The Crimes of Margo Freshwater | 4. Born to Run
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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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.
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.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:12
2
What happened to Margo Freshwater during her childhood?
2:12–18:12
3
How did Tanya create her new identity after escaping?
18:12–22:01
4
What challenges did Tanya face while starting over in Akron?
22:01–32:39
5
How did Tanya navigate relationships while hiding her past?
32:39–38:04
6
What led to Tanya's unexpected pregnancy?
38:04–39:40