The Binge Crimes: Lady Mafia - The Crimes of Margo Freshwater | 2. Bad Lead
Episode Date: January 12, 2026On the run with nothing but adrenaline and borrowed luck, Margo Freshwater vanishes into Baltimore while detectives waste precious time chasing the wrong trail. Binge all episodes of The Crimes of ...Margo Freshwater ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge Crimes on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access. From serial killer nurses to psychic scammers – The Binge is your home for true crime stories that pull you in and never let go. Join our free newsletter at Patreon.com/TheBinge. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. The Crimes of Margo Freshwater is brought to you by Glass Entertainment and Sony Music Entertainment. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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All right, so this is actually happening
in T-minus five minutes.
I will be sitting down with Tanya MacArthur, aka Margo Freshwater,
for her first ever interview.
And I truly cannot believe this.
This has been a long time coming.
For the past three years, we've been trying to find Margo Freshwater.
And back in 2021, when this podcast was still a seat of an idea,
we started plotting our approach.
We knew this could take some time.
A few of my colleagues pursued her over the years,
but Margot Freshwater lived up to her reputation.
She was really hard to track down.
We tried going through the attorney who had once defended her.
We thought if we could build trust with him,
maybe he'd be our key to finding her.
He took a call, but communication fizzled.
Then somehow, word got back that we were trying to reach her.
and one summer afternoon in 2025, my phone rang.
I didn't record that very first call,
but I did record the call I made the second I hung up with her
with my producer, Ben.
So she gave me a call.
Wow, okay.
What was it like getting her on the phone?
I just wanted to say the right thing,
and it was interesting too,
because, you know, when you hear her on the phone,
She just sounds like your mom.
Yeah.
She sounds like anybody.
Yeah.
And I want to treat her like anybody.
It's been a pursuit.
And we weren't the only ones chasing her.
Over the years, a lot of people wanted to get her to tell her story.
Think Dateline, 2020, Good Morning America even.
She turned them all down.
But for some reason, she saw something in me.
even though I'm a heavily tattooed millennial who dresses like Adam Sandler half the time.
She trusted me.
And when I first sat across from her, it was hard to reconcile that the woman in front of me
could be the same person who escaped prison, someone who'd been convicted of murder.
Standing at around 5'1, her voice carries a maternal softness.
She almost seemed shy.
It all took me by surprise.
When I hit record, it was tough to tell who was more on edge.
I think one of the big questions here at the beginning is,
you've never sat down and told your story on the record before.
Why now?
Now feels like the right time to do it,
and I wanted to get my story out there, the way it really went down.
Tanya is 77 now, and time isn't exactly on her side.
If this story is ever going to be told by her,
It's now or never.
What a lot of people don't understand is when I created my new identity and had a new life,
I had to put the life that I had known out of sight, out of mind.
My life wasn't easy when I started.
She didn't make it easy for investigators either, because everyone hunting her started started in the wrong place.
She'd already figured out something that people chasing her hadn't.
I knew I could never contact my family.
Last episode we told you about Margot's mother, the one who kicked her out.
But Margo was also a middle child.
She had two brothers and a great aunt she adored.
One call, one letter, one drop in could put them all in jeopardy.
If they lied, then they would be in.
trouble for abating and abetting, or they would have to make the decision to turn me in.
And so I could not, in good conscience, put him in that situation.
Margot left home after she and her mother fought about her pregnancy, but she hadn't imagined
she'd never go back.
Becoming a fugitive meant just that, at just 22.
To stay hidden, she had to vanish completely, leave every face, every face, every,
name and every piece of her old life behind.
From Sony Music Entertainment and Glass Podcasts, this is the crimes of Margot Freshwater.
I'm Cooper Mall.
Episode 2, Bad Lead.
As soon as Margot scaled the fence, leaving Tennessee prison for women in the dust,
she and her accomplice, Faye Copeland didn't slow down.
It was just minute by minute.
The first trucker got them as far as a busy truck stop.
Then moved on.
They waited only long enough to find another ride.
The second driver agreed to take them to Baltimore,
where Faye had extended family.
They had no clear final destination,
no money,
just the belief that anywhere was better than a prison cell
on the outskirts of Nashville.
I knew we were going to her relatives,
and I just wasn't sure what I was going to do.
And the farther the highway stretched,
the more unreal it felt,
The two women rode with strangers and trucks until exhaustion set in.
At some point, even fugitives need a place to catch their breath to regroup before the next stretch of road.
