A Beautiful Child

by Matt Birkbeck

  Everyone had questions, but felt it wasn’t their business to pry. School was an environment where parental alcoholism, drug abuse, and sexual abuse were problems that never went away, and teachers were experienced at dealing with the resulting dysfunctions exhibited in students of all ages. In the event a student suffered apparent physical or emotional harm, social services, or even the police, were called.

  What made Sharon’s story all the more devastating and incomprehensible to the staff at Forest Park was that she appeared to be highly functional, and her intelligence and inner strength apparently worked against her in that it allowed her to separate her two lives—the one she had with her father, and the one she had at school. A weaker, less intelligent person would have, in all probability, fallen apart at some point, and given away his or her personal secrets.

  Earle Lewis, Sharon’s ROTC instructor, thought it stretched the limits of comprehension to figure where the genes came from to develop that type of character.

  Lewis had never known anyone like Sharon Marshall.

  Joe Fitzpatrick had worked dozens of kidnappings during his lengthy career, but never one that involved a child stolen two decades earlier.

  There were so many questions, the most important of which was, How would he go about finding her true identity?

  Fitzpatrick began his search in earnest by obtaining a list of missing-child organizations throughout the country. Clearinghouses served as registries for all missing-children cases reported within each state, and Fitzpatrick found at least one clearinghouse in all fifty states. He personally wrote fifty letters, describing Sharon and the approximate year she was believed to have been taken, anywhere from the summer of 1973 to the fall of 1975, when she first appeared with Floyd in Oklahoma City.

  Fitzpatrick spent half his working days on the phone with the clearinghouses, focusing his attention on places where Floyd was known to have traveled in the mid-1970s, including Georgia and Illinois. Floyd’s mother, Della, died in Chicago in 1968 and Floyd was said to have visited her grave in 1974. Della lived a hard life. She was an alcoholic who turned to prostitution, who later married and moved to Illinois. Floyd last saw her in 1960 in Indianapolis prior to entering the Army.

  But information coming from the various clearinghouses shed little light on Sharon’s plight, and responses soon became predictable since few states maintained records older than five years.

  Some went back ten years, but none longer.

  Several leads did surface through conversation and networking: California authorities suggested two possible identifications, but they quickly washed out. Another possibility emerged out of Florida concerning a woman and her daughter, who had both disappeared. Fitzpatrick thought he might have a hit since the photo of the missing girl looked like Sharon, but the father and brothers of the girl were certain they were not identical.

  With each new lead, particularly the Florida connection, Fitzpatrick would share the promising news with Mark Yancey and Ed Kumiega. All were excited with the possibilities, discussing the leads long into the night at the U.S. Attorney’s office. Fitzpatrick would stop by at the end of the day, share the information, and Yancey and Kumiega could see and sense Fitzpatrick’s excitement.

  They could also plainly see his complete dejection when it became clear there was no match.

  As months went by, the search had become a frustrating and, to a large degree, impossible exercise. Even Fitzpatrick, with nearly three decades of experience, was surprised at the lack of information available in searching for a missing child from the not-too-distant past. There was simply no place to go to find detailed information on missing children prior to 1990.

  If one girl could go unnoticed after being kidnapped and held for so many years, Fitzpatrick wondered, how many others shared the same predicament?

  To understand the gravity of problem, Fitzpatrick decided to research the issue.

  The lesson was eye-opening.

  CHAPTER 27

  Define a missing child in America prior to the mid-1980s and the typical answer would be anyone under the age of eighteen who willingly left their home.

  A runaway.

  And runaways were considered the problem of parents, teachers, and social workers, not the police. That attitude prevailed for decades as law enforcement agencies throughout the country virtually ignored missing children. There are more than eighteen thousand police departments throughout the United States and all routinely failed to take reports, imposed waiting periods before considering taking a missing-person report, and after 1975 either ignored or simply refused to input missing children cases into the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database.

  And in cases where police did take reports, there was little communication between the thousands of police departments. Given the low priority placed on missing children, a child could be abducted from one jurisdiction, and no other police agency, not even a neighboring department, would know about it.

  The criminal justice system, which ultimately dictates police response, showed even less concern for missing children. There were few criminal statutes prior to 1982 that addressed family-abduction issues, giving police no real authority to deal with runaways even if they wanted to. Runaways were considered status offenders, not criminals.

  In essence, Congress, the courts, and law enforcement paid little attention to the plight of missing children in America.

  No one even bothered to gauge the problem until 1975, when the National Statistical Survey on Runaway Youth, a federally funded study, estimated that approximately 500,000 children ran away from home each year. The report was criticized for being incomplete, since it relied on a sampling of inferior statistics maintained by clearinghouses in each state, which received their information from local police departments, which failed miserably in monitoring and acting on missing-children reports.

