give this deep thought and then come in and get this behind her.
18:26 Speaker 01 Nash, the man she once followed across state lines, now in the limelight. Not for his hand in the crimes, but to tell Margot it was time to give herself up.
18:37 Speaker 01 The segment ends on a split screen. On the right is a grainy, black and white head and shoulders image of a woman with short hair and a neutral expression, labeled as Margo Freshwater. On the left, her details. Margo Freshwater, age 46, 5'4", 130 to 200 pounds. Beneath that is a large tip hotline number.
18:59 Speaker 05 If you know anything about the case of Margo Freshwater, agents are in our Washington, DC studios waiting to hear from you.
19:08 Speaker 01 Before any chain reaction was set, Costas, watching from Ohio, picked up a pen as Michael.
19:16 Speaker 03 After it aired, I wrote Leona a letter, and I wrote Tommy a letter, basically saying, you know, "I can't believe this. I happened to be watching America's Most Wanted, and lo and behold, there's my mom." And Leona wrote back and said, "Don't listen to anything you hear. Your mom was a wonderful woman."
19:46 Speaker 01 That was the last he ever heard from all three of Margot's family members. They were left with no choice but to rely on the public, tips coming in from America's Most Wanted.
19:56 Speaker 03 The way we divvied it up was, every tip that came in that was in the confines of Ohio, they kicked it to me.
20:08 Speaker 01 Each one offered a glimpse of a woman who wasn't Margot.
20:12 Speaker 03 When the tips start coming in, it wasn't, "Hey, I know this woman's Margot because she told me." But it was always, "Hey, I know somebody that looks just like the agent has me."
20:24 Speaker 01 Knowing now how Margot aged, I gotta say, the picture that was blasted on America's Most Wanted couldn't look further from the woman I met, or the woman in the mugshot that drew me to this story. In the grainy black and white, they disappeared her bone structure. Her eyes are further apart. Imagine asking AI what you look like in a parallel universe. It just doesn't make sense.
20:47 Speaker 03 The problem is, you know, that's one person's interpretation of one photo. If you look back at all the photographs of Margot from the time she was arrested and in trial and in jail, she literally looks different in a lot of these photos.
21:03 Speaker 01 That photo turned out to be more of a problem than a clue. Instead of narrowing the search, it sent investigators chasing faces that only looked the part.
21:12 Speaker 03 Every once in a while, you get a phone call here or a tip there that we'd follow up on, but really nothing of any substance.
21:21 Speaker 01 The kind that only reminded them how cold the trail really was. Weeks turned into months.
21:27 Speaker 03 We never closed it out, but it just goes into a pending inactive state.
21:35 Speaker 01 Margo Freshwater's 15 minutes of fame were up. The brief resurrection of her story faded as quickly as it appeared.
21:43 Speaker 01 But true crime television never lets go. It loves to trot the same stories back out, polish them up, and send them searching for an ending all over again.
21:53 Speaker 03 In 2002, clear out of the blue, I got a call from a producer from Unsolved Mysteries, and they said that they wanted to do a show on Margo Freshwater.
22:08 Speaker 01 Another true crime TV show wanted to look into Margot's case, but this time, there was a big difference. Previous searches for Margot had been all phone calls, paper trails, and shoe leather, the old way. Now, the 21st century had broken open, and with it came the kind of technology that could find anyone, anywhere.
22:33 Speaker 07 Observe: The North American Dad. 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, "Dang, that's a good offer." The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle. No one called him "boss." He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on Carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.
23:06 Speaker 00 Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress. A hoodie slips beneath a blazer. An old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.
23:35 Speaker 01 Eight years after America's Most Wanted sparked his first hunt for Margot, unsolved mysteries felt like a second shot. A chance to finally prove what he'd always believed. That Margo Freshwater wasn't a ghost.
23:47 Speaker 03 Of course, they talked to Tennessee. They talked to me. And now you go to the case file, you blow the dust off of it, and you start leafing through it again.
23:57 Speaker 01 And once that old file was opened again, it was like a signal went out.
24:02 Speaker 03 Shortly thereafter, I got a phone call from Greg Elliott from TBI.
24:08 Speaker 01 You heard that right. Another Greg. Different badge, same hunt.
24:14 Speaker 08 I started as an agent with Tennessee Bureau of Investigation in 1985. Started right out of college. The primary area that I spent the most time working in was fugitive cases.
24:25 Speaker 01 That call connected two decades of dead ends. Because while Costas had been striking out in Ohio, Tennessee investigators had been playing hot potato with the case and hitting the same walls. Eventually, the potato landed in Elliot's hands.