The second truck driver, because it was going to be quite a ways to go, he stopped at a motel and he said,
why don't you two get out, get cleaned up, and I'll come back in the morning and pick you guys up.
The driver bought them a room.
inside, running water drowned out the fear of being hunted.
I just took a shower and I was exhausted.
That night, Faye and Margo slept side by side in double beds.
For the first time in months, no clanging doors.
Just the hope of a trucker's promise and the thin walls of a borrowed night.
The next morning, the trucker came back just like he said.
He thought they were sisters.
And before long, the two women were rolling into Baltimore.
more, trusting that Faye's relatives would welcome them with open arms.
When we got there, they were surprised to see her, and she said, I've got a friend with me.
Showing up out of the blue with some random new friend, that's a situation with no polite script.
I don't even think they knew we had been in prison.
The Copeland's let the two ladies stay. No questions asked.
Margot kept her distance. This wasn't home, and she didn't plan on staying long.
If she was going to make it out from under their roof, she needed cash, fast.
And within a week, she found her solution.
I had gotten a job selling encyclopedias.
The door-to-door gig got her out from under the Copeland roof during the day,
but it also meant seeing strangers, face-to-face, all day long.
Sounds like risky work for someone trying not to be recognized.
I would go to the post office because they'd have wanted to be.
posters up, but I never saw anything for me.
Still, she knew she was working on borrowed time, and eventually Margot told a coworker her future
plan.
I told her I wanted to get back to Ohio.
She said, well, I've got family there.
This single connection opened a narrow path westward, a lifeline that looked just stable
enough to trust.
I was saying, you know, I don't have anywhere to stay.
You know, I'd have to find some.
place to stay, you know, and so I could get a job and everything.
This woman barely knew Margot, but she was willing to help anyway.
And she said, well, if you decide to go, I can let my parents know.
And that was the plan.
Once Margot saved enough scratch for a train ticket, she'd be on her way.
This is crazy to me.
Why in the world did Margo feel pulled back to Ohio, the one state where people might
actually recognize her?
I was hoping because I knew our family's attorney,
and I was hoping maybe I hadn't really thought it out
that I could get some help that way.
It makes almost no sense.
Reaching out to the family lawyer
while trying not to get them in trouble.
But she was young, completely on her own,
with no one to tell her it was a bad idea,
no one to say, don't go back to Ohio.
And in Baltimore already, trouble was closing in.
While Margo was chasing a dream, Faye was chasing thrills.
Faye was doing stuff that I knew was going to get us caught.
So she was going out to bars, and I knew she was going to get caught.
It was bold to say the least.
This woman had just escaped prison and was acting like it was just a bad dream she'd finally shaken loose.
All it would take was one wrong person recognizing Faye and going to the cops.
but Faye was almost flaunting herself.
I was nervous the entire time.
She just seemed some nonchalant about everything.
Margot felt the clock speeding up.
She'd only ever thought of Baltimore as a pause.
But now, something inside of her said, run.
Problem was, she was still broke
and needed an immediate out.
Then someone unexpected offered her a lifeline.
Faye's brother.
I had told him my fears
and he knew that we escaped.
Faye's brother wasn't a snitch
and since he hadn't gone to the police
knowing his family was harboring fugitives
Margo felt like she could trust him
and I told him my fears again caught
he was staying in an all-men's rooming house
and he said
well just leave
and I'll put you up in the rooming house
until you go back to Ohio
and hide you out there.
Margot was game.
If Faye went down, she could not be dragged with her.
And that meant severing whatever sisterhood escaped through that fence with them.
Margo hurried to gather the few things she had to her name.
Then, Faye interrupted her.
She walked in.
on me. And she said, what are you doing?
Busted. Margo had to think on her feet, fast.
And I said, oh, well, I met someone and we're going to California.
There was some clever logic behind this lie.
I thought when she got picked up, she would tell them where I was.
Not bad for a split-second story. And Faye didn't question it. As far as she was concerned,
Margo was heading west towards sunshine and a fresh start.
But really, she was headed down the road to spend the night
hold up in a men's boarding house.
So her brother had me dress up like a guy
and snuck me into the rooming house.
My hair was pulled up and he had me put on a hat and a trench coat.
Another escape pulled off cleanly, hidden in plain sight.
Upstairs the room was small and dim.
The walls felt close.
Margo knew she could only stay there long enough to secure a way out.
And that night, the cost of the next step revealed itself.
Now this part I'm ashamed of, but it bought me my freedom.
He told me he would get me a train ticket to Ohio,
but I had to allow him to have his way with me.
