The Crimes of Margo Freshwater | 3. Undercover

Summary

The Crimes of Margo Freshwater | Ep. 3: Undercover (Jan 19, 2026)

Podcast: The Binge Crimes: The Crimes of Margo Freshwater
Host: Cooper Moll (Sony Music Entertainment)

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Episode Overview

This episode, "Undercover," delves into the obsessive and ethically gray search to find Margo Freshwater, a convicted murderer who escaped from prison and vanished for decades. The focus is on investigator Greg Costas, who, driven to find the truth, adopts an elaborate undercover scheme—impersonating Margo's long-lost son—to infiltrate her family and trace her steps. The episode captures the hunt’s twists, the role of 90s and early 2000s crime TV, and the breakthrough made possible by early digital databases.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Obsessive Investigator: Greg Costas's Approach

• Dogged Determination

  • Costas is described as unswayed by years of dead ends.
    • Stephen Shearholt: “Greg was like a dog with a bone.” (01:17)

• Ethical Gray Area: The Undercover Son

  • Costas concocts a ruse to pose as Margo’s abandoned son (Michael), leveraging his own age as a cover.

    • Costas: “Why couldn’t I impersonate the baby that she gave up for adoption in 1966?” (01:37)

  • Risks include exposing a real adoptee to facts they might not want and harming unrelated families.

• Difficulty in Tracing Michael

  • Adoption records are sealed and nearly impossible to crack. Costas turns to the nonprofit Reunite for help, confessing his ruse to earn their cooperation.
    • “They were concerned, you think?... I basically told them the whole story.” (04:23)

• Eureka Moment

  • A detail—father’s occupation: hairdresser—helps Costas identify the right Michael from adoption records.
    • “When I saw 'hairdresser,' I knew this is him.” (05:20)

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2. The Undercover Operation: Building a Fiction

• Constructing a Fake PI Firm

  • Costas and partner David Meyer invent “Great Lakes Investigations” (a nod to ‘freshwater’), complete with business cards, letterhead, and a fake office line. (07:32–08:16)
    • “We had to create a fictitious private investigation company... Great Lakes are fresh water.” (07:32)

• Infiltrating Margo’s Family

  • First tries family members one by one:

    • Tim White: Yields nothing useful (08:50)

    • Aunt Leona: Empathetic, welcoming, but has no new info; shares prison-era photos of Margo (09:51–11:43)

      • (Memorable moment:) “Honey, I’ve always wondered what happened to you.” –Aunt Leona (10:43)

    • Tommy (Margo's brother), in prison:

      • The ruse is almost busted; Tommy, having been warned, suspects cops:
        • “If the dude writes me, he's legit. If he comes to visit me in person, they're the police.” (13:57)
      • Costas and Meyer improvise to stay in character, barely convincing Tommy.
        • “If you’re not the police, why are we inside the warden’s office?” (14:36)

  • Takeaway: None of the family provides clues; Margo had truly cut off all contact.

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3. Turning to Publicity: America's Most Wanted

• National TV Exposure

  • With family routes exhausted, Costas leans on the TV show America’s Most Wanted to spark leads. (17:47–19:47)

    • Show uses outdated photo enhancements; tips flood in but are all dead ends.
    • Host commentary: “The picture that was blasted on America’s Most Wanted couldn’t look further from the woman I met...” (21:12)

  • The broadcast severs the last connections to Margo's family as Costas, still in character as Michael, writes letters referencing the show. Aunt Leona responds loyally:

    • “Don’t listen to anything you hear, your mom was a wonderful woman.” –Aunt Leona (20:34)

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4. The Digital Break: From Cold Case to a Lead

• Unsolved Mysteries Revives the Case

  • Years later, Unsolved Mysteries digs up the story in 2002.
  • Greg Elliott (TBI investigator) joins, uses new online databases to search using the alias Tanya McCarter.

• The Database Match

  • A search for Tanya and Margo’s DOB yields an exact hit in Columbus, Ohio: Tanya Hudkins McCarter.

    • Costas overlays old and new photos; facial features match exactly.
      • “The eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears, the chin, the lips... There’s no difference.” (28:00–29:26)

  • Greg Elliott’s reaction:

    • “It looked like you were looking at a picture of a mother and a daughter.” (29:49)

• Building the Case

  • Costas finds:
    • No birth certificate for Tanya
    • Inconsistent records, aliases, and multiple “fathers” listed (32:32)
      • “She was in prison, that’s why [five years are unaccounted for].” (34:18)
    • No fingerprints on record (34:01–34:16)
    • Employment history further exposes fabricated details

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5. The Sting: Cornering Margo

• Surveillance & Anticipation

  • Costas surveils her apartment for weeks; finally, one night, spots activity (37:24)

    • “As I was drinking my beer, I thought, you know what? ...Let me just take a ride by the apartment...” (36:58)

  • Calls and confirms a woman is home; doesn’t yet know if it’s Margo.

