Pod Insights The Binge Crimes The Crimes of Margo Freshwater | 6. The Reckoning About this episode Tonya is behind bars again. The only thing that can free her is evidence nobody bothered to consider the first time. And if they dismissed her story fifty years ago – why would they trust it now?
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Transcript 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.
0:55 Speaker 02 Margo Freshwater was finally recaptured in Ohio in 2002. Now she's in prison, here in Tennessee. But Freshwater says she didn't do the crime that landed her a 99-year sentence, and she has the evidence to prove it.
1:10 Speaker 01 The Memphis newscasters made it sound like her lawyers could just fight their way back into court.
1:15 Speaker 03 Lawyers for Freshwater say this could be the breakthrough that they're looking for. Evidence could be presented that was never heard before. Evidence that is a jailhouse statement from an informant saying that Freshwater is not the killer. And her lawyers say if this doesn't work, they will continue to fight.
1:33 Speaker 01 Fighting was easy. Getting a judge to even open the door was the trickier part. Tanya had new evidence. The confession from Glenn Nash that he alone killed Hillman Robbins, Sr. But evidence means nothing if there's no legal way to show it to anyone.
1:50 Speaker 04 I had to figure out a creative way to get it back into court.
1:54 Speaker 01 That's Stephen Ross Johnson, one of Tanya's lawyers.
1:57 Speaker 04 Because, got to remember, it's been 32 years since she escaped.
2:03 Speaker 01 Once the deadlines and statutes of limitations have passed, that kind of proof is basically locked out.
2:08 Speaker 04 In Tennessee in general, any newly discovered evidence you've got to present in post-conviction proceedings. But you have to file that one year after your conviction has become final.
2:21 Speaker 01 Post-conviction law doesn't give you much room to work with. You can only raise constitutional issues. And luckily, Stephen had one: a Brady violation. The prosecutor had withheld evidence that supported Tanya's claim of innocence in a death penalty trial, which is about as serious as it gets. But even with that, they were decades past the deadline to file it.
2:43 Speaker 04 So we decided, let's file a quorum nobis claim.
2:50 Speaker 01 It's used when somebody has already been convicted, has no appeals left, and then new evidence surfaces that couldn't have been found earlier and might have changed the outcome. Think of it like going back to the judge and saying, "If you had known this back then, things could have turned out differently, and here's the proof." It's rare, and it succeeds even more rarely.
3:13 Speaker 01 And in the spring of 2003, Tanya was brought back into a Tennessee courtroom for the first time since the world was being rocked by Woodstock. Stephen Ross Johnson and Bob Ritchie showed up with a bold claim that the 32-year delay should have been forgiven because the state had caused it.
3:31 Speaker 01 Tanya didn't know about Nash's confession. Her trial lawyer didn't know. But the prosecution had a simpler answer, one they thought ended the conversation before it began.
3:41 Speaker 04 John Campbell's position was, on its face, it should be denied because it's out of time.
3:48 Speaker 01 John Campbell, you heard his voice in our first episode. Today, he's a judge on the Court of Criminal Appeals in Tennessee. But in 2003, he was the assistant district attorney for Shelby County.
4:00 Speaker 05 My first reaction when I saw this filing was, you know, she'd escaped for 32 years. And it seemed to me kind of a stretch to believe that she could still prosecute a claim after she had absent herself for so many years.
4:16 Speaker 01 It didn't matter that the evidence had been tucked away in a file for decades.
4:21 Speaker 04 There's a provision of the quorum nobis statute that says you must be without fault in failing to present the evidence at the appropriate time.
4:28 Speaker 05 The delay was her fault.
4:31 Speaker 01 There was an added difficulty for Tanya's defense. Steven and his colleague Bob Ritchie were stepping into unfamiliar territory.
4:40 Speaker 04 We all had no clue what the court would do. We were in front of Judge Otis Higgs. We'd never been in front of Judge Higgs before.
