Against Their Will

by Nigel Cawthorne

  In March 1986, Jennifer got a phone call from a jubilant Sharon: she had gotten a scholarship to Georgia Tech. She planned to study engineering. Her ambition was to work for NASA, and studying at Georgia Tech meant that she could continue living at home.

  Then Sharon’s mood changed. She had not told her father yet. Maybe he would not let her go. He had a bad back and arthritis. In addition to cooking and cleaning for him, Sharon had to massage him every night. Later that night, Sharon called again. This time she spoke in a whisper. She had told her father about the scholarship and he was going to let her go to college.

  But before Sharon left Forest Park High, her appearance changed. She began to put on weight. When asked if she was pregnant, she denied it. But eventually, she had to confess. The father, she said, was her new boyfriend, Curtis Flournoy. When Warren found out, he insisted that she give up her place at Georgia Tech. He even forbid her from receiving her diploma with her graduating class. Sharon grew depressed. She ran away with Curtis. Warren caught up with them at a motel just over the state line in Alabama. He seized Sharon, leaving a note telling Curtis that he was not the father of her child.

  When Sharon phoned Jennifer to tell her about her pregnancy, she said there would be no abortion and no college. The following Saturday, Warren dropped Sharon off at the Fishers’ and sped off. Sharon told Jennifer and her mother that Warren had decided to move to Arizona. The dry weather there would be better for his arthritis, and living was cheap there. Sharon was toying with the idea of going to Arizona State the following year. After a brief conversation, they heard Warren beeping his horn outside and said their farewells.

  In mid-July, Jennifer got a letter from Mesa, Arizona. Sharon was working as a hostess in the restaurant of the Marriott Hotel near the airport in Phoenix. She had given birth to a son and had given it up for adoption. She asked if she could visit Jennifer. Two weeks later, she arrived by Greyhound. Sharon was her old self again. She and Jennifer pricked their palms and became “blood sisters.”

  Later Sharon drew Mrs. Fisher aside and asked whether she could move in with the Fishers. She did not like Arizona. Mr. and Mrs. Fisher said that, if her father approved, she could stay. But Sharon did not think it was a good idea to ask him. Disappointed, she phoned her father and told him she was coming home.

  The following day at the airport, Sharon wept copiously. Mrs. Fisher thought something must be terribly wrong. She asked Sharon if she was sure that there was not something she wanted to tell them. But that was not Sharon’s way. The problem, whatever it was, had something to do with Warren, the Fishers thought. They kissed her and said good-bye. Sharon begged them not to forget her, but they knew little of what happened after that.

  The Fisher family later learned that Warren and Sharon moved to Tampa, Florida. There they lived as man and wife, under an alias. Warren called himself Charles or Clarence Marcus Hughes. Sharon was Tonya Dawn Hughes, née Tadlock.

  Warren’s real name was Franklin Delano Floyd, and he was a psychopath. Sharon’s real name has yet to be discovered. The first record of her was in 1975 when she was in school in Oklahoma City under the name “Suzanne Davis.” That does not seem to have been her real name either. Floyd had abducted her sometime before, when she was just a toddler, and pretended that she was his daughter.

  They fled from Oklahoma City after he was accused of sexually abusing the child, though no charges were filed. In 1980, they turned up in Louisville, Kentucky, where they began using the names Warren and Sharon Marshall. After another two years, they suddenly moved to Atlanta.

  In 1988, in Tampa, they had a child named Michael. They left Florida in November 1988 and moved to Louisville, Kentucky. On Christmas Eve, Sharon was found unconscious in her car and was taken to a hospital. She had overdosed and was found to be pregnant. She refused to say why she was suicidal, or who the father of her child was. Warren was notified as next of kin. After he picked her up from the hospital, they moved back to Florida. It seemed that every time she formed an attachment—or became pregnant—they moved on.

  During her travels, Sharon managed to stay in touch with Jennifer. In sporadic phone calls and letters, she volunteered patchy details of her life. She told her friend about Michael and working in various clubs—though she said she was a waitress. When she was living in South Carolina, Sharon tried to get Jennifer to come for a visit. Remembering the last overnight visit, Jennifer refused the invitation and Warren got angry.

