A Beautiful Child

by Matt Birkbeck

  The mourners exited the church, preparing to go to the Park Grove Cemetery. Clarence would not attend the burial, but stood on the chapel steps, his neck still red with dye, reminding everyone what he’d said.

  “Let it go,” said Clarence. “Just let it go.”

  Flanked by his two bodyguards, Clarence looked away from the mourners and toward the street as more than a dozen police cars swarmed in front of the chapel, followed by a black hearse. Clarence walked down the steps of the chapel to the lead police car, opened the back door and climbed inside.

  Connie, J.R., and the others stood there, unsure of what was unfolding, but hoping that the police would finally arrest Clarence for the murder of his wife.

  Fifteen minutes later Clarence emerged from the car, shook hands with a police officer, then walked away, his bodyguards behind him. The police seized Tonya’s coffin. The burial would be postponed as the investigation into her death continued.

  The two life insurance policies in the name of Tonya Dawn Hughes totaled $80,000, and designated Clarence Marcus Hughes as the beneficiary. The policies were new, having been purchased just months before, and Clarence told the clerk on the phone he had no idea he’d be calling so soon.

  “A terrible tragedy, just a terrible tragedy,” said Clarence.

  Nonetheless, Clarence called just hours after the funeral to inquire how to begin the process of collecting on the policies, one of which was for fifty thousand dollars, the other for thirty thousand dollars.

  The clerk asked Clarence for his Social Security number, then asked him to sit tight. He returned to the phone a few minutes later, asking again for Clarence’s Social Security number.

  “There seems to be a problem with the number you gave me. It doesn’t exist,” said the clerk.

  Clarence apologized, saying he mixed up his numbers, and gave him another number. The clerk asked Clarence to hold on, then returned a few minutes later.

  “Sir, we seem to have a problem here.”

  “What number did I give you?” said Clarence. “Oh, no. I’m so confused. I buried my wife today. I’m sure you can understand.”

  Clarence gave the clerk a third nine-digit number, then waited nervously, remaining on the phone a full five minutes before the clerk returned.

  “Everything is in order,” he said quickly.

  Clarence noticed a slight change in his voice.

  After hanging up the phone, Clarence packed his bags and drove out of Tulsa, heading east.

  He knew that the final Social Security number given to the clerk was not for a Clarence Hughes—but for a Franklin Delano Floyd. He also knew that when the clerk saw the name, he would no doubt notice that Floyd was a federal fugitive, on the run from authorities since 1973 for parole violation and attempted kidnapping.

  The insurance company notified the police, who contacted the U.S. Marshals office. It didn’t take long, following conversations with the Oklahoma City Police Department, to realize that Floyd was probably armed and considered dangerous. Police strongly believed, based on the coroner’s report, that Floyd, a.k.a. Clarence Hughes, killed his wife—ostensibly to collect her insurance money—and were gathering evidence in the hopes of bringing charges forward. Clarence could not identify the gynecologist in Oklahoma City that Tonya was scheduled to visit. They also learned that Tonya obtained her Oklahoma driver’s license using a phony birth certificate.

  When U.S. Marshals arrived at Clarence Hughes’s apartment, he was already gone. When they searched Hughes’s history, he had none. He was a ghost. So investigators turned their attention to Franklin Delano Floyd.

  CHAPTER 9

  Franklin Delano Floyd was born June 17, 1943, in Barnesville, Georgia, the youngest of five children. His older brother, Billy, was born in 1933, followed by Dorothy in 1934, Shirley in 1937, and sister Tommye—spelled with a “ye”—in 1939.

  His father, Thomas H. Floyd, was born in Georgia and labored in a cotton mill. He came into this world on April 10, 1912. Unassuming and friendly when he was sober, his demeanor became decidedly darker once he started drinking the clear and potent moonshine he made in the woods near his house. He abused his wife and his children, who would remember the nights when they’d hide under their beds when their father returned home from a night of drinking, belt in hand.

