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[solemn music playing]
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[man 1] It's late at night in Oklahoma City, in April of 1990.
[indistinct radio chatter]
Two or three guys are in a truck driving along the road.
And they see some kind of debris.
-[engine stops] -[vehicle door opens, closes]
[suspenseful music playing]
And then they see off to the side, there's a body.
And it appears to be a young woman, a blonde-haired woman.
[sirens wailing]
And they call an ambulance.
She's rushed to the hospital,
and her husband, Clarence, eventually shows up.
He says her name is Tonya Hughes, that she's a stripper in Tulsa,
and that they have a young son named Michael.
And he's much older
and he's just kind of this weird guy.
So, the doctors, as they continue to examine her,
they see old bruises.
They see old injuries.
There's something wrong with this picture.
[monitor beeping rapidly]
Ultimately, she passes away.
[flatlining]
[pensive music playing]
The girls Tonya danced with want to find her family.
So they call this woman and they tell her that her daughter died.
And she says, "What are you talking about?"
"My daughter died 20 years ago. She was only 18 months old."
They realize that who they just buried was not Tonya Hughes.
So now they're asking,
"What happened?"
"And who the hell is she?"
[pensive music continues]
[film whirring]
[music continues]
[music fades]
[bottles clinking]
I met Tonya at Passions in the fall of 1989.
[electro music playing]
We became friends because we were the babies of the group.
[electro music continues]
And so we just kind of clicked together.
We weren't like the biker-chick type girls.
We were just kind of like the type of girl that went to school, graduated.
I was going to college at that point.
And so we had a lot in common.
I could tell she was smart.
You know, constantly reading. Always wanting to get more knowledge.
We talked all the time.
Tonya was my best friend.
[indistinct chatter]
[Karen] When I met Tonya, I met her husband, Clarence.
He was an older man,
and they had a two-year-old son, Michael.
[relaxing music playing]
Her son meant everything to her.
He was her world.
He was always smiling and happy. I mean, he loved her so much.
[music continues]
Every time I've seen them together, Michael would be right next to his mother.
He wouldn't be next to Clarence at all.
I asked her, "Why don't we take Michael to the zoo?"
And she's like, "No, no, no, no."
Michael couldn't go anywhere
with her alone.
When we use dressing rooms, you see each other.
She had bruises.
The whole backside of her.
She said she'd slipped and fallen, but I know different.
[sniffling] And it was bad.
[tense music playing]
And it got worse.
It kept getting worse.
One day, Tonya came and told me
that Clarence had taken a life insurance policy out on her.
She was terrified.
She really wanted to run, but she had Michael
and he kept him under lock and key.
Very lock and key.
I think she was scared he was going to hurt her and him.
And I don't think she could've gotten Michael away from Clarence.
She… She was stuck
and didn't know how to get out.
[siren wailing]
[Karen] Clarence called me on April 25th, 1990,
and told me that she'd been involved
in a hit-and-run in Oklahoma City.
[siren wailing]
[suspenseful music playing]
She never told me that they were going out of town.
[vehicles passing by]
Why shouldn't she tell me that?
None of it felt right.
[suspenseful music playing]
[man 2] Tonya Hughes arrived, uh, sometime after midnight.
She had a medium-severe closed-head injury.
She needed to be placed in the ICU and treated as best we could
with intravenous fluids, medications to control her blood pressure,
and medications to control the brain swelling.
Now, Clarence told me that she was in the ICU,
and that she was not allowed any visitors.
I wasn't supposed to go see her, nobody was supposed to go see her,
but I went up anyway.
And that's when the nurses came in,
and that's when they told me that they felt this was foul play.
The nurses told me it wasn't a hit-and-run.
But what caught my attention was the scratch marks right here.
Like, somebody's hand scratches.
To me, it looked like she had been in a fight.
[monitor beeping]
[Engles] She was in pretty good shape, considering an auto-pedestrian accident.
Her vital signs were stable.
But she, uh, seemed to have a sinking spell
and it… it was a mystery to me.
[monitor beeping rapidly]
[flatlining]
[Karen] I'd gotten home and the phone had rang. It was the hospital.
That she had passed.
[somber music playing]
She was 20 years old when she died.
[sobbing]
[birds chirping]
And that's how we found out her name wasn't her name.
[somber music continues]
Her name wasn't actually Tonya Hughes,
and we didn't know who she was at that point.
That's why we only put "Tonya" on her tombstone
And I don't think Michael was safe with Clarence at all. At all.
The hospital asked me about Michael's condition
and said that he was not talking.
And I go, "That's not him."
And that's when they gave me the information to go to DHS.
DHS came and got Michael and put him in a foster home.
[film whirring]
[gentle music playing]
-There he is. -That's it.
-Uh-huh. Mickey Mouse Club. -Yeah.
We had to wear the Mickey Mouse hat that day.
We got Michael on May 1st of 1990.
Michael's mom passed away the day before,
and he had just celebrated his second birthday.
We got instructions from the caseworker
that he's still on the bottle and he can only have Pepsi.
If you ever told him no,
he would go into hysteria.
He would lay on the floor,
like right out there on that ceramic floor,
and he would bang his head on the floor.
He'd raise his head that high--
Yeah, to the point where we were afraid he was gonna injure himself.
It was messed up in a way, but he was a good kid.
[Merle] The very first night I took him off the Pepsi.
Took him off the bottle.
And just gave him a cup with milk in it.
And so, you know, I thought, "Man, what am I doing?"
You know, when you take a baby off a bottle,
they're not too happy the first few nights.
Well, he started to settle.
By the end of that week…
-[Ernest] …he's a different kid. -…he's a different kid.
I never thought I'd see the day that he would do that.
We get Michael for four years.
Just over the first two years,
he actually started to grow emotionally, physically, mentally.
[happy music playing]
The… The whole time we had Michael
his dad had tried to get Michael back.
[Clarence] My son is punished for wanting to see his dad.
Locked in his room, his toys are taken away,
and he told… he's told that his dad's a mean man.
We cannot allow removal of child from a non-cruel and abusive home
due to a wet diaper or perceived lack of affection,
which I was unable to give my son during a period of a weak time
when my wife died tragically.
[Ernest] Now, he had visiting rights.
Michael was made to go for visits.
Michael didn't like that.
We would tell Michael that he had to go see his dad.
He would crawl up under the piano bench and he just kept saying,
"That mean man. That mean man. That mean man."
It wasn't a good day for Michael, ever.
[Clarence] Let me leave this thought with you.
Broken homes and cruel things
perpetrated on children cause a criminal to be born.
[ominous music plays]
It was assumed by everybody
-that he was the father. -…that he was the dad.
DHS called me and said that, um,
we needed to take Michael for a paternity test.
The paternity test came about
and it was proven he was not the father in any way.
No… No biological relation.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Merle] And they terminated his parental rights.
So then the visits stopped.
So that same week,
this pickup truck came by
and this man is going, like, five or ten miles an hour.
He just kept looking at me the whole time.
I'm thinking, "What's the man looking at?"
I had this hunch. I don't know what.
And I called DHS and I said,
"Can you tell me what kind of vehicle Clarence Hughes drives
or what he looks like?"
And when they described him to me, I said, "That man was just by my house."
Then they said, "You're just paranoid." And I said,
"No, I really feel like something's going on."
[ominous music playing]
[man 3] On September 12th, 1994,
we got the call that there was a man had been tied to a tree in the woods,
handcuffed, duct-taped.
