Pod Insights The Binge Crimes The Crimes of Margo Freshwater | 5. Tables, Turned About this episode What begins as an ordinary afternoon ends with Tonya in handcuffs and her family in disbelief that she’s a convicted murderer. It turns out there’s a lot more to the Bonnie and Clyde story than was previously known.
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Transcript 0:01 Speaker 00 Into the wild, the Calteia Panther encounters a shimmering crocodile, a lonely lovebird, a breathless zebra, and a restless tiger.
0:16 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.
0:45 Speaker 01 After 32 years on the run, Margo Freshwater had landed in the back of a police cruiser. And what's going through your head on the way to the station?
0:54 Speaker 02 Well, I knew it was over. I knew it was over.
0:58 Speaker 01 Did you resign to that, or were you starting to get a sense of fight in you?
1:03 Speaker 02 No, I resigned. I knew it was done. It was over.
1:09 Speaker 01 Maybe it was over, but once they got to the interrogation room at the Columbus Police Department, she didn't act cornered. Instead, she did something a little weird.
1:22 Speaker 03 So you're still denying that you're Margo Freshwater?
1:24 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
1:25 Speaker 03 Fingerprints don't lie.
1:28 Speaker 01 This wasn't simple evasion. It threw the room off balance. Even the cops couldn't tell what they were dealing with.
1:35 Speaker 03 You are saying you are not Margo Freshwater?
1:37 Speaker 02 Right.
1:38 Speaker 03 You say Margot doesn't exist anymore?
1:41 Speaker 02 Well, I can't really explain it. She doesn't exist to me. That person in my mind died, had to die, in order for myself to be born into who I am today.
1:56 Speaker 02 My identity is who I am today.
1:59 Speaker 01 Margot died. It's an unsettling choice of words, but it reveals Tanya's logic. To survive as Tanya, Margot had to be buried somewhere deep. Tanya wasn't denying she had once been Margot. She was denying that Margot still counted. She spent nearly four hours with investigators in the interview room, and she told them everything: how she'd escaped and how she'd reinvented herself. And she insisted that her flight from prison was justified because she didn't kill Hillman Robbins Sr., Esther Bouye, and C.C. Surat, and she says she couldn't have stopped it.
2:36 Speaker 02 I did not do any of that. I didn't want any of it done.
2:40 Speaker 01 Tanya only had one regret.
2:43 Speaker 02 Maybe if I'd never gone down to Tennessee in the first place, nothing would have happened. All I wanted to do in the very beginning was to prove my innocence. Yeah, I just wasn't able to do it because I didn't have the money to get the attorneys. And then I forgot about it, and I just left alive.
3:01 Speaker 01 She might have tried to forget, but the state of Tennessee didn't forget. And now, she was being sent back to the very place she slipped from: the Tennessee Prison for Women, to carry out the remainder of her 99-year sentence. What comes next is where the ground shifts. The myth of Margo Freshwater, the troubled girl, the criminal mastermind, the heartless lover: None of it survives what you're about to hear. She was never the person the record made her out to be. Tanya has truths she's held on to for half a century, and she's about to drop them. From Sony Music Entertainment and Glass Podcasts, this is The Crimes of Margo Freshwater.
3:46 Speaker 01 I'm Cooper Mall, episode five, Tables Turn.
3:56 Speaker 01 They say the winners write history. And for more than 50 years, the winners controlled the story of Margo Freshwater. When I first came across her case, what struck me wasn't just the gaps. It was the silence. Her voice wasn't anywhere. No interviews, no memoirs, nothing. She testified at trial, but no one believed her. Her version of the story never made the record, never got told on America's Most Wanted or Unsolved Mysteries. This episode exists because I couldn't shake that. I needed to hear her side. And I figured if I did, you probably did too. I've always approached this story like any reporter would, with neutrality and an open mind.
4:40 Speaker 01 I wasn't expecting Tanya's version of events to line up with the accounts that I had read in the legal record, or that had been given to me by the people who investigated her, most of whom were in diapers when she was convicted. But when we met in a windowless hotel boardroom off an interstate in Columbus, nothing could have prepared me for what she laid bare.
5:00 Speaker 04 I've always lived with the guilt, and this is the first time I'm sharing it, that if I hadn't tried to get out that door, then maybe he wouldn't have shot the lady.