4:47 Speaker 01 And the pressure didn't stop there. Tanya's family filled the benches, watching every move, every word. They were counting on Steven and Bob to finally break the cycle that had trapped her for decades. John Campbell, though, got a more hostile reaction from Tanya's relatives.
5:04 Speaker 05 Every time I walked by them, they looked like they were going to kill me. I mean, talk about getting stared down. They would just stare me down. I've tried some really bad people, and I haven't really had a reaction like that from family members. I really haven't.
5:20 Speaker 01 This hearing wasn't about getting justice for Tanya, or what the evidence showed. It was simpler, harsher. Whose fault was the decades-long delay? The state's because the original prosecutor, Terry Lafferty, suppressed the evidence? Or Tanya's for running? Tanya's escape, something she'd never be able to undo, had become the very thing blocking the truth she'd been trying to surface her entire adult life.
5:47 Speaker 04 It clouded the whole case. It clouded this legal issue for every proceeding.
5:55 Speaker 01 Judge Higgs listened. He measured the escape against the accusation that the state had buried exculpatory evidence. And then came the decision.
6:04 Speaker 05 Judge Higgs originally found that because of her actions and the fact that it was way over a year, and the fact that a lot of the witnesses that would be necessary are now dead, that she shouldn't get relief.
6:17 Speaker 04 It was denied.
6:19 Speaker 01 But there was something Judge Higgs wasn't considering in his decision.
6:23 Speaker 04 That presupposes that she would have uncovered it, right? And there's no suggestion that she even would have been able to uncover it within that year? That makes no sense. It only came to light because of the passage of time.
6:36 Speaker 01 Steven had expected a long fight. He just didn't expect the first blow to land so hard or so early. Neither he nor Tanya could have foreseen just how long the legal road would be. But in the end, deliverance came from an unexpected place. From Sony Music Entertainment and Glass Podcasts, this is the finale of The Crimes of Margot Freshwater. I'm Cooper Mall, episode six, The Reckoning.
7:17 Speaker 06 I knew Steve was working hard to get me out. I believed in him.
7:25 Speaker 01 By then, Tanya had come to trust him. Their relationship was unlike any lawyer-client relationship I've ever known. Professional, but also intimate. Tanya has this need to be seen, to be believed.
7:40 Speaker 04 I told her, I don't know how long this is gonna take, but I'm gonna do everything I can to get you out, and I'm just gonna keep fighting.
7:47 Speaker 06 I had a lot of support from my family and friends. I had people from the church sending me cards. My minister would come down every three months from Ohio to visit with me. My husband was coming down every other week. My children would come down to see me, and it helped me keep my, my spirits high.
8:17 Speaker 01 While lawyers were trading briefs, Tanya's family was trading sleep, gas money, and whole weekends just to get a few hours with her.
8:25 Speaker 07 We were a young family, just starting out. We didn't have money for like a hotel or anything like that, so we would leave like Friday night.
8:34 Speaker 02 In the middle of the night, like two or three in the morning.
8:36 Speaker 07 So that the babies could sleep in the car and we would drive straight through, all the way to Nashville, visit her for, what did we get? Four hours?
8:46 Speaker 02 Three or four hours.
8:47 Speaker 07 Three or four hours. Get right back in the car and drive straight back to Ohio. Cranky kids, you know, sleeping in the car for two days. And, you know, the only playtime that they were getting was in a prison visitation.
9:02 Speaker 01 Those visits became their routine. Months of waiting turned into years of driving through the night. Years of kids growing up in back seats. Years of Tanya watching her family's life unfold in three-hour increments across a prison table. When Judge Higgs denied Tanya's petition in 2002, Stephen knew the real fight was just beginning. He appealed that decision. And after four years of arguments and counter appeals, Tanya's case ended up before the Tennessee Supreme Court. By that point, the question became simple. Would the Supreme Court let this fight continue? Or kill it?
9:39 Speaker 04 So we won, but we won a hearing in front of the same judge that had denied us before.
