Franklin Delano Floyd

• 1. Introduction

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  Franklin Delano Floyd died of natural causes on the 23rd of January 2023, at the age of 79, while still on death row. He was an American murderer and child sex offender, and he spent most of his life moving under borrowed names. For years, nobody could say who the woman known as Sharon Marshall really was. Nobody could say where a child linked to her had ended up. A journalist, federal agents and a film crew all spent years pulling at the same tangle of lies. This documentary asks how the false identities held for so long, and what finally broke them.

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• 2. Orphanage Years

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  Franklin Delano Floyd was born on the 17th of June 1943 in Barnesville, Georgia, the youngest of five children of Thomas and Della Floyd. His father, a cotton mill worker and an alcoholic, died of kidney and liver failure at age 32. Della was suddenly a widow at 28. She moved her children into a small apartment with her own parents, but by 1946 the grandparents could not manage the crowded household and asked them all to leave.

  The Lamar County child welfare agency advised sending the children to the Georgia Baptist Children's Home in Hapeville. Floyd was allegedly bullied there for being "feminine". He later said older boys sexually assaulted him on a regular basis. Staff were harsh as well, and as a teenager he had his hand dipped in hot water as punishment.

  In 1959, Floyd ran away from the home and broke into a nearby house to steal food. The home reached his sister Dorothy, who was married with two children and living in North Carolina. Staff told her that charges would be dropped if she took her brother in. She later threw him out, and he went to Indianapolis to look for his mother.

  Della, he learned, had become a sex worker. She helped him forge legal papers so he could travel to California and enlist in the United States Army. Six months into his service, the Army discharged him after finding that he was underage and that his papers were false. Floyd could not find his mother again and drifted across the country. Della died on the 2nd of July 1968.

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• 3. Prisons and Escapes

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  On the 19th of February 1960, at age 16, Floyd broke into a Sears department store in Inglewood, California, hoping to steal a gun. A burglar alarm brought police quickly, and a shootout followed. Floyd was hit in the stomach but survived emergency surgery. He then spent a year in a youth institution. In 1961 he was arrested for violating his parole by taking a fishing trip to Canada with a friend.

  In May 1962, Floyd went back to Hapeville and took a job at Atlanta International Airport. The following month he abducted a four-year-old girl from a local bowling alley and sexually assaulted her in nearby woods. He was convicted of kidnapping and child molestation and sentenced to ten to twenty years at the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville. That November he was moved to Milledgeville State Hospital for psychiatric testing.

  A medical errand in 1963 gave Floyd his chance to escape. He fled to Macon and robbed more than $6,000 from a branch of the Citizens & Southern National Bank. After his conviction he was sent to the Federal Reformatory in Chillicothe, Ohio. A second escape attempt got him transferred to the United States Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. There other inmates repeatedly raped him, and at one point he climbed onto a roof and threatened to kill himself. Later stops included the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. In 1968 he returned to the Georgia State Prison, where he befriended a fellow inmate named David Dial.

  Floyd left prison in November 1972 and went to a halfway house. On the 27th of January 1973, a week after leaving the halfway house, he approached a woman at a gas station. He forced her into her own car and tried to sexually assault her. She escaped and Floyd was arrested. Dial, by then also free, posted his bond. Floyd skipped his hearing on the 11th of June 1973 and became a fugitive.

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• 4. A Stolen Family

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  By 1974, Floyd was using the alias Brandon Williams when he met Sandra Francis Brandenburg, born Chipman, at a truck stop in North Carolina. She had four children by two fathers. Suzanne Marie Sevakis, born in 1969, was the daughter of her first husband, Clifford Ray Sevakis. Allison, born in 1971, Amy, born in 1972, and Philip, nicknamed Stevie, born in 1974, were children of her second husband.

  In the Netflix documentary Girl in the Picture, Brandenburg described meeting Floyd in a church. She was crying, and he came over to ask what was wrong. She told him she might lose her children. Floyd offered to marry her and become their father, and she accepted. They dated for a month before marrying, and he persuaded her to move the family to Dallas, Texas.