  Thomas succumbed to liver and kidney failure and died in June of 1944 at age thirty-two, leaving his wife Della, age twenty-nine, to support and care for the large family. Della had little money and was forced to move into her mother’s small second-floor apartment over a grocery store in Barnesville. The arrangement lasted fifteen months, proving too difficult for all concerned, especially Della’s parents who asked her to leave. With nowhere to go and no means to raise her children, Della contacted the Lamar County Department of Public Welfare. Social workers there suggested she place her children in the Georgia Baptist Children’s Home in Hapeville.

  Opened in 1872 in downtown Atlanta to care for twenty-two children orphaned by the Civil War, the children’s home was funded by the Georgia Baptist Convention Cooperative Program. A charter was approved in 1888, and the children were moved from Atlanta to the first campus in Hapeville in 1899. By 1932, the home subsisted on funds solicited from churches and the public.

  A strict criteria determined admittance to the home, which was reserved only for children orphaned “by death or by circumstances.” As far as the home administrators were concerned, all children under its care were orphans, with the goal to make Christian men and women out of them.

  On January 5, 1946, Della Floyd completed her application and a week later, January 11, received word that the Board of Directors charged with overseeing the home unanimously voted to admit the Floyd children. Conditions for acceptance included Della’s understanding that she was severing her parental rights to her children, and visitation would be limited to one visit on a Saturday every three months, which was an exception to the rules. Children with a living parent were generally limited to two visits per year.

  Desperate, Della sat down her two oldest children, Billy, thirteen, and Dorothy, eleven, and explained that she had no choice, that she couldn’t feed or clothe them. She loved them dearly, but had to do this.

  “You’re going to a place that will give you good opportunities,” said their grandmother.

  On January 21, 1946, a woman wearing a long black dress and black shoes arrived for the children. They said good-bye to their mother, and upon their arrival at the home they were placed together in quarantine. Franklin, the youngest, was only two years old at the time and during that first night crawled into bed with his older siblings. An attendant came into the room and pried a crying Franklin away, placing him in a separate room with younger children, where he would remain apart from his brothers and sisters.

  The Floyd children detested their new home, which for them resembled an asylum for mentally ill children. The attendants, or matrons, were often cruel and punished children for the slightest infraction of the rules. Discipline consisted of beatings over a piano bench. Once, a girl in the midst of completing her homework reported that Dorothy, who was playing jacks, was bothering her. The matron took out a belt, lifted up Dorothy’s skirt, bent her over the piano bench, and struck her several times. Male matrons dispensed punishment to the boys, while females would discipline the girls. The matrons were usually husband-and-wife teams inexperienced at overseeing children and unable to find stable postwar employment.

  The daily routine at the orphanage was simple yet demanding. Children were awakened at 6:30 A.M. for breakfast, which consisted of either biscuits or pancakes and syrup. They were ushered away for schoolwork until noon, when they always ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. The children were sent to the neighboring fields to pick and plant fruit and vegetables, which ended up on their dinner table. Green beans, butter beans, and corn served as the main dinner fare, with bread and milk. Rarely, if ever, would meat be served to the children. Matrons enjoyed fried chicken on
Sundays.

  The day ended at dusk.

  All the Floyd children were eventually separated and placed with children in their respective age groups. Girls lived in cottages, ten to a room on one side of the property, while boys were herded into separate cottages, ten or more to a room.

  Clothing—always used and donated—was issued based on need.

  Children attended church every Wednesday night and Sunday morning, and occasionally on Saturday night. For Christmas each child received a fruit-and-candy basket, courtesy of local donations.

  During the summer, when school was out, the children worked in the fields.

  Life at the home was strict and often unbearable, but the children were relatively healthy, attended school, and visited church every week. It was only a few weeks after their arrival that Della wrote to the home requesting permission to visit but was denied. By the summer of 1946 she wrote again asking to see her children and was told she could be accommodated in September, but not to expect to visit again until 1947. The children now belonged to the home, and though encouraged to remain in contact with their mother, the children were treated as if they had no mother. In response to yet another request to visit, the home advised Della to “leave her children alone.” Della would visit once or twice a year, but continued to write seeking more visitation.