  • Pulls in TBI’s Greg Elliott for backup.

• Murphy’s Law Strikes

  • It's Sunday—no judge readily available to sign a warrant. If they wait, Margo might slip away again.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Ethics of Undercover Ops:

  • “You had to tread lightly, okay? Because you’re dealing with three other lives here, meaning the parents that adopted the kid and the kid himself.” – Costas (02:18)

• Moral Dilemmas:

  • “You know you’re going to hell, right?” – Costas’s partner, David Meyer, during their visit to Aunt Leona (11:17)

• The Face Comparison:

  • “It’s creepy, right?” – Costas, after comparing Margo and Tanya’s photos (29:24)

• Frustration with Elusive Truth:

  • “I have to keep digging. I have to keep digging. I have to keep digging.” – Costas (34:32)

• The Absence as Proof:

  • Stephen Shearholt to Costas, on his inability to find any real record of Tanya:
    “The fact that you are not finding anything is the thing.” (36:00)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:37 – Costas hatches the plan to impersonate Margo’s son
• 05:20 – Breakthrough: identifies Michael via “hairdresser” clue
• 09:51 – First successful, emotional contact with Aunt Leona
• 13:57-14:36 – Undercover operation nearly falls apart with Tommy
• 17:47 – America’s Most Wanted coverage
• 21:12 – Discussion on accuracy and futility of media photo enhancement
• 23:53 – Unsolved Mysteries provides new momentum
• 27:14 – Digital search matches Margo’s alias to Tanya in Ohio
• 28:00–29:26 – Visual comparison of mugshots confirms suspicions
• 36:58 – Costas’s fateful drive-by leads to the sighting
• 39:26–40:16 – Waiting game and legal hurdles as police try for a warrant

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Episode Tone

The episode maintains an investigative, at times gritty and suspenseful tone, with moments of dry humor and empathy. Costas’s doggedness is as prominent as the ethical unease surrounding his methods, and host Cooper Moll lets these complexities breathe through vivid narration and firsthand testimony.

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Conclusion

“Undercover” peels back the layers of the investigation into Margo Freshwater’s disappearance, illustrating not only the ingenuity and obsession of the investigators, but also the transformation of true-crime sleuthing in the digital age. The chase is fraught with ethical landmines, false leads, and the ghost of a woman who, for decades, stayed one step ahead—until technology and persistence finally closed the gap.

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Next Episode Tease:
The story promises to dig into Margo’s first five fugitive years and how complications shaped her life on the run.

Transcript

[A]

What's up, rich people? It's me, Haley, aka Mrs. Dow Jones. Money is juicy. That is why I have taken it upon myself to start a new podcast called Financial Tea. Every single week, I will break down what is happening in money right now. Plus, I'm going to bring on experts, entrepreneurs, and influencers to spill their financial tea. Think of it as your new weekly financial gossip column. Listen to Financial Tea wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.

[B]

Listen to all episodes of the Crimes of Margot 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. The binge.

[C]

Why not? I think traditionally people maintain contact with their families, and we were not convinced that she had not.

[B]

That's Stephen Shearholt, retired BCI agent who eventually became Greg Costas boss. Sheerholt remembers that as long as Margot's fate was still unknown, Costas wouldn't stop until he found the answer.

[C]

Greg was like a dog with a bone.

[B]

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.

[C]

I thought, why couldn't I impersonate the baby that she gave up for adoption in 1966?

[B]

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.

[C]

And I could approach the family members saying, hey, this is who I am. I'm trying to find my birth mother, Margot Freshwater.

[B]

This was a pretty bold planethically blurry, for sure.

[C]

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?

[B]

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 Costas played the part, he could slip right into their world without setting off alarms.

[C]

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 case. All you could really find was the birth certificate.

[B]

There was no guarantee it would lead anywhere. But Costas, he doesn't give up that easy.

[C]

We'll be right back following these commercials. 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.

[B]

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?

[C]

They were concerned, you think? 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.

[B]

Costas has got a silver tongue. The guy can talk his way through just about anything.

[C]

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.