24:42 Speaker 08 She was given to me for some reason, not any special reason. I just happened to be up to bat at that time, I guess.
24:49 Speaker 01 But this case was different. The woman's trail was ancient. The paper inside the file was yellowed and thin. Even her mugshot looked like it belonged to another century.
24:59 Speaker 08 So that was a really cold case by the time I got to it.
25:03 Speaker 01 By 2002, when unsolved mysteries came calling, Elliot had been in the game long enough to spot a dead case from a mile away. He wasn't obsessed with this case the way Costas had become. To him, Margo Freshwater was just another name in an old file with a story ripe for Hollywood. So if he was calling Costas up, something had to have shifted.
25:25 Speaker 03 And he says to me, "Have you ever come across the name Tanya McCarter?" And I said, "No, but we knew Tanya. It came from the FBI when she first escaped from prison. So it was common knowledge that was one of the aliases that she was using."
25:49 Speaker 01 Fay Copeland, the woman Margot had escaped prison with, mentioned that name back in 1971. Now that clue was finally in the right hands, at the right time. Because now, the World Wide Web was a thing. The National Crime Database connected precincts from coast to coast, letting cops share information. Agencies across the country could talk to each other in real time, share data, compare fingerprints, track aliases. Law enforcement had finally stepped out of the Dark Ages and into a world where no one could hide forever.
26:24 Speaker 03 He had said that there was a database. You put in somebody's name and you're going to get everything about this person that a public record could pick up on.
26:35 Speaker 08 What happened was, one of our analysts came to me and he said, "Hey, you might want to look at this right here." I said, "I've come across an individual up in Columbus, Ohio."
26:43 Speaker 03 Somebody from TBI was just playing around with the computer and put in the name Tanya, just the name Tanya, and Margot's date of birth.
26:56 Speaker 01 Out of all of the records in the database, there was just one single match. A Tanya Hudgens-McCarter, living in the same town Margo grew up in, with the same birthday. This was huge. With the click of a mouse, the dead file had been hit with a defibrillator. Thing was, Elliot was in Tennessee, and this Tanya was in Ohio. When he called up Costas, Elliot needed his help.
27:25 Speaker 08 I said, "Hey, you got this information? See if you can find a driver's license, maybe a DL photo of this person, or figure out who this person is."
27:34 Speaker 01 Elliot thought this was gonna take a minute.
27:36 Speaker 08 He called me back a couple hours later, and he said, "Hey, I'm sending you something. You need to look at this."
27:42 Speaker 03 We took a clear, plastic sheet of paper, and we made a copy of Margo's mugshot from 1966.
27:54 Speaker 03 Then we took a copy of one of Tanya Hudgens-McCarter's previous driver license photos. Then we put a copy of that on a regular, white piece of paper, and then took the plastic sheet with the mugshot and placed it on top of the white sheet that had one of her former driver's license photos.
28:22 Speaker 03 Everything lines up perfectly. The eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears, the chin, the lips.
28:34 Speaker 01 When I visited Costas at his home in Tucson, he pulled this out as if it were a magic trick.
28:40 Speaker 03 So this was another driver's license, one of her driver's license photos where she looks pissed off. And then that was obviously a copy of her mugshot. And then took it and just... It's really fascinating. Look at that.
28:53 Speaker 01 That is crazy, the way the eyes line up.
28:56 Speaker 03 Yeah. Look at that. But look at that. I mean, isn't that crazy?
28:59 Speaker 01 It was truly shocking.
29:01 Speaker 03 I mean, look at that. There's no difference.
29:04 Speaker 09 It really does take your breath away. It's...
29:06 Speaker 03 It's creepy, right?
29:07 Speaker 09 Yeah, I think creepy is one of the better ways to describe it.
29:10 Speaker 01 The woman in the picture was older, softer around the eyes, but the resemblance is unmistakable, like time had folded in on itself, and Margo was staring back from a new life.
29:22 Speaker 03 So I email it to Greg Elliott and he says,
29:29 Speaker 08 "It looked like you were looking at a picture of a mother and a daughter."
29:33 Speaker 01 It was the first face anyone had connected to Margo Freshwater in more than 30 years.
29:39 Speaker 08 I said, "Yeah, we need to look into this a little bit more."
29:43 Speaker 02 I kind of was hurt. It was amazing. That date of birth, that first name, and then that photo. It was the whole loaf of bread.
29:51 Speaker 01 Sheerhold saw confirmation. Costa saw coincidence.
29:56 Speaker 03 I'm very cautiously pessimistic. I try to keep my expectations low so I don't get disappointed.