[music continues]
The suspect casually walked in. He asked to see the principal.
He said he was there to get his son.
He actually pulled a gun partially out of his pocket.
And said, "I wanna get Michael, and you're gonna help me do that."
He told me that he was ready to die.
If I didn't help him, I wasn't going to live.
[Billy] And then he walked into the classroom,
with the principal at gunpoint
and kidnapped Michael from the school, along with the principal.
He said, "We're gonna walk out here, we're gonna take your truck."
"And I want you to drive a little ways to a dirt road."
They stopped eventually.
The principal was walked into the wood line
where he was handcuffed to a tree
and then duct-taped around his face and mouth.
Eventually, after a period of time,
someone found him and called the authorities.
After we cleared the scene, we went ahead and contacted the FBI.
The next day, agent Joe Fitzpatrick came to my office, introduced himself.
[pensive music playing]
[objects clattering]
[bell tinkling]
[Joe] You fight more crime in New York City on the way home
than you do here in Oklahoma City.
We don't have many kidnappings in Oklahoma,
but if we had a kidnapping, I knew it was coming to me.
In kidnappings, you wanna make the recovery in the first 48 hours.
If you don't, your chances go down drastically.
The very first thing we did was put out an all-points bulletin.
All the agencies in Oklahoma were on the lookout for a young boy
by the name of Michael Hughes,
who had been taken by a person claiming to be the boy's father,
Clarence Hughes.
We pulled his file and saw that in 1990,
he tried to collect on his wife's life insurance policy.
But the social security number he gave was for a man named Franklin Floyd.
So Clarence Hughes's real name was Franklin Delano Floyd.
[dramatic music playing]
Franklin Floyd had so many aliases.
Trenton Davis, Warren Marshall, and Clarence Hughes.
We also realized that Franklin Floyd had been in a halfway house.
The fact he's in a halfway house means he came out of prison.
So I immediately pulled his criminal record.
In 1962, he abducted a girl.
He robbed a bank in 1963.
He was released into a halfway house in 1972.
Then in 1973, he attacked a female.
He was arrested, posted bail,
but then he failed to appear in court for trial.
He'd been on the run ever since that time, and a fugitive for almost two decades.
All this information together,
very simple to analyze that we had a real problem.
[newsreader 1] Franklin Floyd spent ten years in prison in the '60s.
After getting out, he didn't report to his parole officer
and was missing for the next 17 years.
[newsreader 2] He was an expert in being on the run
and knew how to conceal his identity.
[pensive music playing]
And there were real questions about the boy's mother,
who had died four years before.
[newsreader 2] The finger of blame started pointing at Franklin Delano Floyd
when co-workers of Tonya's, from a Tulsa strip joint called Passions,
went to police with their story.
[ominous music playing]
When I first learned that Tonya was actually killed by a hit-and-run driver,
it was more than likely Franklin Floyd had committed that.
I mean, this guy was gonna be violent. Catching him might be tricky.
[music continues]
Behavioral Science told me I had a week.
Said after a week, Floyd would most likely get tired of the boy,
and he'd become a liability, and he would kill him.
[newsreader 3] Floyd and young boy are believed to be driving
in a 1994 Ford pickup, full size.
The tag number, QCN305, Oklahoma license plate.
[newsreader 4] Tonya Hughes was the mother of the boy
kidnapped from the Choctaw school,
but she was run over by a car in Oklahoma City in 1990.
[newsreader 5] Leads concerning Michael Hughes
should be directed to the FBI at 842-7471.
In 1994, there was a big news report, um, about the kidnapping.
My mom was watching the news and she said,
"Jenny, they have her under a different name. Some name Tonya."
"But that's Sharon. I'm telling you, that's Sharon on the news."
And I was like, "What's wrong?" You know, "Is Sharon on the news?"
"Are they interviewing her? What's going on?"
[sobbing] And my mom said, "No."
"She is-- Sharon's dead."
[sniffling]
I called the FBI. I called the hotline and I said, you know,
"There was a news report we had on about
a girl named Tonya."
"I know who she is."
"Her name is Sharon Marshall."
[sniffling] "She was my high school best friend."
[film whirring]
[upbeat music playing]
I met Sharon in 1984 at the student council camp.
[woman] I was a classmate of Sharon Marshall.
We were in the gifted program together at Forest Park Senior High.
Sharon was in class of 86. I was class of '87.
I had two full years with her being my best friend.
It's a typical high school.
[Sherry] Wild hallways, crazy kids.
[whistling]
People sneaking out to the back parking lot to smoke.
We would go to a mall just to look for boys.
We all had big hair and crazy clothes.
It was just your normal 1980s high school kind of vibe.
[Jenny] It all started when I met Sharon at that summer camp.
It was just instant best friends.
I felt, from the first day, I had known her my whole life.
I remember her the first day she came into that class
because all the boys went, "Wow!" [laughs]
She was just super smart. She was in ROTC.
She was in science club. She was in the gifted program.
She had a lot going on for her.
Sharon's friends were the outcasts.
We weren't really all that popular. We were the gifted kids.
You know, the gifted kids are not necessarily usually the popular ones.
[chuckles]
"Sherry, your yearbook's as bad as mine to find a place to sign."
"You're a really sweet and strange girl."
"Stay that way."
"Keep your unique style and be yourself."
"Love you, Sharon Marshall."
She always went for the underdogs.
Just the kind of person she was.
[Lynn] High school, for me, was a little tough.
I was smaller than the other guys.
I was involved in art.
Being almost beat up, being called a fag.
That was normal.
And my sophomore and junior years were only made happy
due to a couple of people.
And one of those people was Sharon Marshall.
During school, there was always a note for me
that said, "Hey, Ray baby."
"Hope you're having a good day. I love you, Sharon."
[Jenny] She was very mature for her age.
She was very adamant from day one that she wanted to go to Georgia Tech,
and she wanted to be an aerospace engineer.
I remember the phone call when she called and she was screaming on the phone.
"I did it. I got in."
"I got accepted to Georgia Tech,
and I got a full scholarship,
and I'm gonna be in the aerospace engineering department."
She was so excited. It was the best day of her life.
And she was so, so happy. It's all she talked about.
Her dad bought a full-page ad in the yearbook
to congratulate her on the scholarship at Georgia Tech.
Dad said, "Lookout, Georgia Tech!"
"Hello, future Air Force General and aeronautical engineering career. Dad."
There were parents who took out full-page ads
but they were all baby pictures and, you know…
Why would a dad choose something sexy for his daughter?
That doesn't make any sense.
We just thought her dad was really strict and really weird.
[Jenny] The first time I met her father was when he brought Sharon up to my house.
He pulled my dad aside and asked for a loan.
And my dad said, "No way." [laughs]
You know, "No."
And that put a real bad taste in my parents' mouth.
And that was day one.
She told me her mother was hit by a car on a bridge
and died when she was in the second grade.
She was in charge of cooking dinner every night.
Um, she wasn't… wasn't really allowed to talk on the phone.
She said, "Don't call here too much unless I know in advance you're gonna call."
"But I can call you."
As soon as he would come home,
I mean, she would get real anxious in her voice
and she's like, "Okay, okay, I got to go."
You know? And she would hang up.
[line disconnects]
[phone ringing]
And I remember the phone call when she called,
and she's bawling her eyes out,
and she said she was pregnant.
And I remember, um, being shocked.
You know, crying when she told me she was pregnant.
And going, you know, "Oh my God, what are you going to do?"
