Girl in the Picture is a true-crime documentary released on Netflix on 6 July 2022. The documentary film is based on the international bestseller A Beautiful Child and its follow-up, Finding Sharon, written by the award-winning investigative journalist Matt Birkbeck. The documentary investigates the search to solve a 30-year-old mystery, about who was Sharon Marshall and how did she end up with a fugitive who apparently killed her.
It is directed by Skye Borgman, who helmed the award-winning Abducted in Plain Sight and Matt Birkbeck is also working as the executive producer in the film. It has a runtime of about 1 hour and 42 minutes in total. Netflix has also released a five-part audio miniseries on Apple Podcast which features complementary information and interviews not seen in the film.
-Girl in the Picture Review Does Not Contain Any Spoilers-
A Hit and Run Case Takes a Sinister Turn
The documentary film starts off with some men discovering a young woman lying unconscious on the side of the road in Oklahoma City in April 1990. The woman is identified as Tonya Hughes who works as a stripper in Tulsa and has a husband named Clarence and a toddler son named Michael.
She is taken to the hospital but due to various injuries on her body, she dies. When the police and the hospital staff tried to call the parents of Tonya Hughes, they are told that Tonya actually died 20 years ago as a child. But then who is this woman who was found unconscious and is known to everyone as Tonya?
That’s when the whole mystery around her identity was formed and suspicions grew towards her husband. To ensure the safety of Michael, he was put in a foster home run by the Bean family, while Clarence was given visitation rights. But as the investigation was going on, they did a DNA test of them, which revealed that he was in no way related to Michael and thus all his parental rights were taken away.
Until four years later when he abducted Michael from his school and ran away. That’s when FBI officer Joe Fitzpatrick comes into the picture. When he got on to the case, they learnt that Clarence had taken a policy in Tonya’s name and the given social security number traced back to Franklin Delano Floyd, which was his actual name.
In fact, he had many aliases that he used in different states, had spent 10 years in prison and had even more charges against him including abduction, raping a minor and other sexual assault charges. The abduction case became nationwide news and someone while watching the news recognised Tonya Hughes.
It was her school best friend Jenny Fischer who recognised Tonya but called her by a different name. She called her Sharon Marshall, who went to Forest Park High school in Georgia with her. And the man who claimed to be her husband was actually her father. Now if you think that her identity is revealed finally, then you are absolutely wrong. It was just a start in the tangled web of mystery.
Michael was never found by the police but Franklin Floyd was convicted for 52 years in prison on the charges of kidnapping, firearm assault etc. And only pieces of information were collected from Sharon’s classmates and strip club co-workers, while her case was closed down with Michael’s case. The real identity of Sharon and her past remained in the dark.
It was only in 2002 when Matt Birkbeck came across the old picture of Floyd & Sharon, which intrigued him to investigate further. Although he wasn’t able to get any leads, he wrote about his experience in the book A Beautiful Child. The case got a lot of attention from his book and lots of people mailed him about missing girls at various places but no one matched.
He published another book called Finding Sharon in 2005, which lead to Sharon’s another child named Megan Dufresne. She had never met her birth mother but looked eerily similar to her and Michael. She was adopted as a baby by a family. But still, the case was nowhere to be solved. Finally in 2011, when the National Centre of Missing & Exploited Children reopened the case and involved the FBI in questioning Floyd, we learn the horrific past and identity of the girl.
Final Thoughts: Stream It or Skip It?
Girl in the Picture on Netflix is an intriguing watch which keeps you guessing about the 20-year-old dead girl’s identity until the very end. You can only imagine the horrors she was living with and wonder why she never ran away from that life. The film features the retired FBI officer and Police chief who was in charge of the case and all her classmates and colleagues, who paint a pretty picture of her personality.
Although it makes me wonder if the police would have questioned Floyd enough in the 90s only, then it wouldn’t have taken 20 odd years to find out her origin. It shows how a troubled childhood affects the person in growing into a perpetrator or either becoming a victim of their own fears.
Girl in the Picture is streaming on Netflix.
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