The Binge Crimes: The Crimes of Margo Freshwater
The Crimes of Margo Freshwater | 4. Born to Run
26 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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. Colonial Hills in the 1950s felt like every town USA.
Small Cape Cod homes, each with its own patch of clipped lawn, stood side by side like siblings in matching outfits. This suburb of Columbus was one of those places where people believed they were building something, not just houses, but lives. And to the extent that a baby could know there was a great big world beyond it, little Margo Freshwater seemed determined to explore that great big world.
When I was 18 months, my mom had me out in the backyard and she forgot something inside. She ran inside to get it.
She stepped back out, expecting to see her daughter still inside the fenced yard. And I was gone. just vanished. No gate open, no tracks in the mud. Houdini in diapers. She hunted everywhere, and all the neighbors were looking for me. Every backyard was checked, every corner scanned, until the search party spilled out to the boundary where homes end and danger begins.
The houses on Indianola Avenue, the back of their houses faced the railroad tracks. At one of those houses, a neighbor stepped out to take out the trash. And as she turned around to go back in the door, something caught her eye. And she turned around, looked, and she saw this child on the railroad tracks and a train coming. So she ran and she grabbed me off the tracks.
This was Margot's first great escape.
I've always believed that everyone has a purpose on this world. And once that purpose has been fulfilled, that's when we move on.
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Chapter 2: What happened to Margo Freshwater during her childhood?
Stepping into trouble and surviving it would become her signature, the trait that shaped every turn to come. From Sony Music Entertainment and Glass Podcasts, this is The Crimes of Margot Freshwater. I'm Cooper Mall. Episode 4, Born to Run. Greg Costa spent 10 years chasing Margot Freshwater, trying to stitch together the three decades she lived in hiding.
He had scraps, paperwork, old applications, secondhand memories, pieces of a life, but never the full picture. Yet he kept looking. And finally, the trail led him right up to her front door. And up until now, you've mostly heard about that search. You're probably wondering what Tanya was doing all those years. I was too.
Before we get to that, I think we need to sit with what makes Tanya's story unusual. In most people's lives, 30 years go by collecting the small, ordinary moments that make up a life. You fall in love. You have kids. You struggle with bills. You change jobs. You suffer losses. You celebrate the wins. It is the slow, uneven rhythm of becoming a person.
Tanya lived all that too, but she lived it with a secret that sat right behind her rib cage. She lived three decades of milestones knowing her past could find her at any second. To survive it, Tanya ended up making a set of principles for herself, some rules to live by. She never wrote them down, but her rules were etched into how she moved through the world.
When we last left, Margo, she jumped on a train in Baltimore, narrowly missing the FBI, who'd just caught up with Faye Copeland, the woman she escaped with. The train took her as far north as it could go, a notch in the Rust Belt, Akron, Ohio. She arrived with nothing but a couple of bags and the hope that the next stranger might be safe to trust.
That woman she barely knew from selling encyclopedias, the one Tanya shared her plan to get back to Ohio with, made good on her offer. She'd arranged for her parents to meet Margo at the station,
That was the first time I'd ever had an Arby's because they asked me if I'd eaten and I said no. So they stopped at an Arby's and got me a roast beef sandwich.
Warm food, a full stomach. It was the closest she had come to comfort in months. Almost as soon as she got to Akron, she moved west to Ashland, where there were more opportunities to earn a living. But starting over required more than just money. Margo needed a past no one could trace, a future built clean. I'm a really ambitious chick, but this sounds like an impossible to-do list to me.
Back in those days, things were a lot different. So I wasn't going to steal someone's identity. I was going to create an identity.
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Chapter 3: How did Tanya create her new identity after escaping?
It's walking past someone who once loved you and acting like you never met.
I wanted so much to say, so much more, but I knew I couldn't. So I just said sorry again and then walked on. I would have wrapped my arms around her and told her how much I loved her and missed her.
Moments like this stayed with her. They reminded her how thin the membrane was between the life she built and the one she left behind. I just needed to connect with my past. As fully committed as she was to the life of Tanya, it's like sometimes she'd get homesick for Margot.
And fragments of Margot's past were woven into Tanya's present, blurring the line between who she had been and who she became. Take when Jo asked Tanya about her family.
I said, well, as far as I know, I don't have any family left. I said, my mom wanted me to go to college, which was true. She wanted me to go to college. And I said, I wasn't ready to go to college. And so I wanted to go out on my own at the age of 18. And she told me, if I left, don't bother coming back. And he said, well, don't you want to try to find him? And I said, no, not at this point.
And he accepted that. And it wasn't hard to tell that story because so much of it was true. I just put a lot of the truth into the background that I would give.