5:13 Speaker 01 It was my second trip to Ohio. I'd flown out once before just to meet Tanya and build trust. This time, Tanya and I knew each other well enough to sit across a table without that early awkwardness. But I wasn't alone. Tanya wouldn't speak to me without her lawyer in the room. So Stephen Ross Johnson, her attorney, sat beside her. This was a first for me, a situation that would make any journalist nervous. Would he stop her from being honest? What I discovered was the opposite. Having her lawyer by her side actually made Tanya comfortable enough to open up.
5:48 Speaker 04 I was just so traumatized and terrified and scared.
5:55 Speaker 01 We started at the beginning. When Tanya went to Memphis to help her friend Al in October 1966, she believed she was stepping into a short-term arrangement. She'd babysit until she saved enough money to pay Glenn Nash for Al's legal fees. Nash told her she'd be home in a few weeks. But when she settled in, the gap between what Nash promised and what he delivered became a canyon.
6:18 Speaker 04 I noticed Nash never seemed to let me out of his sight. And I kept asking him, I said, "When are you gonna set this up so we can do this? Because I've gotta be home by Thanksgiving." And it just never happened.
6:33 Speaker 01 Nash never put work toward Al's case.
6:36 Speaker 04 He was constantly drinking. I mean, he'd go through bottle after bottle, like it was water.
6:44 Speaker 01 Booze wasn't his only fixation.
6:47 Speaker 04 He had an obsession with just making sure where I was.
6:52 Speaker 01 At trial, their relationship was made as seem like a romance. This sounded like a one-sided obsession, an older man who wanted to control a helpless teenager.
7:01 Speaker 04 I was at his office telling him I was gonna go home. And we got into a big argument. And so I walked away from him. And he grabbed my arm, and he grabbed it so tight that when he let loose, his entire handprint was on my arm.
7:18 Speaker 01 That moment stripped away any illusion she could leave freely. She looked for help quietly, discreetly, in the safest way she could imagine at the time. In fact, the night before Hillman Robin Sr. was murdered.
7:33 Speaker 04 I went back to my room. I had said that I was gonna go get some magazines. And when I left the building, I went to a payphone and called my brother. And I said, "Is there any way you guys can come get me?"
7:51 Speaker 01 Tommy didn't have any money either. Tanya was shit out of luck. Had her family been able to come pick her up, her whole life would have taken another path. Because the very next day, her future got derailed.
8:06 Speaker 01 That night, after her babysitting shift, Tanya was in a room with the door open, talking casually with the man who lived across the hall. They were making a plan to hang out later that evening. For the first time in a while, Tanya felt calm, chit-chatting with a neighbor. Then a noise pulled her out of the conversation.
8:26 Speaker 04 I heard this commotion outside. I looked out the window. And so then I went outside, and Nash was arguing with some gentleman.
8:38 Speaker 01 Whatever was happening, it escalated fast enough that the other man walked away fed up.
8:43 Speaker 04 Nash was upset, and he was drunk. He was yelling at me, and he said, "Get in the car."
8:50 Speaker 01 Tanya didn't argue. She went.
8:52 Speaker 04 He started the car up, and he almost hit a pole. And I said, "Where are you going? Let me drive, because I don't want to get killed." And he said, "I need a bottle of liquor." So he told me where to go.
9:08 Speaker 01 She pulled the white Ford Fairlane up to Square D Liquor.
9:11 Speaker 04 I said, "Well, hurry up." So he stumbled his way into the liquor store. And I sat there, and I waited, seemed like forever.
9:21 Speaker 01 Tanya was growing impatient. She wanted to get back to her neighbor she'd made plans with.
9:26 Speaker 04 And so I thought, "Oh, I'm gonna have to get out and go in and get him." So I went in. And I said, "Are you ready to go? Come on, let's go." Next thing I knew, he was pulling a gun out.
9:40 Speaker 01 Everything that followed happened in seconds.
9:43 Speaker 04 It was just the three of us. And he told Mr. Robbins and myself to get in the back room. And of course, he was pointing the gun at us.
9:53 Speaker 01 The back room was cramped, windowless, and lit with that harsh fluorescent glow that makes everything feel colder.
10:00 Speaker 04 Then, shortly after getting into the back room...
10:06 Speaker 04 A customer came in.
10:08 Speaker 01 For a second, she hoped that interruption might break Nash's focus, maybe even give her a sliver of a way out.
