A so-called father’s obsession with his son turns deadly as the true nature of his crimes and aliases become clear. When the shocking past of federal fugitive, Franklin Floyd intersects with a Jane Doe mystery, an avalanche of secrets are revealed. With it, a resolution of the Sharon Marshall mystery seems closer than ever.
A so-called father’s obsession with his son turns deadly as the true nature of his crimes and aliases become clear. When the shocking past of federal fugitive, Franklin Floyd intersects with a Jane Doe mystery, an avalanche of secrets are revealed. With it, a resolution of the Sharon Marshall mystery seems closer than ever.
Girl in the Picture Podcast is a companion to the documentary coming to Netflix on July 6, 2022. The podcast is a standalone audio documentary and can be listened to before or after watching the film. If you are hoping to avoid spoilers, we recommend watching the film before listening to episode 3.
Girl in the Picture Podcast is brought to you by Netflix and Main Event Media.
Narrator: Skye Borgman
Writer and Producer: Anna Priestland
Executive Producers: Emily Bon and Jimmy Fox for Main Event Media, Skye Borgman and Matt Birkbeck.
Sound Editor: Joel Porter
Sound Designer and Mixer: Reed Thomas Lawrence
Original Music Composition by: Jimmy Stofer
Based on the books “A Beautiful Child" and “Finding Sharon” by Matt Birkbeck.
Special Thanks: Ashley Rodriguez, Joe Fitzpatrick, Billy Carter, Merle Bean, Jenny Fisher, Robert Schock, Dr Anthony Falsetti, and Heather Lane
If you are in need of support on any of the issues related to this podcast, please reach out to someone.
If you need to talk with someone, but aren't sure which service is best for you, Victim Connect Resource Center can help you.
The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN)
1-800-656-HOPE (4673)
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 or
or online using a safe computer at www.thehotline.org
National Sexual Violence Resource Centre
National Human Trafficking Hotline
Hotline: 1-888-373-7888
Text: 233733
ChildHelp National Child Abuse Hotline
Hotline: 1 (800) 422 – 4453
Available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week via phone and text.
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
Hotline: 1 (800) 843 – 5678
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
Hotline: 1-800-273-8255
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)
Hotline: 1 (800) 662 – 4357
[00:00:00]
SKYE: This podcast contains content which may be upsetting or triggering to some listeners. Please check the show notes for resources should you need to reach out to someone.
[siren wailing]
[helicopter whirring]
[dogs barking]
[00:00:39]
ASHLEY: I felt like I knew Sharon and I felt like it was somebody maybe I went to school with. I work in this field, and I've seen and read a lot of really horrific things in other cases but her story, knowing the tragic and horrific life she lived every single day and the fact that she was still able to keep her composure and her compassion and her humanity to everyone else outside the home, I was just touched by that and touched by her story.
[00:01:09]
I just wanted to figure out what we could do to try to find some answers.
SKYE: At the end of episode three of "Girl in the Picture," four years had passed since Tonya's death.
[00:01:37]
Clarence, or Floyd, knowing police had discovered his real name, left Michael in foster care and fled. He knew they were after him for the 1973 charge where he attacked and tried to kidnap the woman in Georgia. Authorities were aware that the names Clarence and Tonya were aliases but still believed that Tonya had just been Floyd's wife.
[00:02:03]
They had no idea yet about Warren and Sharon Marshall, the boat insurance fraud, or the trailer park fire. A few months after Tonya's death, Floyd was arrested but he would only serve four years before being released on parole again. His attempts at regaining custody of Michael had backfired.
[00:02:25]
And by the time he was let out of prison, Michael was six and about to be adopted by Merle and Ernest Bean in Choctaw, Oklahoma. Floyd knew he was about to lose him forever.
JOE: I was seated at my desk. I was talking to another agent.
[00:02:45]
And I told him, "I'm praying for something big to happen. You know, it's been a little monotonous here lately." Not knowing that the phone was gonna ring and neither one of us was gonna get home that night.
SKYE: That's retired FBI Special Agent Joe Fitzpatrick. We heard from Joe in episode three as he learned about Floyd's identity. And Joe would go on to be the lead Special Agent on the case.
[00:03:12]
JOE: When my phone rang and on the other end of the line was Billy Carter with the Choctaw Police Department. And Billy advised me that they'd had a kidnapping at the Choctaw Elementary School.
