The Binge Crimes: Night Shift - The Crimes of Margo Freshwater | 5. Tables, Turned

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

What begins as an ordinary afternoon ends with Tonya in handcuffs and her family in disbelief that she’s a convicted murderer. It turns out there’s a lot more to the Bonnie and Clyde story than was previously known. 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. Want more of the story? 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

Listen to all episodes of the Crimes of Margo 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. 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. Do you still denying that your margolns? Freshwater. Fingerprints don't lie. 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 Margot 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. Margo died. It's an unsettling choice of words, but it reveals Tanya's logic. To survive as Tanya,

Margo had to be buried somewhere deep. Tanya wasn't denying she had once been Margo. She was denying that Margot still counted. 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 Ceci 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, I never would have happened. All I wanted to do in the very beginning was to prove, for innocence. Yeah, 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 left 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 Margo 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 truth she's held on to 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, They say the winner's 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. 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 won. 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 in 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 the time. that early awkwardness. But I wasn't alone. Tanya wouldn't speak to me without her lawyer in the room, so Stephen 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 Glen 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 a 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. He was constantly drinking. I mean, he'd go through bottle after bottle like it was water. Booze wasn't his only fixation. He had an obsession with just making sure where I was.

At trial, their relationship, was made to seem like a romance. This sounded like a one-sided obsession, an older man who wanted to control a helpless teenager. I was at his office telling him I was going to go home, and we got into a big argument, and so I walked away from him, and he grabbed my arm, and he grabbed it so tight

that when he let loose, his entire handprint was on my arm. That moment stripped away any illusion she could leave freely. She looked for help quietly, discreetly, in the safest way she could imagine at the time. In fact, the night before Hillman Robin Sr. was murdered. I went back to my room. I had said that I was going to go get some magazines. And when I left the building, I went to a pay phone and called my brother. 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, Tani 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. 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. 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 Whiteford Fair Lane 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 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. The back room was cramped, windowless, and lit with that harsh fluorescent glow that makes everything feel colder. Then, shortly after getting into the back room, a customer came in. For a second, she hoped that interruption might break Nash's focus, maybe even give her a sliver of a way out. 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 blow 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? Can't get enough of the story of Margot, Freshwater, do you need more than the episodes can provide? Real quick, we just launched a free true crime newsletter and community page to go along with our binge shows, including the Crimes of Margo Freshwater, and you can access it at the link in our episode description or at patreon.com slash the bench. You'll get behind the scenes reporting, case updates, and a chance to chat with one of the show's creators and other fans. The newsletter comes out twice a month. It's totally free,

and it's where the story continues. I'll see you. there. Just hit the link in the description or head to patreon.com slash the binge. Carvana's so easy, just a click and we've got ourselves a car. See? So many cars. That's a clicktastic inventory. And check out the financing options. Payments to fit our budget. I mean, that's Clickonomics 101. Delivery to our door. Just a hop, skip and a click away. And bought. No better feeling than when everything just clicks. Clicks. Buy your car today on Carvana

Delivery fees may apply 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 Margaret,

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 door just before Glenn Nash shot Esther Bouillet. 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. Before Mississippi, he had fallen asleep. I thought I could get away and I took off running.

She didn't get far. He must walk up because he caught up to me. Tanya froze. The two stood four feet apart on a door. dark stretch of nowhere. And when Nash finally caught his breath, he had the gun aimed at me. And he said, I told you what I would do if you tried to get away. And at that point, I decided I had nothing to lose. He was drunk. So I lunged. And when I lunged, knocked the gun out of his hand. And we struggled. And he managed to get to the gun.

and he said if you ever do anything like that again, you're dead. But Margo didn't give up on the idea that she could get away. After they ditched the fair lane, we were in a cab, and we were on a back road. And I told Nash, I said, I'm going to be sick. And so the cab driver stopped, and I got out of the car, and I walked back behind the cab about 50. feet to a ditch.

And I pretended like I was being sick. And I moved down the ditch further away from the cab and acted like I was getting sick again. And a truck came by and I tried to flag down the truck. But the truck just passed me by and then I just took off running. Her mad dash ended the same as the last attempt. And he caught up with me, grabbed me. me by the hand and then drug me through some bushes that had thorns on him. My legs heard from

scratches. She wasn't going down without a fight. I saw a house and I broke from his hand and I was going to try to run to the house to ask for help. But before she could, Nash not only made a threat, but revealed what he had done while Tani was sprinting down the road. He said, if you go up there I'll kill him just like I killed the cab driver. That's when she first heard C.C. Surat was dead. When Tanya recounted these murders, something hit me hard. Every one of these three people died at a moment when she was trying to make a break for it. And sitting across from her decades later, she was older than any of them ever lived to be.