  The home’s denial letters always ended with, “They are well and happy, and are doing fine in every way.”

  In reality, the children had their problems, particularly Franklin.

  Considered to be smart as a whip, Franklin was a sensitive boy. Handsome, his mannerisms were seen as feminine, and other boys in his cottage would pick on him daily. Often the bickering would escalate into fighting. When he was six years old, Franklin claimed he was raped by a group of boys who tracked him down near a tree in the field and violated him with a broom handle. Franklin would become a discipline problem and for the next ten years would commit various offenses, from stealing chocolate bars from the commissary and fighting to continuous attempts to run away. On one occasion, his hand was placed in a pot of hot water after he was caught masturbating. Another time he was whipped. His school grades fluctuated, rising to satisfactory in the seventh grade. The following year, in eighth grade, he failed every class.

  Franklin wasn’t the only boy experiencing problems at the home. There were numerous instances of boys being whipped for various infractions. On one occasion, in 1951, a male matron attempted to whip one boy and was attacked by a group of boys. Several workmen passing by spared the matron serious injury. The harsh discipline at the home eventually made its way into the Georgia juvenile courts in 1965, which suggested that punishment such as whipping with a leather strap constituted brutality, forcing the home to review its policies.

  One by one through the 1950s the Floyd children left the Hapeville orphanage, usually on their eighteenth birthday. The older brother, Billy, was the first to leave. He joined the army and served in Korea, then returned to Georgia and married. His wife, Betty, thought he was as mean as a snake and too stupid to turn a radio dial.

  Franklin was the last to go, practically expelled from the home in 1959 after he ran away yet again, broke into a house, and stole food. The home called his sister Dorothy and said he would not be prosecuted if she would be willing to take him in. Dorothy was living in South Carolina, married to a military man, and had two young sons. Dorothy agreed and Franklin was released, to the relief of the home staff. John C. Warr, the home’s general manager, wrote that “We have done our best for Franklin, but I do not think he has ever been really happy here.”

  Franklin stayed only a few weeks with Dorothy before her husband, who considered Franklin dangerous, kicked him out. He was taken in by Judge Purdy, a local domestic relations judge, for five months before leaving for Indianapolis, Indiana, in search of his mother. He found her there, working as a prostitute. Two weeks later Franklin left for California after convincing his mother to sign papers for him to join the U.S. Army. He enlisted on July 11, 1959, and served in Missouri and Oklahoma for six months before he was thrown out in December after Army officials learned he had forged his enlistment papers and was underage.

  Franklin returned to Indianapolis to live with his mother, but she was gone. He drifted to Philadelphia, New York, Miami, Atlanta, New Orleans, and finally Los Angeles. Broke and destitute, he was arrested in February 1960 after breaking into a Sears store, where he attempted to open a gun case and triggered a burglar alarm. Police arrived and there was an exchange of gunfire. Franklin was shot in the stomach. He survived following surgery and was placed in the Youth Institution at Preston, California, from June 1960 until August 1961.

  On November 1, 1961, he was taken into custody for violating his parole, having left the state with another youth, James Marvin, for a camping trip to Alaska. Franklin underwent psychiatric testing and was released in January 1962.

  In May 1962, he returned to Hapeville, Georgia, and lived near the very orphanage he detested. It wasn’t long after his arrival that he stood accused of a heinous crime—kidnapping and raping a four-year-old girl.

  In June 1962, Franklin walked into a bowling alley and abducted the girl, taking her outside to neighboring woods. A physical examination determined that the girl had been sexually molested, with semen stains and bite marks on and around her vagina. On July 31, he was convicted in Fulton County Superior Court of child molestation and sentenced to ten to twenty years. The kidnapping charge was dropped. His proclamation of innocence for child molestation was ignored and he was incarcerated at the Reidsville state prison.