9:44 Speaker 01 The state Supreme Court agreed with Stephen and his team. The new evidence in Tanya's case, that suppressed confession, should be heard. And once it landed back in Memphis, everything slowed to a crawl again. Dates had to be set, records had to be pulled. By the time the hearing was finally scheduled in 2006, four years had passed since Stephen first filed the petition. And in that stretch of time, Stephen's fight became even more personal.
10:12 Speaker 04 Bob Ritchie passed away from cancer. I'd lost my mentor. He had died in the middle of this fight. Tanya needed my help. But another motivating factor here was I wanted to finish what he and I had started together.
10:26 Speaker 01 Now Stephen had to walk into that courtroom alone and prove what the state had hidden in 1969.
10:32 Speaker 04 I called Terry Lafferty as a witness in front of Judge Higgs in court and testified under his portrait in the courtroom and admitted to the Brady violation. Said that he suppressed that statement from Johnny Box that had Glenn Nash's confession and that he was told by a supervisor not to produce it.
10:52 Speaker 01 And there was somebody else from Tanya's original trial. Somebody unexpected. Ken Armstrong. The last surviving member of the all-male jury that condemned Tanya to 99 years in prison. When Tanya's capture made headlines, Ken got in touch with Stephen.
11:09 Speaker 04 He said, "I'm so glad you're trying to help her. I've always thought that she was innocent. I think that I made a mistake at her trial. In fact, the other jurors wanted to give her death. I wanted to acquit her because I believed her story. I compromised and we gave her 99 years."
11:24 Speaker 01 And Ken had more to reveal, things no one had ever put on the record.
11:29 Speaker 04 He said that even though they were sequestered, the bailiff would, in the middle of the trial, bring newspapers in to let them read the newspapers, would allow them to have access to the local television news. And you've got to remember, this case had already gone through two mistrials in Mississippi. There was a lot of media attention surrounding this case. It had been sensationalized. And now she's being tried in Memphis.
11:55 Speaker 01 There's a rule in the law that says you can't use someone's past accusations or bad acts against them. Bringing it up at trial is unfairly prejudicial, so it's usually kept out.
12:05 Speaker 04 And so, the jury hearing about the murder of the cab driver in Mississippi and how she had been charged with that, with Glenn Nash, and she'd gone through two trials and they'd been mistried. The jury hadn't convicted her, but she'd gone through two trials. The jurors were not supposed to have known any of that in the case in Tennessee.
12:24 Speaker 01 When Stephen called Ken Armstrong as a witness, Stephen asked Ken if they had known about the suppressed evidence back in the 1969 trial, but they have convicted Margo Freshwater?
12:34 Speaker 04 And he said, "No, they wouldn't have."
12:37 Speaker 01 But it still wasn't enough.
12:40 Speaker 04 Judge Higgs said that none of that would have mattered because even if she wasn't a shooter, Margo Freshwater still could have gotten convicted as an Ader and a better.
12:54 Speaker 01 Remember, in her original trial, part of the problem was that, under Tennessee law, Tanya was considered an accomplice just by virtue of being there when the murder happened.
13:04 Speaker 04 And Judge Higgs found that, and the state argued, it didn't matter whether she was a shooter or not. What mattered was, she was there. She participated. She waited on the customer in the liquor store. She stayed with Glenn Nash after he committed this murder in Memphis. And that those facts helped to evidence her intent to offer aid, encouragement, support, and to participate in the robbery and the homicide.
13:38 Speaker 01 Judge Higgs denied the appeal again.
13:44 Speaker 06 I told everyone from the get-go that I wouldn't just walk out. Tennessee wasn't going to allow that to happen. I was going to have to enter a plea of some kind, or I would go to trial.
14:00 Speaker 06 It just made me tougher. I know I'm going home. No matter how long it takes, I know I'm going home.