SKYE: Billy Carter was Choctaw's Assistant Chief of Police in 1994 when a call came in.
[00:03:34]
James Davis, the principal of the local Indian Meridian Elementary School, had been found bound and handcuffed to a tree on the side of a dead-end road.
BILLY: We got Mr. Davis back to the office. And we began to interview with him about exactly how things went down at the school. You know, it just seemed like it was such a normal morning for him. He was already in a meeting.
[00:03:58]
And then a man walked in, and he asked to see the principal, Mr. Davis, and then had a seat. He actually pulled a gun partially out of his pocket and said, "I'm gonna get Michael, and you're gonna help me do that."
[00:04:13]
So they walked to the classroom and Mr. Davis asked the teacher to send Michael out and kidnapped Michael from the school along with the principal and then just went into this immediate story that he had been grieving for his son, he was there to get his son, and it was gonna happen, even if he had to die doing it.
SKYE: Floyd walked Principal Davis and Michael out of the school and demanded that they all get in the principal's truck.
[00:04:43]
Billy says that Davis had no way of safely letting anyone know that something was wrong, so staff, not realizing what had happened, did not make a call to police.
BILLY: Franklin Floyd gave all the directions, said, "We're gonna walk you out here, we're gonna sit in your truck" that passed the home of the Bean family who was the foster parents to Michael at the time. And then Mr. Davis was instructed to turn a little ways to a dirt road.
[00:05:12]
And stopped it eventually, told Michael that he was gonna get out and look for his dog. Mr. Davis was walked about 40 to 50 yards into the wood line and was basically handcuffed to a tree at that point and then duct taped around his face and mouth. After a period of time, enough sweat had built up, enough movement.
[00:05:32]
He was--part of the tape was actually able to come off of his mouth, and then he would start yelling. Four hours in the heat, no water, you know, it's just luck that someone was close enough that could hear him. Had he'd been maybe another 100 yards into those woods, maybe he would have never been heard.
SKYE: By the time Billy and the Choctaw Police knew Michael had been abducted, more than three hours had passed since Floyd had fled the scene with him.
[00:06:01]
And the Beans? They didn't know Michael was missing until later in the day.
MERLE: I was at the dentist. And Ernest was home with the rest of the kids. He was off that day. And the school called Ernest and they said, "Can you tell me who Michael's caseworker is?"
[00:06:25]
And we got a call from the police and said, "Michael's been kidnapped, you need to come to the police station." And so I sped home from the dentist. And we went up to Choctaw Police and started things rollin'.
BILLY: They immediately knew or suspected what had happened and knew pretty much who it was. They were shocked that it did happen but not shocked at who did it.
[00:06:52]
Ernest, at the time, told me it was more than likely Franklin Floyd. So with that name, we started those phone calls and found out that he had some pending charges in Oklahoma City. He also was lived in a federal halfway house. We were just trying to find out who this guy was and how do we run him down, how do we catch him.
SKYE: Merle had called Social Services a couple of times previously, warning them that she thought something was going to happen to Michael.
[00:07:20]
And each time she did, she was told she was being paranoid.
MERLE: I was so mad at DHS. I said, "If you just would have listened. That was my thought, "If you just would have listened." The director of DHS in charge of media would not let us go public for two months after his kidnapping.
[00:07:45]
And he said, "If it was any other child, if it was your biological child, that you'd be on it in a heartbeat and you'd have that out in the public. You know, 'this is my child, he's kidnapped, get them back,' you know, plea from Michael's return." But with it being a DHS child, we didn't have that opportunity.
[00:08:12]
SKYE: Because Michael was in foster care, allowing his foster parents to personally hit the media straightaway may have impacted or violated state regulations and privacy laws and could have been detrimental if the case went to trial. In some cases, and this wasn't the case for Michael, state laws can even prevent law enforcement or foster families from sending out pictures or even a name. Luckily, Michael's details and photo went out to other police precincts and media outlets that night.
[00:08:41]
His photo hit the papers and the news stations right away, something not all foster kids who went missing at the time were afforded. But Merle feels that if she and Ernest were allowed to make a public plea for help, they may have been able to get more attention. Meanwhile, Billy Carter was learning that the criminal they were dealing with was one of America's most wanted.
BILLY: He's in a halfway house. Look at this record. You know, he should be--she should have been in prison a long time ago for a long time.
