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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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After 32 years on the run, Margo Freshwater had landed in the back of a police cruiser. And what's going through your head on the way to the station? Well, I knew it was over.
I knew it was over.
Did you resign to that or were you starting to get a sense of fight in you?
No, I resigned. I knew it was done. It was over.
Maybe it was over, but once they got to the interrogation room at the Columbus Police Department, she didn't act cornered. Instead, she did something a little weird. This wasn't simple evasion. It threw the room off balance. Even the cops couldn't tell what they were dealing with.
You are saying you are not Margo Freshwater? Right. You say Margo doesn't exist anymore. Well, I can't really explain it. She doesn't exist to me. That person in my mind died, had to die in order for myself to be born into who I am today. My identity is who I am today.
Margot died. It's an unsettling choice of words, but it reveals Tanya's logic. To survive as Tanya, Margot had to be buried somewhere deep. Tanya wasn't denying she had once been Margot. She was denying that Margot still counted.
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Chapter 2: What led to Margo Freshwater's arrest after 32 years on the run?
She spent nearly four hours with investigators in the interview room, and she told them everything, how she'd escaped and how she'd reinvented herself. And she insisted that her flight from prison was justified because she didn't kill Hillman Robbins Sr., Esther Bouye, and CeCe Surratt. And she says she couldn't have stopped it.
I did not do any of that. I didn't want any of it done. Tanya only had one regret. Maybe if I'd never gone down to Tennessee in the first place, it never would have happened. All I wanted to do in the very beginning was to prove my innocence. And I just wasn't able to do it because I didn't have the money to get the attorneys. And then I forgot about it, and I just led a life.
She might have tried to forget, but the state of Tennessee didn't forget. And now, she was being sent back to the very place she slipped from, the Tennessee Prison for Women, to carry out the remainder of her 99-year sentence. What comes next is where the ground shifts.
The myth of Margot Freshwater, the troubled girl, the criminal mastermind, the heartless lover, none of it survives what you're about to hear. She was never the person the record made her out to be. Tanya has truths she's held onto for half a century, and she's about to drop them. From Sony Music Entertainment and Glass Podcasts, this is The Crimes of Margot Freshwater. I'm Cooper Mall.
Episode 5, Table's Turn. They say the winners write history, and for more than 50 years, the winners controlled the story of Margot Freshwater. When I first came across her case, what struck me wasn't just the gaps. It was the silence. Her voice wasn't anywhere.
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Chapter 3: How did Margo Freshwater react during her police interrogation?
No interviews, no memoirs, nothing. She testified at trial, but no one believed her. Her version of the story never made the record, never got told on America's Most Wanted or Unsolved Mysteries. This episode exists because I couldn't shake that. I needed to hear her side. And I figured if I did, you probably did too.
I've always approached this story like any reporter would, with neutrality and an open mind. I wasn't expecting Tanya's version of events to line up with the accounts that I had read in the legal record or that had been given to me by the people who investigated her, most of whom were in diapers when she was convicted.
But when we met in a windowless hotel boardroom off an interstate in Columbus, nothing could have prepared me for what she laid bare.
I've always lived with the guilt, and this is the first time I'm sharing it, that if I hadn't tried to get out that door, that maybe he wouldn't have shot the lady.
It was my second trip to Ohio. I'd flown out once before just to meet Tanya and build trust. This time, Tanya and I knew each other well enough to sit across a table without that early awkwardness. But I wasn't alone. Tanya wouldn't speak to me without her lawyer in the room. So Steven Ross Johnson, her attorney, sat beside her.
This was a first for me, a situation that would make any journalist nervous. Would he stop her from being honest? What I discovered was the opposite. Having her lawyer by her side actually made Tanya comfortable enough to open up. I was just so traumatized and terrified and scared. We started at the beginning.