[B]

Costas had to figure out of the three, who was the one. Then something jumped out at him. In the details Reunite provided on each.

[C]

Boy, one of them said, father's occupation, hairdresser.

[B]

Earlier, when he got his hands on the birth certificate, the father's occupation was listed as hairstylist.

[C]

So when I saw a hairdresser, I knew this is him.

[B]

Bingo.

[C]

His name was Michael, and he lived up in Finley, 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 fresh water 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.

[B]

It's funny where Costas draws the line.

[C]

So I thought, well, I'll talk to the adoptive parents. And it was a very difficult phone call.

[B]

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.

[C]

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.

[B]

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 Maul. Episode 3 Undercover.

[C]

As part of the COVID 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.

[B]

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.

[C]

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 fresh water.

[B]

Even special agents have inside jokes.

[C]

We had business cards, letterhead, and the.

[B]

Phone number on them.

[C]

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.

[B]

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.

[C]

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.

[B]

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.

[C]

We thought, well, let's start with Tim White.

[B]

But he had nothing. He told them he barely knew her, never knew she was pregnant and couldn't help them.

[C]

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.

[B]

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.

[C]

I decided, I'm going to go up with my partner so I could be standing there.

[B]

They rehearsed the story one last time in the car, every word meant to sound casual and believable.

[C]

We get there, we knock on the door. This little old lady comes to the 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.

[B]

For a split second, Costas 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.

[C]

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.

[B]

They looked around. The place felt untouched by time. Lace curtains, family photos, the faint smell of old furniture and dust. Costas could feel the weight of their deception settle in as they sunk into the well worn couch.

[C]

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.

[B]

Then footsteps on the stairs cut the moment short.

[C]

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.

[B]

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, Jack, yo. Without the charismatic first lady's, smile. She is in prison. After a few minutes of small talk, the conversation shifted to what they were really there for. Locating a fugitive. Turns out Leona held onto more than just pictures. She still carried her own version of the story. One where Margot wasn't a killer at all.

[C]

She had told me that she didn't believe that Margot was guilty.

[B]

And last she'd seen Margot was when that photo was taken.

[C]

She had heard that Margot escaped, but that was it. So we left. I had the pictures, and then me and Aunt Leona became kind of pen pals for a little bit.

[B]

I asked Costas 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.

[C]

So the next person, obviously, was Tommy.

[B]

Margo's full blooded brother, who happened to be in prison at the time.

[C]

And I actually made a colossal mistake. A rookie mistake, if you will.

[B]

I'll let Costas explain.

[C]

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.

[B]

Turns out Tommy had gotten a heads up and he was savvy, like his sister.

[C]

Tommy looks at me and says, yeah, my brother Tim White wrote me a letter and said somebody claiming to be Margo's son may be coming to visit you. So Tommy says, so I said to my celly, 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.

[B]

Costas exchanged a quick look with his partner. Now here they were, standing right in front of him, exactly the way a cop would.

[C]

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?

[B]

Meyer took the lead on the damage control.

[C]

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.

[B]

For a moment, neither of them knew which way it would go.

[C]

Well, we convinced him that I was legit and he added me to his visitation list at the prison.

[B]

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.

[C]

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.

[B]

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.

[C]

Can'T get enough of the story of Margot Freshwater. Do you need more than the episodes can provide? Real quick? We just launched a free true crime newsletter and community page to go along with our binge shows, including the crimes of Margo Freshwater. And you can access it at the link in our episode description [e-mail] thebinge you'll get behind the scenes reporting, case updates, and a chance to chat with one of the show's creators and other fans. The newsletter comes out twice a month, it's totally free and it's where the story continues. I'll see you there. Just hit the link in the description or head to patreon.com thebinge Listen, we.

[B]

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[C]

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[B]

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[C]

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.

[B]

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.

[C]

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.

[B]

In the 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. Martin, Margo's co conspirator, gave them an exclusive phone interview.

[D]

I think that it would be to Margo Freshwater's best interest to go ahead and turn herself in.

[C]

A lot of time has passed and.

[B]

It'S really time that she give this.

[C]

Deep thought and then come in and get this behind her.

[B]

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. 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 Margot freshwater, age 46, five'4,130-200 lb. Beneath that is a large tip hotline number.

[C]

If you know anything about the case of Margo Preshwater, agents are in our Washington, D.C. studios waiting to hear from you.

[B]

Before any chain reaction was set, Costas, watching from Ohio, picked up a pen.

[C]

As Michael after it aired, I wrote Leona a letter and I wrote Tommy a letter basically saying, you know, I can't believe this. I happen 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.