  On November 1, 1962, he was sent to Milledgeville State Hospital for psychiatric testing. Four months later he escaped while being escorted to an eye examination. Franklin stole a car and drove it to Macon, where he bought a pellet pistol and on March 15 robbed the Citizens and Southern Bank of $6,810.28. He was captured later that day and confessed to robbing the bank, but explained he needed the money to appeal his conviction on the child molestation charge.

  On July 12, 1963, Franklin was sentenced to fifteen years for the bank robbery and sent to the Federal Reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio. Two months later he attempted to escape with two other inmates, hot-wiring a prison fire truck and crashing it through a fence near the rear gate. The truck was damaged from the crash, and the inmates were captured. Franklin pled guilty to attempted escape and destruction of government property. He was sentenced in October to an additional five years in prison, to run concurrent with his bank robbery conviction, and was transferred to the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

  Franklin had a difficult time at Lewisburg, a maximum-security prison that housed far too many violent criminals, most from the Washington, D.C., area. Targeted by more aggressive inmates for his immaturity, youth, and conviction for molesting a child, Franklin was regularly raped and beaten. Pedophiles were considered the lowest form of life in prison, and given that many of the inmates were abused as children, they showed no mercy with Franklin. The abuse was so severe that Franklin climbed the roof of a prison building and threatened to jump. He was talked down by prison personnel and taken to the prison hospital ward for psychiatric evaluation. Following his release from the hospital, he was returned to the general population, where he was repeatedly raped and beaten and disciplined for a variety of offenses, including insolence, running in the corridor, threatening an officer, fighting, and leaving a detail without permission.

  Unstable and unable to cope with the harsh and violent environment at Lewisburg, Franklin was transferred in June 1964 to the Medical Center of Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, for another psychiatric observation.

  In February 1965, he was transferred to the federal penitentiary at Marion, Illinois.

  Marion was a new, maximum-security facility designed to replace the famed federal prison at Alcatraz, which closed in 1963. As during his tenure at Lewisburg, Franklin fared poorly at Marion. He eventually submitted to a “daddy” for protect
ion to stay out of harm’s way. He was still subject to performing sexually, but the beatings stopped, allowing Franklin to discover and nourish an interest in law. He also studied for and received his GED.

  The newly found serenity also prompted contact and reconnection with the Georgia Baptist Children’s Home. Franklin wrote frequently to the general manager, John C. Warr.

  Franklin’s letters were often long and eloquent, acknowledging his troubled past, his sorrow for any pain inflicted on his “friends” at the home, and hope that his life would one day follow a good and decent path. In 1966, Franklin even sent Warr a Christmas card. While Warr replied with several letters of his own, encouraging Franklin to continue with his studies, he held a decidedly different opinion of Franklin in letters to prison officials. In one missive, Warr was clear in explaining that Franklin Floyd was a deeply troubled man who gave “us lots of trouble.”

  “He has a keen mind, but in my experience, he is so emotionally unstable. I hope he will behave himself,” wrote Warr.

  In February 1968, Floyd was transferred to the Reidsville State Prison to complete his federal bank robbery sentence and serve the balance of his Georgia state conviction concurrently for the 1962 attack on the four-year-old girl. Reidsville was one hundred miles to the east of Atlanta and was no different than the tough federal system. Convicted child molesters were subhuman, and once again Floyd felt the wrath of his fellow convicts.

  Too weak and cowardly to defend himself, Franklin befriended David Dial, a career criminal serving four years for a drug charge. Dial was well over six feet tall and 240 pounds. His physical presence and nasty disposition struck fear in much of the prison population. Dial took a liking to Franklin and offered him protection. Together they passed the countless hours of boredom that comes with prison time playing chess and talking, though it was Franklin who did most of the talking. He denied molesting the four-year-old girl and bitterly complained about his lot in life, particularly the treatment he received growing up at the children’s home.