[tense music playing]
She's like, "Well, I'm gonna have it. I'm gonna put him up for adoption."
"But Daddy won't let me go to college now."
"You have to, you got a scholarship. You're going to Tech. You're so smart."
"You wanna be an aerospace engineer. You're gonna do all these things."
She said, "Somebody has to take care of Daddy."
[receiver clicks]
[Lynn] I think it actually crushed her, not being able to go to Georgia Tech,
because that's all she worked for.
I mean, that's all she worked for.
[ominous music playing]
Sharon called one day and said,
"We're leaving in a coupla days for Arizona."
She said, "I'm gonna have the baby out there."
And she told me she was gonna put him up for adoption.
She said Daddy wouldn't let her keep it.
[film whirring]
[newsreader] Police say 51-year-old Franklin Floyd
entered the Indian Meridian…
[Walsh] Twice now, America's Most Wanted highlighted
the Michael Hughes abduction.
After last Saturday's episode, the show got close to 20 calls from viewers
who claim to know something about the boy's whereabouts.
One of these tips is going to be the tip that leads us to Michael Hughes.
When Michael went missing, it was all over the news.
And I believe that's when I met Joe Fitzpatrick.
[suspenseful music playing]
And, um, I sat and talked with him for hours.
And he said, "Jenny, not only is she dead, but she's not who you think she is."
[Joe] We showed her photographs of Tonya Hughes.
And she said that was who she knew as Sharon Marshall.
And that, uh, this man who we knew as Clarence Hughes
was who she knew as Sharon's father, Warren Marshall.
[Jenny] They thought this was his wife.
They said, "They're married."
And I'm like, "No, that's her father. They're not married."
And they said, "No, honey, they're married."
And I was like, "No. That was her father."
We had a portrait of very different people of who Sharon was.
[Joe] We realized, after talking to Jenny Fisher,
that Tonya also had aliases.
[suspenseful music playing]
We discovered that, in 1989, one year before her death,
they changed their names.
Sharon Marshall became Tonya,
and Warren Marshall became Clarence Hughes.
And the names they used were taken off tombstones in Alabama.
And then they got married under the new names, in New Orleans,
which means this man married his own daughter.
It was unbelievable.
One question led to another.
And soon police were wondering just who they were dealing with.
Investigation showed she went by many names,
like Tonya D. Hughes and Tonya Dawn Tadlock.
But who was this woman and who killed her?
There's a big question here.
What happened to Sharon Marshall in this time period between high school
until she was found dead on the side of the road?
-[film whirring] -[somber music playing]
Her death was suspicious.
But there was no proof that Floyd killed her.
What happened to Sharon Marshall?
[music continues]
[dramatic whoosh]
[music fades]
[Jenny] I heard from her one time.
She told me, you know, "We're moving some,
we're going to go out West. We're doing this…"
They, somehow, in all of that, ended up down in Tampa.
She was employed as a stripper in one of the clubs there.
[woman] Mons Venus, in the late 1980s,
was the only place to go for adult entertainment.
[rock music playing]
This was known as a place that had the most beautiful girls
in the world.
We didn't just wear lingerie.
We wore amazing French lingerie.
We were the best of everything.
We had everyone come through here.
Women.
Athletes.
Musicians.
Businessmen.
Every night, it felt like a party.
[film whirring]
I remember the day that Sharon Marshall walked through the door.
She looked like a living baby doll.
She dressed very innocent.
She had a full lace cover-up.
So she was never walking around completely naked like everyone else.
She really did look like a little girl.
She was very shy.
She just really didn't talk about her past.
And she didn't talk about herself.
But she and I were starting to become friends.
And that's when the girls in the club started telling me
about her dad and their weird relationship.
Sharon's dad told her that she needed to inquire
about the parties that I was setting up,
and she needed to tell me that she was available.
[rock and roll music playing]
There is this millionaire's club here
and their parties were the easiest to do.
You dance three songs, no lap dancing.
No one touches you.
And walk out of there with, you know, 500 to 1,000 dollars.
And that was the first party I took Sharon to.
One of the men told me,
"You'd better go get Sharon and I need her to leave now."
"She's in front of the women's bathroom."
She was standing outside, at the door,
and she was offering sex services to these men for 50 dollars.
She said, "Well, my dad told me to do it and he bought me condoms."
That was disgusting.
I couldn't believe
that a man
would put their daughter in that situation.
[ominous music playing]
Sharon never told me she was pregnant,
but it became apparent.
[solemn music playing]
Sharon's relationship with her son, Michael, was beautiful.
She was a wonderful mother.
She was so engaged with him.
And just seeing the way he looked at her.
I think that was…
that was the best thing that ever happened to her.
[birds chirping]
[serene music playing]
[woman] When I was 15, I started babysitting Michael.
He was my buddy.
He would head-butt me. Forehead to forehead.
We'd stare at each other. Daw!
Ah-wah-wah-wah.
He'd take his mouth and do it on my cheek. Ah-wah-wah-wah.
He was such a sweetie.
[film whirring]
I lived in the Golden Lantern Mobile Home Park here in Florida.
And I lived about one city block from Sharon and Warren Marshall.
Sharon and Warren's trailer was… was normal.
Two-bedroom, one-bath. Average-sized trailer.
Warren slept on the hide-a-bed, in the living room.
Sharon had the back room.
And then the middle front room was Michael's.
He didn't have a crib. I always thought that was weird.
He had like a little pack 'n play.
What's funny is they didn't have family. And they only have one or two friends.
Sharon had a friend, Cheryl.
She would come over to Sharon and Warren's house like one to three times a week.
And she'd always dress nice and had her nails done.
And she was so nice.
Like she, literally, would come through the trailer park with her Corvette.
It was a beautiful car.
And see me at the pool and just wave.
And as a 15-year-old, somebody that pretty,
it just made you feel good,
you know, that someone of her level, class, and style was saying hi.
[Heather] Cheryl was just gorgeous.
She was Italian.
She had this long, beautiful, thick, black hair.
She had a wild look, but she really wasn't wild. She was very naive.
She was a beauty pageant winner.
And she saw Mons Venus as a stepping-stone.
She was hoping to become a model.
She wanted to be in Playboy.
But then I find out that Cheryl was hanging out with Sharon and her dad,
and I was concerned about her safety.
[ominous music playing]
[Michelle] One night, we were watching wrestling.
And Warren went to put in a video so we could record it.
And that's when I saw
Sharon and Cheryl on the beach
without tops,
and dancing.
I just remember sitting there and going, "That's Sharon."
"Is he recording his own daughter?"
And then he realized, "Oh shit! I need to--" You know?
"You don't ever talk about this. This is not something--"
"That was just fun," blah-blah-blah-blah. I was just like, "Okay."
"Yeah, I… I got to go. My curfew is up."
[Heather] One of the girls told me about the video.
When Cheryl comes in, I'm irate with her.
And she tells me Sharon's dad said, "Let me take pictures of you."
"And I'm going to take this video and I'm going to submit it to Playboy,
and you're going to be a star."
[disturbing music playing]
And she said, "He was trying to have sex with me."
"And I didn't want to have sex with him."
"I was fighting him off."
"And a switch flipped
and he became very violent."
I just told her, "I can't protect you from them."
"You need to stay away from them."
[unsettling music playing]
But all of a sudden, Sharon and her dad disappeared.
She just didn't show up for work. She never said anything.
I thought they must have left because there was so much talk.