  Eventually, they moved to Tulsa, where they were known as Clarence and Tonya, and lived in a trailer park with baby Michael—now Michael Anthony Hughes. Tonya supported the family by working as an exotic dancer in a seedy strip joint named Passions. Her body showed signs of incompetent plastic surgery. Her breasts were conical and hard, while her hips and thighs were large for her short body. But she made up for it with her dancing and the sexy schoolgirl outfits she wore at the start of her set. Tonya did not drink or take drugs, which were freely available in the club. Instead, between sets, she would read.

  She worked seven days a week and her “husband” Clarence insisted that she bring home $200 a day. If she didn’t, the bruises on her body were all too obvious the day after. The other girls at the club did not like Clarence. He was at least twice Sharon’s age and seemed creepy. He would bring her to work and be waiting for her in the parking lot at the end of the night. In between, he would call the club nearly every hour to check up on her. Her friends at the club urged her to leave Clarence and flee town, but she was scared and told her boss, J. R. Buck, that things were not as they seemed.

  Her fears were not unreasonable. Clarence had friends in the local sheriff’s department. He had a number of guns at home and told anyone who wanted to hear it that he would kill Tonya if she ever tried to leave him.

  Sharon’s closest friend at the club was nineteen-year-old college student Karen Parsley, who used the stage name Connie. Karen figured that the solution to Tonya’s problem was to find her a boyfriend. She fixed her friend up with one of Passions’ bouncers. When Clarence found out about it, Tonya turned up to work with bruises all over her body. Her new beau wanted to confront Clarence, but Tonya forbade it.

  Next Tonya got close to one of the customers, a college student named Kevin Brown. They began dating surreptitiously, and Kevin offered to take Tonya and Michael away, out of the state. She declined, fearing that Clarence would kill all three of them.

  Although Connie and Tonya grew close, Connie learned little about Tonya’s private life. Tonya said she was from Alabama and had started dancing in Florida. Connie could see for herself that Tonya doted on Michael, while the boy shied away from Clarence.

  Eventually, Kevin convinced Tonya that she could escape from Clarence. Her mood changed. She talked of going to college and studying to become a nurse. She even said that she knew things about Clarence that could put him in prison for life, but would not say more.

  Then Tonya took a rare day off. That evening, Connie got a call from Clarence. Tonya had been in an accident. She was in a hospital in Oklahoma City. He claimed that she had a gynecologist’s appointment there and had been hit by a car.

  Three men had been driving down a poorly lit exit road from Interstate 35 toward a Motel 6 just outside Oklahoma City, when they saw a shoe in the road. Then they spotted a body in the gutter. It belonged to a young woman. She was still alive and her body was contorted with violent convulsions. The sped off to the Motel 6 and told the night watchman to call 911. An ambulance rushed Tonya to a Presbyterian hospital. When the police arrived, they found her groceries strewn across the road. There was also a portable radio and headphones, a broken windshield wiper, radio aerial, and a fleck of red paint that was thought to be from the suspect’s vehicle. The road was wet and there was a forty-foot skid mark leading up to what was thought to have been the point of impact. From what they could piece together, it looked as if the woman had been walking along the road with the headphones on, listening to music, and had not heard the car appro
aching in the dark from behind.

  The clerk in the mini-mart in the truck stop a few hundred feet away said a young woman had come into the store to buy groceries at around 12:30 a.m. and had set off back toward Motel 6 when she was hit.

  In the hospital, the victim cried out, “Daddy! Daddy!”

  She was given medication to stop the convulsions. When the medical staff removed her clothing, they found her body was covered in old scratches and bruises. There were fresh bruises on the back of her legs and a large hematoma on the back of her head. It seemed as if the car’s bumper had hit her on the back of the legs and she had fallen backward onto the hood. Curiously, there were no broken bones, no cuts, and she had lost very little blood. This was rare in a road traffic accident.