As she walked me through each killing, step by step, there was this quiet wait 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, face 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, we 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. Helping herself in this place meant only one thing. And one day, another prisoner, Fay Copeland, admitted she wanted out too. She said, well, if you ever decide

to leave, I'll go with you. And I said, oh, okay. and it was until then that I really started thinking about it. It was casual, almost offhand. But for Tanya, who had just learned she might die behind those walls, it landed like a lifeline. Suddenly the idea wasn't wild. It wasn't impossible. It was practical.

If no one was going to get her out, maybe she could get out herself. They didn't dream up some cinematic escape. This wasn't the Shawshank Redemption. No tunnels, no fences cut in the dead of night. It was simpler than that. We were going to go to one of the evening church gatherings. And we were going to wear our uniforms,

but under our uniforms, we were going to have our regular clothes on. And then as we were coming back to the dorm, is when we would take off. And after that night, she disappeared into Tanya. She built a whole world there as a mother, a grandmother, a wife, certainly not a lawbreaker, and she was hoping that would be the end of it. But of course it wasn't. For law enforcement, Tanya's arrest in the parking lot of that athletic club with her family surrounding her

was the tail end of a long chase. But for the people who only knew her as Tanya, this was just the beginning. Imagine that you're just like living your life and then all of the sudden, you wake up in a nightmare or a movie. That's Casey Henry, Tanya's daughter-in-law. She's married to Tanya's youngest, Tim. When this happened, they were barely older than Tanya was when she escaped prison.

We're literally children, and we don't know where to go or what to do. Just hours before the apprehension, the family was having the kind of afternoon where nothing felt wrong at all. We decided to go to, the athletic club and enjoy the pool in the hot tub. Tim and Casey met us and little A.J. So we were at the athletic club swimming and having a great time. Tanya and her family were riding the kind of warm Ohio day that makes you want to stretch things out even longer. While we were in there,

we decided to have a cookout. And so we had called everybody and said, you know, we're going to have a cookout. Everyone would meet at Tanya and Daryl's. That was the plan anyway. And then when we left, that's basically when stuff hit the fan. We were walking out of the concourse and we were talking and I see about 20 men just casually walking up the parking lot towards us. Tanya was holding our son and the police officer asked her to hand the baby over to me. They didn't address me. They addressed Daryl. And they said, Mr. McArthur, and he said yes.

And they said, we don't believe that your wife is who she says she is. We believe that she is a fugitive, Margot Freshwater. To Tataña's husband, Daryl, the officers might as well have been speaking a foreign language. He was surprised and he said, no, you're mistaken. Daryl pushed back with the kind of stunned certainty of a man who genuinely believed the police had the wrong woman. But shock works its way through a family in different forms.

With emotions running in every direction, Tanya's son Tim reached for the only response that made sense in the moment. I laughed about it at first, like, because I didn't believe it. And just, it was pretty wild out there story. The laughter died fast. In an instant, the mood flipped, and the situation blew open. Every cop I've talked to remembers this moment when Tanya whispered into Tim's ear. So when I met him, I asked him what she said.

I don't think we've really talked about that with anybody, but when she gave me a hug, she just said it was true. I don't even know if angry was the right word. It was like just kind of a mixture of emotion, shock, everything. I really didn't know what to think at that point. The moment Tanya was taken into custody, her family's world flipped inside out. One second, they were living in 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 marbering the fugitives. And had they thought I had been marboring 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.

per-cast, 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 lie. She's not that 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 law.

Do you know that? And I can't before I can't. I don't believe you. You're a different person now. Your life has changed. That girl died a long time. I know she did. Okay.

And what she don't know is all the fact. Because I never murdered it. I don't think you did, sweetheart. I wouldn't believe that. if they were to say that. You can hear in Daryl's voice, he's shocked, but holding it down for his wife all the same. A real ride or die.

Then as soon as Tanya got taken away, Daryl and Tim got in the car and drove straight to Vermont. They had to get to Tim's oldest sister, Angie, before she heard the news about her mom. The whole car riding nonstop was just different media outlets, calling wanting to do stuff. A family that had never been near a newsroom or a courtroom was suddenly trapped in the center of a national frenzy.

We didn't know until the next day that it was going to be front page Columbus dispatch. There was news cameras outside of our house. The headline detonated Tanya's secret past across the city. A murder conviction, an escape, a lifetime of hiding. It was kind of scary, but like, I remember Tom Casey from here on out. It was all just about fighting for her and trying to get her home. Remember, the warrant for Tanya's arrest wasn't from Ohio. It was from Tennessee.