10:15 Speaker 04 And he told me to go out and wait on the customer. And I said, "No, I'm not going to go out and wait on the customer. This is crazy." And he said, "Get out there and wait on the customer." So I did, because he had the gun. I was terrified. I was shaking. I couldn't even talk. I was so nervous. And all I wanted to do was get that man out of there.
10:44 Speaker 01 She waited on the customer all while Nash watched her through the crack in the doorway, checking to make sure she didn't run, didn't signal for help, didn't break the invisible perimeter he'd drawn around her.
10:56 Speaker 04 After the gentleman went back out, I had to go back to the back room. I saw that Mr. Robbins was laying on the floor with his hands tied. And Nash went back out front.
11:11 Speaker 01 This was her chance to save Robbins.
11:13 Speaker 04 I bent down and I was trying to untie Mr. Robbins.
11:18 Speaker 01 Maybe they could break away before Nash returned.
11:21 Speaker 04 And Nash came back and caught me and slammed me up against the wall. And then he told me to step out the door. There was a back door. And I got about a foot out the door and I'm looking around trying to figure out if there was anywhere I could run to.
11:43 Speaker 04 I heard some noises. I realized were gunshots.
11:48 Speaker 01 She says she didn't see the killing. She only heard the shots. The fatal blow she had been accused of delivering. But she wasn't even in the room.
11:57 Speaker 04 And Nash came out. And by this time, I'm hysterical and I'm crying. He said, "You can't go to the cops because I used two guns."
12:08 Speaker 01 The .38 and the .22.
12:10 Speaker 04 So they're going to think you're the one that killed him if you go to the cops. And you can't go home because I know where you live. And he said, "You can't go anywhere because I'll find you and I'll kill you."
12:24 Speaker 01 Not only had Nash framed her, he had her trapped. People assumed for so long that Tanya had to be evil, because why else would she stick by Nash's side? Why wouldn't she run to the cops? But she didn't go to the police because she was afraid she might be blamed. I don't know if I'd act any differently if I was that cornered and scared. Would you?
12:54 Speaker 00 In deepest jungle, Cartier's panther spies a wandering bird that circles the skies. A lovebird, lost and missing his mate, is far from his pass in lonely state. Dry your tears, now there's a start. Follow my steps to heal your heart. Panther stalks through the leaves with silent grace. Through the power of scent, she finds the trace. Behold, two lovers reunite in the skies. A most precious thrill sparkling in their eyes. Together forever, they shine each day, bound by the beauty of Cartier.
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14:09 Speaker 01 Mr. Robbins was dead. The gun was in Nash's hands. And the threat was clearer than it had ever been. Tanya did what she had to do to stay alive.
14:19 Speaker 04 He told me to get in the car and drive.
14:22 Speaker 01 Once Tanya pulled away from the liquor store, she wasn't driving towards safety. She was driving straight into a stretch of day she can barely remember. She told me the details come back in flashes. But every flash has Nash in it.
14:38 Speaker 04 I probably only stood maybe 5'2", 5'3", and only weighed about 105 pounds. And he was taller than I was.
14:53 Speaker 04 He was also a karate expert. There is no way I could go up against him.
15:00 Speaker 01 Fear kept her compliant and shock kept her quiet. But the desire for survival kept her alert for any opening, however small. One of the clearest memories Tanya has from this stretch is Oakland Park, Florida. Nash stopped at a convenience store to get something to eat.
15:17 Speaker 04 We went in and he was going down an aisle and I kept inching towards the door, thinking, well, maybe now I can try to get away.
15:26 Speaker 01 In her trial in 1969, the prosecutor told the jury Margot could have gotten away, but chose not to. What he didn't tell them was, she did try. In fact, she tried at that very convenience store just before Glenn Nash shot Esther Bouye. But before she hit the threshold of the door, Nash had cottoned on to what she was trying to do.
15:49 Speaker 04 And I heard shots and he was on top of me, pushing me out the door.
15:57 Speaker 04 I've always lived with the guilt, and this is the first time I'm sharing it, that if I hadn't tried to get out that door, that maybe he wouldn't have shot the lady.
16:12 Speaker 01 The next time Margot tried to escape, she ended up staring down the barrel of a gun.
16:18 Speaker 04 Before Mississippi, he had fallen asleep. I thought I could get away and I took off running.