She told Joe what she needed to. Not the truth, but the lie she needed him to believe. That maybe even she needed to believe. There's a part of Tanya's life, Margo's really, that sits in a black box. Opening it is the hardest part of telling her story because inside that box is everything she learned to use to survive long before she stepped into a courtroom or scaled a prison fence.
When she was a child, she grew up with an alcoholic father, who she repeatedly witnessed abuse her mom. At 15, she was date-raped and pressured into getting an abortion. It set her up for the life she had now as Tanya, the mother of seven. Margot had given up the baby she got pregnant with at 17. That was the son that got her kicked out of her mother's house.
All of this had taught her that when things got bad, she needed to get out fast. It's almost like she'd been on the run long before she became a fugitive. But Tanya's life rarely paused to let her process anything. It just kept coming. And the next turn had nothing to do with her past and everything to do with her future with Joe.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Tanya face while starting over in Akron?
By the 90s, Tanya's days of odd jobs were behind her. She was a career woman now, selling insurance for MetLife, which brought her to Columbus. Not just a bigger city, but the city she grew up in. There was no man in the picture.
I chose not to have anyone permanently in my life until my children were grown.
And as they grew up, Tanya held on to a private promise, one she whispered every night when the house was finally still.
I would always pray to God, please don't let anything happen that I get caught until at least Tim is 22 years old, because then I knew they could make it on their own.
The fear of getting caught never really disappeared, like a ringing in her ear that simply sat off to the side while real life demanded her attention. And no one questioned the woman she presented to the world, because she gave them no reason to. Her past was invisible to everyone but herself. She didn't tell any of her kids the truth. Not a single friend. No one.
If you saw her then, you'd never know this woman had been on the run for nearly three decades. Her kids left home and carved their own lives, and Tanya found new ways to fill her time. In April 1999, she broke her ankle on the ice outside her office. Recovery left her restless and up late.
It's 2.30 in the morning and I woke up and I couldn't go back to sleep. So I turned the TV on and there was this ribbon going across the bottom of the show. And it was talking about telepersonals. And so I thought, well, that looks like something I can do because I was bored.
She set up a profile where men could leave her voicemails. If she was interested, she'd call back. This is a lot more involved than a swipe left or right.
I would get messages, and then I would call the person. And I'd write down their name, and we would talk off and on, depending upon whether they were interesting or not. I only ended up meeting three, because Daryl was my fourth.
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Chapter 5: How did Tanya navigate relationships while hiding her past?
You know, the phrase, your heart is beating out of your chest. Mine had burst through and was doing laps around that parking lot.
Then they finally closed the distance.
He says, are you Tonya Hudkins McCarter? She just got this distant deer in the headlight look. And she didn't say anything. She just stared at us. And it was just like she was staring right through us.
Steve says we are with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, and we have been conducting an investigation alongside the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and we actually have reason to believe that you're not Tonya Hudkins-McCarter, but that you are, in fact, Margo Freshwater, who is a fugitive. And I knew right then, we were about 99, 98% sure that this was the right person.
But when I got that right there, it was like, she just realized this is it. They finally called up to me.
Now, this is when it turns into kind of a shit show. Picture it, an unsuspecting family in a parking lot, and suddenly officers are closing in, telling their mother and wife she isn't who she says she is, that she's an escaped convict who's been running since the 70s.
Keep in mind, we're in the parking lot. Everybody's looking around like, what in the hell is going on? She has no emotion, like stoic, like there was no color in her face, but no emotion. So now you're getting the, Daryl is like, you know, what, what are you talking about? That's my wife. And the kid's going, that's my mom. They were...
upset who in the heck are you to come in here with policemen and police cruisers and detectives and accuse my mom or my wife of murder they felt we had lost our minds the anger hit hard but it didn't change what had to happen next so we told her we have a warrant
for your fingerprints and she says fine are you you gonna take him here and we said no we are going to take you down to the columbus police department where they will be taken so at that point she turns and she started walking toward daryl and i remember like stopping her saying whoa whoa whoa whoa and she looked at me and said i just want to say goodbye so
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Chapter 6: What led to Tanya's unexpected pregnancy?
Then he told me to step out the back door. I got about a foot out the door and I heard some noises I realized were gunshots.
Don't want to wait for that next episode? You don't have to. Unlock all episodes of The Crimes of Margot 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 first of every month. Check out the Binge channel page on Apple Podcasts 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 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 McClain. Mixed and mastered by Matt DelVecchio. Our theme music was composed by Oliver Baines. We use music from MIBE and Epidemic Sound. Our production managers are Sammy Allison and Kristen Melchiorri. Our lawyer is Michael Belkin.
Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rasek, and Carrie Hartman. Please rate and review The Crimes of Margot Freshwater. It helps people find our show.
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