And we were trying to get her away from him.
But the baby was never out of his sight.
And she was afraid for that.
And there was no way she was leaving Michael.
[unsettling music continues]
[film whirring]
[birds chirping]
Jennifer Fisher didn't know what happened to Sharon all those years.
-[inaudible] -[phone ringing]
And I said, at the time we had no clue, you know, what was going on.
We thought her father was just a weirdo.
But I remember one day Sharon wanted me to spend the night at their house.
My dad was out of town.
My mom said, "Just this once I'm gonna let you go down
and spend the night down there."
"And do not tell your father."
My mom dropped me off.
We were starting to change, to get ready for bed.
She pulled open one of her drawers
and pulled out all this very, very sexy lingerie.
And she said, "Oh, Daddy buys this stuff for me and lets me have it."
I said, "Oh my God, these are beautiful. But, uh, hello, why do you have this?"
And she's like, "Oh, I just keep it in here 'cause it's just pretty."
And, um…
[sighs]
[sobs]
He came in with a gun.
They didn't have doors in their house. They had curtains. There were no doors.
And he walked in with a gun.
And he pointed it at us and he said, "What are y'all doing?"
I mean, he screamed at the top of his lungs.
I screamed.
Um, we only had underwear on. We… We were just changing.
I didn't have clothes on. I grabbed everything to hold up.
And he starts laughing. Maniacal, evil laugh.
And then he says, "I'll be back." And walked out.
And I looked at Sharon and she… she just laughed.
"Oh, Daddy's just being silly."
[sniffling]
So we changed and then he came back.
[sniffling]
And he still had the gun.
And he ordered me to lay down,
on the floor, on a sleeping bag, and put a pillow over my head.
And I did.
And he raped her at gunpoint. [sobs]
And I was in the room.
[sniffling]
And we didn't talk after that. He got up and he left.
And I was… I just laid there.
[sniffling] The next morning she came over and she gave me a big hug,
and she said,
"Daddy's just like that."
She said, "I'm okay. You're okay."
She said, "Just let it go."
[solemn music playing]
I never said a word to anybody because I was scared.
[sniffling]
It's hard because through the years,
this has been the most painful thing in my life.
It's changed who I was as a person.
It changed how I view the world.
It changed everything about me.
[birds chirping]
[solemn music continues]
I don't know anybody who had as miserable a life as she had
for as long as she had.
I hated the fact that,
as a child, she was sexually abused.
And then, uh, he took her around to strip clubs
to perform and make a living for him.
And that made me hurt for her.
I hurt… I hurt a lot for her.
I can't imagine anybody being under those conditions
for that long a period of time.
[pensive music playing]
We knew that Floyd committed sexual crimes against Sharon.
And we know he had a history of abduction, rape, and violence.
As always, this was a pattern.
He'd been convicted in 1962
of abducting a four-year-old girl and raping her.
He was a convicted pedophile,
In the 1990s, again, he attacked a woman.
So we begin to see the pattern of violence and abuse.
But going through Floyd's past,
it was obvious that something was off.
[suspenseful music playing]
An agent comes up with a neighbor
that knew Franklin Floyd in the 1970s, in Oklahoma City.
And the neighbor had a picture
of Floyd with Sharon when she was about 5 or 6 years old.
Behavioral Science agent tells me it's a typical picture of an abused child
because she's looking sad, she's not smiling.
So we looked at the timeline.
And we realized Sharon was 20 years old when she died in 1990.
Which means she would have been born around 1969 or 1970.
Floyd was in prison from 1963 to 1972.
There was no way he could be Sharon's biological father.
He wouldn't have a child. I mean…
It wasn't logical that the girl belonged to him.
Floyd had a history of kidnapping.
So when I saw it, I said, "Oh my God. He had probably kidnapped her too."
[music fades]
We have concern that she may have been kidnapped as a young child,
and had been kept in the custody of Franklin Floyd
during this whole time period.
[Joe] He kept her for over 15 years.
I know, at this point, that her real name wasn't Sharon Marshall or Tonya Hughes.
But I had no idea who she actually was,
who are her parents,
where she came from,
what her true name was.
We just didn't know.
You get a little queasy in the stomach because you realize that
this horrendous case just got worse.
We thought, therefore, that Michael was in real danger.
So we knew we had to act, and act fast.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Billy] Franklin Floyd had been a federal fugitive for 17 years.
So we knew he was gonna be hard to find.
He was just out there somewhere.
And God bless those FBI agents
who took over that case and decided, "We got to do this."
Joe Fitzpatrick came up with a plan.
[Joe] Any criminal case like this,
the best indication you have of what someone's gonna do in the future
is what they've done in the past.
[Billy] This guy's had so many aliases,
and people like that tend to redo the same thing over and over again.
They have a pattern, usually.
[Joe] I figured he was using the same aliases.
I figured he'd go to the places he'd been before.
Phoenix, Florida, Georgia, and… and Kentucky.
[phone ringing]
So I put a stop on all of his aliases.
[Billy] They alerted all the different states
where he had obtained a driver's license under different names,
thinking that he might try to renew a driver's license.
[pensive music playing]
[Joe] Sure enough,
he renewed that driver's license under Warren Marshall
in Louisville, Kentucky.
And I flew to Kentucky,
and we had an agent in Louisville dress up in a UPS uniform.
[suspenseful music playing]
Arrest procedure had to be delivering his driver's license to him
and arresting him at that time.
[music continues]
[music intensifies]
[siren wailing]
And we delivered the driver's license.
And agents surrounded him
and took him into custody.
Immediately following his arrest, agents went to his residence,
talked to all the neighbors.
[reporter] Floyd lived in this rundown apartment building,
just east of downtown Louisville, about six weeks.
Not long enough for his neighbors to know much about him.
To my knowledge, he didn't even talk to anybody.
Just came in and came out.
Didn't talk to anybody about family or anything like that, so…
No one had seen Michael.
I checked with both employments where he was presently employed
and with his previous employ as a painter.
No one had seen Michael.
He had a bus ticket
from Atlanta, Georgia to Louisville, Kentucky
for one person and one person only.
He's my son, I love him very much.
[keys jingling]
I hope that they find him.
[Joe] The next day, I sat him down and… and I asked if Michael was still alive.
And he claimed that he was.
He said he left him with a rich person.
There's no rich person who has anything to do with Franklin Floyd.
They were all such ridiculous statements. This… This is another one of his lies.
[solemn music playing]
At this point, I felt certain Michael was dead.
But it… it's a child, and you… you hope you're wrong.
[cameras clicking]
We miss Michael.
He's like a son to us.
Michael, we love you.
Uh, if we knew where to come to get you, we'd come get you
but we don't know where.
There'd be many times that we'd be driving down the road and I'd see a kid in a car
and the hair was the same color as Michael's,
and I'd try to get up beside him and see it wasn't Michael.
But there's… there's always,
you know, until you get the final definite,
there's always that thought that maybe he's still out there.
There's just something about him.
The way he looks, his big brown eyes that conveys the love that he has for us.
We have that same love for him and we just want to have him back.
[sniffling]
[cameras clicking]
[siren wailing in distance]
[birds chirping]
[Joe] As this case was set up for trial,
we realized that charging Floyd for Michael's murder on its merits is weak
because we don't have a body.
It would be a hard case to win.
[man] You can make a murder case without a body.
But we know that if we're gonna get a conviction,
we have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
And at this point,
it's a close call.