So he bought me a train ticket.
Hey, Sal.
Hank, what's going on?
We haven't worked a case in years.
I just bought my car at Carvana and it was so easy, too easy.
Think something's up?
You tell me, they got thousands of options.
Found a great car at a great price.
And it got delivered the next day.
It sounds like Carbana just makes it easy to buy your car, Hank.
Yeah, you're right. Case closed.
Buy your car today on Carvana.
Delivery fees may apply.
Margot had split from Baltimore just in the nick of time.
Fay was not so lucky.
I sat up the leads up there.
The agents did their investigation and caught her.
Allegedly, they dismissed Margo by a few hours.
When Fay and Margo broke free,
the state of Tennessee asked the FBI to take the lead,
and the file landed on a desk in Nashville.
New to the bureau, new to the office,
Richard Knudson got assigned the case.
You know him from the last episode.
In 1970, I had been assigned to the Nashville resident agency office of the FBI,
and I had obtained an ineleful flight to avoid confinement federal warrants
for Margo Freshwater and Fay Copeland.
His job was to bring the girls back from the lamb and in front of prosecutors.
Knudson was an old school cop.
Think Tommy Lee Jones and the fugitive.
The kind of man who lives by the rules, but doesn't let them slow in.
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. From that file, we'd obtain her background,
a little bit about her case, a whole lot about relatives or friends or where she had lived,
those kinds of things where I could set out leads trying to find her.
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 Margot's past, hoping someone would point them in the right direction.
Nobody in Ohio cooperated with us. They hadn't seen her. They didn't know, et cetera, et cetera.
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 borneau leads, the FBI pivoted.
to the woman who might still be within reach.
We were able to find out that Faye Copeland apparently had relatives up there in the Baltimore area.
While the FBI spread out across Baltimore in search of Faye,
Knudson 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 Margot thought she could save.
Alfred Schlerith.
that boyfriend she was trying to help when she got involved with Glenn Nash in the first place.
He's just a typical criminal is the best I can say.
And he just kind of dismissed the whole thing.
As far as he was concerned, he just turned that page.
It was no great loss to him.
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.
We leaned forward to a screen,
but just as soon as the kiss was over,
I knew that, oh, that's the end of us.
It's a goodbye kiss.
I just knew that I had lost.
He stated that after it became clear to him
that Margot was involved with Nash,
he sent her a letter telling her to, quote,
kiss my ass.
There would be no breadcrumbs from Al.
Less than a month after Margo and Nash were caught,
he was convicted of the armed robbery that set off this whole saga
and shipped off to the state prison in Nashville,
where he served his time before eventually heading back to Ohio.
Canudson's next play, Margot's more notorious associate,
the one who avoided prison altogether, Glenn Nash.
We cried, obviously, but he had an attorney.
There just wasn't anything we could do.
Which brought Knudson back to the only person,
left in custody who might still help the investigation.
The woman who Margot escaped with, Faye Copeland.
Faye was middle late 30s and had a much more of a commanding presence.
And also she had a background and drug trafficking.
Knudsen had a laundry list to go over with Faye, and she was ready to betray her friend.
She was under the impression that if she could lead them to Margo, they'd cut her a break.
Faye told him the exact same story that Tanya told me.
I did at least one in-depth interviews with Faye,
and she always stuck to that story.
When it came to where Margo was,
Faye had less to offer.
She gave him a name, and it wasn't Margo.
It was Tanya.
So we had that name,
and I think that's what she was going by up there in Baltimore.
But how would anyone who actually knew Margo
know that she was going by Tanya
and how would anyone who knew her by Tanya
know that she ever went by Margo?
At the time, Knudsen didn't think
this was a particularly useful tip,
but he noted it anyway.
Copeland said that last she knew
that Margo had gotten tied up
with a pimp in Baltimore
and as far as Faye was concerned, she had disappeared.
Baltimore Vice checked every corner
they could think to look.
We felt we had a pretty good coverage there,
and there's nothing,
we can't find anything at all about Margot.
We know Faye knew more than she led on to the cops.
Margot had told her that she went to California.
Why didn't she tell them that?
For 10 years, Special Agent Richard Knudsen
turned over every stone he could.
All while Margo's whereabouts were parts unknown.
The trail to Margo was thin from the start.
And every time it circled back, it landed on her family.
That was the one constant.
But the freshwater's wouldn't talk.
And without their help, Knudsen was left piecing together a puzzle with almost no pieces.
I kept on sent his stuff up there to Ohio, to our field office up there.