  Testimony before Congress in 1982 suggested that the actual number of children who disappeared each year hovered near two million, with estimates of as many as five thousand children murdered every year through kidnapping and abduction. Thousands more were never seen again.

  The numbers were not verified but were shocking enough. Even more unsettling was that the U.S. government provided zero dollars for the search and recovery of missing children.

  There was no agency, no department, no investigators—no one—aligned with or supported by the federal government charged with the task of coordinating and investigating missing-children reports throughout the country. Aside from placing pictures on milk cartons, the plight of missing children in America was a nonissue.

  Individual cases did emerge over the years, leading to public outrage and federal legislation, but they were few and very far between. The first was in 1932, when the infant son of Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped and killed in New Jersey. The nation reacted angrily, given Lindbergh’s status as a national hero, and Congress responded with the Lindbergh Law, legislation that authorized the U.S. Department of Justice, in the form of the FBI, to intervene in kidnapping cases that crossed state lines.

  Congress later passed the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction Act in 1968, which stopped parents involved in custody disputes from “judge shopping,” or traveling to different states to seek favorable custody decisions.

  In 1975 the FBI instituted a missing-persons file in its National Crime Information Center, an automated information sharing system that allowed law enforcement throughout the country to input and review cases in one centralized file. But few law enforcement agencies took the time to input cases, much less investigate missing-persons reports. Most reports involving missing children were treated as runaways or children taken in domestic disputes, and were ignored.

  The nation remained in the dark to the plight of missing children until 1982, when Congress adopted the Missing Children Act, legislation enacted following three unsettling events that occurred over a two-year span.

  The first was the abduction of a seven-year-old boy, Etan Pat
z, from his downtown New York City neighborhood in May 1979.

  Patz persuaded his parents to allow him to walk alone to the bus stop two blocks away. His mother watched him stroll down the first block, then went inside. He never made it across the second block.

  New York newspapers published Patz’s heart-tugging photo daily, and the publicity surrounding an abduction off a city street in broad daylight caused a national furor. It had happened countless times before throughout the country, but none of those cases received the scrutiny or notoriety as the Patz abduction.

  The second event involved the murder of twenty-nine young men and boys in the Atlanta area. Their bodies were found from 1979 to 1981 throughout the greater-Atlanta region. The nation followed along as body after body washed up in local lakes and rivers.

  The third and final event occurred in July 1981, when six-year-old Adam Walsh was abducted from a Florida shopping mall. His head was found two weeks later in a ditch, his body was never recovered.

  His parents, John and Reve, desperately sought answers, but were surprised and disturbed to learn there were few coming from law enforcement. The Walshes’ profound grief, personal frustration, and anger attracted thousands of parents of other missing or lost children whose stories were tragically similar to the Walshes’ but never heard.

  Children of all ages were taken at all hours of the day, from homes, parks, supermarkets, schools, hospitals, amusement parks—anywhere.

  It was clear to all concerned that that these violent acts toward America’s children were not isolated events, and the furor reached Washington, D.C., Congressional hearings in 1982 revealed the untold violence and tragedy surrounding the disappearances of thousands of children and their parents’ desperate need for resources to investigate each and every case.

  Legislators were bombarded with stories of children routinely beaten, bludgeoned, burned, and sexually abused by predators who easily retreated into the shadows, with little fear of capture and prosecution.

  The Missing Children Act of 1982, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, was a milestone. It announced to all that after decades of ignorance, the federal government now perceived the investigation and recovery of missing children a priority.

  The new legislation called on police departments throughout the country to investigate every missing-person report involving a child and to enter all pertinent information into NCIC. It also required the FBI to intervene where appropriate and confirm NCIC entries for parents of the missing.

  Another milestone occurred just two years later, when Congress enacted the Missing Children’s Assistance Act, which recognized that federal assistance was urgently needed to “coordinate and assist the national problem of missing and abducted children.”

  Later that year, Congress directed the establishment of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Formed as a direct result of the lobbying efforts led by John and Reve Walsh, the National Center was formed as a nonprofit agency funded by the federal government and private donations. Its mandate was to help families find missing children. The National Center was charged with creating and maintaining a national clearinghouse of information on missing children, running a toll-free hotline, and providing technical assistance to law enforcement ill-suited for the task.

  The National Center opened in April 1984 in Washington, D.C., with a small staff of retired police detectives, a general but unfocused purpose, and an initial budget of $3.3 million.

  It was the first quasi-federal agency with a sole responsibility for missing children.

  Soon after its historic creation, it became clear that the National Center’s greatest attribute would be its lobbying power. The National Center was not a lobbying center, but Congress found it difficult to say no to the rising tide of anger expressed by parents of the missing, the numbers of which no one really knew.

  With previous testimony alluding to the number of the missing at a staggering two million annually, Congress sought more tangible statistics, and through the Missing Children’s Assistance Act called for a new study, the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children in America (NISMART), to accurately estimate the number of missing children in the United States.