So what seemed like a pretty straightforward and easy case to prove
was really not that easy a case. We had some hurdles we had overcome.
So we charged him with kidnapping Michael Hughes,
carjacking, using a firearm during the carjacking,
which added a five-year minimum mandatory sentence on to that.
We also charged him with a second firearm offense
for using the firearm during the commission of the kidnapping.
That added an additional 25-year sentence.
[Billy] The first time I saw him was when he was being escorted into federal court.
He just had this empty, deadly stare.
That stare was a Charlie Manson stare.
It was scary to me.
[tense music playing]
[reporter] Is justice going to be served here, Mr. Floyd?
Floyd started off defending himself and… and he was very aggressive,
asking dumb questions.
He knew that this judge may allow him
to argue his case, and have what we call hybrid representation.
He wanted to get up and tell the story. He wanted to talk.
And the only way he could do that without taking the witness stand
was to be able to argue to the judge.
He would ramble and go off on tangents.
It was just ego, hubris, narcissistic personality,
sociopathic personality.
[Jenny] I testified in Michael's kidnapping trial.
The hardest thing, terrifying, was having to face him in court.
To testify with him sitting right there.
And I remember on the stand,
looking over and staring right in his eyes.
And, like, "I got you. I got you, fucker."
[music continues]
[Billy] Floyd got up to ask her a question.
You drew your opinion about me in the way I am
based on the information that the FBI told you, right?
And she said, "No, I drew my opinion about you when I saw the type of lingerie
you were buying your daughter and how you made her dress.
That's when I drew my opinion about you.
And I looked right in the face and I said, "You are her daddy."
"She called you daddy. You were her father."
And his… his attorney just threw his papers up in the air.
There was nothing they could do.
[Mark] Look, it was not an easy case.
It… It was all circumstantial.
I mean, that's what gave me heartburn.
I've never lost a case at trial. Never.
But every time, at the end of trial, you get butterflies in your stomach.
The judge released the order and we were successful on all counts.
After evading the law for two decades, he was sentenced to 52 years in prison,
no parole, for the kidnapping of Michael Hughes.
[reporters clamoring]
-[reporter] Mr. Floyd, what do you think? -Fuck you and Oklahoma, son of a bitch.
-Fuck off, you motherfucker! -[reporter 2] Where's the boy?
Fuck you!
[ominous music plays]
[Joe] Then I got a call from an agent.
They found the principal's truck, which Floyd stole in the kidnapping.
And they found photographs that'd been taped underneath the truck.
[suspenseful music plays]
They were all, almost all
obscene.
Pornography.
It was very obviously Floyd's because included in these photographs
were some photographs of Sharon when she was small.
Also, in these photographs, was a young lady we hadn't seen before.
She was in various stages of being disrobed and beaten.
And I said, "He could not have beaten her to this extent and not killed her."
He'd had to.
We had another mystery.
Who was she?
Looking at her, she had… she had real tan lines.
And I go, "Well, they could've spent time in Florida, Georgia, and Kentucky."
So I sent the photographs down to those offices
and asked them to check their unsolved cases.
Now this is what you call a shot in the dark.
[newsreader] A highway crew makes a grisly discovery.
A badly decomposed human skull.
Four days of digging produces 90 percent of a skeleton,
along with a breast implant, and some clothing and jewelry.
When we examined the skull, we found two bullet holes to the back of the skull
and the orbital bone was broken under one of the eyes.
It was definitely not a natural death.
There was definitely homicidal violence involved in it.
So, yes, it was classified as a homicide almost immediately.
We looked at all of the local agencies.
We weren't able to identify the skeleton.
About a year later, we got notified by the FBI
that they had photos from another case of a young lady that was being beaten.
And as we look at them,
the shirt wrapped around the neck of the girl who's been beaten
matches the shirt that we have tied in a knot.
We went ahead and got dental records from them and Jane Doe I-275,
which is what she was known as.
And we were able to actually identify
the skeleton on the side of the interstate.
Ms. Cheryl Commesso.
And during our investigation, we discovered that Cheryl had worked
as an exotic dancer at the Mons Venus.
[newsreader] Now, police want to talk to anyone
who knew Cheryl Commesso back in 1989.
[Heather] After the videotape of Cheryl and Sharon,
there just was a lot of gossip going on.
Everyone in the club was talking about it.
And then Cheryl showed up at the club.
And she had a bruise on her cheek, a black eye.
She had marks on her neck
where you could see she had been strangled.
And that's when I knew that this had gone from Warren being a twisted pervert
to him being physical.
And he was obsessed with her.
He called many times to the club
and he was asking me a lot of questions about Cheryl.
He wanted to know her last name.
He wanted to know where her dad lived.
Every time he called and asked for Cheryl,
I would tell him that she isn't here and then I'd hang up.
We did everything we could
to try to create separation between the two of them.
But shortly after that, I was walking out of the club.
Sharon's dad was in the parking lot.
[suspenseful music playing]
And Cheryl was standing next to his car and they're having a heated argument.
And he was screaming at her.
And he said he was going to kill her.
So, I ran over there. I intervened.
Then he got mad at me, and he revved his car at me
and the car lurched.
He was acting like he was going to hit me with the car.
I walked away holding her,
walked her to her car.
I thought she would go home to her dad.
And that was the last time I saw Cheryl.
[music fades]
[Michelle] All of a sudden, Sharon and Warren had to go out of town.
And they asked if I could collect the mail and keep my eyes on the trailer.
And one night, the neighbor right across the street
went outside to smoke a cigarette out on the porch,
and there was a guy in a truck.
And he gets out of the truck, goes around to Sharon and Warren's house.
About five minutes later, he comes out, gets in the truck, takes off.
Flicks his cigarette, comes inside, and he said…
"All of a sudden I hear this boom!"
He looked out the window and there's this big ol'…
[exploding]
Right through the center. And like, literally, the stove went through the…
Like just… [mimics blast]
People, you know, that were chitter-chatting,
you know, by the pool, by the mailbox, you know, that…
Warren had hired somebody or made somebody, uh,
burn down his trailer.
[Joe] We finally knew why Floyd left Florida in such a hurry.
He was fleeing because he had killed Cheryl Commesso.
Floyd knew that law enforcement would be looking for
a man, his daughter, and her child.
They would not be looking for a man, his wife, and their child.
And that's why they stopped and got married.
[pensive music playing]
[newsreader] The story of Floyd's criminal life spans half the nation,
from Oklahoma, where his wife turned up dead,
he kidnapped his son and abducted a school principal,
to this underbrush, near Interstate 275,
where the skeletal remains of Cheryl Commesso turned up.
Former detective Mark Deasaro says
Floyd will murder again if he ever gets out of prison.
He's a… He's a sociopath and a predator.
Floyd was charged with first-degree murder for Cheryl Commesso.
[ominous music plays]
[Mark] I always felt that we had a good case
when you looked at all the evidence,
even though, the majority of it may have been circumstantial.
It was just overwhelming, the fact that we could put her there,
we could put him there. We could put them together.
We had people that observed arguments between them.
Franklin Floyd faces lethal injection for the murder of a Tampa nude dancer.
[ominous music plays]
[Michelle] The detectives, they asked me to identify some photos.
There's a photo of Cheryl's body laying on that mattress.
The exact same dirty, nasty mattress
on that hide-a-bed in his living room.
I was in that man's house at least seven times a week.
And out of those seven times,
every day that couch was open.
There was no… no misrepresentation.
That was the same mattress.
I knew. I was…
Yeah.