[00:09:11]
You know, it showed him being picked up on the parole violation, and then six months later, back out on parole. I'm like, "Okay, you arrested him because he violated parole. And now he's back on the streets again." And of course, that's the court system doing that. That's not the police. Those are things we don't have control over. But yeah, when I saw his record and the different types of crimes, I knew this guy had to be a very violent person was number one.
[00:09:38]
I mean, bank robberies, shootouts, attacking women. I mean, this guy was gonna be violent, no doubt. Catching him might be tricky. That eventually was one of the reasons why we did contact the FBI. So we knew that Michael probably was not going to be in Oklahoma. The truck was gone. Michael was gone. So that's when they stepped in and they decided they were going to take jurisdiction of the case.
[00:10:08]
JOE: We had a real problem. In kidnappings, you want to make the recovery in the first 48 hours. If you don't, your chances go down drastically. This was a little different case because he's claiming to be the parent, claiming the boy is his. So that gives you a little leeway thinking that, you know, you got more time.
SKYE: When the investigation began, the theory was that Floyd wouldn't harm Michael.
[00:10:38]
Principal Davis said that during the abduction, Michael seemed happy in Floyd's presence and not in any distress. But at the 48-hour mark, with no leads or sightings, this theory changed. Joe had discovered more about Floyd's past. After his release from prison, Floyd had gone to Oklahoma City where he got a job as a maintenance worker at an apartment building. He broke into a woman's home, attacked her with a knife, and attempted to rape her.
[00:11:08]
He was arrested, charged, and although, he was already on parole, he was granted bail again. They could no longer assume that Michael wasn't in physical danger.
JOE: We contacted behavioral science division of the FBI.
[00:11:27]
And I was informed I probably had about a week to find Michael. Said, "After a week, Floyd would most likely get tired of the boy and he'd become a liability and he would kill him."
SKYE: Keeping Michael was never a viable option for Floyd. He was going to be seen with him and people would begin asking questions.
JOE: He's gonna get caught. Floyd's gonna get caught with the boy. He's growing up. He's gotta go to school.
[00:11:55]
He's gotta be around in public, and they're already looking for him for kidnapping. So having Michael around was a bad situation for Floyd to be in. We knew we had to act and act fast. This was the only real pressure I felt in this investigation, the time factor.
SKYE: They had APBs out on the principal's truck.
[00:12:21]
But having lost four hours, everyone knew they had time to cross state lines. They could have been in Texas or Arkansas easily, possibly Kansas. Floyd could have even changed the license plates. It wouldn't be for another eight years that the AMBER Alert system would be implemented across a greater part of the United States. But this was before that time, before gas station CCTV or GPS car tracking.
[00:12:48]
The local news pushed out as much information as they could, and "America's Most Wanted" would feature Michael's kidnapping twice.
[00:12:57]
JOE: The file we got at the halfway house had his probation officer's report, everything, parking, being sent to prison. We took everybody that he had been associated with and listed his correspondence to the prison, and we sent agents out and interviewed everybody we could find that knew him in any form or fashion.
[00:13:27]
SKYE: Seven days into the hunt for Floyd and agents were spread out across the cities they knew he had lived. One agent was in Oklahoma City, knocking on doors of the neighborhood Floyd had lived in as far back as 1975.
JOE: One of the agents had talked to a neighbor who produced a photograph of Franklin Floyd with a little blonde girl sitting on his lap. She was five to six years of age.
[00:13:55]
And we knew that this wasn't right, Floyd wouldn't have a five- or six-year-old girl that was actually his. We looked at the photograph, and the resemblance was overwhelming. We took a photograph we had in the office of a girl we knew to be Tonya. And we compared it with the photograph that the agent brought in.
[00:14:23]
It was obvious that this picture of this little girl and the pictures of Tonya, they were the same person. We started looking at the timeline, and Tonya was 20 years old when she died in 1990, which means she would have been born around 1969 or 1970.
[00:14:44]
Floyd was in prison from 1963 to 1972. Which means it's physically impossible for the child to belong to Floyd. Floyd had a history of kidnapping. He kidnapped somebody in 1960. He kidnapped Michael. At this point, we felt pretty confident that he had kidnapped this five-, six-year-old girl and her real name wasn't Tonya Hughes.