  The next morning, Clarence arrived at the hospital. He explained that he had driven from Tulsa the previous day with his wife and their two-year-old son and had checked into the Motel 6 at around 3 p.m.

  Around midnight, Tonya was walking down the road to the mini-mart at the truck stop. A quarter of an hour later, she called from a pay phone, saying that they did not have any baby food but she was returning with what she could find. Clarence said that he had then fallen asleep. His wife was a stripper in a club in Tulsa, and she liked men, so he was used to her being out all night.

  In the morning, he had gone to the mini-mart, where the clerk told him about the accident. He called the police and they came to the motel. They asked to see his car. He showed them his dark blue Oldsmobile, which was undamaged. Both the windshield wipers and the radio aerial were still in place.

  In the hospital, Clarence showed little concern for his wife, though the doctors said that they believed she would pull through and come out of the coma in a day or two. Before he left, he put a sign on her door that read, “No Visitors.”

  Connie and Kevin drove to the Presbyterian hospital in Oklahoma City. They ignored the “No Visitors” sign and went in to see Tonya. The nursing staff reported the mysterious theft of all Tonya’s belongings, including her clothes. When Connie commented that there were no marks on Tonya’s face or arms, a doctor pulled her aside and said, “This was no car accident.”

  Connie said that she had already had doubts and believed that Clarence was trying to kill Tonya. The medical staff advised Connie to contact the police.

  Tonya had seemed to react to Connie’s presence, so Connie took a motel room nearby. Clarence still forbade visits, but the staff would phone Connie whenever the coast was clear. When Clarence heard about this, he phoned Connie and yelled at her. But Connie held her ground, telling him that Tonya was her friend and no one was going to stop her from seeing her.

  Clarence then changed his tune. Without Tonya stripping, he was short of money and offered to sell Connie the trailer, saying he was planning to move to Oklahoma City.

  The prognosis was good and Tonya was expected to come out of the coma the next day. But the following morning, Connie got a call, saying that Tonya’s condition had suddenly deteriorated. By the time she arrived that the hospital, Tonya was dead. She learned that Clarence had visited the night before. Then in the morning, her life had slipped away without her ever regaining consciousness. Clarence had left instructions that Tonya’s organs were to be donated and her body was to be cremated. Connie protested that Tonya had said she wanted to be buried. Clarence eventually backed down when Connie and J. R. Buck agreed to pay for a funeral back in Tulsa.

  The one remaining problem was Michael. At two, he did not talk. Left in the care of Clarence, he was unwashed and smelled of urine. Connie contacted social services. Clarence agreed to allow Michael to go into temporary foster care for a week until after the funeral and after he had completed his move to Oklahoma City. An autopsy noted the implants in Tonya’s breasts and buttocks. The cause of death was given as “head injury,” and under “manner of death” the medical examiner ticked “homicide.” As far as the police were concerned, Tonya’s death had been a hit-and-run. However, with no clue to the identity of the driver, there was little they could do about it.

  Michael’s foster parents Ernest and Merle Bean, said they had never seen a child in such emotional distress. He beat his head on the solid floor on the foyer of their home and would not stop crying. Nevertheless, they did what they could.

  Connie told the social services of her concerns. She believed that Tonya had been killed by Clarence and that Michael was not safe in his hands. As a result, Michael was made a ward of the court.

  Clarence was furious. He turned up at Tonya’s funeral, with two burly sheriff’s deputies, then vented his anger on the mourners. He told them that Tonya had taken her secrets with her to the grave. Now they should let it be. Then he turned his venom on Connie, blaming her for depriving him of his son. And he put a picture of a man of about thirty years old with a five-year-old girl on his lap on top of the coffin.

  The street outside the chapel suddenly filled with police cars. Clarence went to speak to the cops. Connie and the others hoped that they were going to arrest him for Tonya’s murder. But he shook hands and walked away. However, the police did impound the corpse for further investigation.

