A Beautiful Child

by Matt Birkbeck

  Deasaro took part during the first few days of the investigation, combing the roadside for additional evidence and eventually finding a small bone, which he turned over to Schock.

  A native New Yorker from Staten Island, Deasaro opted to attend college in a warmer climate and received a degree in criminology at St. Leo College in Pascal County, just north of St. Petersburg. He liked Florida and decided to stay, accepting a position with the Plant City Police and giving up earlier dreams of joining the New York City Police Department. Deasaro, thirty-six, later joined the St. Petersburg police in 1983 and eventually worked his way to detective with robbery homicide.

  Deasaro and Schock made for a strange pairing—the quiet, unassuming native Floridian and the brash extrovert from New York. Deasaro was personable, impulsive, and loud; his friendly demeanor, charm, and good looks would take over a room in an instant. Deasaro was the hare, and Schock the turtle. But they worked well together, and Schock continued following leads with the phone calls while Deasaro contacted several clothing manufacturers, attempting to find more information on the garments found near the remains.

  Some of the worn, dirty clothing still had labels attached, and Deasaro called the American Apparel Manufacturing Corporation in Arlington, Virginia, to help with the identification.

  He passed along the registration numbers on the tags and was told the companies in question went out of business some ten years earlier. Another piece of clothing, a pair of black stretch pants, had the name Laurente on the label. Deasaro learned that the pants were cheap knockoffs of Yves St. Laurent, and that none of the clothing would be available in stores today.

  Schock and Deasaro followed every single lead, but couldn’t come up with a name to attach to the remains. After eight weeks the case remained open, but was just one of dozens of unsolved mysteries involving unidentified women found dead in the Tampa Bay area.

  The call from the FBI more than a year later startled Schock, and he readily agreed to meet the following day with the Tampa police and FBI at a parking lot outside the Pinellas County Sheriff’s office.

  Schock stood in the parking lot and wiped his sweaty brow as he slowly reviewed the photos handed to him. He was taken aback by the brutality and sickness so plainly evident.

  Schock quickly noticed the clothing pushed up toward the victim’s neck. It was a white bikini top and striped shirt, similar to the worn clothing found near the skull of his Jane Doe.

  Schock thought this was too good to be true.

  It was explained that the photos were found more than a year earlier taped to the gas tank of a Ford truck in Mission, Kansas. The truck had been stolen during a kidnapping in Oklahoma in September 1994. The kidnapper was a Franklin Delano Floyd, who was currently in prison in Oklahoma City awaiting transfer to a federal facility to serve a fifty-two-year sentence following his conviction. Floyd lived in the Tampa area from 1988 to 1989 under the alias Warren Marshall. Included with the photos was an FBI file on Floyd, offering additional details of his troubled, disturbing, and violent history.

  Schock returned to his desk downtown at police headquarters and read through the file. Attached was a contact number for a Joe Fitzpatrick from the FBI’s Oklahoma City field office, who was the agent in charge of the Floyd case. It was Fitzpatrick who had sent the photos to the Tampa FBI field offices. He’d spent the past year working the Oklahoma City bombing investigation and recently returned his attention to Floyd and the photos.

  Fitzpatrick saw that the victim was well tanned, and figured she lived in a hot, sunny climate. Fitzpatrick knew that Floyd lived in the Tampa area in the late 1980s. It was a long shot, but he sent the photos to the Tampa FBI field office, and they were now in Schock’s hands.

  Schock called Fitzpatrick that afternoon; their conversation was pleasant but to the point. Schock said judging by the clothing worn in the photos, he strongly believed that the woman and his Jane Doe were one and the same.

  Fitzpatrick was stunned. It was his idea to send the photos to Tampa, but the sheer thought of connecting Floyd to an open homicide investigation halfway across the country was mind-boggling, even for a case that already stretched the imagination.

  Schock requested any and all information on Floyd, and Fitzpatrick obliged, offering to help any way he could. Fitzpatrick always believed there was more to Franklin Floyd, deeper, darker secrets that remained hidden. A new investigation, particularly a murder probe, could open new doors to the mysteries surrounding Floyd and possibly those of Sharon and Michael.