  In 1975, Brandenburg was sentenced to thirty days in jail for passing bad checks. She left her children in Floyd's custody. When she was released, she came home to an empty residence, and both her husband and her children were gone. She eventually found Allison and Amy in the care of a church-run social services group. She never found Suzanne or Philip. When she tried to file kidnapping charges, local authorities told her that a stepfather had the right to take the children.

  Allison later said that her mother first claimed Philip was dead. Their mother then learned from Social Services that he was alive and had been privately adopted in North Carolina soon after birth. In March 2019, a man named Steven Patterson contacted the author Matt Birkbeck after his father died. He wanted answers about his biological parents. A DNA test in 2020 confirmed that he was Brandenburg's son.

  Patterson said he was born and raised in North Carolina by adoptive parents. His mother, Mary, had met a pregnant Brandenburg in a hospital just after Mary lost a pregnancy of her own. Weeks later, Brandenburg appeared at Mary's door with a baby boy. She said she was leaving town with her new husband and three daughters and could not care for a fourth child. Mary remembered Floyd standing by and watching as the baby changed hands. She renamed the boy Steven. This differs from the earlier belief that the infant vanished along with his sisters. As of 2018, Brandenburg was known as Sandra Willett.

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• 5. Becoming Sharon Marshall

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  In 1986, a young woman living as Sharon Marshall graduated from Forest Park High School in Forest Park, Georgia. She was really Suzanne Sevakis, and Floyd was living nearby as Warren Marshall. She won a full scholarship to the Georgia Institute of Technology to study aerospace engineering. She told a friend that she was pregnant and that her "father", Warren, would not let her go to college. She gave birth, and the child was placed for adoption.

  The pair then moved to Tampa, Florida, where she began work as an exotic dancer. She became pregnant again and gave birth to Michael Anthony Hughes in 1988. In 1989 she and Floyd were married in New Orleans. By then they were using the aliases Clarence Marcus Hughes and Tonya Dawn Tadlock, and the certificate names her Tonya Dawn Hughes. Years later it emerged that she had given birth to a daughter while living in New Orleans. That child, named Megan, was also placed for adoption.

  By late 1989 the couple lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she danced at a strip club. A fellow dancer named Karen Parsley urged her to leave Floyd, whom she described as domineering. Sevakis answered that he would kill her and her son if she tried. Floyd had joined the Fraternal Order of Police even though he was not an officer. He told her his connections would let him track her down.

  By April 1990, Sevakis had made up her mind to run. She planned to leave with Kevin Brown, a college student she was seeing in secret, and to take Michael with her. That same month, three passers-by found her lying beside a highway one hundred miles outside Oklahoma City, with groceries scattered around her. Police concluded that a car had struck her from behind as she walked from a convenience store toward a Motel 6. She was taken to Presbyterian Hospital in Oklahoma City with severe bruises and a large hematoma at the base of her skull, and she died there.

  Floyd reached the hospital the next day. He told police he had fallen asleep at the Motel 6 after she went out for groceries. Investigators treated him as the lead suspect in her death.

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• 6. The Missing Boy

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  Michael's foster parents gave authorities a detailed picture of the boy who arrived in their home after Sevakis died. Floyd had placed him in foster care and left Oklahoma. He had limited muscle control, did not speak, and often fell into hysterical fits at first. Over time he made remarkable progress. In 1994 the foster parents began adoption proceedings.

  Six months after placing Michael, Floyd was arrested on a parole violation. As part of the adoption process, officials compared Michael's DNA with Floyd's to settle the question of paternity. They found that Floyd was not Michael's biological father. Once he was out of jail, Floyd tried to win custody anyway. His criminal record and the lack of any biological tie led to a denial.

