The fugitive who hid her deadly secret for 32 years

It was 1970 and Margo Freshwater was 18 months into a 99-year sentence for murder when she scaled the fence of the Tennessee state prison in Nashville and hitched a ride to freedom with a passing trucker.

After a sighting in Baltimore a few days later, she appeared to drop off the face of the earth.

Her former lover, with whom she had embarked on a shooting spree in which three people were killed, told a local newspaper 10 years later that she had probably "married a truck driver" and was "the best damn wife anybody ever had and is completely buried in obscurity and children".

In 1984, at the request of her family, she was officially declared dead.

But 10 days ago, a 53-year-old mother of three and devoted wife to a truck driver was arrested in Franklin County, Ohio, as she strolled out of a health club with her family.

To them she is Tonya McCartor, an enthusiastic ballroom dancer and a picky eater with a heart condition.

But police say she is Freshwater, who was responsible for a series of robberies across the south-eastern US that ended in three deaths.

She is now fighting proceedings to extradite her to Tennessee, where she faces imprisonment at least until 2029, when she will be 81. She has been denied bail.

"She told us she was never worried about getting caught," Ron O'Brien, the Franklin County prosecutor, said yesterday. "I don't think it was a question of people hiding her, or turning a blind eye. I think she just never ran into anybody she knew."

At times, her job at the Met Life insurance company brought her just five miles from where she grew up in Columbus, Ohio.

Confronted with fingerprint evidence, he said, Freshwater had admitted her real identity, which was more than she had done to her children or to either of the two men she married while on the run.

Freshwater's family has proved less willing to accept that the woman they know is a convicted murderer.

"She has been the most wonderful person in my life," Daryl McCartor, her second husband, told the Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper recently. "I can't conceive of her ever doing anything that would cause distress or harm to another person."

Even her lawyer, Richard Piatt, questions whether the two women are the same, in what appears to be an effort to save his client on the technicality that Freshwater is dead.

In 1966 Freshwater was a high-school dropout who travelled from her home city of Columbus, Ohio, to Tennessee to visit a jailed boyfriend when she met his lawyer, 38-year-old Glenn Nash.

She and Nash then carried out a string of robberies across three states, killing a liquor store worker, a shop assistant and a taxi driver.

Nash, a schizophrenic, was declared unfit to stand trial. After years in mental institutions, he was released in 1983 and lives quietly in Arkansas.

Freshwater, convicted of one of the murders and sentenced, effectively, to die in jail, followed another prisoner who broke out, took a train home to Ohio and changed her identity.

She had a son and a daughter by two different men, and then a second son with her first husband, Joseph Hudkins. When he died, she signed up with a local dating agency and met Daryl McCartor, a divorced trucker.

Freshwater even took several holidays in Tennessee, the state where she was listed as a most-wanted fugitive.

She never sought to alter her appearance, said Mr O'Brien, the Ohio prosecutor, but she made one crucial mistake.

Tennessee investigators had been searching for women of similar physical description and age to Freshwater, and acting on a tip-off that she had used the alias Tonya in the past, they ran a routine check on drivers' licences. Tonya Hudkins and Tonya McCartor had the same date of birth as Freshwater.