When Tanya went to Memphis to help her friend Al in October 1966, she believed she was stepping into a short-term arrangement. She'd babysit until she saved enough money to pay Glenn Nash for Al's legal fees. Nash told her she'd be home in a few weeks. But once she settled in, the gap between what Nash promised and what he delivered became a canyon.
I noticed Nash never seemed to let me out of his sight. And I kept asking him, I said, when are you going to set this up so we can do this? Because I've got to be home by Thanksgiving. And it just never happened.
Nash never put work toward Al's case.
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Chapter 4: What were Margo's claims about her identity and past?
And I said, is there any way you guys can come get me?
Tommy didn't have any money either. Tanya was shit out of luck. Had her family been able to come pick her up, her whole life would have taken another path. Because the very next day, her future got derailed. That night, after her babysitting shift, Tanya was in a room with the door open, talking casually with the man who lived across the hall.
They were making a plan to hang out later that evening. For the first time in a while, Tanya felt calm, chit-chatting with a neighbor. Then a noise pulled her out of the conversation.
I heard this commotion outside. I looked out the window. And so then I went outside and Nash was arguing with some gentleman outside.
Whatever was happening, it escalated fast enough that the other man walked away fed up.
Nash was upset and he was drunk. He was yelling at me and he said, get in the car. Tanya didn't argue. She went. He started the car up and he almost hit a pole. And I said, where are you going? Let me drive because I don't want to get killed. And he said, I need a bottle of liquor. So he told me where to go.
She pulled the white Ford Fairlane up to Square D Liquor.
I said, well, hurry up. So he stumbled his way into the liquor store. And I sat there and I waited and it seemed like forever. Tani was growing impatient. She wanted to get back to her neighbor she'd made plans with. And so I thought, I'm going to have to get out and go in and get him. So I went in. And I said, are you ready to go? Come on, let's go. Next thing I knew he was pulling a gun out.
Everything that followed happened in seconds. It was just the three of us. And he told Mr. Robbins and myself to get in the back room. And of course he was pointing the gun at us.
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Chapter 5: What events transpired the night of the murder?
And he told me to go out and wait on the customer. I said, no, I'm not going to go out and wait on the customer. This is crazy. And he said, get out there and wait on the customer. So I did, because he had the gun. I was terrified. I was shaking. I couldn't even talk. I was so nervous. And all I wanted to do was get that man out of there.
She waited on the customer all while Nash watched her through the crack in the doorway, checking to make sure she didn't run, didn't signal for help, didn't break the invisible perimeter he'd drawn around her.
After the gentleman went back out, I had to go back to the back room. I saw that Mr. Robbins was laying on the floor with his hands tied, and Nash went back out front.
This was her chance to save Robbins.
I bent down, and I was trying to untie Mr. Robbins. Maybe they could break away before Nash returned. And Nash came back and caught me and slammed me up against the wall. And then he told me to step out the door. There was a back door. And I got about a foot out the door, and I'm looking around trying to figure out if there was anywhere I could run to.
I heard some noises I realized were gunshots.
She says she didn't see the killing. She only heard the shots. The fatal blows she had been accused of delivering. But she wasn't even in the room.
And Nash came out and by this time I'm hysterical and I'm crying. He said, you can't go to the cops because I used two guns. The 38 and the 22. So they're going to think you're the one that killed him if you go to the cops. And you can't go home because I know where you live. And he said, you can't go anywhere because I'll find you and I'll kill you.
Not only had Nash framed her, he had her trapped. People assumed for so long that Tanya had to be evil because why else would she stick by Nash's side? Why wouldn't she run to the cops? But she didn't go to the police because she was afraid she might be blamed. I don't know if I'd act any differently if I was that cornered and scared. Would you?
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Chapter 6: How did Margo's actions lead to unintended consequences?
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Mr. Robbins was dead, the gun was in Nash's hands, and the threat was clearer than it had ever been. Tanya did what she had to do to stay alive. He told me to get in the car and drive. Once Tanya pulled away from the liquor store, she wasn't driving towards safety. She was driving straight into a stretch of day she can barely remember.