We had Floyd for 52 years.
But now we had a chance to convict Floyd on a murder investigation.
A capital crime, for which he could get the death sentence.
Franklin was found guilty of first-degree murder.
He was sentenced to death.
[Joe] It was a very good feeling to hear the verdict.
There was a great deal of satisfaction in knowing that Floyd was going to be
where he couldn't hurt anybody.
Now, the bad aspect of this case, even after trial is
I had no idea where Michael…
the body is.
[Billy] It was just a freak accident that those photos were found,
and he eventually got convicted of a homicide.
Uh, it wasn't the one we wished to have.
But I think in every police officer's career there's something that lingers.
I took a picture of Michael Anthony Hughes
and I actually taped that right above my computer,
where I had to look at it every day.
It was something that just gave me hope. That's what it did.
It kept me going every day at the office, like…
We need to not come to this. And it will happen.
Someday.
When I left, it was still taped there.
And as I clean my office to leave, I finally took that picture off.
And retired.
In the 27 years I worked for the FBI,
I've come awfully close to closing every case.
Two of them that I was not able to close at the time I retired
was finding Michael and identifying Sharon.
[solemn music playing]
[man] In 2002, a friend just sent me a photograph,
saying you have to look at this.
It was a picture on what was called the Doe Network.
It was a missing person website.
And it was a picture of a little girl
sitting in the lap of a man that was supposed to be her father.
And the caption was underneath that she had been kidnapped,
raised as his daughter and married and killed.
And I said, "Oh my God."
But then more you looked at the picture, and the more you looked at her,
you could see something was terribly wrong.
And I just looked at it and said, "I have to dig into this."
The first person I think I spoke with was Joe Fitzpatrick.
[suspenseful music playing
And he says that there were two mysteries that he had hoped to resolve.
Who is Sharon Marshall,
and what happened to Michael Hughes?
[indistinct chatter]
And even though he was kind of leery talk to me,
you could tell that there was some unfinished business here.
This case meant something to Joe.
And he was really affected by the girl that was in the picture.
It was her.
It was Sharon.
It was
the goodness.
It was
how people talked about her.
It was her accomplishments,
and it was just this beautiful young woman.
who was trapped in evil.
And she had been forgotten.
I just said, "You know, this is more than just a crime story."
I wanted to do everything I could to try to find Sharon's identity.
I thought that was really important and I felt, "You know what?"
"Let's do this book."
And the only person that knew her real identity was Franklin Floyd.
I said, "Let me take a shot
and see if I can go interview Franklin Floyd."
[gate buzzing]
And I go down there and they bring me into this county prison.
[gate buzzes and opens]
So they brought Floyd into an interview room to meet with me.
And they had brought all of his files with him, too.
[chains jangling]
[suspenseful music playing]
And there were a couple of deputies standing next to him.
And then they left.
[door closes]
And it's just me and him now in the room.
And we start talking.
Actually, I should rephrase that. He started talking and he didn't stop.
He thought maybe that somehow I could help him.
I could do something his lawyers couldn't do.
Tell his story and somehow that would free him.
[Floyd] As you go, you're gonna learn a lot about me.
I don't care what you write.
I'll help you tell the truth.
This is the actual where I went in the home,
where my mother abandoned me.
[Matt] So Franklin Floyd was born in 1943.
His father died. He had brothers and sisters.
Mother couldn't take care of him, sent him to the Georgia Children's Baptist Home.
And, you know, he had a troubled life there.
[Floyd] The most torturous place…
Like that old lady, she'd scald my hands.
And then she pushed my head in the closet.
They was beating my feet. I couldn't walk. They swelled up.
I did see how he was created.
I did see how the mold was made.
[Floyd] Boys raped me, beat me,
made me be their slave and all that.
When they bathed me
with certain boys,
they'd take two fingers and shove it up.
And they'd get away with it because I'm small.
By the time he was 18, he had real… he had mental issues.
[Floyd] When I ran away, I joined the army, drifted around the country,
and had to steal everywhere I went.
And then I got accused of a crime, and then went to prison,
was abused
I sure am convicted of molestation, rape, kidnap.
And they had no proof of that. You know that, don't you?
Any time there was an actual specific crime, he'd deny it.
[Floyd] They don't have no proof, witness or something that says…
they saw me taking pictures of somebody with spread legs.
Don't you get what I'm saying?
I would ask him about Sharon and he didn't wanna touch that.
I'd ask him about Michael, and he didn't wanna touch that.
He didn't want to admit to anything.
I said to him, "Where did you get Sharon from?"
He goes, "I didn't get her anywhere. She just came with me."
[Floyd] Listen…
She was a darling.
And was so smart, and…
Listen, she loved me no matter what.
[Matt] He just… He denied everything. He denied killing Sharon.
Kidnapping her. He denied killing Michael.
And he denied killing Cheryl Commesso.
I didn't learn anything from Floyd other than he was just clearly psychotic.
You know, as an investigative journalist, you try to get down to the truth.
It was really frustrating,
by the end of the book, not to… not to have found out who she was.
At that point in time,
you know, we just… the book was done.
And published.
[rock music playing]
Matt Birkbeck interviewed the man now known as Franklin Floyd in prison.
Floyd not only kidnapped Sharon as a little girl,
he's serving time on death row.
[newsreader] Matt Birkbeck wrote the book A Beautiful Child,
which recounts how, against all odds,
the girl known as Sharon blossomed in school.
[dial-up internet connecting]
[mouse clicking]
[computer chimes]
[Matt] When the book came out,
it captured the attention of a couple of websites,
the Doe Network and Websleuths.
These are like amateur detectives.
And then you saw this organic growth.
You could see different threads. They were talking about it.
Who is Sharon Marshall? Could she be this girl that went missing in Utah?
Could she be this girl that went missing in Toronto?
And it just kept building and building and building.
[chiming]
Over the months, I got more emails.
People in the US, people in Canada, people overseas.
Within six months to a year,
we had people around the world trying to find, who is this girl.
A lot of people were frustrated. It was like, "Matt, come on!"
"You know, I'm reading this and was like, we thought you got it,"
And I didn't get it.
And I just… You know, I would answer. I would answer all these emails.
I would just say, "Hey, you know, I did this with the hope
that we're gonna… you know, we could find her identity."
We got a couple of really good leads actually out of it,
but we really didn't have any way to test them.
But then in 2005, almost a year after the book came out,
we got a break.
I got an anonymous email.
And it said,
Would the DNA of Sharon's daughter help you?
[hopeful music playing]
[Megan] I am Megan,
and I am Sharon's birth daughter.
I always knew that I was adopted,
but never felt weird until I've discovered Matt's book.
Then it was a lot more than just being adopted.
The more I learned,
the angrier and sadder I got about everything.
I mean, that's kind of… kind of been a progression of emotions since then.
Everything of this… since learning about it and…
has been more anger and more sadness,
and confusion of how I'm supposed to feel.
I don't know what my feelings are. I know I'm mad… [laughs]
…but I don't know at what specifically, or why.
Like, I'm still trying to figure… figure it all out and process it.
[somber music playing]
I learned a lot that I don't like to think about… about her life.
No girl should have to go through that.
From a stranger, much less somebody that's supposed to be your father.
Or father figure or whatever the hell he was. Um…
Yeah. That's… That's the stuff I don't like to think about.
I was a junior in high school when my aunt discovered Matt's book
and told my mom about it.
