After exercising at a Columbus, Ohio, gym on the morning of May 19, 2002, Tonya McCartor was sweating and her heart was beating rapidly. Although she had cooled down when she left the facility a few minutes later, her sweat was soon heavier and her heart was pounding faster.

Carrying her young grandchild, Tonya walked through the parking lot with her husband, Daryl, her adult grandson, Tim Hudkins, and his fiancé, Casey Henry. Two men approached the group; one of them, undercover policeman Gregg Costas, asked Tonya her name. When she answered “Tonya McCartor,” Costas replied he had reason to believe she was a woman who had escaped from prison over thirty years earlier. Daryl and Tim laughed at the accusation; Tonya, however, remained stoic. She knew her past had caught up with her.

Tonya McCartor’s real name is Margo Freshwater. For thirty-two years she had been living a lie, unbeknownst to her friends and family. She was a convicted murderer who had escaped a Tennessee prison after serving only a one-and-a-half years of a ninety-nine-year sentence.

Margo Freshwater’s life, from naive teenager to escaped inmate to fugitive mother and grandmother, had come full circle.

Margo Freshwater

 

In the fall of 1966, eighteen-year-old Margo Freshwater’s world was crumbling. A native of Worthington, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus, she had dropped out of high school after becoming pregnant. After being dumped by her boyfriend, the penniless Margo gave her son up for adoption and shortly thereafter attempted suicide.

Young Margo

 

Margo survived her attempt to end her life, and she soon had another boyfriend, Al Schlereth, but he had his own problems. After several minor brushes with the law, he was arrested for armed robbery in Memphis, Tennessee.

Desperate to free her new beau, Margo traveled to Memphis where she sought the help of attorney Glenn Nash.

Desperate Margo And Her Boyfriend, Al Schlereth

 

Margo had no money to pay Nash and could not even afford a place to stay while she was in Memphis. Although he was also broke, Nash agreed to take the case pro-bono and put Freshwater up at a local boarding house.

Glenn Nash had once been a respected attorney. Friends and colleagues described him as extremely bright and tests later showed he had a genius level I.Q. Nash, however, was also tormented as his alcoholism was out of control. Although he had been cleared the year before of two federal charges involving theft of postal money orders and treasury bonds, he was still under investigation by the Memphis Bar Association for other instances of misconduct. His paranoia had overtaken him as he believed agents from the bar were conspiring against him.

Nash’s marriage to his wife, Gisela, was crumbling, and he was descending into perpetual drunkenness. Many believed he was also losing his grip on reality.

Glenn Nash

 

Had Margo Freshwater visited Glenn Nash several years earlier, all would likely have been fine. But when the troubled teen walked into the equally troubled lawyer’s office in the fall of 1966, it was a recipe for disaster. An immediate spark ignited between the two tormented souls and soon exploded into a fire that raged out of control. The eighteen-year-old high school dropout and the paranoid alcoholic lawyer twice her age began an affair.

Margo’s first boyfriend had left her with an illegitimate child; her second lover was imprisoned; the third man in Margo’s quest for love was not the charm as he would lead her to imprisonment . . . briefly.

Glenn Nash and Margo Freshwater; 

Two Tormented Souls

 

On December 6, 1966, Nash told Margo’s landlady the couple were going bowling. They instead went on a killing spree, striking in three states.

The first stop was the Square Deal liquor store in Memphis. Upon entry, Nash pointed a gun at the store clerk, sixty-year-old Hillman Robbins, and ordered him to give him the money from the cash register, approximately $600.

Nash then ordered Margo to stay behind the register while he took Hillman into the back room and tied him up. During that time, a customer came into the store and later told investigators that a friendly Margo waited on him and gave no indication that she was in trouble.

After the customer exited the store and drove away, Nash shot Hillman Robbins five times in the head, using two guns, a .22 caliber and a .38 caliber. Witnesses saw a man and a woman fleeing the liquor store and get into a white Ford Fairlane. Such a vehicle was owned by Glenn Nash.

Whether Freshwater knew of Nash’s intentions to rob the liquor store and to kill the clerk is still debated as is her culpability in the subsequent events.

 

Hillman Robbins

 

Twelve days later, on December 18, a nearly identical crime occurred over 1,000 miles away at the Jackson Mini Market convenience store in Oakland Park, Florida, a part of metropolitan Fort Lauderdale.

Witnesses reported hearing gun shots and seeing a man and woman fleeing the store and entering a white Ford Fairlane. When police arrived at the store, they found the body of forty-five-year-old clerk Esther Bouyea. She had been shot multiple times in the neck and, like Hillman Robbins, had been bound with a rope.