14:08 Speaker 01 Here's the thing. Judge Higgs wasn't applying the law the way Tennessee required. He treated the new evidence like it had to guarantee a different outcome, when the statute had a much lower bar. And so Stephen appealed again. Under Tennessee law, the question wasn't whether the evidence would have changed the verdict. It was whether it may have changed the verdict. A distinction that sounds subtle, but carries the weight of someone's entire future.
14:35 Speaker 04 I argued that the court applied the wrong legal standard, because would have necessarily is a higher standard to meet than may have. One is a potential. One is a probability.
14:54 Speaker 01 And that single shift, from would to may, turned the case upside down. It meant the wrong test had been used all along.
15:05 Speaker 04 We go and we argue the appeal now for the third time.
15:09 Speaker 01 You make your case to the appellate judges, and then everything goes quiet. The panel takes the arguments back, their clerks dig into the record, and the judges review it all themselves. They decide how they're going to rule and draft a written opinion. That whole process can take a long time. A really long time.
15:27 Speaker 04 So we're waiting, and we wait months for that opinion to come out.
15:31 Speaker 01 Until one day, the silence finally broke.
15:35 Speaker 04 I got the email from the court, the chief deputy clerk here for the appellate courts. And I opened up the opinion, and I can remember I just started crying.
15:47 Speaker 04 They reversed the convictions and granted a new trial.
15:51 Speaker 01 Nine years after Stephen first met Tanya's family in a Knoxville conference room, the highest court in the state overturned her conviction.
15:59 Speaker 04 I felt like it was the culmination of all those years of work and all those years of just life passing by.
16:07 Speaker 01 Court filings, briefs, hearings that came and went, seasons changing outside the office window while Stephen poured everything he had into a fight that refused to end.
16:17 Speaker 04 At that time, that same year, I'd lost my dad. He had passed away. I remember getting this decision was a bright spot. I knew the fight wasn't over, but I knew that I had the momentum at that point and that the state was going to have a difficult time retrying her based on 40-year-old evidence.
16:47 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.
17:16 Speaker 01 Winning the appeal didn't set Tanya free. It reset the clock.
17:20 Speaker 04 Now it's 2011, nine years later. Tanya is nine years older and the state, I was hoping, would just say, "Okay, game over. We're done. She's served nine years in prison. Enough's enough." But that was not what they were going to do.
17:37 Speaker 01 Her conviction was gone, but now she was simply a defendant again, decades after the murder of Hillman Robbins, Sr. Even prosecutor John Campbell knew the case had turned into a relic.
17:48 Speaker 05 You're stuck with having a retry case basically by just getting up there and reading a transcript. It kind of takes the emotional hook out of it and the personal hook out of it, and the jury's just left with a cold reading of the record. And of course, she's still here and she could testify, and she'd be the only live witness the jury would hear. She's gonna be sitting there in the courtroom the whole time, looking like grandma. You run the risk of people feeling sorry for you. And that's something you have to take into consideration.
18:25 Speaker 01 But Campbell also wasn't about to let her walk.
18:28 Speaker 05 I wanted her to be convicted.
18:30 Speaker 01 And he wasn't the only one.
18:32 Speaker 03 We are terribly upset that this keeps going on and on and on and on.
18:39 Speaker 01 That's Susan Robbins West, the granddaughter of the man that Nash murdered in Memphis, Hillman Robbins, Sr. Susan has since passed away. This audio is from an interview she gave to a local television news station in 2011.
18:53 Speaker 03 And I know God's gonna eventually put the final judgment on her, but she definitely needs to serve time. I mean, she's acting like she misses her family. Well, you know what? It affected our families.
19:04 Speaker 01 Susan isn't wrong. Her family never got anything close to justice. Think about it. Nash, the man who actually pulled the trigger, walked away without serving a single day in prison. No one was really ever held accountable for the murder of Susan's grandfather. Then decades later, after they'd tried to heal, after they'd done the work of moving on, they were being dragged back into the same trauma all over again. Tanya was there the night he died. She didn't fire the gun, but she couldn't save him either. And she got to build a life afterward. She has a family. Susan barely had memories of her grandfather. I understand why that would sting, why that anger would feel righteous.
