Against Their Will

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Once in custody, Floyd called social services in Oklahoma, explained the situation, and asked them to look after his son until he was released. A court recognized Floyd as Michael’s father. The Beans were horrified. Floyd was a convicted pedophile and they knew something terrible had happened to Michael. At two years old, he could not speak. Nevertheless, when Floyd was transferred from Atlanta to the federal prison at El Reno, near Oklahoma City, he was granted visitation rights.

  Floyd remained a suspect in the murder of Tonya, but the police could find no material evidence against him. They did not even know who she was. All Floyd would say was that he had met her in Chicago. They had had a child together in Alabama in 1988 and married the following year in New Orleans.

  Michael made slow progress with the Beans. There were often problems after he was taken on his monthly visits to see Floyd. Meanwhile, Floyd underwent everything the courts required in order to get custody of the boy when he was released—except one. He refused to take a paternity test. Eventually, he was forced to. It came back negative. Franklin Delano Floyd was not the biological father of Michael Anthony Hughes, and Floyd’s visitation rights were rescinded. The Beans then put in an application to adopt Michael.

  Floyd was released on March 30, 1993. As legal wrangles over the custody of Michael were ongoing, Floyd was given a parole officer in Oklahoma City. Floyd would talk openly about his early life and his concerns over Michael, but he would reveal nothing of what he had been up to between 1973 and 1989. He maintained that Tonya had been the victim of a hit by organized crime, but would volunteer nothing to fill in her background. It was also clear to those who dealt with him that he was still dangerous.

  Then in July 1993, Floyd’s visitation rights were restored. A court decided that he had been denied the right to challenge the paternity test. What’s more, he had had a two-year custodial relationship with Michael and his mother.

  Floyd got a job as a janitor in an apartment block. When one of the tenants returned home, she found Floyd rummaging through her drawers. In his hand, he held a pair of her panties. He punched her in the eye and attacked her with a knife, cutting her arm. But her boyfriend, who appeared soon after, managed to subdue him until the police arrived.

  Despite the severity of the attack, Floyd was released on bail and sent to a halfway house. He knew if he was convicted on the assault charge, he would lose all hope of regaining custody of Michael, so he took matters into his own hands.

  By this time, Michael was going to elementary school in Choctaw. On September 12, 1994, Michael took the bus to school as usual. At 9 a.m., Floyd entered the school and walked into the office of the principal,James Davis. He had a gun and threatened to kill Davis if he did not help him.

  Floyd forced Davis to go to Michael’s class and ask the child to come out into the corridor. The teacher told Michael to get up and follow the principal. Floyd, Davis, and Michael went out to the principal’s pickup. Davis was then forced to drive them out of town. Floyd left Davis handcuffed to a tree in a field, with duct tape over his mouth. He told Davis that he would call someone to free him after two hours and left the key to the handcuffs out of reach. Davis eventually managed to remove the duct tape from his mouth and cried for help.

  Two hours later, the FBI were on the case. Special Agent Joe Fitzpatrick of the Oklahoma City office sent details of the kidnapping to bureaus across the country. He was convinced that Floyd would flee the state. An All Points Bulletin was issued to police agencies throughout the region.

  Agents were dispatched to interview Mr. Davis, the Beans, and anyone who had known Floyd, under his many aliases, over the years. In a lockup behind the halfway house in Oklahoma City that Floyd used for storage, photographs were found of Floyd’s “wife” Tonya in provocative poses. In one, Fitzpatrick thought she looked about fourteen.

  After a week, FBI agents tracked down an Oklahoma school district employee who had known Trenton Davis, aka Franklin Floyd, in the 1970s. He had a photograph of Davis with a young girl named Suzanne, who he said was his daughter, perched on his lap. Floyd had reappeared a few weeks earlier to reclaim the photograph, but at the time he could not find it. The girl appeared to be about five or six. Then Fitzpatrick realized that she was a younger version of the girl in the pictures found in the lockup. Tonya was Suzanne. Floyd’s daughter had become his wife.

  Agents tracked down David Dial, who had helped Floyd over the years. He was asked about the little girl Floyd had taken with him when he was on the run. Dial said that Floyd had told him that the girl’s mother had been a crack addict. He had taken the child to keep her away from the drug scene. She had been four at the time.