  The study took six years to complete, the results of which were published in 1990.

  NISMART focused on a target year of 1988, and found that the plight of missing children was really five different and distinct problems: family abduction; nonfamily abduction; runaways; thrownaways; and lost, injured, or otherwise missing children.

  Combined, NISMART revealed that over a million children were reported missing in 1988. Of that number 450,000 were considered runaways while 438,000 were considered “lost/injured/otherwise missing.”

  Joe Fitzpatrick’s interest in his search for Sharon’s identity was in nonfamily abductions, which included the “unauthorized” taking of a child by someone other than a family member who detained the child more than an hour or lured the child for the purposes of committing another crime, such as kidnapping or sexual assault.

  The NISMART study determined there were 114,600 attempted nonfamily abductions, which encompassed all efforts to gain custody of a child, including luring children into cars, in malls, near schools, from parks—just about anywhere. Many attempts were unsuccessful. Either the child refused the advance or a parent or another adult interceded, driving the potential abductor away.

  Still, Fitzpatrick saw that anywhere from 3,600 to 4,600 children were successfully taken against their will each year, with many of those children subsequently sexually or physically abused, or both. Of those taken, two hundred to three hundred were considered “stereotypical kidnappings,” which meant the child was killed, ransomed, or the perpetrator intended to keep the child permanently.

  Pedophiles such as Floyd who kidnapped rarely kept the child longer than seventy-two hours, when the child would either be set free or murdered. Fitzpatrick realized that Floyd’s case was most unusual in that he not only kept Sharon alive but maintained custody, even under the pressure of his status as a federal fugitive.

  There was no other case on record where a pedophile, convicted felon, and federal fugitive kidnapped a child and successfully raised her as his daughter—successful to the extent that he maintained custody of the child for fifteen to seventeen years. What made the case even more baffling was Sharon herself, a beautiful, tender, and highly intelligent girl who could easily have told someone, anyone, about her plight, but remained silent.

  The efforts of parents and the National Center throughout the 1980s led to another major piece of legislation in 1990, when Congress passed the National Child Search Assistance Act, which greatly improved the Missing Children Act of 1982 by mandating that no federal, state, or local law-enforcement agency could establish or observe a waiting period before accepting a missing-child case. And police were required by law to input information into NCIC within two hours of receiving reports of missing children under eighteen years of age.

  Law enforcement agencies throughout the country were now mandated to act, and the new guidelines resulted in direct improvements in the recovery of missing children, which reached 75 percent of all reported cases by 1995.

  For Joe Fitzpatrick, the success of the missing children movement from 1982 to 1990 did little for his investigation into the disappearance of a girl from the early to mid-1970s.

  Fitzpatrick realized the ease with which a predator like Franklin Floyd could conceivably kidnap a girl during that time, travel to another state, and go unnoticed. Floyd was clever enough to obtain documents, including Social Security numbers and birth certificates, from a vast network of resources and contacts, including ex-cons, that spanned the country.

  Once Floyd enrolled Sharon in first grade in Oklahoma City, he began a legitimate paper trail where legal parentage was never a consideration. No one—teachers, guidance counselors, neighbors, or acquaintances—ever sought actual proof that Floyd was the legal parent. N
o one had reason to. As long as Floyd could provide transfer records from each of Sharon’s previous schools, and without any signs or signals from Sharon herself, the ruse was complete.

  To all who knew Floyd and Sharon, he was simply a single father struggling to raise a daughter.

  Prospects for identifying Sharon Marshall were dim at best, and Fitzpatrick was running out of options. So he turned to the National Center.

  The National Center opened a file on Michael Hughes on September 15, 1994, three days after Michael had been kidnapped, and through the Hughes case Fitzpatrick developed a relationship with the agency.

  Since its creation in 1984, the National Center had grown from a small agency with a handful of employees and small working spaces with typewriters to an efficient organization that relied on increased funding, state-of-the-art computers, and the expertise of experienced investigators from various local, state, and federal police agencies.

  By 1995 the National Center privately estimated, based on statistics from the FBI and studies such as NISMART, that some 800,000 children went missing each year. But thanks in part to the work of the National Center a solid 75 percent were recovered, which was far better than the estimated 50 percent recovery rate recorded by law enforcement when the agency opened its doors in 1984.

  Ron Jones was the case manager in charge of the Michael Hughes investigation for the National Center. A veteran homicide detective with the Washington, D.C., police, Jones joined the National Center after retiring from the D.C. force in 1987.

  His job upon receiving the Michael Hughes case was to publicize the kidnapping within law enforcement circles throughout the nation as well as the media. Jones sent out flyers with Michael’s picture and made numerous phone calls, which produced leads from all over the country that subsequently were passed along to the FBI.