30:04 Speaker 01 Costa wasn't about to call this case solved without something solid to back it up.
30:09 Speaker 03 I'm like, "Let's pump the brakes, you know, let me do some work on this." So I decided, "Well, I am gonna just dig into the life of Tanya Hudgens-McCarter."
30:25 Speaker 01 He'd need hard proof. So the idea was to find enough probable cause to obtain Tanya Hudgens-McCarter's fingerprints to compare them to the ones Margo Freshwater gave when she was arrested in December 1966. There wasn't proof that Tanya was Margot, not yet. But the more he looked, the more this Tanya woman started to smell like trouble.
30:48 Speaker 03 I don't know if this woman is Margo Freshwater, but Tanya Hudgens-McCarter is hiding from something or somebody. The more I dug, the more red flags kept coming up.
31:03 Speaker 01 He started with the obvious, the cornerstone of legal identity.
31:07 Speaker 03 There's no birth certificate for this woman.
31:11 Speaker 01 In fact, it didn't appear she even existed before 1974. No school transcripts, no hospital records, no paper trail for this Tanya.
31:21 Speaker 08 The social security number that she was using had no history prior to that.
31:27 Speaker 01 Maybe McCarter hadn't always been her surname. There was an answer for that, too.
31:31 Speaker 03 She applied for her social security number in 1971 as Tanya Myers. She listed David A. Myers as her father, okay?
31:43 Speaker 03 Reapplied in 1973 as Tanya Myers listed David Anthony as father. So now we got David Myers and David Anthony. Reapplied in 1974 as Tanya Zimmerman listed again David Myers as a father. Reapplied in 1978 as Tanya Hutkins listed David Myers as father.
32:14 Speaker 01 She'd clearly had more than one husband, but more than one dad? That's kind of not possible. It was as if her past had been rearranged, line by line, to fit whatever version she needed at the time. Next came employment records.
32:31 Speaker 03 I found out that she worked at MetLife.
32:34 Speaker 01 Selling insurance. This could be it.
32:38 Speaker 03 I was tracking that down to see if she ever did get licensed because I knew that if she got licensed, she would have to be fingerprinted.
32:46 Speaker 01 In most states, if you want to sell insurance, you have to be fingerprinted as part of your background check. Those prints go to state and federal agencies, including the FBI, to make sure you're cleared to work.
32:57 Speaker 03 But she never was printed.
33:00 Speaker 01 MetLife might not have had her fingerprints, but she was an employee after all. They'd have to have a file on her, which included her initial job application. That would certainly have some background info. Costa subpoenaed it.
33:13 Speaker 03 And there was a high school listed that didn't exist.
33:19 Speaker 01 Another alarm bell. Costa figured if that one personnel file exposed a lie, there were probably more. He pulled her records from MetLife, then traced her back to her brief job at AAA. The details did not line up. Even the high school she listed changed from one application to the next. The specifics bounced around, but one thing in every file stood out.
33:43 Speaker 03 Looking at it as a whole, one thing that was consistent was there was about five years of her life that were just unaccounted for.
33:53 Speaker 01 Every document they pulled traced back only so far, until it suddenly stopped.
33:59 Speaker 03 Why? Well, because she was in prison, that's why.
34:05 Speaker 01 Most investigators would have stopped there. Costas couldn't. He wanted more than circumstantial evidence. He wanted a smoking gun.
34:13 Speaker 02 I still wasn't convinced. I have to keep digging. I have to keep digging. I have to keep digging.
34:19 Speaker 01 Costas reached out to a few of Tanya's MetLife coworkers. They didn't have much to say about Tanya, but they did explain the last name McCarter.
34:28 Speaker 08 She left in February 2000 to become a truck driver with her husband. So they determined that she was married to Darryl McCarter and that he was an over-the-road trucker. She actually had her CDL, which is why she quit her job.
34:43 Speaker 01 A commercial driver's license. It looked like Tanya and Darryl went into business together. Each record felt like it might be the one to unlock her past, but the answers kept vanishing just as he got close. Sheerhold remembers Costas was really hung up on making Tanya Hudgens-McCarter real.
35:02 Speaker 02 We just kept hitting dead ends or unable to find a birth certificate. And Greg rightfully was following up on everything and expecting to have an aha moment. And it didn't happen.
35:18 Speaker 01 What unsettled Costas most was the feeling that he was chasing a shadow, not a person.
35:24 Speaker 02 He was getting very frustrated, very discouraged, thinking that it's not her or I would have found something. And I remember one day talking to him at his house and telling him the fact that you are not finding anything is the thing.