An abandoned Ford Fairlane was found along a nearby highway shoulder. It was registered to Glenn Nash of Memphis, Tennessee. Inside, police found ropes and shell casings matching those used in the murder of Hillman Robbins. Margo was identified as Nash’s companion and an All Points Bulletin (APB) was issued for the pair’s arrest.

I could not find a picture of Esther Bouyea.

 

On December 28, ten days later, the body of fifty-five-year-old cab driver C.C. Suratt was found in a Mississippi ditch. He had been shot twice in the back of the head. Shell casings matched those used in the murders of Hillman Robbins and Esther Bouyea.

Nash and Freshwater had returned home and resumed killing. Suratt is believed to have been shot after he picked up the pair just across the state line in Millington, Tennessee, fifteen miles northeast of Memphis.

C.C. Suratt

 

After staking out bus stations throughout Tennessee and Mississippi, police spotted Nash and Freshwater at a station in Greenville, Mississippi, one-hundred-fifty miles south of Memphis near the southeastern Arkansas border.

The couple were arrested and charged with the murders of Hillman Robbins and C.C. Suratt; only Nash was charged with the murder of Esther Bouyea.

The Couple Are Captured  

 

After a psychiatric examination, however, Glenn Nash was declared insane and incompetent to stand trial. He was instead sentenced to incarceration in a mental hospital.

Despite not firing the actual shots, Margo Freshwater stood trial twice for the murder of C.C. Suratt. She claimed Nash was violent and out of control, believing all three victims were members of the bar association who were “out to get him.” She insisted she had been afraid of him and had participated in the crimes out of fear for her own life.

Both trials resulted in hung juries and mistrials were declared. The state declined to try Freshwater a third time for the murder of C.C. Suratt.

Two Mistrials

 

Three years later, in 1969, Freshwater was tried for the murder of the first victim, Hillman Robbins, in Memphis. Nash was still deemed insane and would not stand trial in the courtroom where he had tried several cases before his descent into madness.

Freshwater did not have a fresh story, and again claimed that even though she and Nash had sex after each killing, he was holding her prisoner and she was terrified of him. She testified she had no idea he planned to kill Hillman Robbins when they robbed the liquor store in Memphis and that Nash forced her to participate in the subsequent robbery and murders of Esther Bouyea and C.C. Suratt.

Freshwater, however, was fresh out of luck with the Memphis jury. They did not believe her claims of captivity and, although she had not pulled the trigger, found her guilty of the murder of Hillman Robbins. She was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison.

The state of Florida sought to charge Nash, alone, for the murder of Esther Bouyea, but the insanity ruling prevented them from doing so. Freshwater was never charged in connection with her murder.

The Third Time Is The Charm

 

Margo Freshwater was incarcerated at the Tennessee State Prison for Women in Nashville. After serving only eighteen months of her ninety-nine-year sentence, she took it upon herself to make a fresh start.

On October 4, 1970, Freshwater and several other inmates were being escorted by an unarmed guard on the outside of the prison. She and another inmate, Faye Fairchild, scaled the prison’s barbed-wire fence and made a run for freedom. Both women were young and fit; Margo had run track in high school. In contrast, the guard was older and not in good shape. The women easily ran out of his view and hitched a ride to freedom.

The escapees made their way to Baltimore, Maryland, where Fairchild had family. After laying low for several weeks, they were seen on a street saying goodbye to each other.

Several sources say Fairchild was captured two years later in Chicago, but another says it was only a couple of days after she was last seen in Baltimore. Yet other sources say she stayed at large for over twenty years, not being captured until the early 1990s. I could not find a picture of her.

Margo Freshwater stayed off the radar for over three decades. Her family had her declared dead in 1984, in order to settle the estate of her grandmother. Margo, however, was not six-feet-under.

Freshwater Escapes

 

Authorities came to believe Margo Freshwater was using the names “Tonya” and “Tanya.” In 2002, after using police computer databases to check nationwide for anyone using those names along with Freshwater’s birth date of June 4, 1948, they found a woman named Tonya McCartor had the same date of birth. What particularly caught investigators’ eyes was that the woman was living in Worthington, Ohio, where Margo Freshwater had been born and lived before her life of crime. Employment records showed the woman had not worked from 1966-70, the same years Freshwater was jailed and then imprisoned.

When investigators obtained a copy of Tonya McCartor’s driver’s license, they were struck by the facial similarities between the woman and an old photo of a young Margo Freshwater.

 

A Striking Resemblance

 

Tonya McCartor was arrested as she was leaving the Columbus health club on May 19, 2002. Fingerprints confirmed she was Margo Freshwater.

With her true identity uncovered, Freshwater revealed the details of her three-plus decades as a fugitive. She had avoided detection by not resuming her criminal career and by living a simple life.