And finally, the agent that got assigned that case got so disgusted with me that he was going to come down and beat me up.
Everyone was tired of chasing a ghost,
and Margot was making elite agents look like they were spinning in circles.
They're pouring their hair out.
They're trying to find her, and he keeps on being a dry hold.
Knudsen made multiple overtures to Margo's mom and brother to no avail.
And something about their silence began to feel intentional.
Just because they didn't have the best relationship with her,
doesn't mean they thought what happened to her was fair.
As they say, blood is thicker.
The family was convinced that this has been a tremendous miscarriage of justice for their sister, her daughter.
And if she could escape, as far as they're concerned, that was great.
And they would have done whatever they could hide and shelter her.
And if she could get away from it, if she could beat the system, good for her.
And they were simply getting sick of the FBI asking questions they didn't know the answers to.
Can't blame them.
I'd be annoyed too.
They felt like I was harassing them or the FBI was, or we weren't.
But that was the only place we could turn.
And we couldn't persuade them to surrender her or get her to surrender and get her back into the system.
And so we were at a loggerhead.
There was nothing.
And soon there was no one.
In 1984, the family buried Margo, on paper anyway.
They had her legally declared dead.
The investigation died.
quietly. We've done everything we can, so reluctantly I close a case from the FBI standpoint.
It was a disappointing but practical decision, especially for a guy who doesn't like to stop
until the job is done right. Margot Freshwater's name faded from the wanted lists, and it would
stay that way until someone decided to look again. When I first started this job, I wanted to
give my paycheck back every two weeks. But what made me a dog at investigator, I don't know. I guess that's just
how I'm wired. Some of these cases I've worked in my career, I've actually had supervisors tell
me, you're never going to solve it. And that just gives me more motivation. We got the request
from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation in 1993. That's Greg Costas. Tennessee was calling him
because he was out of Ohio. He was an agent with their Bureau of Criminal Investigation, known as the
BCI.
America's Most Wanted, wanted to profile Margo Freshwater.
But while the show was in production, TBI reached out to BCI because Margo was originally
from Columbus.
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.
And I remember my boss coming to me at the time.
the time in asking me if I wanted to work a fugitive case.
And I'm like, yeah, sure.
I mean, I actually thought that it was somebody local that had a warrant out for
their arrest and I could go in arrest to take to jail.
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.
So he hands me to case file and I get to looking at it and I realized that this woman escaped from prison in 1971.
And I remember saying to him, do you realize that this woman's been on the run since, you know, I was five years old?
And he started laughing and said, yeah, just kind of go through the motions.
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.
And I'm like, what the fuck?
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 lie.
wire. You never quite know what's coming next.
Like, just the whole story of boyfriend needs help. She goes to Memphis to help them.
The attorney she retains, they end up banging, you know, they end up in a romantic affair
while dudes in jail. And then the three-state murder spree. And then poof, in the air.
And I remember saying at the very beginning, like when I read this, like, my God,
this sounds like it was like a made-for-TV movie.
I was like, this is fucked up.
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 saguaroes 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 cost us. It was his clumsy golden doodle puppy,
Theo.
Hi. Hi. Hi. Hey, how are you? How are you? Good to see you. Nice to meet you. Nice to finally meet
you. Yes. That's Theo.
Oh, Theo. Wow. You're adorable. Thank you. Oh, you're talking about Theo?
I'm going to grab my stuff. All right. You found it okay? Yeah. Come on, Theo.
Costas wasn't kidding. When I walked into his house, there on the kitchen counter were two brown
accordion folders bursting at the seams. We started at the beginning. I wanted to know the
specifics of the request from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. The team
The request was try to establish if she has any living relatives and if so try to determine whether or not there was ever contact made.
But this time, this wasn't just about asking questions and taking the family's word for them.
Costas wanted harder proof to see if Margo was really calling or writing.
But the FBI had hit a wall and Margo had been declared dead.
I had some questions about that.
If this woman was declared dead
and did not seem to be actively committing crimes,
why was she worth his time?
When someone on the run is declared dead,
that usually brings the whole case to a stop.
You can't prosecute a dead person,
so the criminal case just ends.
But it turns out,
Costas wasn't entirely sold on the idea Margo was dead,
because when the family made it official,
it was just a probate court ruling
to settle her grandmother's will.
They wanted to distribute the money evenly
between the people who were still around,
and Margot wasn't.
Her death was a bureaucratic judgment,
not one based in fact.
There wasn't a coroner involved or anything like that,
which meant there was still a chance she could be out there, alive.
