Cooper Maul

Knudsen was an old school cop.

Think Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive, the kind of man who lives by the rules, but doesn't let them slow him down.

So first, he felt like he had to understand what drove their great escape.

He hadn't heard of anything like this before.

Knudsen had to get the goods on Margo to understand her motivation.

and the deputy warden handed over her personnel file.

In the 1970s, tracking a fugitive was a slower, more manual process.

There were no digital databases linking local police to federal agencies, so communication often meant phone calls and mailed bulletins.

Fingerprints had to be compared by hand, and investigators relied heavily on informants, paper records, and luck.

Without GPS, credit card tracking, or surveillance cameras, once someone crossed a state line, they could vanish for years.

In Ohio, agents knocked on doors, sat in living rooms, and worked through every name in Margo's past, hoping someone would point them in the right direction.

Remember, this was the same family that barely even made a phone call to Margo when she was wrapped up with Glenn Nash in Memphis.

Why would they suddenly care about where she is now?

And because boots on the ground in Ohio bore no leads, the FBI pivoted to the woman who might still be within reach.

While the FBI spread out across Baltimore in search of Fay, Knudsen drove to Memphis to examine the case files himself and meet with local prosecutors.

He wanted to understand how a teenage accomplice ended up serving the kind of time usually reserved for the trigger man.

His first call was to the man Margo thought she could save, Alfred Schlereth, that boyfriend she was trying to help when she got involved with Glenn Nash in the first place.

Whatever remained of that relationship ended the moment she ran with Nash.

Al later told investigators that the last time he saw Margo was when he was in jail in Tennessee.

Here's Al speaking to a reporter in 1994 about that visit.