The fugitive

She made her name as one half of a murderous double act who became the Bonnie and Clyde of the Sixties. Then, following her escape from prison, she disappeared without trace, changed her name, and for 32 years lived the life of model suburban wife and doting granny. But she made one fatal mistake. Andrew Gumbel on the life, crimes and capture of one of America's most wanted and all-but-forgotten killers

For 32 years, it was one of the great unsolved criminal mysteries in America. And it ended in the unlikeliest of settings, a suburban car park outside a sports club. Tonya Hudkins McCartor, a 54-year-old grandmother from Columbus, Ohio, had just been swimming with her husband, her son, his fiancée and their baby. They looked like the most normal family in the world.

As they were about to get back in their car, they were approached by two policemen. McCartor was asked to identify herself, and she did. But the policemen were not satisfied. They said they had reason to believe that she was a longtime fugitive from justice called Margo Freshwater, who had participated in a string of multi-state murders back in 1966 and escaped from a Tennessee prison four years later.

She would, they said, have to be taken into custody, in handcuffs, to check her fingerprints. The policemen were polite, but insistent. Her family members could not believe what they were witnessing. "This is my wife!" Daryl McCartor cried. "This is my mother!" echoed Tim McCartor. Tonya, however, said nothing. Slowly, she hugged each of her family members in turn, whispering into their ears: "I was always afraid this day would come."

The blameless grandmother turned out to have a past, and what a past. In 1966, Margo Freshwater was a wild teenage runaway. She had dropped out of high school in her native Ohio, left her unhappy family home, gone through with an unwanted pregnancy, given up her baby for adoption and hooked up with a young hoodlum with a penchant for armed robbery.

The boyfriend, Alfred Schlereth, was arrested in Memphis that summer, so she travelled down to Tennessee to find him a lawyer. And that's when the trouble really started. The lawyer she picked, Glenn Nash, was not only crooked and corrupt; he was also, unknown to her, a paranoid schizophrenic who believed the world, or at least the Memphis bar association, was out to get him.

At first the two of them plotted how to spring Schlereth from custody. Then came the twist: Nash and Freshwater became lovers. According to Freshwater's subsequent trial testimony, she only agreed to sleep with Nash, who was 20 years her senior and married, to try to help out her boyfriend. But Nash, at least, had other ideas, and instead of working on Schlereth's case they hit the road. With a bang.

The crime spree that ensued earned them comparisons with Bonnie and Clyde – passionate lovers desperately shooting their way across several states. But there was nothing so romantically glamorous about them. Before they even left Memphis, a liquor store attendant, Hillman Robbins Sr, was shot five times in the head and left lying in a pool of blood. In Millington, Mississippi, it was a cab driver. And in Oakland Park, Florida, where the law finally caught up with them, it was a female convenience store worker. All their victims were shot at close range with either a .38 or a .22-calibre pistol. Nobody ever quite figured out what the motive for the crimes was. It may have been petty robbery, but it seems more likely that it was utter madness.

Prosecuting these crimes proved a frustrating affair. Nash was deemed unfit to stand trial after he was diagnosed schizophrenic. That left Freshwater, whose culpability was ambiguous at best. In Florida no charges were brought because it was not clear whether she had been at the scene. In Mississippi, two separate juries deadlocked on whether she had been an accessory to the cabdriver killing, and she was acquitted. According to the prosecutors, the slight, blonde defendant flirted with the jurors and made them fall for her.

The district attorney's office in Memphis, the last jurisdiction to have a crack at her, was determined to succeed where the others had failed. Although the local newspapers were taken with her charms, the prosecution successfully established that she had been in the liquor store at the time of the shooting, that she had had opportunities to run away from Nash but did not take them, and that she had made love to him after the murder. She protested that she had acted under duress, but public morality in 1960s Tennessee had little patience for unmarried teenage mothers who had affairs with older men. She was given a 99-year sentence for murder.