  Fitzpatrick obtained a copy of Floyd’s phone records in Tulsa. Soon after Tonya’s death, Floyd had called Greg Higgs in Phoenix. At the age of twenty, Higgs had worked as a waiter in the Marriott Hotel to put himself through college. He had dated Sharon Marshall, who said she planned to study aerospace engineering at Arizona State. But when local businessmen had offered to sponsor her, her father put a stop to it, trying instead to get them to invest in his painting business.

  Suddenly Sharon disappeared, but eight months later, she was back at her old job. She and her father had been in Texas and elsewhere, but things did not work out. Six months after that, she disappeared again. Then in May 1990, Higgs got a call from Warren Marshall, saying that Sharon was dead. Warren also said that Greg was the father of Sharon’s two-year-old son, Michael, and asked whether he was prepared to look after him. Greg said he would. Warren said that he would call back to make arrangements. That was the last Greg heard.

  Six weeks after Michael’s kidnapping, Davis’s pickup was found in a parking lot in Dallas, Texas. But Floyd was nowhere to be found, so Fitzpatrick contacted the offices of the department of transportation in all the states Floyd was known to frequent—Oklahoma, Georgia, Arizona, Louisiana, Kentucky, Texas, and Florida—to ask police to watch for driver’s license applications under any of the aliases Floyd was known to use. After two weeks, Fitzpatrick got a call from officers in Florida, saying that a man named Warren Marshall had applied to renew his driver’s license. The application had come from an address in Louisville, Kentucky.

  On November 9, 1994, an FBI agent posing as a Federal Express employee delivered the driver’s license to Floyd at the used car lot where he worked. When Floyd signed for it, he was arrested by seven armed FBI agents. The area had already been sealed off. Fitzpatrick was taking no chances.

  When Floyd was searched, agents found that he was carrying the current address of a woman he had raped in 1962 when she was four years old. Her name was Rebecca Barr.

  When questioned about Michael, Floyd said he was fine, but would not say where he was. And Suzanne? He said he had taken her from a prostitute named Linda Williams in Indianapolis in 1974 because she was a drug addict, but he would not confirm that the child’s last name was Williams.

  Floyd boasted about his ability to evade the law and blamed Sharon for ruining her life by going with boys. He would not say what had happened to her first child. He said that, after Michael, she had had another baby that was adopted by a family in New Orleans. When asked if he had ever had sex with Sharon, he denied it and refused to answer any further questions if asked again.

  Floyd’s neighbors and colleagues at work were questioned. No one had seen Michael. There was no sign of him in Floyd’s apartment. However, Floyd had with him a single bus ticket from Atlanta to Louisville, dated September 30. Fitzpatrick checked and discovered that Michael had not traveled with Floyd on that day. Whatever had happened to the child had happened before Floyd left Atlanta.

  Fitzpatrick discovered that Floyd had checked himself into Grady Memorial Hospital on September 21, and discharged himself on the 29th. On the 20th, a man answering Floyd’s description had attacked a woman while taking a test drive in a Dodge Shadow she was selling. She escaped and he drove off in the car.

  The FBI office in Atlanta contacted Rebecca Barr. Fitz
patrick thought Floyd might have a soft spot for her. She agreed to help. After contacting Floyd by phone, she surmised that Michael was probably dead.

  A fellow prisoner reported that Floyd had said he had thrown the boy off a bridge. Another said Floyd admitted killing Michael and hiding his body in a drainpipe. His sister said Floyd had told her that he had drowned Michael in the bathtub when they were having a bath together in a motel, after Floyd had asked Michael if he loved him and Michael had said no. He had then put his body in the trunk of his car and disposed of it.

  When the Dodge Shadow stolen on September 21 was found, dogs trained to locate corpses showed an interest in the trunk. This all but confirmed that Michael was dead, but his body was never found. Without a body, Floyd could not be charged with murder.

  Instead, he went on trial for kidnapping the child. Floyd chose to defend himself. He was found guilty and sentenced to fifty-two years in jail.