19:49 Speaker 01 If it were my blood, I think I'd feel the same way.
19:56 Speaker 01 A retrial wouldn't happen overnight. There was a door out, but it required Tanya to do the one thing she had refused to do for more than four decades.
20:05 Speaker 04 I met John Campbell in Nashville. And we sat down and we were talking through a potential resolution here that would get Tanya home. And we came up with something fairly creative.
20:19 Speaker 01 A plea deal.
20:20 Speaker 04 The only way we could do it was as a best interest plea. And I told him she's innocent.
20:26 Speaker 01 A best interest plea, also known as an Alfred plea, allowed Tanya to enter a guilty plea while maintaining her innocence. By taking this path, she would be acknowledging that if a trial were held, the state would likely have enough evidence to convict her despite her innocence. And here's the problem with that.
20:44 Speaker 06 I always told Steve I would not plead guilty to something I didn't do.
20:50 Speaker 04 I had a tricky decision to propose to Tanya. It was her decision. But I have a path to get you home now. Or do we stay and fight? And I'm with you, I'll fight. But it's also my job to look out for your best interest.
21:09 Speaker 06 So I called home and I talked to Daryl. And he said, well, you're going to have to make a plea. And I said, no, I'm not going to plead. He said, well, you don't have to plead that you're guilty. And I said, I've told everybody how I feel about this. So we went back and forth on it. And he told me, Steve said that I would choose to go to court. And Campbell told him, well, if she goes to court, it'll be at least a year or two before she sees the inside of a courtroom.
21:51 Speaker 06 And I told Daryl, I guess I won't be coming home because I'm not going to plead. By this time, I'm crying. And he said, it's not fair to me and the kids. We know you're innocent.
22:06 Speaker 01 When Tanya hung up, she carried the weight of the decision back to her cell, her family, her health, the years slipping away. And for the first time, she let herself wonder whether innocence was something she had to prove.
22:20 Speaker 06 So I went back to the room, and I was crying and praying and asking the Lord, "Please, let me know what to do." And I ended up falling asleep, crying, crying myself to sleep. And when I woke up the next morning, I knew what I was gonna do. I was gonna plead, because I knew how they had drug it out nine-plus years after getting the evidence found back in 2002. And I knew they would do the same thing if I went to court. And I thought, "It's not fair to Daryl, it's not fair to my kids, and it's definitely
23:05 Speaker 06 not fair to Steve, because Steve has worked so long and hard on this over the years. And I can't put him through this anymore." And I know if I go to court, he'll stick right there beside me. And so, I decided that's what I was gonna plead.
23:27 Speaker 01 With a single signature in the fall of 2011, Tanya traded the fight for freedom for the rest of her life with her family. In a way, through this compromise, everyone got what they wanted.
23:39 Speaker 05 She's convicted, she stands convicted of it, and whether it's an Alfred plea or not, it's still a conviction.
23:46 Speaker 01 John Campbell got his guilty plea, Tanya got to go home, and Stephen's now decade-long battle to get Tanya free was finally won. In a stunning turnaround, 63-year-old Margo Freshwater pleaded guilty on Friday to first-degree murder in the 1966 death of store clerk Kilman Robbins.
24:07 Speaker 04 It was agreed that she would get credit for all time served. We anticipate, once all of her sentencing credits are calculated by the Department of Corrections, that she'll be released in the next few days.
24:20 Speaker 01 Nobody was anticipating her return more than her husband, Daryl. It's been a tough experience, and it's something that I would not want any couple to have to go through.
24:32 Speaker 05 But when you have two people that are in love and they marry for better, for worse, they just get the worst out of the road first, I guess. And that's what we've done, and we've managed to keep our relationship as solid as it was the day we met. I'm looking forward to us rejoining our lives together.