Over Thirty Years Later, 

Margo Is Recaptured

 

After escaping prison, Freshwater told investigators she and Fairchild hitched a ride with a trucker to Baltimore. A couple of weeks later, Fairchild took a train to Chicago, while Freshwater went to Ashland, Ohio, eighty miles southwest of Columbus. She obtained a driver’s license and social security number under the name Tonya Myers, found work as a waitress, and lived at a boarding house.

Freshwater soon gave birth soon to a son. She said she was pregnant when she escaped from prison but refused to divulge the father; he is believed to have been a prison guard. She had been imprisoned for eighteen months, meaning Glenn Nash, who was committed to the asylum and not allowed contact with Freshwater, could not be the father.

Shortly after giving birth, Freshwater began dating Phillip Zimmerman, a man she had met at the Ashland boarding house. She told him she had been raped in a juvenile jail while serving time for petty theft. Although they never married, Freshwater and Zimmerman raised her son and had a daughter together before parting ways after seven years.

After Becoming a Fugitive

Margo Became A Mother . . .

 

Freshwater then married and had another son, Tim, with Joseph Hudkins, a railroad worker from Columbus. After he died in 1988, Freshwater, under the name Tonya Hudkins, began working as an administrative assistant for MetLife Insurance. Through her job, she came in contact with many people in her hometown, but she never “met” anyone who recognized her.

. . . And Later A Professional

 

Amazingly, Margo Freshwater lived many years undetected in the town where she had grown up. She said she had encountered an aunt and a high school classmate while in public but that neither recognized her.

Back Home Again

 

Freshwater met Daryl McCartor, a long-haul trucker, through a telephone dating service in 1998. They married within a few months, and she quit her job with MetLife Insurance. The newlyweds then began traveling the country together.

“Tonya” Ties The Knot

 

Margo Freshwater was returned to the Tennessee State Prison for women, the same prison she had escaped from over thirty-one years earlier, to serve her ninety-nine-year sentence. After serving nine years, her conviction for the murder of Hillman Robbins was overturned.

Johnny Box, a cellmate of Glenn Nash before he was ruled incompetent to stand trial, wrote a letter in 1969 to the district attorney prosecuting Freshwater, saying Nash told him that he alone had killed Hillman Robbins and confirmed Margo’s claims of being controlled by him. It was learned, however, that the district attorney provided only one page of the letter to Freshwater’s lawyers.

After a Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled the full letter should have been turned over to the defense team, Freshwater was given a new trial. In October 2011, the court accepted her best interest guilty plea, allowing her to plead guilty to the murder of Hillman Robbins while maintaining her innocence. Margo Freshwater had spent, in total, approximately ten-and-a-half years in prison and was given credit for time served. She was released in November 2011.

Returned To Prison 

But Later Released

 

Daryl McCartor took his wife back after her release.

Daryl McCartor

 

Now seventy-four-years-old and legally named Tonya McCartor, the former Margo Freshwater had said on her Facebook page several years ago that she was still living in Worthington, Ohio. It appears she is no longer on Facebook.

Margo Freshwater Is Now 

Tonya McCartor

 

Glenn Nash was released from the mental hospital in 1983, declared fit to re-enter society. Despite efforts to try him for the murders, he was still ruled to have been insane at the time, and the courts did not allow his prosecution.

Nash returned to his wife, Gisela, to whom he was married when he had the affair with Freshwater. A 2011 article states he was living in West Memphis, Arkansas. He appears to have stayed out of further trouble.

Freshwater and Nash both say they had no contact with each other after Freshwater’s escape from prison. The 2011 article said Nash was contacted after Freshwater’s release from prison that year, but he refused to comment.

I am not sure whether or not Glenn Nash is still living. He would be in his nineties.

Nash Has Also Been Released

 

The saga of Margo Freshwater has been compared to that of Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army and subsequently committed several crimes in conjunction with group members. Both women claimed to have committed their crimes out of fear and manipulation.

It is interesting that Freshwater lived as a fugitive under the named “Tonya” and that Patty Hearst went by the name “Tanya” while an SLA member.

“Tonya” And “Tanya”

 

Hillman Robbins Jr., whose father was the first person killed during the Nash-Freshwater crime spree, was a professional golfer who had a successful amateur career, highlighted by winning the 1957 U.S. Amateur.

Hillman Jr. died at age forty-nine in 1981.

Hillman Robbins Sr. And Jr.

 

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/32467336/clarence-hillman-robbins

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/168229105/esther-frances-bouyea

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/28322267/carlie-clifford-suratt

SOURCES:
• America’s Most Wanted
• Columbus Dispatch
• Memphis Flyer
• Los Angeles Times
• The Tenneseean
• Unsolved Mysteries