Sharon Marshall: The Girl Who Was Stolen Twice

Sharon Marshall was an exceptional student. Teachers across multiple states remembered her: quick, warm, unusually gifted at mathematics, and possessed of a focused attention that made adults curious about her home life. She competed in academic programs, sometimes in regional tournaments. In several schools she was the kind of student other students aspired to be.

She was also, as those teachers would eventually discover, a person who did not legally exist.

Her real name was Suzanne Marie Sevakis. She was born on August 9, 1969, in Maryland. At approximately age four, while her mother Sandra Chipman was incarcerated, a man named Franklin Floyd Delashmit took Suzanne from the household. He moved across the country, enrolled her in schools under a new name, and built a false identity around her that would outlast her life.

No one reported her missing. No alert went out. For more than two decades, Suzanne Sevakis was a living child in the missing persons files of no jurisdiction on earth.

The architecture of a false life

Franklin Floyd was born in 1943 and had a criminal record stretching across several states before he took Suzanne. He had served time for burglary and assault. He was also a predator who had targeted children before, and his approach with Suzanne was not improvised. He moved frequently - enrolling her under varying surnames or fabricated backstories - and isolated her from any relationship that might connect her to a prior identity.

The name he gave her, Sharon Renee Marshall, was unremarkable enough to pass without scrutiny. For school enrollment he sometimes posed as her father, sometimes provided paperwork whose legitimacy nobody examined closely. Schools in the 1970s and 1980s were not required to verify the birth certificates or prior records of newly arriving students in the way they are today. A plausible adult with a plausible child and a plausible story was sufficient.

What Floyd could not control was Sharon's ability. She genuinely excelled. In multiple schools she led her class in core subjects. Records later recovered by investigators showed her performing at levels that, in any ordinary trajectory, would have led to substantial scholarships and academic recognition. In at least one district she was being considered for advanced placement. Each time, Floyd moved her before the path could develop.

By her late teens, Sharon was working in strip clubs in the Atlanta area, directed by Floyd and keeping most of what she earned for him. She had formed limited relationships within the narrow latitude Floyd allowed. In 1988 she gave birth to a son, Michael Wayne Hughes, on November 16. Floyd's relationship to the child was ambiguous in legal terms but controlling in practice.

Death with the wrong name

On the night of May 10, 1990, Sharon Marshall was struck by a vehicle in Oklahoma City and left at the scene. She was twenty years old. She died from her injuries on May 20, 1990.

The driver was never identified. Floyd was in Oklahoma City at the time. Investigators later considered seriously whether he had arranged the hit-and-run, but he was never charged in connection with her death. No evidence meeting a legal standard was developed.

The death certificate named her Sharon Marshall. No one at the hospital or among the investigators at the scene connected the dead woman to Suzanne Sevakis, because there was no active missing persons report for Suzanne Sevakis that described her. She was buried under a name that was not hers. Her family - her mother, her sister Melissa Lara, her other siblings - had no way of knowing what had happened to her.

The boy who vanished

Michael Hughes was placed in foster care in Oklahoma after his mother's death, with Floyd entangled in custody claims through disputed paperwork. In 1994, Floyd was serving time on unrelated criminal charges while Michael remained with foster parents. In September 1994, Floyd arrived at the foster home, took Michael, and disappeared.

Michael was five years old.

Floyd was eventually charged with federal kidnapping. He was also charged and convicted - sentenced to death - for the 1989 murder of a Florida woman named Cheryl Ann Commesso, whom he had married and then killed. In prison, Floyd became known for using Michael Hughes as a bargaining tool. He would occasionally offer investigators geographic references, partial names, suggestions that the boy had been left with a family somewhere. Investigators from multiple agencies pursued each thread. None produced a verified location or any confirmation that Michael was alive.

Floyd was never consistent. He would suggest Michael was safe, then withdraw the claim. He was never specific enough to be verified and never empty enough to be dismissed.

Franklin Floyd died in federal custody on January 16, 2019. He was seventy-five years old. Whatever he knew about Michael Hughes, he carried it out of the world.

The name comes back

Sharon Marshall's sister, Melissa Lara, had grown up knowing that Suzanne was taken and never returned. She never stopped looking. The case gained renewed attention in the early 2010s through online communities focused on cold cases and identity mysteries, and investigators began applying forensic genealogy tools that had not existed when Sharon died.

In 2016, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, working with DNA comparison using Melissa's sample, confirmed that Sharon Marshall and Suzanne Marie Sevakis were the same person. Melissa Lara received confirmation that her sister had been alive for two decades under another name - academically gifted, resilient, clearly remarkable under circumstances that would have broken most people - and had been dead for twenty-six years.

The formal identification gave Sharon her name back. It gave Melissa her sister, in the only way that was still possible.

What the case does not resolve

Three threads remain open.

The hit-and-run driver who struck Sharon on the night of May 10, 1990 has never been identified. Floyd's possible role - which investigators long considered - was never legally established. Whether her death was deliberate, arranged, or a coincidence that served his purposes has not been determined to any evidentiary standard.

The location of Michael Hughes is entirely unknown. He would be thirty-seven years old in 2026. No confirmed sighting has occurred since the day Floyd took him in September 1994. There is no confirmed evidence that he is alive and no confirmed evidence that he is dead. Floyd's occasional partial disclosures created a record of hints, none of which resolved into anything that could be verified on the ground.

The full extent of Franklin Floyd's crimes before 1970 - the period before he took Suzanne, during which he moved across multiple states and left a fragmented criminal trail - has never been fully traced. What else he did, and to whom, is not known.

Why the case matters

The Sharon Marshall case illustrates a specific structural failure of the child protection system as it existed in the 1970s. Suzanne Sevakis was not tracked as a missing child because no one with the standing or capacity to file a report did so at the time Floyd took her. She was invisible to the system designed to protect her precisely because the system could only find children who had been officially reported as lost.

She attended school for years. She competed. She placed in academic programs. She left footprints in dozens of records under a name that was not hers. The gap between those footprints and the child they belonged to was two decades and one DNA test.

She appeared in yearbooks across America alongside children who would grow up to remember her as unusual, kind, and inexplicably sad sometimes. None of them knew that the person sitting next to them in class did not, in any legal or institutional sense, exist.

The central question of what happened to Michael Hughes is the one question that might still have a living answer. Floyd's claim that the boy was left with a family has never been definitively ruled out. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children maintains an active case file. The FBI maintains a separate file. The case is not formally closed.

Suzanne Sevakis was taken twice: once when Floyd removed her from her family, and once when the world buried her under a name that was never hers. The second theft was partly undone in 2016. The question of what happened to her son - the last living thread connecting her to anyone - has no answer.