24:51 Speaker 01 And on Halloween night, 2011, Tim McCarter's cellphone buzzed.
24:55 Speaker 04 We were walking for trick or treat, and some news outlet called and had mentioned that, you know, she's going to be coming home soon. And they were trying to pinpoint a time and day because they all wanted to come and be there.
25:11 Speaker 01 Tim and Casey wanted to get ahead of the media frenzy. They were still shell shocked from the circus after Tanya had been arrested.
25:18 Speaker 04 We just got in the car, drove down there, kind of played it off like it wasn't going to happen.
25:23 Speaker 01 On November 1st, outside the Shelby County Jail, it almost didn't feel real.
25:28 Speaker 07 We're waiting for her out front, and we're like, are they going to find a reason to arrest her as soon as she walks out the door? We were still doubting it till she walked out.
25:37 Speaker 01 And when the gates finally opened.
25:42 Speaker 07 We embraced for maybe a second and threw the stuff in the car and left. We didn't feel safe until we got out of the state of Tennessee.
25:49 Speaker 01 The three of them took off like a bat out of hell.
25:52 Speaker 04 We took the closest way out of Tennessee. She wanted out of there as quick as possible.
25:56 Speaker 01 And once Tanya crossed back into Ohio, she let herself exhale for the first time.
26:03 Speaker 06 When I came home, I did kneel down and feel the carpet and thought, oh, that feels so nice. And I just ran my fingers through it. And then I went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and looked around the house because it was the first time I'd seen the house because Daryl bought it while I was in Nashville.
26:25 Speaker 01 Tanya did what she's always done best. She started over.
26:29 Speaker 06 After I touched the carpet and opened the refrigerator, I got a piece of paper and pencil and made my list of everything that I needed to do.
26:38 Speaker 01 Legally changing her name to Tanya, obtaining her original birth certificate, a temporary driver's license.
26:45 Speaker 06 And as I accomplished that, I would check everything off.
26:49 Speaker 01 Tanya had spent decades surviving by erasing herself. Now, the irony was impossible to ignore. Only by being caught did she finally get to exist. She no longer had to pretend she was someone else. She was free. For the first time in 45 years, Tanya McCarter got to live as herself.
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27:49 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.
28:21 Speaker 01 Tanya hadn't even finished settling back into her own home when the past found its way back to her.
28:26 Speaker 04 She had just been reunited with her family, celebrating their first Thanksgiving together in nearly a decade.
28:34 Speaker 01 For the first time in a long time, her life was quiet. Then Stephen Johnson's phone rang.
28:40 Speaker 04 I got a call from Ken Armstrong, the juror. And by now, Ken Armstrong is in his late 70s. He's not doing well, but he goes, "Oh my gosh, I saw where you went and you got her out to her family. And I'm so happy."
29:00 Speaker 01 Remember, Ken Armstrong was the lone holdout in a jury room that wanted Margot to receive the death penalty.
29:05 Speaker 04 And he said, "I never got an opportunity to tell her I'm sorry. I would love to talk with her and to tell her I'm so sorry." And he said, "I really want to see her. I just don't want to talk to her on the phone. I want to see her before I die."
29:23 Speaker 01 Stephen knew how hard this could be for Tanya.
29:25 Speaker 04 The last place in the world she wanted to be was Memphis, Tennessee.
29:32 Speaker 01 But he called her anyway.
29:33 Speaker 04 And she said, "I'll drive down and come see him."
29:39 Speaker 01 On a cold December morning, Tanya headed toward Tennessee. She brought her friend Sue along. Together, they drove back through the same state line she once crossed as a fugitive, all to answer the request of a dying man. By the time they reached Memphis, the sun was low. She and Sue pulled into a quiet neighborhood, a small house.
30:00 Speaker 06 And we went in, and Ken was sitting in his wheelchair. And we saw each other, and we hugged. And he said, "Are you okay? I've got to know that you're okay." And I said, "Yes, Ken, I'm okay, because you saved my life."