16:26 Speaker 01 She didn't get far.
16:28 Speaker 04 He must have woke up because he caught up to me.
16:32 Speaker 01 Tanya froze. The two stood four feet apart on a dark stretch of nowhere. And when Nash finally caught his breath.
16:40 Speaker 04 He had the gun aimed at me. And he said, "I told you what I would do if you tried to get away." And at that point, I decided I had nothing to lose. He was drunk, so I lunged and when I lunged, knocked the gun out of his hand. And we struggled and he managed to get to the gun. And he said, "If you ever do anything like that again, you're dead."
17:12 Speaker 01 But Margot didn't give up on the idea that she could get away. After they ditched the fair lane.
17:19 Speaker 04 We were in a cab and we were on a back road. And I told Nash, I said, "I'm gonna be sick." And so the cab driver stopped and I got out of the car and I walked back behind the cab about 15 feet to a ditch. And I pretended like I was being sick. And I moved down the ditch, further away from the cab, and acted like I was getting sick again. And a truck came by and I tried to flag down the truck. But the truck just passed me by and I just took off running.
17:59 Speaker 01 Her mad dash ended the same as the last attempt.
18:02 Speaker 04 And he caught up with me, grabbed me by the hand, and then drug me through some bushes that had thorns on them. My legs hurt from scratches.
18:14 Speaker 01 She wasn't going down without a fight.
18:17 Speaker 04 I saw a house and I broke from his hand and I was gonna try to run to the house to ask for help.
18:25 Speaker 01 But before she could, Nash not only made a threat, but revealed what he had done while Tanya was sprinting down the road.
18:32 Speaker 04 He said, "If you go up there, I'll kill him, just like I killed the cab driver."
18:37 Speaker 01 That's when she first heard C.C. Surat was dead.
18:43 Speaker 01 When Tanya recounted these murders, something hit me hard. Every one of these three people died at a moment when she was trying to make a break for it. And sitting across from her decades later, she was older than any of them ever lived to be. As she walked me through each killing, step by step, there was this quiet weight in the room, like she knew exactly what that meant. That she got away and they never did.
19:14 Speaker 01 She was alone with a serial murderer, so frightened she had never even stopped to think she could be implicated.
19:21 Speaker 04 I don't remember being afraid of being caught. I remember being afraid that he was going to eventually kill me.
19:30 Speaker 01 There's an alternate universe where Tanya would have been dead. She'd never lived to take the fall.
19:38 Speaker 01 The nightmare finally ended in Mississippi.
19:41 Speaker 04 We got off the bus and they arrested him or stopped him as soon as he got off the bus. I got off the bus and just kept walking, then they stopped me.
19:54 Speaker 01 This was the point in our interview where my blood boiling reached a fever pitch. I knew what was coming next. She was about to take the fall for a string of crimes that she had been coerced into. She was never the Bonnie to Nash's Clyde.
20:11 Speaker 01 Tanya wasn't staying in Mississippi. We know that. She was extradited to Tennessee, faced trial alone, and after narrowly escaping the death penalty, booked at the prison for women. When the prison gates closed behind her, the warden sat her down, expecting tears, anger, collapse, something. What she got instead was resolve.
20:36 Speaker 04 He said, "Well, you seem to be awfully calm. Why is that?" And I said, "Because I'm innocent and I know I didn't do this and I know eventually I'll go home."
20:53 Speaker 01 Tanya didn't start her 99-year sentence with rebellion on her mind. She believed an appeal would land, that her conviction could be overturned. But hope has a shelf life in a place like that.
21:04 Speaker 04 I got the news that my appeal had been denied and he told me there were no other options for me. And then I felt like the only thing I could do is help myself.
21:18 Speaker 01 Helping herself in this place meant only one thing. And one day, another prisoner, Fay Copeland, admitted she wanted out too.
21:28 Speaker 04 She said, "Well, if you ever decide to leave, I'll go with you." And I said, "Oh, okay." And it was until then that I really started thinking about it.
21:42 Speaker 01 It was casual, almost offhand. But for Tanya, who had just learned she might die behind those walls, it landed like a lifeline. Suddenly, the idea wasn't wild. It wasn't impossible. It was practical. If no one was going to get her out, maybe she could get out herself. They didn't dream up some cinematic escape. This wasn't The Shawshank Redemption. No tunnels, no fences cut in the dead of night. It was simpler than that.