35:45 Speaker 01 That was their probable cause. And they were going to run with it. But they still needed a warrant and to find the woman they were going to serve. Luckily, they had her address from the driver's license they pulled up in the database.
36:00 Speaker 03 So I start doing drive-bys of the apartment that her and Daryl McCarter are living in. So I'm driving by almost every day. No activity, no activity, never saw any lights on.
36:16 Speaker 01 For two weeks, day after day, outside their East Columbus suburban apartment, nothing changed. On Saturday, May 18, 2002, Costas had just clocked out.
36:29 Speaker 03 I was on my way home from work and I stopped and I got a beer. I got a beer and a shot.
36:34 Speaker 01 Then, like muscle memory, Margot's case found its way back into his thoughts.
36:39 Speaker 03 As I was drinking my beer, I thought, you know what? What the hell? Since I'm already out, let me just take a ride by the apartment and see if there's anything going on. So I drive by the apartment and a light's on that I'd never seen on before. And then right in front of the light is Daryl's car license plate, R O O T 66. So that's when I was like, holy shit, I think they're home.
37:06 Speaker 01 For a moment, Costas just sat there, engine idling, staring at that window. This was the closest he had ever been to the woman he'd been chasing for nearly a decade and who'd been on the run even longer. Then, his pulse kicked up.
37:24 Speaker 03 And I parked where I could see their apartment and see the car in case anybody left. And I remember literally sitting there thinking, what the fuck do I do now?
37:36 Speaker 01 Costas had gone totally rogue. He couldn't just walk up and knock on the door without backup or a signed warrant.
37:44 Speaker 01 He needed to know who was inside. There was one way in, the phone number they'd found in the database. In the moment, it was the only card to play.
37:54 Speaker 03 I thought, okay, I'll call the number and just say, hi, who's this? And hopefully she'd say, oh, it's Tanya, who's this?
38:07 Speaker 03 I called the number. Hello? And a woman answers. And I say, hi, who's this? And the woman says, well, who's this? And I said, this is Vinnie. And she says, who you looking for, Vinnie? And I said, I'm looking for Suzie. And she goes, you got the wrong number. I said, oh, I'm sorry.
38:30 Speaker 01 Well, that was awkward. But it gave Costa something, sort of.
38:35 Speaker 03 Okay, now I know there's a woman in the house, but I don't know that it's Margo Freshwater or Tonya Hudgens-McCarter.
38:42 Speaker 01 It was time to call for backup.
38:43 Speaker 03 I called my boss and I said, they're home. I'm gonna be sitting on it for a while to see if I have any movement. And he says, okay. I then called Greg Elliott from the TBI.
38:56 Speaker 08 And he said, hey, they're home. He said, they're back at the apartment. We've got the apartment under surveillance. And this is about seven or eight o'clock one night. So I said, okay, I'm coming up and we'll see what we gotta do to get her identified.
39:08 Speaker 03 And he did. He flew up that night.
39:10 Speaker 08 I actually flew the TBI plane up there that we had and got there by 11 or 12 o'clock. He met me at the airport. They kept the house under surveillance. And then we started the next morning at about 5 o'clock. So the issue that we had was, number one, we had to get the affidavit written, the search warrant, and then had to locate a judge.
39:32 Speaker 01 They needed to move now. But Murphy's Law had other plans. Tonya Hudgens-McCarter turned up on the worst day of the week to push paperwork, Sunday.
39:42 Speaker 03 The prosecutor wanted to wait till Monday. And I'm like, there's no way in hell. They're here now.
39:48 Speaker 01 Tonya and Daryl were truckers, used to long hauls and disappearing for weeks at a time. If they pulled out again, who knew when they'd have another shot at her?
39:58 Speaker 03 I'm a nervous fucking wreck.
40:01 Speaker 01 Judges were home. Offices were dark. Phones ringing into the void. If they waited till Monday, they risked losing her entirely.
40:14 Speaker 01 Next time on The Crimes of Margo Freshwater, Tonya reveals how she hid from authorities in those first five years as a fugitive and what made things complicated from the jump.
40:25 Speaker 09 We were talking one night. And I told him, I said, well, you're nice. I like you. But I can't get in a relationship. I'm pregnant.
40:51 Speaker 00 Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress? A hoodie slips beneath a blazer? An old cap finds a new scarf? Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.
41:21 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 Kristin Melchiori. Our lawyer is Michael Belkin. Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rasek, and Carrie Hartman.
42:04 Speaker 01 Please rate and review The Crimes of Margo Freshwater. It helps people find our show.
42:23 Speaker 00 Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress? A hoodie slips beneath a blazer? An old cap finds a new scarf? Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.
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