[00:15:14]
SKYE: Joe and his team had realized the girl in the picture was Tonya or Sharon, but they didn't know her true identity. They were certain she was not someone Floyd had met and married as an adult. They knew she had been with him since she was a young child. Franklin Floyd's criminal file had opened up the case in unexpected ways. As Joe Fitzpatrick says, he looks at someone's past in order to predict where they will go.
[00:15:43]
He could see from Floyd's early life that committing crimes, getting caught, and receiving lenient sentences had been a pattern throughout his entire life. Most disturbingly, Floyd had been convicted of abducting, beating, and raping a four-year-old girl in Hapeville, Georgia, in 1961. While serving 20 years at Reidsville State Prison, he was in and out of the psychiatric hospital, where he sometimes spent months at a time.
[00:16:11]
He escaped from prison twice. The first time, he held up a bank. And during the second, he stole the prison firetruck. These escapes added time to his sentence, but in the end, he was still paroled after spending just ten years in prison, half his original sentence. Prison psychiatrists would consistently note that Floyd's upbringing had major effects on his life and many sympathized with him.
[00:16:38]
Like, when he kept getting access to Michael, psychiatrists and care workers often sided with him, believing he was a decent person whose upbringing and abuse in state care had greatly contributed to his life of crime. But he had learned from a young age how to use the sympathy he received to manipulate his situation. As a baby, Floyd and his siblings were handed over to the Hapeville Baptist Children's Home, just north of Atlanta. His father had died.
[00:17:07]
And when his mother turned to alcohol, she could no longer care for them. According to reports, he was tortured and sexually abused before running away from the home. In Floyd's late teens, just before attacking the four-year-old girl, he drifted across the country, arriving in California in 1960. With no prospects, no family, and violent tendencies, he broke into a Sears store where he stole a suit and a gun.
[00:17:34]
When he was caught, he shot and injured a police officer. He was too young for prison, so he was sent to a notoriously violent reform school. Because of the number of aliases Floyd created following this, the scope of his background had been hidden for decades, and it wasn't until 1994, until this point in the investigation, that the true picture had emerged of who Franklin Floyd really was.
[00:18:02]
And it would be that photograph of a little girl from 1975, kept by a neighbor, that would paint the most detailed picture of all.
JOE: When I looked at the picture and saw what we had, it added more depth to the horror of the case, you know, 'cause nothing could be good about this.
[00:18:32]
The behavioral science agent told me, he said, "That's a picture of an abused child. She looks oppressed. She's down. She's not smiling." But the first reaction when I saw it was, "Oh, my God. He's taken her too." I contacted all the driver's license agencies to put a stop on his name and aliases.
[00:18:58]
I figure he'd go to the places he'd been before, Phoenix, Florida, Georgia, and Kentucky
SKYE: In early November 1994, two months after Michael's kidnapping, Joe boarded a plane to make an arrest.
JOE: I get a call advising me that he's applied for a driver's license, and it was to be delivered to Louisville, Kentucky.
SKYE: Floyd had gone back to a place that felt familiar, Louisville.
[00:19:27]
He had lived there with Sharon when she was between 10 and 12 years old. They'd also gone back there to visit while living in Florida, the time Sharon was found unconscious in the car. Joe and six FBI agents from Louisville arrived at the used car dealership where Floyd was working. One agent, dressed as a driver, walked in to deliver Franklin Floyd his fake license.
JOE: Floyd actually came out and agents surrounded him and took him into custody at that time.
[00:19:57]
Sitting next to him in the backseat of the car, it was a good feeling that you now had him under arrest. I did the interview myself. I asked him, first of all, where Michael was, and he, of course, made a story up about that.
[00:20:19]
He claimed Michael's still alive and he put him with some rich person that was taking care of him and kid's doing real well. We talked about Michael's mother. He claimed he rescued her and that he was running with her because the mafia was after her.
[00:20:45]
There was things that he would say that no one would believe. One of the first things I did was show him the photograph of him and the little girl. He looked at me and says, "That doesn't bother me." Oh, well, I knew it had to bother him.
[00:21:08]
You know, he went back to the neighbor and asked to have that photograph back. He knew that it was--it was incriminating. At that point, no one had seen the boy. In fact, the agent out of--in Louisville says, "Joe, the boy's dead."
[00:21:35]
I said, "I know that."
SKYE: After Floyd's arrest, Principal Davis's truck was found just over the Texas border, but a search of both sides of the highway came up with nothing. By this point, Joe had uncovered information about the days following the kidnapping. Immediately following the abduction, Floyd drove to Atlanta with Michael, checking into a Fulton motel under yet another alias and stayed for eight nights.