22:13 Speaker 04 We were going to go to one of the evening church gatherings. And we were going to wear our uniforms, but under our uniforms, we were going to have our regular clothes on. And then, as we were coming back to the dorm, is when we would take off.
22:34 Speaker 01 And after that night, she disappeared into Tanya. She built a whole world there as a mother, a grandmother, a wife, certainly not a lawbreaker. And she was hoping that would be the end of it. But of course, it wasn't.
22:56 Speaker 06 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.
23:28 Speaker 00 In deepest jungle, Cartier's panther spies a wandering bird that circles the skies. A lovebird, lost and missing his mate, is far from his path in lonely state. Dry your tears, now bears a start. Follow my steps to heal your heart. Panther stalks through the leaves with silent grace. Through the power of scent, she finds the trace. Behold, two lovers reunite in the skies. A most precious thrill sparkling in their eyes. Together forever, they shine each day, bound by the beauty of Cartier.
24:14 Speaker 01 For law enforcement, Tanya's arrest in the parking lot of that athletic club with her family surrounding her was the tail end of a long chase. But for the people who only knew her as Tanya, this was just the beginning.
24:28 Speaker 04 Imagine that you're just like, living your life and then all of the sudden, you wake up in a nightmare or a movie.
24:36 Speaker 01 That's Casey Henry, Tanya's daughter-in-law. She's married to Tanya's youngest, Tim. When this happened, they were barely older than Tanya was when she escaped prison.
24:46 Speaker 04 We're literally children and we don't know where to go or what to do.
24:54 Speaker 01 Just hours before the apprehension, the family was having the kind of afternoon where nothing felt wrong at all.
25:00 Speaker 05 We decided to go to the athletic club and enjoy the pool and the hot tub. Tim and Casey met us in Little AJ.
25:09 Speaker 04 So, we were at the athletic club swimming and having a great time.
25:15 Speaker 01 Tanya and her family were riding the kind of warm Ohio day that makes you want to stretch things out even longer.
25:21 Speaker 05 While we were in there, we decided to have a cookout. And so, we had called everybody and said, you know, we're gonna have a cookout.
25:30 Speaker 01 Everyone would meet at Tanya and Daryl's. That was the plan, anyway.
25:34 Speaker 04 And then, when we left, that's basically when stuff hit the fan.
25:41 Speaker 05 We were walking out of the concourse and we were talking and I see about 20 men just casually walking up the parking lot towards us.
25:54 Speaker 04 Tanya was holding our son and the police officer asked her to hand the baby over to me.
26:02 Speaker 05 They didn't address me. They addressed Daryl. And they said, "Mr. McCarter?" And he said, "Yes." And they said, "We don't believe that your wife is who she says she is. We believe that she is a fugitive from Margo Freshwater."
26:22 Speaker 01 To Tanya's husband, Daryl, the officers might as well have been speaking a foreign language.
26:27 Speaker 05 He was surprised and he said, "No, you're mistaken."
26:31 Speaker 01 Daryl pushed back with the kind of stunned certainty of a man who genuinely believed the police had the wrong woman. But shock works its way through a family in different forms. With emotions running in every direction, Tanya's son, Tim, reached for the only response that made sense in the moment. I laughed about it at first, like, because I didn't believe it. And just, it was a pretty wild-out-there story. The laughter died fast. In an instant, the mood flipped and the situation blew open. Every cop I've talked to remembers this moment, when Tanya whispered into Tim's ear. So when I met him, I asked him what she said.
27:12 Speaker 01 I don't think we really talked about that with anybody, but when she gave me a hug, she just said it was true. I don't even know if angry is the right word. It was like, just kind of a mixture of emotion, shock, everything. I really didn't know what to think at that point. The moment Tanya was taken into custody, her family's world flipped inside out. One second, they were living an ordinary Ohio life: running errands, juggling work and babies, planning dinner. The next, they were standing in a police station with no roadmap, no information, and no idea who to trust. Tim remembered trying to get to his mom any way he could. We did try a lot to talk when we were down there, and they wouldn't let us unless
27:54 Speaker 01 we did interviews with them prior to seeing her. They were suddenly part of the investigation, whether they liked it or not. As Daryl McCarter told a local reporter at the time.