  Over the next week Fitzpatrick sent Schock copies of files on the FBI’s investigation of Franklin Floyd, including the names and contact numbers of all those involved in the kidnapping investigation, as well as acquaintances of Floyd in other states, particularly Georgia.

  Schock and Deasaro initially reached out to law enforcement in Oklahoma. The Choctaw police department filled in additional details on the kidnapping, and the Oklahoma City and Tulsa police departments eagerly offered background info on their investigations surrounding Sharon’s murder in 1990.

  On July 24, Schock and Deasaro drove across the bay to Tampa Police headquarters. A year earlier, during their original investigation, they reviewed missing-persons records dating back to 1990, based on Dr. Maples’s belief that the remains were only a few years old.

  Since Floyd lived in the area in 1988 and 1989, they expanded their search another two years to include missing-persons reports from that period. Tampa proved fruitless, so they drove to the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s office to review two of their open cases. One had already been reviewed and eliminated. The other involved Cheryl Ann Commesso, a nineteen-year-old woman who had been reported missing in June 1989, but was last seen two months earlier, in April. Her car, a red Corvette, was reported abandoned by security at the St. Petersburg-Clearwater airport in May.

  Commesso’s description—including her height and weight—fit the Jane Doe. She also had breast implants, as did the woman in the photos. Schock compared the torture photos to a picture of Commesso’s driver’s license, and they appeared similar.

  Schock requested, and received, all dental x-rays in the Commesso file along with a copy of the original missing-persons report. He and Deasaro then drove back across the bay to the Pinellas County Medical Examiner’s office to compare the x-rays to those of the teeth found with the remains. The testing proved inconclusive.

  Schock called Commesso’s father, John, who lived in the Tampa area, and requested his daughter’s dental records. John said they were in New York, with Cheryl’s mother, Lois.

  Schock called Lois in New York, and she sent the records down the next day. With the dental records in hand, Schock and Deasaro returned to the medical examiner’s office. That afternoon Dr. Ken Martin, a forensic odontologist, made a positive identification on the Jane Doe of I-275.

  It was Cheryl Ann Commesso.

  Schock notified her family with the sad news. He learned during the brief conversations that Cheryl had led a troubled life. She was the oldest of three children born to John and Lois, who were originally from New York and moved to Florida in 1985. Cheryl, who was born in June 1970, dropped out of high school when she was sixteen years old and ended up working as an exotic dancer in Orlando. She agreed to return home and live with her father after her parents separated during Christmas 1988, but a month later was gone, living in Tampa, dancing again and driving a 1985 red Corvette. She had placed eight thousand dollars down and her father cosigned the loan for the remainder. She spent another three thousand dollars on upgrades, including a rear spoiler. She also spent several thousand dollars for breast implants.

  John said he received a call from the bank in May 1989 informing him that the Corvette had been abandoned at the St. Petersburg-Clearwater Airport. John figured his daughter had flown somewhere and left the car in the long-term parking lot, intending to return. But after several phone calls to family members he learned that no one had heard from Cheryl for a month or so, and by June a
missing-persons report was filed.

  Following his conversation with the Commessos, Schock called Oklahoma City and informed Joe Fitzpatrick they had an ID on the victim. Neither man was religious, but both had passing thoughts that a higher authority played a role in connecting photos found in Kansas to a murder in Florida.

  With the torture photos and a positive identification in hand, the first order of business was connecting Cheryl Commesso to Franklin Floyd.

  Prior to her disappearance Cheryl danced at the Mons Venus, a popular strip club on North Dale Mabry Boulevard near downtown Tampa. Schock and Deasaro visited the club with photos of Franklin Floyd, Sharon Marshall, and Cheryl Commesso. Employees at Mons Venus who worked at the club in the late 1980s recognized all three. Sharon and Cheryl were dancers, they said, while Floyd was some crazy coot known then as Warren Marshall.

  On August 1, Joe Fitzpatrick and Mark Yancey flew to St. Petersburg to meet with Schock, Deasaro, and a representative from the Florida State Attorney’s office. The Michael Hughes case was still open, and any information coming out of the Florida murder investigation could possibly lead to his remains, or even the true identity of Sharon Marshall.