[00:22:05]
Billy thinks that Floyd killed Michael somewhere between that motel and the Texas border. Joe's theory is that Floyd killed Michael in Atlanta, possibly in the motel. Either way, when Floyd checks out of the motel, Michael is no longer with him.
JOE: I don't think that he killed him without some feeling or some remorse. No.
[00:22:30]
What we have is, in Atlanta, Georgia, they were staying at a motel. Floyd answers a newspaper ad for a car for sale from a lady, sets up an appointment, looked at the car, assaults the lady, takes the car.
[00:22:56]
The next day, he checks out of the motel and checks himself into Grady Memorial Hospital in the psychiatric ward. Something really bothered him.
SKYE: The file for Floyd's voluntary stay in the Grady Memorial psychiatric ward is closed. The FBI says he told doctors he couldn't cope with his wife's death, but we may never know the truth. Perhaps he was just hiding.
[00:23:25]
The woman whose car he stole had escaped and eventually the vehicle was found and handed over to police.
JOE: The FBI in Atlanta takes the woman's car, puts a cadaver dog on the car and the cadaver dog keyed on the trunk. As strong as indication as it can give, it jumped in the trunk, which is unusual unless it's a strong indication.
[00:23:52]
So we logically say, he assaults the lady, has the car, he now has a way to get rid of Michael, puts Michael in the trunk, and after he kills him, checks into the psychiatric ward at the hospital.
SKYE: This is why Joe believes Michael was killed in Atlanta. But a cadaver dog signaling to the trunk, it just wasn't enough to prove murder.
[00:24:18]
But the FBI was about to get an unexpected tip and hear the name Sharon Marshall for the first time. After Floyd's arrest made national news, Jenny received a call from her mom. She had seen a report about Michael requesting information about his mother Tonya.
[00:24:39]
JENNY: My mom told me that night, she said, "Jenny, not only is she dead, but she's not who you think she is. And we don't know her identity. Her name Sharon is not her name. And the FBI is looking for anybody that has information on who--on her identity." I called the FBI. I called the hotline. And I said there was a news report in Atlanta about a girl named Tonya. I know who she is. Her name's Sharon Marshall."
[00:25:08]
"She was my high school best friend. And the little boy that's missing, that's Michael and he's my godson." And they said, "We're gonna fly you up here the next day." And I sat and talked with them for hours. And they said, "Well, we understand that she's a street prostitute and this is--this little boy that's missing is this man's son." And I'm like, "What?"
[00:25:36]
You know, I'm like, "No. No, she's not a prostitute. She's a waitress. They thought this was his wife." They said, "They're married." And I'm like, "No, that's her father." We had a portrait of very different people of who Sharon was and trying to reconcile what was going on. My life was never the same.
[00:26:04]
SKYE: A federal grand jury returned a seven-count indictment against Franklin Floyd including charges of kidnapping and the use of a firearm. But without a body, there was no murder charge. If convicted, Floyd faced a life in prison. Through witnesses like Jenny, prosecutors were able to piece Sharon's life together back through high school.
[00:26:28]
The story they presented at trial was that, shortly after going on the run in 1973, Floyd met a young mother named Linda Williams and her daughter Sharon. They believed that after Linda refused to marry him, he disappeared with Sharon, raising her as his own daughter. The problem they faced was that they had never been able to find any record of Sharon or Linda Williams. Most people heard that Sharon's mom died of cancer, but Sharon told Jenny something entirely different.
[00:26:58]
Coincidentally, the story Jenny was told was that Linda Marshall died in a hit and run accident.
JENNY: The hardest thing was having to face him in court, to testify with him sitting right there. And I looked right in the face and I said, "You were her daddy. She called you daddy. You were her father." His attorney just threw her papers up in the air. There was nothing they could do 'cause he was trying to write her off as just some girl he met and married.
[00:27:28]
And I said, "You raised her as your child. And then you married her." I mean, I'm on the on the stand saying this. And it blew his case out of the water.
SKYE: The day the kidnapping trial began in Oklahoma, police in Tampa, Florida, made a grim discovery that would nail Floyd for good. Bob Schock was with the homicide division when he was called to a crime scene off the Interstate near Clearwater Airport.