28:06 Speaker 07 They wanted to know whether or not I had been harboring the fugitive. And had they thought I had been harboring the fugitive, I would have been arrested and put in jail on the spot. But after two hours of interrogation, they realized her family and me did not know her past, and therefore, we were not an accomplice in harboring a fugitive, and they let me go.
28:33 Speaker 01 And incredibly, even though they'd been lied to, they immediately stood by her.
28:39 Speaker 07 Here's a woman that they say was a convicted felon for first degree murder. And I said, that's not my life. She's not that kind of person. She couldn't commit that kind of a crime.
28:49 Speaker 01 In Tanya's interrogation, the investigators made a deal with her. She'd tell them everything if she could get a moment with her husband, Daryl. They kept the cameras rolling.
28:59 Speaker 02 I love you guys more than anything in the world, you know that?
29:02 Speaker 07 Yeah.
29:03 Speaker 02 Because I can't believe I can't.
29:06 Speaker 07 I believe that you're a different person now. Your life has changed.
29:12 Speaker 02 That girl died a long time ago.
29:14 Speaker 07 I know she did.
29:15 Speaker 02 Okay. And what you don't know is all the facts. Because I never murdered anyone.
29:20 Speaker 07 I don't think you did, sweetheart. I wouldn't believe that if they were to say that.
29:26 Speaker 01 You can hear in Daryl's voice, he's shocked, but holding it down for his wife all the same. A real ride or die. Then, as soon as Tanya got taken away, Daryl and Tim got in the car and drove straight to Vermont. They had to get to Tim's oldest sister, Angie, before she heard the news about her mom.
29:43 Speaker 03 The whole car ride, nonstop, was just different media outlets calling, wanting to do stuff.
29:49 Speaker 01 A family that had never been near a newsroom or a courtroom was suddenly trapped in the center of a national frenzy.
29:56 Speaker 04 We didn't know till the next day that it was going to be front page Columbus Dispatch. There was news cameras outside of our house.
30:05 Speaker 01 The headline detonated Tanya's secret past across the city. A murder conviction, an escape, a lifetime of hiding.
30:13 Speaker 03 It was kind of scary, but like, I remember telling Casey, from here on out, it was all just about fighting for her and trying to get her home.
30:22 Speaker 01 Remember, the warrant for Tanya's arrest wasn't from Ohio. It was from Tennessee. After her arrest, she retained her family attorney, Richard Piat, who found a creative way to fight her extradition. He claimed that since Margo Freshwater had been declared dead, Tennessee couldn't just bring her back to life to face punishment. Needless to say, Piat's argument didn't fly. Within weeks, the governor signed the extradition order, and Tanya was back in the Tennessee prison for women, in solitary.
30:53 Speaker 04 After she was extradited back to Tennessee, it really just died. There was nobody really talking about her but us.
30:59 Speaker 01 They hustled in ways that at their age should have been reserved for daycare payments in a college fund, not defending a mother from a murder conviction.
31:08 Speaker 04 We did a car wash to raise legal funds, and we had flyers printed out. And people were kind of berating us at those events, like, no, I would not support a murderer, and things like that.
31:20 Speaker 01 That didn't shake their resolve. They stood on hot pavement with signs. They sold bottled water at festivals. They appeared on local and national news, spreading their unwavering belief in the woman who raised them. But none of it moved the needle.
31:36 Speaker 04 I just kind of feel helpless a little bit. Yeah, I'd say so. Helpless, forgotten.
31:41 Speaker 01 They were going up against the strength of an entire state, and they needed muscle.
31:46 Speaker 04 Daryl worked to find an attorney.
31:49 Speaker 01 Behind the scenes, the cavalry was coming, and a plan was taking shape. Attorneys, real ones. People who could stand toe-to-toe with prosecutors and decades-old convictions. People who might be able to get Tanya's conviction overturned, once and for all.
32:12 Speaker 01 I'd already graduated from law school. I'd taken the bar exam, but I was waiting on the bar results. This case is one that was with me from the outset of my career as a lawyer. Enter Stephen Ross Johnson. We met in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the very office Tanya's case landed in his lap. Stephen is your quintessential Southern gentleman. He defies the idea that chivalry is dead. The guy dresses to the nines seven days a week. Perfectly tailored suits, monogrammed at every hemline. He turned 50 this year, and when I asked him how he looked so great for his age, he told me fine bourbon.