I had another nagging question for Costas.
I couldn't fully understand why they'd be barking up this tree again,
all for America's Most Wanted.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation just put together a 10 most wanted list.
They've never done it before.
And number one on their 10 Most Wanted list was Margot Freshwater.
Law enforcement agencies like the FBI and local police send cases to America's Most Wanted
because the show is a useful tool for catching fugitives.
And America's Most Wanted accepted the case.
That kind of exposure could put Margot's case back on the map.
again, giving it the kind of national attention it hadn't seen in decades.
Everything that we were doing really at the time was geared toward the show.
Because we were hoping that the show would shake the bushes and create some chatter.
And we wanted to make sure that we were in place in case that happened.
And the clock was ticking.
The show was in production and I was trying to think of everything possible that we could do
to see if there was any contact.
So when I started looking at it, we were able to determine that she had three relatives
that we were able to identify.
One was Leona Julius, who was an elderly woman and was Margot's aunt.
The other one was Tim White, who was the oldest of the family, and he was Margot's half-brother.
And then she had a full-blooded brother, Tommy Freshwater.
The one who wouldn't cooperate with the FBI in the earth.
early days. It wasn't much of a family tree to work with.
Mother was dead and father had been dead for a long time.
Talking to a fugitive's family can be a huge help for investigators. After all, our families
often know things like where we might go, who we trust, and how we think. That emotional
connection can also be a weak spot. People on the run almost always reach out to loved ones
eventually. But it didn't seem like Margot's family knew much about her back in the 70s.
So why would they know anything now?
Costas couldn't leave that to chance.
Tim was about 10 years older than Margo.
So I think he was kind of grown and gone.
It was just Margo and Tommy and the mother.
There was always police activity at the house,
but it mostly focused on Tommy.
Tommy was always in trouble.
Costa started knocking on doors,
beginning with the Worthington Police Department,
where the family name still rang a bell.
He was very familiar with the freshwater family.
They didn't have any run-ins with Margo,
but everybody had heard about Margo.
She was almost like an urban legend.
But Costas was a pro with something to prove.
If he could crack a legendary case featured on primetime television,
it could make his career.
I was able to find a address for Tim and an address for Leona.
I could not find an address for.
Tommy. I finally found Tommy. Tommy happened to be in prison, which is why it was so difficult
finding him. So now we know we're all three are at. It was time to tighten the net. Costa shifted
from finding family to watching them. His opening move is to place federal mail covers on the
homes of Tim White and Leona Julius, having the Postal Service document all-incoming and outgoing mail
and send the report straight to him.
But letters could take days.
Phone calls were instant.
If Margo ever reached out,
that's where the tremor would show first.
We also put on Leona's phone
and Tim White's phone
what's called a pen register.
You had to get a judge to sign off on it,
but basically it logged every call
that went in or out of the house.
And remember, this was back
when everyone still had landline.
We could take all the numbers, do an analysis of them, and then find out through subpoenas who the phone numbers belong to.
There wasn't one peep from Margo.
Silence on the wire didn't mean she was gone.
It just meant he had to look for her another way.
And then, of course, we did a lot of drive-bys, a lot of surveillance, a lot of pulling license place, running license places.
This was real pre-digital revolution, gumshoe stuff.
We actually went through their garbage.
Costas turned to the one thing he hadn't tried yet.
Talking to the surviving freshwater's face-to-face.
I wanted to interview the family members but could not figure out how to make contact with them.
That was the hard part.
Figuring out how not to blow his cover.
Because in my opinion, even if they had contact with her, either way, the minute they see a badge, they're not saying anything.
He actually used to do undercover drug busts, so that got him thinking.
I was racking my brain and racking my brain and racking my brain.
Costa started thinking less like a cop and more like a con man.
I thought about when before Margo went to Memphis to try to get Al Schlereth out of jail,
she had a baby in August of 1966.
I was born in September of 1966.
She gave that baby up for adoption.
And it just kind of hit me.
Why couldn't I pose as the boy that she gave up for adoption?
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podcast or get the binge.com to learn more. The Crimes of Margo Freshwater is an original production
of Sony Music Entertainment and Glass Podcasts. It was hosted and reported by me, Cooper Mall.
Moro Walls is our story editor.
Our executive producers are Catherine St. Louis, Jonathan Hirsch, Nancy Glass, Ben Federman, and Andrea Gunning.
Sound design and editing by Anna McLean.
Mixed and mastered by Matt Delvecchio.
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Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rasek, and Carrie Hartman.
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