Um, I remember we were driving home from The Snowball Stand,
when my mom told me that there was more to the story
than just my birth mother was killed in a car accident.
[film whirring]
[birds chirping]
[woman] A couple had walked into an attorney's office
and they said they couldn't afford another child.
"Can you find it someone to adopt?"
and we walked in and we saw Clarence and Tonya sitting at the table.
He just wanted this over with. He wanted it done. He wanted money.
He controlled the whole conversation with her.
So yeah, I was a little leery.
But I just feel like God kept telling me, "This is it."
[uneasy music playing]
Six weeks later, Megan was born.
So we got to the hospital,
and she'd already delivered.
She was in the bed
and I went in there privately, just her and I.
And I said, "Did you want to see her?" She says, "No, I can't."
And I think back on this day.
Like why couldn't she have told me more that day?
Why couldn't she have said, "I need help."
Why, when we were alone, we had the opportunity,
did you not say,
"Help me."
Nobody knows about that. Because it was just her and I in that room.
Because the minute Floyd came in, everything stopped.
The whole conversation stopped.
I used to, um…
I sometimes still do.
I'll pull up pictures on the internet of me as a baby,
and pictures of Michael and pictures of Sharon and compare them all.
And just see, um, the cheeks and the nose for sure came from her.
And my natural hair color is the same as hers.
So, there was… yeah. I definitely see myself in her.
[cheerful music playing]
Growing up you want to know who you look like.
What you're supposed to look like. Um…
Family history.
And then you go into your teenage years as a girl.
Um, I just want to know where I came from.
In 2010 or 11, I decided to get my DNA.
Um, it was
so we could hopefully find any other family at the time.
It was exciting. Um…
There was a potential of finding people.
[Matt] Sharon had been pregnant three times.
Once in high school, the baby was supposed to be adopted.
Then it was Michael,
and here's this third one who was given up for adoption in New Orleans.
And that's Megan.
Having that DNA and knowing it was a positive match
meant that it'd just open up this entire world of possibility.
And then that's when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
came to the picture.
[pensive music playing]
In 2011, I inherited a very small case file
about this girl named Sharon Marshall.
And I didn't have a lot to go on.
You know, after I read the book,
you know, with my little file again, I had nowhere to turn to.
I didn't have a law enforcement agency
but Joe Fitzpatrick was clearly a big player in all of this.
He told me about how the case was inactive with the FBI,
and that there was never really a case open on Sharon Marshall.
He was just able to work that investigation
in conjunction with the abduction of Michael Hughes.
When Joe stepped up to the plate and said that he was going to help me, um,
you know, I… I was… I was ecstatic.
[Joe] When I received the call
from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
I got excited about the fact that I could get back into this case.
This was unfinished business.
This was something I had made a great deal of progress on,
but never had a chance to tie up the loose ends because I retired.
It gave me just a little hope.
But we needed… we needed another shot with Franklin Floyd.
He was sitting on death row. He clearly had all the answers.
So we needed… we needed another interview with him.
[man] I got a call from the National Center for Missing Children,
from an Ashley Rodriguez.
I started digging it on the file and really trying to study who Floyd is.
He's… He's my target and I want to know everything I can about him.
[both sighing]
I told him, "He's gonna lie to you. He's gonna lie to you something awful."
"If you get a truth out of him, you're gonna be lucky."
I was not optimistic at all.
To be honest, it was kind of like our last resort.
So the FBI deployed to Florida to interview Franklin Floyd.
[man] I had three questions I wanted answered.
One was, "Who is Sharon Marshall?"
"What happened to Michael?"
And, "Were you responsible for the death of Sharon?"
Then I zeroed in on the first one of who was she.
Because that's an easy question to answer.
He may not want to answer, but it's… he's not admitting to a murder.
And he would not talk about it.
He… He just started shutting down, and he started ranting.
We didn't even introduce ourselves as FBI agents before he starts on a rant.
He thought we were his attorneys.
We had him seated.
We were standing while he was doing this rant for good 45 minutes.
And I finally said, "We're not your attorneys."
And he says, "Well, who the fuck are you?"
And I said, "We are FBI agents."
And he… he cocks his head back and goes, "What do you want?"
"Well, I'm reopening the Michael Hughes investigation."
He goes, "I'd appreciate it if you'd close it."
I said, "Well, I'm not gonna do that."
I said, "You wanted him to be your… your new Sharon."
"Sharon's out of the picture, this is your new Sharon.
Michael's… Michael's the one that's gonna replace her."
And I kept talking to him, and then he starts crying.
He was emotional and that's… that's an opportunity to me.
And Scott kind of slapped the table enough to get his attention.
"How did you kill him, Floyd?" And his… his crocodile tears are flowing.
And I raise my voice, "How did you kill him?"
He looks at me and says, "Don't you do that."
And I finally hit my fist down on the table,
"How did you kill him, Floyd?"
Waterworks turn off.
"I shot him twice in the back of the head to make it real quick."
[tense music playing]
None of your damn business where he's at.
[reporter] For more than 20 years
no one knew what happened to the little boy,
but now the FBI believes they have answers.
Tears and sadness from a family who abruptly lost a child.
And, Father, please tell him hi, give him a hug, and then a kiss.
And we'll see him one day.
It hurts
to, uh, lose a child.
-He was almost our child. -[Merle] Mm-hmm.
Uh, the adoption papers were almost completed.
Uh, and he was kidnapped before we could complete them.
All the kids counted him as a brother.
Uh, so everybody counted him as one of ours.
Uh…
Mmm.
The FBI says the suspect in a cold case more than 20 years old
has confessed to murder.
Floyd says he buried the boy near the Oklahoma Texas border.
We stayed out there for two full days.
Digging for two days, sifting for two days.
And, uh, not a thing.
You know, we… we gave it a 110 percent.
And just didn't find anything.
But I still wanted to know who Sharon Marshall was.
And he bought in.
Partly because Floyd loved to talk about himself.
It was funny. He was jumping, he was telling a lot of stories.
And then all of a sudden, he starts talking about how, um…
How good looking he was, and he's wearing a bus driver outfit
in… in Cherryville, North Carolina, and…
You know, he was the best bus driver in the world.
And he tells us that he meets a girl, Sandy.
She had just lost her three kids to the state.
And Scott asked probably one of the most brilliant questions.
He says, "What was your name at the time?"
Uh, Brandon Cleo Williams was the name he gave us.
[suspenseful music playing]
And that was something we had never heard before.
And when… when he gave that name, it gave us something.
And not only did he give us that name, he walked us even further
and gives us the…the person that he met,
how they got married.
He gave us the date.
He was able to give us the daughters' names
and even where the daughters were born.
So I said, "Who's the oldest?"
He goes, "Well, that's the one you're here asking about."
"Where was she born?" "Livonia, Michigan."
"How do you know this?" "I've seen the birth certificate."
He goes, "That's the girl you're looking. That's the girl you're here asking about."
I… I asked him,
"What… What was the oldest girl's name?"
And he, "Well, it was Suzanne Sevakis."
[nostalgic music playing]
[baby cooing]
[baby laughing]
[music fades]
They told me what her identity was, I sat there and it was just sort of, uh…
Oh, I wasn't in a trance. I was just…
just so delighted.
You know, I almost cried… [laughs]
…when I told that to him.
Oh shoot!
He goes, "We know her identity."
And he tells me her name's Suzanne Sevakis.
I was like,
"Holy shit!"
I don't think relief is the right word but that's kind of what I felt.