  Clarence had taken out two life insurance policies on Tonya worth a total of $80,000 just weeks before her death. Right after the funeral, he called to see how the claims were progressing. He was asked for his social security number. However, the number he gave did not match their records. Nor did a second. A third number was accepted, however; it was for a Franklin Delano Floyd. A fugitive who had been on the run since 1973, Floyd was wanted for attempted kidnapping and a parole violation. The insurance company immediately informed the federal authorities.

  When the U.S. Marshals turned up at Clarence’s apartment, he had already fled. When they checked his background, they found that neither Charles nor Clarence Hughes existed. Neither did Tonya Hughes, née Tadlock. She had obtained her driver’s license with a phony birth certificate. However, Franklin Delano Floyd most definitely did exist.

  Born in 1943 in Barnesville, Georgia, the youngest of five children, he was the son of an abusive drunk who died when Floyd was one. Unable to bring the children up on her own, his mother took them to a children’s home in Hapeville where she was not allowed to visit them.

  Although he was the baby of the family, Floyd was forced to sleep in a separate room from his siblings. The regime was strict, and beatings were frequent. Food was sparse; clothing was second-hand. And, after a morning’s schoolwork, the children would be sent to work in the fields.

  Floyd was a sensitive boy. Perceived as feminine, he was bullied and claimed he was raped by a group of boys with a broom handle when he was six. His behavior and school grades rapidly deteriorated. He ran away repeatedly. At sixteen, he left the home and moved in with his sister, but her husband threw him out, saying he considered him dangerous.

  Floyd went to Indianapolis, where he found his mother. She was working as a prostitute. Then he joined the army, saying that he had her permission. He was discharged after five months when it was discovered that he had forged his mother’s signature on his enlistment papers.

  Drifting from city to city, he broke into a Los Angeles branch of Sears, where he opened a gun case, setting off an alarm. When the police arrived, there was an exchange of gunfire. He was arrested after being shot in the stomach.

  After a year he was released, but was re-arrested for a parole violation. Released a second time, he returned to Hapeville, Georgia, where, a month later, he abducted a four-year-old girl who it seems he knew from the children’s home. Semen stains and teeth marks where found around her vagina. He was sentenced to ten to twenty years. A few months later, he escaped, stole a car, bought a pistol, and robbed a bank. This earned him another fifteen years. He got a further five years for another attempted escape. This time he was sent to the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

  A convicted pedophile, Floyd was regularly beaten and raped by the other prisoners. He tried to kill himself.
After a period in the hospital wing, he was returned to the general population, where the beatings and rape resumed. He became a serious disciplinary problem and had to be transferred to the new maximum security prison at Marion, Illinois. There, he settled for being the bitch of a prisoner who could protect him. The sexual abuse continued, but the beatings stopped.

  He was returned to Georgia to complete the balance of his sentences for the sexual molestation and bank robbery in Reidsville State Prison. Again he was forced to seek the protection of another prisoner, career criminal David Dial.

  Released in January 1973, Floyd was arrested again for trying to abduct a woman at a gas station. Dial, who had since been released, posted bail for him. Floyd then disappeared. Ever since, he had been on the run.

  When Floyd disappeared from his apartment in Oklahoma City, the Beans were informed. As there was no way that Michael would be returned to the custody of a fugitive from justice, they volunteered to keep Michael.

  While she had worked at Passions, Tonya had told some of the girls that her parents had been killed in a car accident. Others were told that she had simply been estranged from her family. Connie and J.R. Buck decided that, if her family was alive, they should know of their daughter’s death. Buck began calling phone numbers listed to anyone named Tadlock in Alabama. After two or three calls, he reached a woman who said she was the mother of Tonya Dawn Tadlock. He braced himself and informed the woman that her daughter was dead. Mrs. Tadlock said she knew she was. Tonya had died of pneumonia twenty years ago when she was just eighteen months. It seems that the name of the girl who had worked at Passions had been lifted from a gravestone.

  Six weeks after he had fled from Oklahoma City, Clarence Marcus Hughes, aka Franklin Delano Floyd, was arrested in a trailer park in Augusta, Georgia, after a tip-off. He was using the name Trenton B. Davis. It was one of his many aliases, most of which were taken from gravestones.