[B]

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.

[C]

The way we divvied it up was every tip that came in, that was in the confines of Ohio, they kicked it to me.

[B]

Each one offered a glimpse of a woman who wasn't Margot.

[C]

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 age enhancement.

[B]

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.

[C]

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.

[B]

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.

[C]

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.

[B]

The kind that only reminded them how cold the trail really was. Weeks turned into months.

[C]

We never closed it out, but it just goes into a pending inactive state.

[B]

Margot Freshwater's 15 minutes of fame were up. The brief resurrection of her story faded as quickly as it appeared. 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.

[C]

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 Margot Freshwater.

[B]

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.

[A]

What's up, rich people? It's me, Haley, aka Mrs. Dow Jones. Money is juicy. That is why I have taken it upon myself to start a new podcast called Financial Tea Every single week, I will break down what is happening in money right now. Plus, I'm gonna bring on experts, entrepreneurs, and influencers to spin spill their financial tea. Think of it as your new weekly financial gossip column. Listen to financial tea wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.

[B]

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.

[C]

Of course they talked to Tennessee. They talked to me. And now you go to the case file, and you blow the dust off of it. You start leafing through it again.

[B]

And once that old file was open again, it was like a signal went out.

[C]

Shortly thereafter, I got a phone call from Greg Elliott. From tbi.

[B]

You heard that, right? Another Greg. Different badge, same hunt.

[D]

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 working in was fugitive cases.

[B]

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 Elliott's hands.

[D]

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.

[B]

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.

[D]

So it was a really cold case by the time I got to it.

[B]

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, Margot Freshwater was just another name in an old file with a story ripe for Hollywood. So if he was calling cost us up, something had to have shifted.

[C]

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.

[B]

Faye 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.

[C]

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.

[D]

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.

[C]

Somebody from TBI was just playing around with the computer and put in the name Tanya. Just the name Tanya. And Margo's date of birth.

[B]

Out of all of the records in the database, there was just one single match. A Tanya Hudkins match. McCarter living in the same town Margot 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.

[D]

I said, hey, 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.

[B]

Elliot thought this was going to take a minute.

[D]

He called me back a couple hours later, and he said, hey, I'm sending you something. You need to look at this.

[C]

We took a clear plastic sheet of paper, and we made a copy of Margo's mug shot from 1966. Then we took a copy of one of Tanya 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 mug shot and placed it on top of the white sheet that had one of her former driver's license photos. Everything lines up perfectly. The eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears, the chin, the lips.

[B]

When I visited Costas at his home in Tucson, he pulled this out as if it were a magic trick.

[C]

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.

[B]

That is crazy. The way the eyes line up.

[C]

Yeah, look at that. But look at that. I mean, isn't that crazy?

[B]

It was truly shocking.

[C]

I mean, look at that. There's no difference.

[B]

It really does take your breath away.

[C]

It's. It's creepy, right?

[B]

Yeah. I think creepy is one of the better ways to describe it. The woman in the picture was older, softer, around the Eyes. But the resemblance is unmistakable, like time had folded in on itself and Margot was staring back from a new life.

[C]

So I email it to Greg Elliot, and he says it looked like you.

[D]

Were looking at a picture of a mother and a daughter.

[B]

It was the first face anyone had connected to Margo Freshwater in more than 30 years.

[D]

I said, yeah, we need to look into this a little bit more.

[C]

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.

[B]

Sherholt saw confirmation. Costa saw coincidence.

[C]

I'm very cautiously pessimistic. I try to keep my expectations low so I don't get disappointed.

[B]

Costas wasn't about to call this case solved without something solid to back it up.

[C]

I'm like, let's pump the brakes, you know, let me do some work on this. So I decided, well, I am going to just dig into the life of Tonya Hutkins McCarter.

[B]

He'd need hard proof. So the idea was to find enough probable cause to obtain Tanya Hudkins McCarter's fingerprints to compare them to the ones Margot 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.

[C]

I don't know if this woman is Margot Freshwater, but Tanya Huckins McCarter is hiding from something or somebody. The more I dug, the more red flags kept coming up.

[B]

He started with the obvious. The cornerstone of legal identity.

[C]

There's no birth certificate for this woman.

[B]

In fact, it didn't appear she even existed before 1974. No school transcripts, no hospital records, no paper trail for this Tanya.

[D]

The Social Security number that she was using had no history prior to that.

[B]

Maybe McCarter hadn't always been her surname. There was an answer for that, too.