  Fitzpatrick provided an FBI timeline that revealed Floyd’s whereabouts while in the Tampa area. He had lived in three different residences, all under the name Warren Marshall. Two homes were in trailer parks in Tampa, and the third and last address was at the Golden Lantern Mobile Home Park in Pinellas Park, just outside of St. Petersburg, from January 1989 to June 1989.

  An arrest warrant had been issued for Floyd, a.k.a. Warren Marshall, on May 9, 1989, involving the reported theft of a boat and intent to defraud an insurance company. Floyd had allegedly drilled holes into the bottom of a twenty-two-foot motorboat he owned and sunk it in Tampa Bay, ostensibly to collect the insurance money. A month later, Floyd’s trailer in Pinellas Park had been set on fire, but Floyd and his traveling companions—Sharon and her son, Michael—were gone.

  Fitzpatrick and Yancey took the afternoon to describe the past events in Oklahoma, and shared the remaining photos of Sharon Marshall found in the truck in Kansas with the Florida investigators. Like their Oklahoma colleagues before, Schock, Deasaro, and the others sitting in the room were astounded. They already had a difficult time digesting the Floyd story, the kidnapping of Michael Hughes, and the tragic circumstances surrounding the life and death of Sharon Marshall.

  The photos crystallized the repulsion felt by all.

  Fitzpatrick’s folder on Sharon was fairly complete and included much of the previously missing information, particularly her school years at Forest Park, Georgia.

  Schock, Deasaro, and others in the room were astonished upon hearing of Sharon’s accomplishments—from her selection as a Who’s Who Among American High School Students in 1985, her elevation to Lieutenant Colonel in the ROTC, her senior class rank of twenty-six out of three hundred and fifty and finally her full scholarship to Georgia Tech University.

  “You sure this is the same girl we’re talking about?” said an incredulous Deasaro. “This can’t be the same girl.”

  Fitzpatrick assured Deasaro and everyone else in the room hearing the story for the first time that this was, indeed, the same girl. She was also the same girl kidnapped by Floyd when she was a child, subjected to years of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, and presumably killed by Floyd when she tried to leave him as an adult.

  Her true identity was still unknown.

  Fitzpatrick pulled out a copy of a 1988 hospital report from Louisville, Kentucky. Floyd, Sharon, and Michael suddenly bolted from Florida in November 1988 and lived for a short while at the Forsythia Apartments on Barley Avenue in Louisville. Sharon danced briefly at The Godfather club.

  Around 8 P.M. on Christmas Eve, 1988, Sharon was found in her car, alone and unconscious. She had overdosed and was transported by ambulance to Humana University Hospital, where doctors revived her. Distraught and suicidal, Sharon wouldn’t confide to doctors or psychiatrists the nature of her problem. During subsequent testing, doctors discovered that she was pregnant, probably in her first or second month. Sharon declined to tell them who the father was.

  Floyd, a.k.a. Warren Marshall, was listed as a relative and notified by the hospital. He quickly checked Sharon out of the hospital, packed their bags, and they returned to Tampa, renting a trailer at the Golden Lantern trailer park in Pinellas County.

  “You’re kidding me, right? You’ve got to be kidding me?” said Deasaro, unable to fully comprehend all that he was hearing.

  Fitzpatrick once again assured Deasaro and others seated that the story was, sadly, accurate.

  “It’s clear that whenever Sharon established a relationship with someone in a particular location or city, Floyd would move. Each time she became pregnant, in Georgia, Arizona, and Florida, they would leave. No friends, no ties, no attachments. This was one of the ways he controlled her all those years, by keeping her isolated,” said Fitzpatrick.

  Schock remained quiet through much of the meeting, as was his way. He was repulsed by Floyd, but deeply moved by Sharon’s story. Aside from the ghastly photos of Cheryl Commesso found in the Ford truck, Schock focused on one particular picture in Fitzpatrick’s file. It was Sharon’s high school graduation photo. She wore a conservative, black off-the-shoulder dress, with small white pearls around her neck. She had a slight smile, and to Schock’s eyes was simply beautiful.