And that would have been that, but for her extraordinary escape from the Tennessee Women's Prison in 1970. She outran a guard, scaled a ten foot barbed wire fence and instead of becoming a lifer, Freshwater became a mystery – one so deep that all efforts to track her down were unsuccessful. The police had traced her as far as Baltimore, where they caught a fellow inmate who had escaped with her and found out she was using the alias Tonya, but then she vanished, seemingly for good. Her family had her declared officially dead when her grandmother's estate was settled in 1984.

They say there are no second acts in American lives, but Margo Freshwater surely proves that adage wrong. Her emergence as Tonya Hudkins McCartor began with the discovery, shortly after her escape, that she was pregnant (investigators believe she might have bribed a prison guard with sexual favours). She quickly hooked up with a man called Philip Zimmerman, told him she had been raped, and settled down to a precarious existence in central Ohio. She worked as a bartender and a nurse's aide, and applied for a new social security card and driving license with her new alias. Zimmerman split up with her after seven years and the next man in her life, Glen Hudkins, died prematurely of cancer. She raised three children, working all the while at jobs that gradually became more established – country club manager, insurance agent, estate agent.

Two years ago, Tonya seemed to have found a new kind of happiness. Through a dating agency she met and married Daryl McCartor, who shared her passion for ballroom dancing and took her with him on long-haul truck journeys cross-country. Tonya gave herself the CB nickname Sexy Legs. Daryl was The Leg Inspector. She was forever surrounded by loving children and grandchildren.

The idyll came crashing to an end, however, with her arrest that Sunday in May. The unassuming grandmother quickly admitted she was indeed Margo Freshwater and even her family, despite the initial shock and scepticism, has come to accept it. "We don't believe her current husband or the son who was with her at the time knew anything about her past," says Larry Wallace, director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

The ramifications of her discovery are mind-boggling. Not only did she settle less than 20 miles from where she grew up, she seemed to take an almost perverse pleasure in revisiting the scenes of her past. She and Daryl drove their truck several times into Tennessee, visiting the Smoky Mountains near the prison where she served her time and careering straight through Memphis en route to Graceland, although she never contacted her two estranged brothers or aunt who still lives in the Columbus area. "It's uncanny," says Ron O'Brien, Franklin County Prosecutor. "She never saw anyone who seemed to recognise her."

The police never quite closed her case, but they, like her family, came to think in time that she must be dead. And, were it not for a series of fortuitous breaks, she might have remained undiscovered for ever. Last March, producers at a television programme called Unsolved Mysteries put in a call to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to see if there was anything new on the Freshwater case. Agent Greg Elliot told them there was not – every lead had gone cold. Just for a lark, though, he entered the name "Tonya" and Freshwater's date of birth into the computer. To his surprise, the computer spat out the name of a woman in suburban Columbus, Ohio.

Agent Elliot put in a call to Gregg Costas of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, and Agent Costas, wanting to be thorough, decided to compare Freshwater's mugshots from the 1960s with Tonya McCartor's driving licence photo. To his astonishment, they matched up almost exactly. "It was like seeing a mother and daughter," he said.

Elliot and Costas travelled together to the Columbus suburb where the McCartors lived, staked out their place for a couple of days, made a positive identification and scurried to a judge for an arrest warrant. It's one of those moments that every lawman dreams of.

To the McCartor family, however, it was the beginning of a nightmare. "I just thought they had the wrong person and I'd have her home that evening," said her husband Daryl. He was wrong. The woman they knew as Tonya is now in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison in another state, with no possibility of parole until 2029. They hope to be able to reopen her case, prove that the evidence against her was never solid enough for a conviction and use her exemplary life since her jailbreak as an argument for her release. "I know who she is well enough to know she did not do what they say she did 32 years ago," said McCartor. "This doesn't change the way I feel about my wife."

However, there are other people involved in this case whose feelings about Margo Freshwater haven't changed either. Susan Robbins West, who was seven years old when her grandfather, Hillman, was shot, is one of them. "I think she should spend the rest of her life behind bars," said Robbins. And it looks like that will be the case.

Not that there isn't some residual sympathy for Freshwater. Shortly after her arrest, Agent Costas noted that she only made one mistake – retaining her real birthday. "If she hadn't used the same birthdate," Costas said, "she would have died Tonya McCartor."