[C]

She applied for her Social Security number in 1971 as Tanya Meyers. She listed David A. Myers as her father. Okay. 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 Huckins listed David Myers as father.

[B]

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.

[C]

I found out that she worked at MetLife selling insurance.

[B]

This could be it.

[C]

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.

[B]

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.

[C]

But she never was printed.

[B]

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.

[C]

Costas subpoenaed it, and there was a high school listed that didn't exist.

[B]

Another alarm bell. Costas 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.

[C]

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.

[B]

Every document they pulled traced back only so far until it suddenly stopped.

[C]

Why? Well, because she was in prison, that's why.

[B]

Most investigators would have stopped there. Costas couldn't. He wanted more than circumstantial evidence. He wanted a smoking gun.

[C]

I still wasn't convinced. I have to keep digging. I have to keep digging. I have to keep digging.

[B]

Costas reached out to a few of Tanya's MetLife coworkers. They didn't have much to say about Tonya, but they did explain the last name McCarter.

[C]

She left in February 2000 to become a truck driver with her husband.

[D]

So they determined that she was married to Daryl McCarter and that he was an over the road trucker.

[C]

She actually had her cdl, which is why she quit her job.

[B]

A commercial driver's license. It looked like Tanya and Daryl 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, Shierholt remembers Costas was really hung up on making Tonya Hudkins McCarter real.

[C]

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.

[B]

What Unsettled cost us most was the feeling that he was Chasing a shadow, not a person.

[C]

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.

[B]

Anything is the thing 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.

[C]

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 for two.

[B]

Weeks, day after day, outside their East Columbus suburban apartment. Nothing changed. On Saturday, May 18, 2002, Costas had just clocked out.

[C]

I was on my way home from work, and I stopped and I got a beer. I got a beer and a shot.

[B]

Then, like muscle memory, Margot's case found its way back into his thoughts.

[C]

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 lights 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 ot 66. So that's when I was like, holy, I think they're home.

[B]

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.

[C]

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?

[B]

Costas had gone totally rogue. He couldn't just walk up and knock on the door without backup or a signed warrant. 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.

[C]

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? I call 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 Susie. And she goes, you got the wrong number. I said, oh, I'm sorry.

[B]

Well, that was awkward. But it gave Costa something sort of.

[C]

Okay. Now, I know there's a woman in the house, but I don't know that it's Margo Freshwater or Tanya Huckins McCarter.

[B]

It was time to call for backup.

[C]

I called my boss and I said, they're home. I'm going to 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.

[D]

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 7 or 8 o' clock one night. So I said, okay, I'm coming up and we'll see what we got to do to get her identified.

[C]

And he did. He flew up that night.

[D]

I actually flew the TBI plane up there that we had and got there about 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, a search warrant, and then had to locate a judge.

[B]

They needed to move now, but Murphy's Law had other plans. Tanya Hudkins McCarter turned up on the worst day of the week to push paperwork Sunday.

[C]

The prosecutor wanted to wait till Monday. And I'm like, there's no way in hell they're here now.

[B]

Tanya 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?

[C]

I'm a nervous fucking wreck.

[B]

Judges were home. Offices were dark, phones ringing into the void. If they waited till Monday, they risked losing her entirely. Next time on the Crimes of Margot Freshwater. Tanya reveals how she hid from authorities in those first five years as a fugitive and what made things complicated from the jump. We were talking one night and I told him, I said, well, you're nice, but I like you, but I can't get in a relationship. I'm pregnant. Don't want to wait for that next episode. You don't have to unlock all episodes of the Crimes of Margo Freshwater ad free right now by subscribing to the Binge Podcast channel. Search for the binge on Apple podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page. Not on apple. Head to getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. As a subscriber, you'll get binge access to news stories on the 1st of every month. Check out the Binge Channel page on apple podcast or getthebinge.com to learn more. The Crimes of Margot Freshwater is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and Glass Podcasts. It was hosted and reported by ME Cooper Maul. Maura Walls is our story editor. Our executive producers are Kathryn St. Louis, Jonathan Hirsch, Nancy Glass, Ben Federman, and Andrea Gunning. Sound design and editing by Anna Maclean, mixed and mastered by Matt Del Vecchio. Our theme music was composed by Oliver Baines. We use music from MIBE and Epidemic Sound. Our production managers are Sammy Allison and Kristen Melchiori. Our lawyer is Michael Belkin. Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rasik, and Kerry Hartman. Please rate and review the Crimes of Margo Freshwater. It helps people find our show.