  She appeared to be a young woman with a future filled with unlimited potential.

  Schock decided that the Sharon in this photo could not be confused with the poor soul who was subjected to years of degradation and horror in the other photos laid out before him. No, Schock determined that this was the image of Sharon Marshall to be seared into his memory: an image of beauty, grace, and wholesomeness. She may not have had a real name, but this was the real woman, and the photo served to inspire Schock and Deasaro.

  Over the course of the next month Schock and Deasaro would travel to Oklahoma to interview the witnesses who testified in Floyd’s federal trial and others who came in contact with Sharon and Floyd in Tulsa.

  Upon their return to St. Petersburg in mid-September, the two detectives began navigating the uncharted waters of Franklin Floyd and Sharon Marshall, a journey that would lead them to focus their attention on their last six months in Florida, from January to June 1989.

  CHAPTER 22

  The red Corvette sprinted past the handful of children playing basketball, ignoring the signs to “go slow—children at play.” The driver, a young shapely woman with dark, wild hair and long, glossy fingernails, picked up her speed as she exited the Golden Lantern trailer park, her car screeching and smoke billowing from the rear tires as she turned right onto Park Boulevard.

  Michelle Cupples had seen the car before, though she didn’t think the driver lived in any of the singlewide trailers that made up the tawdry development in Pinellas Park. No, Michelle decided, she was definitely a visitor. No one in this neighborhood could afford a car like that.

  It was mid-January, 1989, the weather on this day too cool even for the west coast of Florida. As they resumed their game, Cupples noticed a man and woman walking slowly up the street.

  They were the new neighbors from down the block.

  The man appeared to be older, while the woman was probably in her twenties. She held a boy in her arms. He couldn’t have been more than a year old or so.

  When they reached the front of Michelle’s home she jumped up and walked toward them, placing her attention on the boy.

  “Hi, what’s your name?” she said.

  “That’s Pookie,” said the man.

  “Well hello, Pookie. I’m Michelle. How old are you?”

  The boy stared.

  “He’s just tired,” said the man, who identified himself as Warren Marshall. The boy’s real name was Michael. The woman standing next to him was his mother, and her name was Sharon.

  “I’m his grandfather,” said Warren. “You li
ve here?”

  “Right there,” said Michelle, pointing to her trailer.

  “You seem good with kids. How old are you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Really,” said Warren. “You know, my daughter here works nights and there are times we can use a babysitter. Would you be interested?”

  “Sure,” said Michelle.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what. Next time I need someone I’ll just come and knock on your door. That sound OK?”

  “Fine with me,” said Michelle, who thought it was odd that Sharon didn’t even say hello.

  A week later Warren came knocking and Michelle was hired to sit for Michael.

  The Marshall home was just around the corner from where Michelle lived and she recognized the trailer as the one with the boat in the driveway.

  Three cars were parked in front of the house: the red Corvette convertible that had whizzed by Michelle and her friends the week before, and two others, a green Chevy and a red Ford pickup truck.

  Inside, the trailer was typical. In the living room was a couch, which was really a hideaway bed. Next to the couch was a television, VCR, video camera, and dozens of black videotapes, perhaps a couple of hundred. The kitchen was in the middle and held a small table, three chairs, and a high chair.

  Of the two bedrooms, one belonged to Michael, the other was Sharon’s, which left Michelle guessing that Warren, the grandpa, slept on the sofa bed.

  Michelle waited by the front door for several minutes before Warren emerged from Michael’s room. Sharon stepped out from her room. With her was a friend, who was introduced as Stevie.

  Stevie was thin and voluptuous. She had dark hair, wore plenty of makeup, and talked with what sounded like a New York accent. Sharon was quiet, much as she was when they first met. She said hello, but not much more.

  Warren laid out the rules, and there were lots of them. Of most importance: Never enter Sharon’s room.

  “You can’t go into Sharon’s bedroom, understand? Ever. And you see this closet here?” he said, pointing to a small door near the entrance to Michael’s room. “Don’t ever go in there either. That’s Michael’s stuff in there. You git me?”