32:51 Speaker 01 In 2001, Stephen started working for Bob Ritchie, a heavyweight in criminal defense. When Tanya's family walked into the firm, Stephen was only 27.
33:02 Speaker 01 First time I met him, we had to go down to Knoxville. I remember that meeting with Daryl and Tim and Casey, and they were telling us how much they loved her, how much they cared about her. And how much they believed in her and believed that she did not commit this murder that she'd been convicted of. I felt good leaving there. I felt like they were the right people.
33:27 Speaker 01 Her new lawyers didn't see a killer. They saw a woman whose entire life had been rewritten by one violent man and a system that never heard her out. Stephen felt this case needed to be reexamined from the ground up.
33:40 Speaker 05 The entirety of the prosecution's case at her trial was that they were saying she had shot Kilman Robbins, Sr. And so really, us coming into the case, we knew it was our job to try to prove her story.
33:55 Speaker 01 Wanting to prove her innocence was the easy part. The real challenge was actually doing it.
34:01 Speaker 05 There's a process when you're coming into one of these old cases and you're trying to investigate if the person is innocent and can you reverse the conviction. You know the story that convicted them. You know the story of guilt. And so you have to come in and say, was that the accurate story? Or is there a different story?
34:18 Speaker 01 Before Stephen could attack a 1966 conviction, a case older than him, he had to start with the one person who lived every second of it.
34:27 Speaker 05 Bob Ritchie and I drove over to Nashville and we spent several days with Tanya at the Tennessee Prison for Women.
34:36 Speaker 01 At the time, Tanya was 53.
34:39 Speaker 05 She was in an orange jumpsuit and I can remember talking to her about the surreal experience of escaping 32 years prior and here she is back again.
34:51 Speaker 01 Hearing him describe that first meeting, I recognized the same steadiness I'd heard when Tanya told me her story. Different room, decades apart, but the details lined up in a way that was hard to ignore.
35:04 Speaker 05 She was very open to tell us her entire story and everything that had happened and was very grateful for us to look into this. And she was also very consistent in that she didn't do this. She didn't shoot. Anyone. She described really how deranged and evil Glenn Nash was and how he abused her and took advantage of her and controlled her and manipulated her and how she tried to get away from him. It's a gut-wrenching story to have heard.
35:38 Speaker 01 Stephen had Tanya's account. Now he needed the record. Every transcript, exhibit, and forgotten scrap that the system had left behind. And none of it was easy to reach.
35:49 Speaker 05 Just getting the trial transcripts, we had to file a motion with the appellate court to have them dig up and then us withdraw the archived record, which was a very cumbersome process.
36:01 Speaker 01 Piece by piece, they dragged a 1966 murder trial back into daylight. But transcripts weren't enough. If the original prosecution had missed something or hidden something, it wouldn't be in a court file. Stephen came into Tanya's case thinking DNA would be the key. Tennessee had just passed a new law that you could test old evidence with no time limit. So he went all in on trying to find something from the crime scene at D Square Liquor that could hold DNA. He went hunting for one specific piece, the tiny metal firing pin from the 22 the state claimed Tanya used. The whole idea was simple. If he could get DNA off that piece, he could get it in front of a judge even 30-plus years later.
36:44 Speaker 01 In theory, it could still hold skin cells decades later. But in practice, it was like searching for a needle in a courthouse basement full of hay. And that was the problem. There was nothing DNA-wise, which meant he was going to have to find another way: the district attorney's archive.
37:04 Speaker 05 So we filed a Public Records Act request to review the prosecutor's old file in Shelby County.
37:13 Speaker 01 That was the file of Terry Lafferty, the prosecutor who put Margot behind bars originally. You heard his voice in our first episode. By 2002, Lafferty was a judge in Shelby County. And weirdly enough, Bob Ritchie thought Lafferty might be able to help them.
37:29 Speaker 05 He just called up Judge Lafferty and he said, Judge Lafferty, you're aware of your old Margo Freshwater case? And he had Terry on speakerphone and he introduced me to Terry over the phone and he said, you know, we're gonna go look at your old file. From when you were a prosecutor in that case, the DA's office is making it available to us. Would you like to go with us? And there was a pause on the phone and Judge Lafferty said, "Well, sure, that'd be great."
37:56 Speaker 01 So the three of them, the defense lawyer, his mentor, and the man who once put Tanya away, sat together in a Memphis conference room. And Stephen watched Lafferty closely.