After her arrest, she retained her family attorney, Richard Piot, who found a creative way to fight her extradition. He claimed that since Margot Freshwater had been declared dead, Tennessee couldn't just bring her back to life to face punishment. Needless to say, Piat's argument didn't fly. Within weeks, the governor signed the extradition order, and Tanya was back in the Tennessee prison for women. in solitary.

After she was extradited back to Tennessee, it really just died. There was nobody really talking about her but us. They hustled in ways that at their age should have been reserved for daycare payments in a college fund, not defending a mother from a murder conviction. We did a car wash to raise legal funds,

and we had flyers printed out, and people are kind of berating us at those events. Like, no, I would not support a murderer and things like that. That didn't shake their resolve. They stood on hot pavement with signs. They sold bottled water at festivals. They appeared on local and national news,

spreading their unwavering belief in the woman who raised them. But none of it moved the needle. I just kind of feel helpless a little bit. Yeah, I'd say so. Helpless, forgotten. They were going up against the strength of an entire state, and they needed muscle. Darrell worked to find an attorney. Behind the scenes, the cavalry was coming and a plan was taking shape.

Attorneys, real ones. People who could stand toe to toe with prosecutors and decades-old convictions. People who might be able to get Tanya's conviction overturned once and for all. I'd already graduated from law school. I'd taken the bar exam, but I was waiting on the bar results. This case is one that was with me from the outset of my career as a lawyer. enter Stephen Ross Johnson. We met in Knoxville, Tennessee in the very office Tanya's case landed in his lap.

Stephen is your quintessential southern gentleman. He defies the idea that chivalry is dead. The guy dresses to the nine's seven days a week, perfectly tailored suits, monogrammed at every hemline. He turned 50 this year, and when I asked him how he looked so great for his age, he told me fine bourbon. In 2001, Stephen started working for Bob Ritchie, a heavyweight in criminal defense. When Tanya's family walked into the firm, Stephen was only 27. First time I met him, we had to go down to Knoxville. I remember that meeting with Daryl and Tim and Casey, and they were telling us how much they loved her, how much they cared about her,

and how much they believed in her and believed that she did not commit this murder that she did, she'd been convicted of. I felt good leaving there. I felt like they were the right people. Her new lawyers didn't see a killer. They saw a woman whose entire life had been rewritten by one violent man and a system that never hurt her out.

Stephen felt this case needed to be re-examined from the ground up. The entirety of the prosecution's case at her trial was that they were saying she had shot Hillman-Robbins, Sr. And so really us coming into the case, we knew it was our job to try to prove her story. Wanting to prove her innocence was the easy part. The real challenge was actually doing it.

There's a process when you're coming into one of these old cases and you're trying to investigate if the person is innocent and can you reverse the conviction. You know the story that convicted them. You know the story of guilt. And so you have to come in and say, was that the accurate story? Or is there a different story? Before Stephen could attack a 1966 conviction, a case older than him, he had to start with the one person who lived every second of it. Bob Richie and I drove over to Nashville,

and we spent several days with Tanya at the Tennessee Prison for Women. At the time, Tanya was 53. She was in an orange jumpsuit, and I can remember talking to her about the surreal experience of a... escaping 32 years prior, and here she is back again. Hearing him described that first meeting, I recognized the same steadiness I'd heard when Tanya told me her story. Different room decades apart, but the details lined up in a way that was hard to ignore.

She was very open to tell us our entire story and everything that had happened, and was very grateful for us to look into this. And she was also very consistent in that she didn't do this. She didn't shoot anyone. She described really how deranged and evil Glenn Nash was and how he abused her and took advantage of her and controlled her and manipulated her and how she tried to get away from him.

It's a gut-wrenching story to have heard. Stephen had Tanya's account. Now he needed the record. Every transcript, exhibit, and forgotten scrap that the system had left behind. and none of it was easy to reach. Just getting the trial transcripts, we had to file a motion with the appellate court

to have them dig up and then us would draw the archived record, which was a very cumbersome process. Piece by piece, they dragged a 1966 murder trial back into daylight. But transcripts weren't enough. If the original prosecution had missed something or hidden something,

it wouldn't be in a court file. Stephen came into Tanya's case, thinking DNA would be the key. Tennessee had just passed a new law that you could test old evidence with no time limit. So he went all in on trying to find something from the crime scene at D-square Liquor that could hold DNA. He went hunting for one specific piece, the tiny metal firing pin from the 22 of the state claimed Tanya used.

The whole idea was simple. If he could get DNA off that piece, he could get it in front of a judge, even 30-plus years later. In theory, it could be a case. could still hold skin cells decades later, but in practice, it was like searching for a needle in a courthouse basement full of hay. And that was the problem. There was nothing DNA-wise, which meant he was going to have to find another way. The district attorney's archive. So we filed a Public Records Act request to review the prosecutor's old file in Shelby County.