30:22 Speaker 06 And he said, "I've felt this guilt for 32 years." He said, "I tried everything I could after I gave that verdict." No one would listen to me. And he said, "I just felt so bad."
30:41 Speaker 01 Two people, bound by a verdict neither of them ever fully escaped, finally sharing the truth out loud.
30:49 Speaker 06 When I say he saved my life, he saved my life. That man will always have a place in my heart.
30:58 Speaker 01 Ken didn't have long after that visit, but before he died, he got what he'd been reaching for since 1969: the chance to look her in the eye and know she was still there. Tanya drove back to Ohio carrying something she'd never had from anyone connected to that trial: absolution. Ken Armstrong wasn't the only man from Margot's past with unfinished business.
31:28 Speaker 06 After I got home, I went out to the mailbox and there was a card in the mailbox. And as soon as I saw the name, I was aware of who it was.
31:39 Speaker 01 The name on the card was one she knew well: Greg Costas, the man who'd tracked her down and put her behind bars. What the hell did he want?
31:48 Speaker 05 I don't know why. I really don't know why. But there was something gnawing at me. So I took a business card and I drove to where she was living. And I put a business card in her mailbox with no note. Nothing, just a business card.
32:06 Speaker 01 To Costas, it seemed like a benign gesture. Not to Tanya.
32:10 Speaker 06 And I got scared. And I went inside and I called my son, Tim.
32:16 Speaker 05 And the next day, I got a call from Tim Hutkins, her son. And he said, "My mom told me you put a business card in her mailbox." I just said, "I want to talk to her. And I want to know if she'll talk to me."
32:29 Speaker 06 Tim called me back and he said, "He wants to meet with you." I said, "Why?" And he said, "He says he just has to meet with you."
32:40 Speaker 01 I wanted to know why, too.
32:43 Speaker 05 I had no idea. I had no idea. But something was just driving me.
32:47 Speaker 01 Tanya agreed to meet with Kostas, but not alone. She brought Tim and Casey with her. They chose a Panera Bread in a Columbus suburb called Hilliard. Neutral, public, and unassuming. A place built for casual lunches, not reckonings.
33:04 Speaker 05 When I was walking out of the house, I said, this is either going to take four minutes or four hours.
33:09 Speaker 06 Greg came in and we all sat down at the table.
33:12 Speaker 05 And she actually gave me a hug.
33:14 Speaker 06 I sat across from Greg. I looked at Greg and I said, well, before we get started, I want you to know I don't hold anything against you. You were just doing your job. And tears formed in his eyes. He said, you don't know how much that means to me.
33:35 Speaker 01 Kostas came because something unresolved had lodged itself in him. Something he couldn't shake until he faced the woman he had spent a decade hunting.
33:44 Speaker 05 I don't know that I felt guilty because I was doing my job, but I didn't realize the ripple effects that it would have. And that's what was eye opening to me. The human element part of it kind of took me off guard.
34:02 Speaker 01 Kostas was just starting to understand what the case had taken out of Tanya's life. But her family didn't need that revelation. They'd felt those ripple effects for almost 10 years.
34:13 Speaker 07 We bought our first house, had two more babies, changed careers. Literally, she missed probably like
34:24 Speaker 04 Like the key 10 years.
34:25 Speaker 07 Our most grown up, you know, from like 20 to 30, when you do your most maturing and growing. She was absent from all of that.
34:36 Speaker 01 Kostas didn't see any of that from his side of the badge, not until now. And when Tanya opened her mouth, what she gave him wasn't resentment.
34:46 Speaker 05 She said, look, I forgive you. I have no ill will toward you. You've been very professional. And you've been a gentleman throughout this whole thing. And I understand that you were just doing your job.