She told me the details come back in flashes, but every flash has Nash in it.
I probably only stood maybe 5'2", 5'3", and only weighed about 105 pounds. And he was taller than I was. He was also a karate expert. There's no way I could go up against him.
Fear kept her compliant and shock kept her quiet, but the desire for survival kept her alert for any opening, however small. One of the clearest memories Tanya has from this stretch is Oakland Park, Florida. Nash stopped at a convenience store to get something to eat.
We went in and he was going down an aisle and I kept inching towards the door thinking, well, maybe now I can try to get away.
In her trial in 1969, the prosecutor told the jury Margo could have gotten away, but chose not to. What he didn't tell them was, she did try. In fact, she tried at that very convenience store just before Glenn Nash shot Esther Bouye. But before she hit the threshold of the door, Nash had cottoned on to what she was trying to do.
And I heard shots and he was on top of me, pushing me out the door. I've always lived with the guilt, and this is the first time I'm sharing it, that if I hadn't tried to get out that door, that maybe he wouldn't have shot the lady.
The next time Margo tried to escape, she ended up staring down the barrel of a gun.
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Chapter 7: What was the impact of the new evidence on Margo's case?
As she walked me through each killing, step by step, there was this quiet weight in the room, like she knew exactly what that meant. That she got away, and they never did. She was alone with a serial murderer, so frightened she had never even stopped to think she could be implicated.
I don't remember being afraid of being caught. I remember being afraid that he was going to eventually kill me.
There's an alternate universe where Tanya would have been dead. She'd never lived to take the fall. The nightmare finally ended in Mississippi.
We got off the bus and they arrested him or stopped him as soon as he got off the bus. I got off the bus and just kept walking and they stopped me.
This was the point in our interview where my blood boiling reached a fever pitch. I knew what was coming next. She was about to take the fall for a string of crimes that she had been coerced into. She was never the Bonnie to Nash's Clyde. Tanya wasn't staying in Mississippi. We know that.
She was extradited to Tennessee, faced trial alone, and after narrowly escaping the death penalty, booked at the prison for women. When the prison gates closed behind her, the warden sat her down, expecting tears, anger, collapse, something. What she got instead was resolve.
She said, you seem to be awfully calm. Why is that? And I said, because I'm innocent and I know I didn't do this and I know eventually I'll go home.
Tanya didn't start her 99-year sentence with rebellion on her mind. She believed an appeal would land, that her conviction could be overturned. But Hope has a shelf life in a place like that.
I got the news that my appeal had been denied, and he told me there were no other options for me. And then I felt like the only thing I could do is help myself.
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Chapter 8: How did Margo's family react to her arrest?
The moment Tanya was taken into custody, her family's world flipped inside out. One second they were living an ordinary Ohio life, running errands, juggling work and babies, planning dinner. The next, they were standing in a police station with no roadmap, no information, and no idea who to trust. Tim remembered trying to get to his mom any way he could.
We did try a lot to talk when we were down there and they wouldn't let us unless we did interviews with them prior to seeing her.
They were suddenly part of the investigation, whether they liked it or not.
As Daryl McCarter told a local reporter at the time, They wanted to know whether or not I had been barbering the fugitive. And had they thought I had been barbering the fugitive, I would have been arrested and put in jail on the spot. But after two hours of interrogation, they realized her family and me did not know her past.
And therefore, we were not an accomplice in harboring a fugitive, and they let me go.
And incredibly, even though they'd been lied to, they immediately stood by her.
Here's a woman that they say was a convicted felon for first-degree murder, and I said, that's not my life. She's not the kind of person, she couldn't commit that kind of a crime.
In Tanya's interrogation, the investigators made a deal with her. She'd tell them everything if she could get a moment with her husband, Daryl. They kept the cameras rolling.
I love you guys more than anything in the world. Do you know that?
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