Girl in the Picture is a Netflix documentary which investigates the mysterious case of Sharon Marshall and her troubled life which lead to her chilling death. It is directed by Skye Borgman, who created the award-winning documentary Abducted in Plain Sight. It has a runtime of about 1 hour and 42 minutes in total.
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. You can even listen to complementary information and interviews not seen in the film on the Apple Podcast by the same name.
How Did Girl in the Picture Died?
Sounds like a simple question but it took more than 20 years to get all the answers. Before we come to Sharon Marshall we will have to know about her other alias, Tonya Hughes and how she died. Tonya Hughes worked as a stripper in club Passions in Tulsa and had a husband named Clarence and a toddler son named Michael.
Also Read: The Longest Night: Everything About Netflix’s Upcoming Spanish Thriller
According to her co-worker, Karen Parsley, Tonya lived a difficult and controlled life where her body was covered with evidence of domestic abuse. She was not even allowed to go anywhere alone with her son. She was surviving anyhow, but one day she told Karen that she feared for her life, as Clarence had taken a policy in her name.
And on one unfortunate evening, her fears turned into reality when she got injured in a hit & run case and was lying unconscious on the side of the road. When found, she was transferred to a hospital but couldn’t fight enough for her life. The nurses talked about the whole incident being foul play to kill her but there was no evidence to accuse anyone.
Even if it was Clarence behind all this in order to get the insurance money, there was no proof against him. But it didn’t leave him out of police suspicions which led to the shocking revelation, that he wasn’t who he claimed to be and definitely not the father of Tonya’s son Michael.
Michael was put up in an orphanage where he was living a fairly happy life with the Bean family for four years until Clarence abducted him from school at gunpoint. That’s when the police reopened Tonya’s case and found that the social security number on the insurance policy leads to Franklin Delano Floyd, a fugitive on the run for many crimes under his name.
The case caught the attention of big media outlets and was broadcasted nationwide. That’s when one of Tonya’s high school classmate came forward and claimed that her name is actually, Sharon Marshall and the man to whom she is married, is her father instead.
Who was Sharon Marshall?
Sharon Marshall was a smart young girl who wanted to become Aerospace Engineer and had even got a scholarship to study at Georgia Tech college. According to her classmate, Jenny, her mother died when she was young and only had her father, Franklin Floyd. Jenny found Sharon to be always terrified of her father but didn’t pay much attention to it until she had a sleepover at their house.
Also Read: Incantation on Netflix: All About Upcoming Taiwanese Horror Movie
During the sleepover, Floyd came barging into the room with a gun and ordered Jenny to lay down on the floor with a pillow over her head. She did as said and to her horror, he started having sex with Sharon. But terrified of what she witnessed, she couldn’t tell anyone about it. And right before graduation, Sharon confessed that she was pregnant and her father won’t let her go to college now. But soon after the duo moved to another state.
Further, we get to know that they moved to Florida where Sharon started working at Mons Venus strip club and even offered sex services to clients while being pregnant. After knowing her abuse story only one question comes to mind, whether he was even her father at all? The investigating officer thought the same as Floyd was in prison from 1963 to 1972 and considering Sharon was born in 1969, he couldn’t be her biological father.
And the deduction was true, as Floyd finally told the truth about her so-called daughter/wife in 2011. After coming out of prison he was in Michigan where he met Sandra Willet. She is the biological mother of Sharon Marshall, but her actual birth name was Suzanne Sevakis. Born to a teenage couple, right out of high school but later they got divorced.
She had two half-sisters named Allison & Amy. Due to some reasons, the three siblings were taken by social services, since Sandra was not able to provide for them. Even Suzanne’s father, Cliff Sevakis, was a Vietnam war returnee and thought he couldn’t take care of them. But when Sandra met Floyd, who presented himself as Brandon Cleo Williams, he assured her to get the girls back and they got married.
But for some reason, Sandra had to go to jail for 30 days and Brandon took the girls with him. When reported, they found Allison & Amy in an orphanage and Suzanne was assumed to be with him only. The rest we can only imagine what could have been like for Suzanne, living in an abusive environment, not even knowing who she really is.
Girl in the Picture is streaming on Netflix.
Also Read: Girl in the Picture Review: An Unknown Girl With Many Names