[00:27:58]
BOB: Part of the Interstate I-275 has a period of time where they send workers in to clear it out and to drain it because of the rainy season that we have. One of the workers had to use the bathroom and he discovered a skull.
SKYE: Bob says, "When he called the medical examiner's office, they told him they weren't coming out to the scene unless he found more remains." So Bob and his team were forced to start combing the scene themselves.
BOB: We found various pieces of evidence.
[00:28:27]
There was a shirt that was striped black, red, and white. It was actually tied into knots, which indicated to me suspicious activity or foul play. And each hand had artificial fingernails. And one of the artificial fingernails had a rhinestone on it.
SKYE: Bob was assigned lead detective on the case, and the remains were labeled "Jane Doe I-275."
[00:28:54]
Until scientific identification and dating was completed, it was presumed the remains were three years old and female. Cause of death? Unknown. This is where a team of forensic anthropologists came in. Dr. Anthony Falsetti was the director of the Human Identification Laboratory at the University of Florida.
ANTHONY: There was some evidence of trauma to the face, broken bones, as well as evidence of gunshot wounds to the head.
[00:29:24]
And so you have a relatively young person, who happens to be female, you know, you eliminate evidence of injury from a car accident. And at the same time, you have evidence of gunshot wounds and trauma to the face, you know, and immediately, that changes your thinking, you know? I mean, at this point, it's a homicide. What else can we learn from this individual that's gonna help identify them?
[00:29:53]
SKYE: Here in Tampa, Florida, they had a murder victim, a young woman with multiple injuries including a gunshot wound to the head and face.
BOB: As a homicide detective, you always would like to know right off the bat who the victim is because, in most cases, if you know who the victim is, there's a good idea you have a link between the victim and the person who is responsible for their death. This case we had not a clue who the victim was. So we were kind of running backwards.
[00:30:18]
We cleaned up the rings, the fingernail with the rhinestone, the shirt, the pants, there was a bathing suit top that we also found. After we got all the evidence that the media released, then we started focusing on any missing person cases that we could get from a timeframe that was one to five years. We did find one breast implant, we determined we had a female, young age, bathing suit.
[00:30:46]
We thought possibilities could exist that it was someone that liked the water but also possibility of being some type of adult exotic dancer.
SKYE: When Bob and his team tracked down the manufacturer of the striped shirt the victim was wearing, they found it was made and sold in the late 1980s. The anthropologists had also completed a closer examination.
[00:31:10]
Looking at the plants that had grown up through the skeletal remains, they were able to put the year of death closer to five years earlier, not three as they had previously predicted. The year of death was now estimated to be 1990.
ANTHONY: So once that happened, then law enforcement started looking farther back in time and that's when several possibilities of who it could be, you know, came up.
BOB: The breast implant itself did have a lot number.
[00:31:38]
We were able to go through a company that made that breast implant, and they were able to let us know what doctor that lot number belonged to.
SKYE: While the Jane Doe I-275 investigation was underway in Florida, Franklin Floyd's trial for the kidnapping of Michael ended in a conviction. Although Floyd didn't get life, the judge sentenced him to 52 years without parole.
[00:32:06]
He was never getting out of prison. The principal's truck, which had been found parked just over the Texas border after Floyd's arrest had been purchased at an auction and made its way to a mechanic in Kansas City for repairs. As the mechanic was wiring a harness for a trailer, he noticed something attached to the gas tank, a small package wrapped tightly in masking tape. He removed it.
[00:32:32]
Inside, he found 97 photographs, mostly children ranging between the ages of 8 to 15 in various stages of undress and explicit poses.
JOE: While I was in trial, I got a call from the OSBI, Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, advised me they had photographs that had been recovered from the undercarriage of Principal Davis's truck.
[00:32:59]
They were almost all obscene. Included in these photographs was some photographs of Sharon when she was small. And then he had some as she got older. And the only person in the world that would have possession of these photographs, have taken these photographs would have been Floyd 'cause he was the only one that had her for that length of time.
[00:33:27]
SKYE: Up until this point, Floyd had given authorities no information on Sharon whatsoever. There were witnesses like Jenny and Heather who believed she was abused as a child, but these photos were the first piece of physical evidence Joe had of child abuse. The images showed a number of other people unknown to police, and one in particular was a real concern to Joe.
[00:33:53]
JOE: In these photographs was several of a young lady, various stages of being disrobed and beaten. He could not have beaten her to this extent and not killed her. He'd have had to. Looking at her, she had--she had real tan lines. So I sent the photographs down to our Tampa office.