34:59 Speaker 01 Four minutes became four hours. Tanya had learned the man who chased her wasn't the law abiding son of a bitch she imagined. And Costas learned the fugitive he'd fixated on wasn't the villain he'd been trained to catch. Two people who once stood on opposite sides of a manhunt found themselves in a booth sharing something much less dramatic and far more human. Recognition.
35:22 Speaker 05 We exchanged phone numbers. And she said, you can call me anytime. And I told her if she ever needed anything from me, that she could call me. I just said, I really appreciate this. And it's weird because I never did anything like that before. And I never did anything like that after, that I wanted to talk to a defendant of any sort of case that I ever worked.
35:51 Speaker 01 But this case wasn't like anything else he ever worked.
35:55 Speaker 01 He wasn't chasing Margo Freshwater anymore. He was trying to make sense of Tanya McCarter and of the younger version of himself, who once believed catching her was the whole story. And that was the moment something clicked for me. Because Tanya doesn't let people into her life easily, but she does have a soft spot for a very specific group of people. The ones who knew her as Margot, the ones who hold pieces of a past even after Tanya had let Margot die.
36:26 Speaker 01 And I think that holds a quiet significance for her. These are the rare people who know her with the ease of longtime friends, and she didn't get many of those in the life she built. Costas is one of those people. Here's what's strange. When I first reached out to Tanya, she had Costas call me up to get a feel for me. She never would have met me if he hadn't given his blessing. In fact, when Tanya and I first spoke in person, she required that Costas be there too. The man who once spent a decade chasing her became the bridge that allowed her to tell her story. And maybe that's why she walked into that Panera.
37:06 Speaker 01 Because letting Costas see her, really see her, was a way to bury the myth of Margot Freshwater and to fully embrace being Tanya.
37:18 Speaker 01 It wasn't just Greg Costas. Even the FBI agent who hunted Tanya in the 70s came around too. Richard Knudsen also started to see that Margo had been telling the truth, that she had been coerced.
37:31 Speaker 05 All of us were somewhat protective of her. I have three daughters. We always told our daughters, be careful of the people you date and you get associated with. They'll get you in trouble. And I can't tell you how many cases through the years that that's been the case where it's been an innocent young lady and she gets tied up with the wrong guy and her whole life is thrown into a spin. And that's what we thought it was. We can see the inequity of the whole darn thing.
37:58 Speaker 06 He kept going back to Tennessee, saying, "This woman shouldn't be in prison. Let me offer her family a deal."
38:06 Speaker 05 The system could have helped her. She had a good appeal, as far as I was concerned, just to the emotions of the situation. Because she takes up with a lawyer, for God's sake, and then this guy's a nut and he does the shooting and he gets off to serving in a private mental institution. How's that fair?
38:26 Speaker 01 I walked into this project thinking I knew what this case was. But now, knowing the new evidence, knowing how Tanya never wanted anyone dead, it's all so much clearer to me.
38:39 Speaker 01 The frightened teenager who bore the blame grew into a woman who should have never lost a moment of her life to a prison sentence. The girl who went on the run became a woman who lost decades she should have never had to forfeit.
38:54 Speaker 01 She missed the opportunity to rebuild her relationships with her mom and brother. She also missed their funerals. She never got to say goodbye to the people who once loved Margo, like her Aunt Leona, who she'd only seen glancingly when she bumped into her at a department store. Because disappearing was the only way to stay alive. No ruling, no reversal, no belated acknowledgement of the truth can return all that time to her. But she can finally name what was taken. She can finally claim who she is. And maybe this podcast, agreeing to sit down, talk, remember, let herself be seen, was the final step, the last door she had to walk through.
39:39 Speaker 01 She's taken her story to a bigger court than any she ever stood in: the court of public opinion, the people who've never heard her voice, the ones who'd only ever known the myth. She isn't hiding anymore. This time, she's getting straight with everyone.
40:11 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.
40:43 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.
41:26 Speaker 01 Please rate and review The Crimes of Margo Freshwater. It helps people find our show.
41:45 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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