  On the 12th of September 1994, Michael was a first grader at Indian Meridian Elementary School in Choctaw, Oklahoma. Floyd walked in and, at gunpoint, forced Principal James Davis to lead him to Michael's classroom. He marched the boy and the principal out to his pickup truck. In a wooded area, Floyd made Davis get out and handcuffed him to a tree. Then he drove off with the six-year-old. Davis survived and was rescued.

  Two months afterward, police arrested Floyd in Louisville, Kentucky. Michael was not with him and was never seen again. The reports reaching authorities contradicted one another. According to some witnesses, Floyd told his sister and others that he drowned the boy in a motel bathtub in Georgia, shortly after the kidnapping. Another person said he watched Floyd bury the body in a cemetery. Others reported that Floyd claimed Michael was alive and safe, though he would not say where or with whom.

  In a 2014 interview with the FBI, Floyd admitted he had killed Michael on the day of the kidnapping, shooting him twice in the back of the head. In September 2014 he said he had left the body on Interstate 35. A search of the area found nothing. Police believe wild hogs may have eaten the remains.

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• 7. Photographs in the Truck

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  In March 1995, a mechanic in Kansas found a large envelope wedged between the truck bed and the top of the gas tank of a truck he had bought at auction. Inside were 97 photographs, many of them showing a woman who was bound and badly beaten. Police traced the truck to Floyd. He had stolen it in Oklahoma in September 1994 and abandoned it in Texas the following month.

  The woman in the pictures was soon linked to Cheryl Ann Commesso, an 18-year-old exotic dancer who vanished in 1989. She had worked at the same club as Sevakis. Coworkers saw an altercation outside the club between Floyd and Commesso. Floyd accused her of reporting Sevakis for misstating her income, which cost Sevakis her government benefits. One coworker said Floyd punched Commesso in the face. Floyd and Sevakis left for Oklahoma soon after she disappeared, and their trailer later burned to the ground. The fire was ruled deliberate arson.

  A landscaper found skeletal remains in 1995 in an area off Interstate 275 in Pinellas County, Florida. They were listed as a Jane Doe for a year before being identified as Commesso. An archeologist determined that she died from a beating and two gunshots to the head. Investigators compared the clothing in the photographs with items found with her remains, and the garments were similar. The medical examiner found that an injury visible in one photograph matched her cheekbone. Many images also showed furniture and belongings identified as coming from the destroyed trailer.

  Other photographs in the envelope documented Sevakis herself. They showed sexual abuse beginning early in her childhood, with images of her in explicit poses starting around age four. This material would later help show that the woman called Sharon Marshall had been taken as a child and raised as Floyd's daughter.

  In 2001, while Floyd awaited trial, Judge Nancy Ley ruled him incompetent and ordered another mental evaluation. Floyd fought that finding and insisted he was competent. Several months later the judge reversed herself and ordered him to stand trial. The jury convicted him of first degree murder on the strength of the photographic evidence, and he was sentenced to death.

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• 8. Finding Sharon

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  Matt Birkbeck, an investigative journalist, published the book A Beautiful Child in 2004. It brought the story of Franklin Floyd and the unnamed Sharon Marshall to a wide audience. It also led to the discovery of the daughter who had been placed for adoption in 1989. Interest in the mystery spread around the world, and in 2011 the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the FBI reopened the case.

  In 2014, two FBI agents sat down with Floyd. In that interview he gave up Sharon's real name, which was Suzanne Sevakis. Investigators then confirmed that she was the daughter of a woman Floyd had briefly married. In 2018, Birkbeck followed up with a memoir, Finding Sharon, about the events that unfolded after A Beautiful Child and the search that ended in her name.

  Girl in the Picture, a Netflix original documentary about Sharon Marshall and Franklin Floyd, first aired in July 2022. Skye Borgman directed it, basing it on Birkbeck's two books, and Birkbeck served as executive producer. The film included interviews with many people from the story, among them the biological parents of Suzanne Sevakis. It was an instant hit and spent several weeks as Netflix's most-watched movie worldwide. It earned a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The film reached audiences about six months before Floyd died.

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