[00:34:22]
Now this is what you call a shot in the dark. They were having a law enforcement officers' convention. So the agent takes the photographs to the convention and has them passed around. And somebody says, "That looks like the victim of that case at St. Petersburg," by the clothing. I get a call from the agent, says, "You're gonna be getting a call from Robert Schock, St. Petersburg Police Department."
[00:34:50]
Of all the cases I've ever had where I took a shot in the dark and everything fell in place, that was it.
SKYE: When Cheryl Commesso, Sharon's friend and fellow dancer at Mons Venus disappeared in 1989, her Red Corvette was found at Clearwater Airport, just a short distance from where the remains of Jane Doe I-275 were found.
[00:35:15]
BOB: We were able to get dental records and made a positive identification that the bones we found on the Interstate I-275 was in fact Cheryl Commesso.
SKYE: When Heather discovered that Cheryl had been murdered and that she had been a victim of who she thought was Warren Marshall, she had a difficult time understanding it.
[00:35:38]
Of course, in hindsight, all the signs were there. But back then, no one, not even Heather thought that Warren was capable of murder.
HEATHER: Once I found out about everything that happened, and I started working with the detectives, I really had an extreme amount of survivor's guilt, just thinking what could I have done differently.
[00:36:06]
I kind of felt like whatever happened between Cheryl and them, I dodged a bullet. I didn't know he was capable of killing anyone, I wouldn't have gotten into a fallout, fight with him in the parking lot. I just thought that he was an abusive person.
[00:36:27]
But I look back and think, "Oh, my gosh. She had to have had some mortal fear that I didn't experience." I don't see her going anywhere near him willingly. There's nothing that would make me think that she would have gotten into the car with him.
[00:36:48]
And so if that car was dropped off at the airport, who drove it? So that's the thing that has often bothered me is he didn't drive that car there by himself and then leave, how's he going to leave, there would have been a record with taxi drivers.
[00:37:16]
So I have a feeling that Sharon had to be involved somehow. He couldn't have done it on his own. She just seemed like she knew too much.
[00:37:31]
SKYE: Perhaps this explains the horrors that Sharon, or Tonya, hid from people like Heather while working at Mons, or Karen during those days at Passions and the true meaning behind those conversations where she would say, "I can't leave him. I know too much." And for Heather, she wasn't just finding out about Cheryl's murder, she was finding out about Sharon's death too and what she was forced into when she became Tonya.
[00:38:00]
She was also finding out that Sharon's beautiful little boy Michael was likely dead too. This was the moment of realization that Sharon and Warren were never who they said they were at all. There was a lot of grieving to do. Floyd was tried and convicted of Cheryl's murder and sentenced to death.
[00:38:22]
The only solace came with the knowledge that he was finally behind bars for good and that he would never harm anyone again. Michael's disappearance remained a mystery. For Joe, Floyd was exactly where he should be, but many aspects of the case were unanswered. He could just never settle. He retired anxious, not only that he had never recovered Michael but he'd never established Sharon's true identity either.
[00:38:51]
But all of that was about to change. Join me next week for the final episode of "Girl in the Picture."
JOE: Who was this woman?
MATT: I realized that finding her real identity was like searching for a needle in a field of haystacks.
[00:39:21]
JOE: But I had no idea who she actually was.
MATT: Why tell her story when there's, you know, a thousand other Sharons and Tonyas who live a similar kind of life.
JOE: I've always thought, "Where is she now? What is she doing now?" A person that was trying to succeed in life.
ASHLEY: Her file went from very thin potential matches to her to thousands and thousands of pages.
[00:39:51]
JOE: Who are her parents? We just didn't know. I don't think closure is possible.
[00:40:02]
JENNY: I think to this day I'm still like, "Where did she come from? You know, who was she?"
[00:40:24]
SKYE: "Girl in the Picture Podcast" is brought to you by Netflix and Main Event Media. Narrated by me, Skye Borgman. Written and produced by Anna Priestland. Executive produced by Emily Bon and Jimmy Fox for Main Media Event, me Skye Borgman, and Matt Birkbeck. Music composition by Jimmy Stofer. Sound edited by Joel Porter. Sound design and mixed by Reed Thomas Lawrence. Based on the books "A Beautiful Child" and "Finding Sharon" by Matt Birkbeck.