Cooper Maul

America's Most Wanted was one of the OG true crime television shows.

It blended crime storytelling with civic action, urging viewers to call in tips.

And those calls directly led to the capture of hundreds of suspects.

Costas couldn't have known that chasing Margo would take up the better part of his young adulthood.

When he first heard about her, he had just got tapped for a new statewide task force, the Special Investigations Unit, the crew that handled the big stuff, corruption, cold cases, and fugitives.

At this point, it'd been nearly 15 years since the FBI closed the book on Margot Freshwater.

Even though she'd been on the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation's top 10 most wanted list, no law enforcement agency had been devoting resources to finding her.

And Costas' impression that this was going to be a humdrum, busy work assignment quickly fell away as he started reading the file.

I've met a lot of cops in my work, and most of them are pretty buttoned up, careful with every word.

But Costas, talking to him feels like standing next to a live wire.

You never quite know what's coming next.

Costa still has that old case file, nearly 18 inches thick.

When I started talking to him earlier this year, I knew I wanted to see it for myself.

At that point, Tanya wasn't talking to me yet, so I was hoping to learn more about her through him.

A few days later, I was on a plane to Tucson, where he lives these days, ready to dig through it with him page by page.

By the time I finally landed, after a mess of canceled flights and travel snafus, the sight of those saguaros stretching toward a huge empty sky was a welcome one.

When I pulled up to his stucco house, the first one to greet me wasn't Costas.

It was his clumsy golden doodle puppy, Theo.

Hi.

Hey.