  While the trial was going on, a mechanic working on school principal James Davis’s stolen pickup found an envelope taped to the side of the tank. It contained nearly a hundred pictures of young girls—from teens to toddlers—many nude and being exploited sexually. A series of them showed Suzanne as she grew from a child to the brink of womanhood. This confirmed that Floyd had sexually abused the child since he had abducted her at the age of four—and throughout her short and tormented life.

  Another set showed a young woman who had been bound, beaten, and tortured. Sexually explicit pictures showed burn marks around her anus. In some pictures, she appeared near death. When Fitzpatrick saw the photographs, he was convinced that Floyd had killed this girl too. However, further investigation was interrupted by the Oklahoma City bombing on April 16, 1995.

  Then in July 1996, the FBI’s office in Tampa tied a photograph of the bound and beaten girl found in Davis’s pickup to a Jane Doe who had been found in a swamp along I-275 near St. Petersburg on March 29, 1995. The body had been there some time and had completely decomposed, leaving only the bones, hair, fragments of clothing, and some jewelry. There were two small bullet holes in the back of her skull, indicating that the victim had been murdered. But no further progress had been made in the case.

  In the photograph, the girl was only wearing a striped shirt and a white bikini top that had been pushed up to expose her breasts. These two items of clothing matched the fragments found with I-275 Jane Doe.

  Fitzpatrick had sent the photograph to Tampa because the girl had appeared tanned, and Florida had been one of Floyd’s stamping grounds. He had been there in 1988 and 1989. The police reviewed the missing persons cases in the area at that time and came up with nineteen-year-old Cheryl Ann Commesso, who had last been seen in April 1989. She had been reported missing in June after her red Corvette was found, apparently abandoned in the parking lot of the St. Petersburg–Clearwater International Airport. Her dental records confirmed that the I-275 corpse was indeed Cheryl Commesso.

  Cheryl had had a short and troubled life. After dropping out of school at the age of sixteen, she began working as an exotic dancer in Orlando. Before she disappeared, she had been working in the Mons Venus strip club in Tampa under the name Stevie. Another of the strippers had been Sharon Marshall, and some of the staff who had worked there back in the 1980s, remembered that Warren had been barred from the club on the grounds that only a weirdo would come to watch his daughter perform.

  Sharon, Warren, and Michael had been living in the Golden Lantern trailer park. Michael’s babysitter said she had seen Cheryl and her red corvette at the Marshalls’ trailer.

  Sharon had found a boyfriend named Cary Strukel at the club. Strukel found Warren peculiar; plainly he did not work and lived off of Sharon’s earnings. He would talk to himself and shovel down handfuls of pills, and he kept a shotgun by the door. The babysitter also discovered a stun gun behind the Marshalls’ sofa.

  When Michael cried, Warren would yell for Sharon to shut the brat up. He also wanted Sharon to have breast implants like Stevie’s so she could have a career in adult movies. As he said this, Warren would pull on Sharon’s nipples. Warren was into adult movies. As a screen test, he had filmed Sharon and Stevie wearing string bikinis on the beach rubbing oil over each other’s bodies.

  It became clear to Strukel that Sharon had no interest in dancing at the Mons Venus, performing in adult movies, or the cheap boob job Warren had foisted on her. She had been coerced. Warren also drove Sharon to bachelor parties and gave her condoms before she went in. The rumor was that he was her pimp. At bachelor parties, Sharon did a lesbian act with another stripper. The other stripper sometimes stayed at the Marshalls’ trailer and reported to the other girls that she thought Warren was sleeping with Sharon. Sharon, of course, had little to say about it.

  Cheryl Commesso also stayed at the Marshalls’. Warren boasted that he had contacts in the adult entertainment industry and with Playboy magazine. She was happy to have him film her engaging in sexual acts with Sharon in the hope that he could further her career. She even slept with Warren. But once, when they took a boat trip and she refused him, he hit her in the face and tried to strangle her. She leapt out of the boat and swam to shore.

  To get Warren back, Cheryl called Florida social services and told them that, while Sharon was collecting welfare, she was also earning thousands of dollars as a stripper. Warren was livid. He lay in wait for Cheryl in the parking lot of the Mons and grabbed her. She screamed and was rescued by the bouncers. A week later, she disappeared.