That was the file of Terry Lafferty. the prosecutor who put Margo behind bars originally. You heard his voice in our first episode. By 2002, Lafferty was a judge in Shelby County, and weirdly enough, Bob Ritchie thought Lafferty might be able to help them. He just called up Judge Lafferty, and he said, Judge Lafferty, you're aware of your old Margo freshwater case, and he had Terry on speakerphone,

and he introduced me to Terry over the phone, and he said, you know, we're going to go look at your old file from when you were a prosecutor in that case. the DA's office is making it available to us, would you like to go with us? And there was a pause on the phone, and Judge Lafferty said, well, sure, that'd be great.

So the three of them, the defense lawyer, his mentor, and the man who once put Tanya away, sat together in a Memphis conference room, and Stephen watched Lafferty closely. Judge Lafferty starts looking through the boxes, but you can tell he's looking for something specifically. It wasn't just a rummaging,

sort of look through the box as it was a directed search. He was going right to something specific. And it didn't take him long. Lafferty reached in with a sense of muscle memory. He found it and he pulled out a file folder and he handed it to me because I was sitting next to him and he said, lookie here. And handed me the folder and I opened it up.

And there was a note card stapled to a series of pages. as a paper, and the note card said since this was not a statement made in the state of Tennessee and was not made to a law enforcement officer of the state of Tennessee, do not give this to the defense. And it had the initials of a supervisor in the DA's office at the time. Stephen turned the page and froze. It was a handwritten statement of Johnny Box. the jailhouse informant in Mississippi. Johnny Box was an inmate confined

in the DeSoto County Jail at the same time as Margot and Glenn Nash. He gave the goods on the couple in exchange for a lighter sentence of his own. Problem was, in Margot's trial, they only released his intel on Margo. It's nothing we haven't already heard. Margot told Johnny Box that Nash robbed D. Square Liquor,

that he'd shot Hillman-Robbins with two guns and how she waited on the customer. But three pages of the... Box's statement never got released. And that's what Stephen held in his hands. And it had in there what Glenn Nash had told him about the murder in Memphis. And Glenn Nash told Johnny Box, Margot was not a shooter, and she wasn't there when he shot Hillman Robbins Sr.

The room went quiet. Once I picked my jaw up off the floor, I looked over at Terry Lafferty and he said that could be important. They were in possession all along of Glenn Nash's statement that corroborated Margot's assertion of innocence. They had that all along and never used it. With this discovery, Margot Freshwater became not just the girl who took the fall. She became the woman who should have never gone to prison at all. who shouldn't have been back there again. No wonder she tried to take back the life she should have had.

This wasn't a clerical error. It was a constitutional violation. Brady v. Maryland is a 1963 Supreme Court ruling that mandates. If the state has evidence that helps the defense, they must turn it over. It constitutionally was something that supported her assertion of innocence and at minimum could have led to fruitful investigation by her and her lawyers on how to obtain admissible evidence

that corroborated her version of events. I mean, that's what the law is. So this was a violation of that? Yeah, it was. It was the reason Tanya spent 32 years running. It was the reason she was sitting in a prison jumpsuit when Stephen met her. And the strangest part,

it came from the hand of the man who buried it originally. Judge Lafferty had pulled the file himself. And he said, yeah, you know, I was a young prosecutor. My supervisor told me not to turn something over. I didn't turn it over, and I felt bad about it, but I didn't feel too bad after she escaped. There in a conference room above the Mississippi River,

the past finally cracked open. Stephen had the story the jury never heard. The truth the state suppressed. I knew I now had a powerful piece of evidence. Next time on the crimes of Margot Freshwater, convictions are notoriously hard to overturn. Even with this new evidence, no one could say whether Tanya would live out her days in prison

or with her family. But Tanya was determined. I know I'm going home. No matter how long it takes, I know I'm going home. Unlock all episodes of the crimes of Margot Freshwater ad-free right now by subscribing to the binge podcast channel. Not only will you immediately unlock all episodes of this show, but you'll get binge access to an entire network of other great true crime and investigative podcasts.

All ad-free. Plus, on the first of every month, subscribers get a binge drop of a brand-new series. That's all episodes, all at once. Search for The Binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page. Not on Apple? Head to get the binge.com to get access wherever you listen. 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.

Morrow 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 McLean. Mixed and mastered by Matt Delvecchio. Our theme music was composed by Oliver Baines. We use music from Mive and Epidemic Sound. Our production managers are Sammy Allison and Kristen Melchiori. Our lawyer is Michael Belkin.

Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rasek, and Carrie Hartman. Please rate and review the crimes of Margo Freshwater. It helps people find our show.