It was just like, it's over. Like we now know who she is.
[Scott] The next day, we get the birth certificate back.
And that birth certificate has her parents' names on it.
Sandra Brandenburg and Clifford Sevakis.
Oh, by the way, they're both still alive.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Sandra] The FBI showed up on the door.
And then they showed me Susie's picture, and I said, "That's my daughter."
"Do you know where she is?"
[gentle music playing]
She was very smart.
Very silly.
And very quick-witted.
I was 18 when I got pregnant and I was 19 when she was born.
I was 17 when I started dating.
Cliff and I were in high school together.
[Cliff] She was about two years younger than me.
But she was, uh, smart and funny,
and I was so smitten.
We were an item all the way through high school.
[Sandra] We got married right at the end of high school.
I got pregnant a few months after we got married.
I was excited.
I was happy.
And I… I couldn't wait for the baby to come.
He was in Vietnam when she was born.
It was hard.
[Cliff] I had an R&R for a week,
and that's when I saw Suzanne for the first time.
She was six months old.
It was a beautiful little cherub.
I was proud.
Your heart grows bigger when you have a child.
But, uh, when I went to Vietnam,
you leave the rest of the world behind and that's your whole world.
I was different when I got back and, uh, she was seeing another guy.
And that's when Sandy told me she wanted to divorce.
[Sandra] I had started seeing another man,
and I got pregnant with Allison and Amy.
But we got divorced.
And I moved the girls and I to a trailer in a mobile home park.
The mobile home park was like on a hill.
You know, the tornado hit out of the blue, I mean, and tipped my trailer sideways.
After the tornado, I had, I guess now they would call it PTSD.
I can remember,
at one point, sitting in the corner, in the living room, on the floor.
And… And the girls saying, "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!"
and I couldn't move.
I went to Social Services because I thought that's what you did to get help.
They… They took the children.
I remember telling her and crying,
"It's not safe. I can't take care of them."
The lady in the front of the Social Services office, she said,
"Honey, go to church. You'll feel better."
Department of Social Services called me up on the phone and said, uh.
"We want to adopt all three girls out to one family."
"They're attached to each other and we don't want to break up the set."
They gave me a choice, either adopt all three or give up all three.
It was pretty rough on me.
I spent a weekend
drinking too much and thinking about it too much.
And, uh, at the time, I was living with my parents,
I was unemployed.
I was, uh, 23 years old, I think.
And I just didn't think I was going to be a good parent, at that point.
I was still kind of messed up from Vietnam.
[bell tolling]
[Sandra] When I went to that church, I know I was crying,
'cause I was crying all the time, and I couldn't stop crying.
And that's where I met him.
He just came and sat down,
and he just started talking to me in… in a calm voice.
You know, "What's wrong?"
"God sent me here to help you."
He said, "We'll go get your children."
"We'll get married, and I'll take care of you and the children,
and everything will be all right."
After we were together, he would do things that were scary things.
Once I realized the situation I was in with him, I didn't know what to do.
And he… he had a knife that he carried all the time.
and he would reach down to his side where the knife was,
and he'd say, "Do you think you're going to leave me?"
That's not happening.
One time I needed to buy the girls' diapers.
I had written a bad check at 7-Eleven.
So I got 30 days in jail.
And that's when he took my children.
I went to the police station immediately
and told the police he had taken my children.
The police said, "Are you legally married to him?"
And I said, "Yes."
And the police said, "That's a civil thing you'll have to take care of yourself."
And I just kept getting louder and louder and louder,
and they escorted me out of the police station.
At some point, and I don't know when exactly,
he had taken Allison and Amy and dropped them off at the orphanage,
and took Susie and left.
[disturbing music playing]
You know, you can't go back and say,
"If I didn't…"
[sniffling]
"If I had found some way to get help."
"To get away from the whole situation, then it never would've happened."
And I was supposed to be her mother and protect her from that monster.
And I didn't.
I'm actually very angry at Sharon's mom.
I don't believe for one second that,
because this was back in the day, that she couldn't find her child.
I was taken in 1976.
And for almost five years, my mom contacted everyone.
Her Senator,
the Mayor, she went on TV.
She did everything she could.
And she wasn't an affluent person,
but she spent all of the money she could looking for me.
My mother did everything,
and I just want to know why.
Why didn't she try harder?
I'll be honest. I did reach out to her grandmother.
That didn't go well.
It's… It's that, "I don't care" attitude.
When you reach out to someone and they… they have no interest,
that, to me… mm-mm.
You don't care?
You don't want to know? What kind of person are you?
I… I just have a problem with that.
[wind whooshing]
[Matt] In 2003, when I was in Tulsa, and I went to visit the cemetery,
I thought, you know, "Wouldn't it be cool
to come back here one day and replace this headstone?"
It just had one name in it, Tonya. And that bothered me.
So after learning her identity,
we decided, you know, I spoke with Megan.
And I said, "Hey, you know, uh, let's do this."
Matt wanted my input on what should be written on the headstone.
And I was like, "Holy crap. That's a lot of responsibility."
She touched a lot of people in her life, and I wanted to make sure that
it showed that she was everything to everybody.
[bell tolling]
[minister] Father, I thank you for this opportunity.
And I pray that you'd bring the comfort, the strength, the heart
to the lives of those here.
Not only here today, but wherever they might be.
[somber music playing]
There she is.
[Matt] She was just 20 years old when she died in 1990.
And it wasn't until June 2017 that we could change her tombstone.
And finally, put her real name there.
[Megan] She was the definition of a friend to everyone.
The sound voice and the… the support system for people,
which is absolutely insane because she had none of that at home.
And she did it all with such poise.
[somber music continues]
[Lynn] She finally had the memorial service that she deserved.
That put a semicolon, for me, on there.
And, finally, she's at rest.
But she's still alive in my heart.
And when I go, maybe that's when the period is. [chuckles]
[Jenny] It was, um, beautiful.
It was… It was wonderful to find out who she was.
Um, I remember just,
"Girl, I got your back," you know?
[Cliff] One of the things that got me most was that she never knew who she was.
Knowing the people that were part of her life really helped me out.
'Cause they don't have such positive memories of her.
You get the feeling that, at times, she was, uh,
making the most of the life she had.
I was excited… excited that…
[inhales deeply, clears throat]
…we put her name on a tombstone and it's her.
[Joe] It was important to all of us, you know, it was…
This was who she really was. This is really her dad.
This is their daughter, you know?
Here's where she is, here's where she lies,
and here's what her true name is.
Sheriff, just thank you.
I got so many new relationships and more family than I needed.
[all laugh]
And I hope I can be half the mom that she was or wanted to be.
Becoming a parent gave me even more respect for my birth mother
because she gave up two children,
if not more,
knowing that it was better for the kids.
My son is named Michael. He's named after my brother.
Michael didn't get to live out his name and I wanted that name to keep going.
What I can do is, I can't talk to Suzanne, but I can talk to Megan.
[solemn music playing]
And that will… that will do.
[Megan] So I'm trying to figure out me,
but I know that this story is going to help somebody.
I just got to figure out all the pieces and how it shaped me,
And then I know I'm gonna be able to share this.
[Heather] I just know that she had a chance.
She would have been one of those persons
that would have been able to overcome what happened to her.
If she had just gotten away from him,
she would have been an amazing survivor.
She had so much potential.
She had something to offer the world.
She really had a gift, and…
that's how I'll always remember her.
[solemn music continues]
[gentle music playing]