  By then, Sharon was clearly pregnant. In May 1989, Warren Marshall had sunk a boat in an attempt to make a fraudulent insurance claim, then he set fire to his trailer, and fled with Sharon and Michael. They had headed to New Orleans where they had married. Detectives reasoned that they had done this to prevent Sharon being forced to testify against Floyd if he was charged with the murder of Cheryl Commesso.

  The authorities also believed that as Sharon had grown older she had become less desirable in his eyes. Her only purpose was to support him financially through nude dancing and prostitution, while Floyd’s erotic interest began to focus on Michael.

  The detectives investigating the murder of Cheryl Commesso went to visit Floyd in Oklahoma City County Jail. He denied knowing Cheryl, though he said she could have been a friend of his “stepdaughter” Sharon. He then told them a rambling story about Sharon stealing money from the mob. That’s why they had left Florida.

  Later they interviewed one of Floyd’s cell mates, who said that Floyd had told him that he had killed someone and covered the body in lye to get rid of it. Floyd had also told the cell mate that he had killed his wife. Once Floyd had said that he had hit her over the head and left her by the side of the road. Another time, he had said he had run her down. When asked about Michael, Floyd’s cell mate said that Floyd had again said that he had thrown the boy off a bridge and the child had screamed all way down until he hit the water. But then, Floyd had said a lot of things. His cell mate thought he was just trying to make himself look big.

  Although this information did not help move the case forward, a grand jury in Florida returned an indictment for first-degree murder in the case of Cheryl Commesso.

  In jail, Floyd was caught with child pornography. Another cell mate said that he admitted to killing Cheryl Commesso and, said that in regards to Michael, Floyd said: “If I can’t have him, no one will.”

  After some legal wrangling, Floyd was found mentally competent to stand trial for the murder of Cheryl Commesso. The trial lasted just nine days. The jury took four hours to find him guilty. It took them another hour to unanimously recommend death by lethal injection. Floyd will likely go to his death without having revealed the whereabouts of Michael Anthony Hughes, or the true identity of Sharon Marshall.

  Chapter 16

  Lena Simakina and Katya Martynova—The Russian Demographic

  ON SEPTEMBER 30, 2000, seventeen-year-old Lena Simakina and her fourteen-year-old friend Katya Martynova, set off from their homes to a disco i
n Sobornaya Square in the center of Ryazan, 150 miles south of Moscow. There was a party there to celebrate the Russian Orthodox holiday of Vera, Nadezhda, and Lyubov—faith, hope, and love. When their evening out was over, they accepted a lift home from forty-eight-year-old Viktor Mokhov, a metalworker at the Skopin car factory, and his girlfriend, twenty-five-year-old Yelena Badukina, who introduced herself at “Lyosha.” The girls thought they were safe because there was a woman in the car.

  In the car, Mokhov gave them vodka that had been laced with sedatives. He drove them to his hometown of Skopin, where they woke up in a dungeon. It was nine feet underground, and their screams were inaudible to anyone outside.

  The cell, which measured eight feet by ten feet, had taken former army officer Mokhov three years to build. He excavated about sixty tons of earth by hand and spread it around a lot nearby. The subterranean prison was hidden under his rusting garage, but could not be accessed directly from it. The entrance was carefully hidden. Around to the side, it was screened from the garden by a wooden fence. Behind a metal panel that had to be pried back with a screwdriver, there was a steel door about six inches thick that was held down by magnets. Beyond that was a secret ground-level room that was only three feet high; a trapdoor and wooden ladder led to another chamber below. That chamber contained a padlocked steel hatch at ankle height, measuring just twenty by fifteen inches. Mokhov could only just squeeze through.

  Beyond the hatch was the door to the girls’ cell and the entrance to the “sex chamber.” Mokhov had drilled ventilation holes in the concrete ceiling, and wired it up to provide electricity. He would lower a bucket to be used as a lavatory and another with water for washing. Later, he allowed them a small electric stove and let them cook rice to supplement the meager rations he provided.

  Mokhov beat the two girls with a rubber hose and demanded sex every day. If they tried to resist, he would starve them or cut off their electricity—their only source of warmth during the cold Russian winter. He would limit the supply of oxygen so they could hardly breathe and spray tear gas into the cellar.