38:07 Speaker 05 Judge Lafferty starts looking through the boxes, but you can tell he's looking for something specifically. It wasn't just a rummaging sort of look through the boxes. It was a directed search. He was going right to something specific. And it didn't take him long.
38:22 Speaker 01 Lafferty reached in with a sense of muscle memory.
38:25 Speaker 05 He found it and he pulled out a file folder. And he handed it to me because I was sitting next to him. And he said, "Looky here." And handed me the folder. And I opened it up. And there was a note card stapled to a series of pages of paper. And the note card said, "Since this was not a statement made in the state of Tennessee and was not made to a law enforcement officer of the state of Tennessee, do not give this to the defense." And it had the initials of a supervisor in the DA's office at the time.
39:04 Speaker 01 Stephen turned the page and froze.
39:08 Speaker 05 It was a handwritten statement of Johnny Box, the jailhouse informant in Mississippi.
39:17 Speaker 01 Johnny Box was an inmate confined in the DeSoto County Jail at the same time as Margot and Glenn Nash. He gave the goods on the couple in exchange for a lighter sentence of his own. Problem was, in Margot's trial, they only released his intel on Margot. It's nothing we haven't already heard. Margot told Johnny Box that Nash robbed Dee Square Licker, that he'd shot Hillman Robbins, Sr. with two guns, and how she waited on the customer. But three pages of Box's statement never got released. And that's what Stephen held in his hands.
39:51 Speaker 05 And it had in there what Glenn Nash had told him about the murder in Memphis.
40:02 Speaker 05 And Glenn Nash told Johnny Box, Margo was not a shooter. And she wasn't there when he shot Hillman Robbins, Sr.
40:13 Speaker 01 The room went quiet.
40:15 Speaker 05 Once I picked my jaw up off the floor, I looked over at Terry Lafferty and he said, "That could be important." They were in possession all along of Glenn Nash's statement that corroborated Margo's assertion of innocence. They had that all along and never used it.
40:34 Speaker 01 With this discovery, Margo Freshwater became not just the girl who took the fall. She became the woman who should have never gone to prison at all, who shouldn't have been back there again. No wonder she tried to take back the life she should have had. This wasn't a clerical error. It was a constitutional violation. Brady versus Maryland is a 1963 Supreme Court ruling that mandates, "If the state has evidence that helps the defense, they must turn it over."
41:03 Speaker 05 It constitutionally was something that supported her assertion of innocence and at minimum could have led to fruitful investigation by her and her lawyers on how to obtain admissible evidence that corroborated her version of events. I mean, that's what the law is. So this was a violation of that? Yeah, it was.
41:24 Speaker 01 It was the reason Tanya spent 32 years running. It was the reason she was sitting in a prison jumpsuit when Stephen met her. And the strangest part, it came from the hand of the man who buried it originally. Judge Lafferty had pulled the file himself.
41:40 Speaker 05 And he said, "Yeah, you know, I was a young prosecutor. My supervisor told me not to turn something over, and I didn't turn it over. And I felt bad about it, but I didn't feel too bad after she escaped."
41:52 Speaker 01 There in a conference room above the Mississippi River, the past finally cracked open. Stephen had the story the jury never heard, the truth the state suppressed.
42:02 Speaker 05 I knew I now had a powerful piece of evidence.
42:10 Speaker 01 Next time on The Crimes of Margo Freshwater.
42:15 Speaker 01 Convictions are notoriously hard to overturn. Even with this new evidence, no one could say whether Tanya would live out her days in prison or with her family. But Tanya was determined.
42:29 Speaker 05 I know I'm going home. No matter how long it takes, I know I'm going home.
42:38 Speaker 06 What's it take to be a mentor with big brothers, big sisters? It takes 30 minutes and a cup of coffee, a video game, best two out of three. It takes sharing thumbs up emojis, clapping emojis, and loaded nachos at halftime. That's how you make an impact on a young kid's life. So go on, share a few hours a month, because mentorship may sound huge, but the truth is, it takes little to be big. To learn more, volunteer or donate, go to bbignow.org.
43:12 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.
43:56 Speaker 01 Please rate and review The Crimes of Margot Freshwater. It helps people find our show.
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Previous The Crimes of Margo Freshwater | 4. Born to Run Next The Crimes of Margo Freshwater | 6. The Reckoning Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated