The firm still had Sharon’s file on record, along with her blood type, which was A negative. According to the sisters, Henry Harbison had A positive blood, while Freda had O blood, making it possible to have a child with A negative blood. Since we couldn’t discount Sherri Lynn by her blood type, the mystery deepened.
In May I traveled to Oklahoma City and Tulsa, and spent nearly two weeks interviewing a host of people, including Joe Fitzpatrick, Mark Yancey, Ed Kumiega, and several of Sharon’s former coworkers at Passions.
I was cautiously optimistic that perhaps we were on the right road since the National Center was zeroing in on Henry Harbison and Freda Denman as Sharon’s real parents, given the blood type, physical resemblance, and time of her disappearance.
I shared the information with Joe Fitzpatrick, whose idea for an interview was sitting in a fishing boat on a small lake surrounded by snakes and other interesting creatures. We later spoke at length at his home, and Fitzpatrick was helpful and earnest, though somewhat guarded when it came to revealing details of the inner workings of the FBI.
Fitzpatrick was still very much interested in the Floyd case, having testified at his murder trial eight months earlier in St. Petersburg, Florida, and took great interest in the new information involving Henry Harbison, someone whom he had never heard about. He asked to be informed should something develop.
Mark Yancey and Ed Kumiega were also interested in the new lead, the case having affected them as much as anyone. The two prosecutors were very helpful in relaying the events surrounding the Michael Hughes kidnapping trial and provided access to the paperwork and information required to accurately depict the events that transpired before, during, and after the trial.
Like Fitzpatrick and others, the mystery surrounding Sharon Marshall gnawed at them. I also interviewed Gary Homan, Floyd’s old parole officer, and the Bean family, who were still haunted by the loss of Michael.
In Tulsa I met Karen Parsley, a.k.a. Connie, and Lavernia Watkins, a.k.a. Bambi. We sat in a restaurant for several hours as they shared their stories of Sharon. They knew her for less than a year, yet Sharon left an indelible imprint on each of the women. Like everyone else who ever met Sharon or heard her story, they wanted to know her real identity.
Both Connie and Bambi were still employed at Passions, though now well into their thirties they had given up dancing. We visited the dank club, the trailer park where Sharon and Floyd had lived, and Sharon’s grave. They knew Sharon as Tonya, and the simple, marble marker bore that name.
The two Sharon letters were forwarded to the National Center in June, and all concerned, including Shelley, Shannon, and Gerry Nance, would wait through the summer for an answer.
In the interim, research on the Church of the New Song, along with the prison records of several church leaders, revealed all had been at the federal prison in Atlanta the same time as Franklin Floyd, among them Jerry Dorrough, John Price, and founder Harry Theriault.
Floyd arrived at USP Atlanta in November 1971 to serve out his time for the 1962 escape attempt at the federal prison in Chillicothe, Ohio. Floyd was there in March 1972, when the Church of the New Song held its first “service” at the Atlanta prison with six hundred inmates in attendance.
During the summer I contacted Joe Grant, former editor of the Penal Digest International, who said he did not know or remember Floyd. I also found Jerry Dorrough, who was living in Texas. Dorrough visited a public library to go on-line and pulled up the Doe Network website. He didn’t recognize Franklin Floyd, but did remember Henry Harbison, with whom he served time together in the 1960s. He described Harbison as a “good guy,” though somewhat intense.
Dorrough thought he remembered the name John Price but wasn’t sure.
Price was said to be a deeply troubled and violent man who took an interest in the “church” while at USP Atlanta in 1971 and 1972. He was released from prison in 1972 and ended up at the “church” headquarters in Iowa City, where he lived and worked fixing grain silos.
While delving further into the Church of the New Song, on July 17 we received some very encouraging news from Gerry Nance: Lab technicians at Bodetech were successful in extracting DNA from one of the stamps on Sharon’s envelopes.
With what was believed to be Sharon’s DNA in hand, Nance moved quickly. He sent out a retrieval kit to one of Freda’s sisters to complete a mitochondrial DNA test since the DNA that had been extracted from the stamp was too degraded to perform nuclear DNA testing.
To complete the test, Bodetech needed a sample from a maternal member of the Denman family, and received permission to obtain a “swab” from a sister. A kit was sent out, the sister took a Q-tip, put it into her mouth and rubbed it against the inside of her cheek, then placed it in a clear package and sent it back to the National Center.
Again, we waited.
In the interim the search continued to connect the dots between Floyd and Henry Harbison, and the dots had begun to connect quickly.
By September the story came into focus.
In November 1971 Franklin Floyd was transferred from the state prison in Reidsville, Georgia, to the federal prison at Atlanta. Floyd became a regular at the prison library, studying the law and meeting other jailhouse-lawyer types, nearly all of whom were involved in the new Church of the New Song.
John Price was already at USP Atlanta, having arrived in August 1971 on a gun charge.
Price and Floyd were at the prison when the Church was officially recognized in February 1972, and both attended the first official gathering of the new church in March 1972.
John Price was paroled later in 1972 and moved to Iowa City, where he took part in a number of church activities. Price was six-feet-one, about 190 pounds, and strong. He had a slight southern accent and was said to be quite the ladies’ man. But Price was also considered dangerous and, like most other ex-cons who had served lengthy prison sentences in tough prisons, he was a survivor, capable of taking care of himself and striking first if he believed he was in danger.
Though it’s not clear, somewhere along the line Price connected with another dangerous individual, Henry Harbison, a.k.a. Michael Johnson. Price wrote at least one letter to Harbison, an Iowa City P.O. box listed as the return address, the same P.O. box used by the Church of the New Song.
Harbison always had “guests” staying at his Independence home, men he introduced to neighbors as his “brothers.”
The sisters, Shelley and Shannon, learned about Harbison and Price through the Independence police file, and also from Joe Grant, whom they tracked down in Phoenix, Arizona, and traded several e-mails with.
During one exchange, Grant relayed how he recently received a visit from Harry Theriault, the founder of the Church of the New Song.
Theriault spent most of the 1970s in solitary confinement, the effects of which led to what Grant believed was mental instability. Theriault believed he was a “prophet” and went by the name of Shiloh. During Theriault’s visit to Arizona, Grant said he asked him about John Price, but Theriault was in no mental condition to remember much of anything.
The sisters also learned of a letter written by Theriault to Jerry Dorrough in the early 1970s, with Theriault referring to Price saying, “The Bishop has ordered Brother John Price, S.R.M. to stay out of the Habazinian. It’s spiritual stuff on a physical plane.” (According to Jerry Dorrough, S.R.M. meant Special Revelation Minister, a title concocted by Theriault and given to most members of the Church of the New Song.)
Grant then sent an e-mail to Shelley, saying he was “thinking about the missing kids” and that Freda was “probably murdered.”
“Brother John [Price] was capable of such acts,” wrote Grant.
There was no mention of Harbison, though the sisters were very aware of his violent reputation, his threats to the Denman family, and the physical abuse he inflicted on his young wife, Freda, who was twenty-seven when she disappeared. Given that Harbison was wanted by the FBI at the time the entire family disappeared, al
ong with the blood found at the Independence home, which the sisters learned matched Freda’s blood type, the sisters believed that Freda had been killed and the children taken away. By whom, they weren’t sure.
In late September 2003, Gerry Nance called with some astonishing news: Initial results from the DNA testing revealed that Sharon’s DNA, retrieved from the stamp affixed to the letter sent so long ago to Jennifer Fisher, appeared to be consistent with that of the Denman family.
A definitive answer would come soon, perhaps in weeks, said Nance.
The added time allowed for further investigation and conjecture concerning Harbison, Price, and Floyd. Given the evidence in hand, it appears that Henry Harbison and Franklin Floyd may have met somewhere near Chicago. Both were in and around the city at the same time, the Independence police having tracked Harbison to Rensselaer, Indiana, just southeast of Chicago, after he wrote several bad checks. Harbison was on the run from the FBI, and if Freda was killed back in Independence, carrying two children with him was a liability.
Floyd was known to be in Freedom Village, Illinois, also just south of Chicago. Both were members of the Church of the New Song, which had a flophouse in Chicago run by a PDI photographer where wayward ex-cons and church members would be given a warm meal and place to spend the night. Among the several stories told by Floyd about gaining custody of Sharon was one where her father gave him the child, saying he couldn’t care for her.
Three weeks later, in mid-October, Nance called again. Only this time the news was not good: Further testing on the DNA sample proved fruitless. Technicians at Bodetech found cross-contamination coming from any number of sources, including the glue from the stamp and the handling of the letter over the years, which precluded them from further examination.
All we would get from the stamp would be a host of unanswered questions.
Still, Nance was encouraged and emboldened by the initial DNA results and decided to “pull out all the stops.” Nance began the process of obtaining permission to obtain DNA samples from Sharon’s third child, a daughter adopted by a family in New Orleans. Nance also contacted Dr. Henry Lee, a noted forensic pathologist in Connecticut, to obtain a tissue sample taken from Sharon at the time of her autopsy in 1990. Sharon’s organs helped more than a dozen people improve and lengthen their lives considerably, many of whom are still alive today. Lee’s office obtained Sharon’s tissue sample in 1995 in a bid to identify a missing person.
In February 2004, I visited Franklin Floyd again and, surprisingly, he acknowledged he knew Henry Harbison (from a 1974 photo) but insisted he “didn’t want to talk about it.” He also dismissed the suggestion that Sharon was Sherri Lynn Johnson. The mystery would unfold three months later when it was learned that, unbeknownst to all, the Oklahoma City police had two vials of Sharon’s blood and hair samples in storage, taken when she died in 1990.
In May 2004, the samples were shipped to Bodetech for analysis and DNA testing confirmed that Sharon Marshall was not Sherri Lynn Johnson. The news was deflating to all who worked on this lead for over a year and served to reinforce the extreme difficulty in searching for the long-term missing. But all was not lost. Floyd’s disclosure that he knew Henry Harbison raised questions about what role, if any, he had in the disappearance of Freda Johnson and her children. More importantly, Nance now had a profile of Sharon’s DNA, a crucial development. The DNA profile will be input into a national database for comparison against other DNA profiles collected across the country. Nance firmly believes that someone searching for a long-lost little girl will come forward, their DNA compared, and the mystery of Sharon Marshall’s true identity will finally be revealed.
AFTERWORD
In the weeks after the September 2004 publication of the hardcover edition of A Beautiful Child, I received hundreds of heartfelt letters and e-mails from readers who were traumatized, saddened, and angered by Sharon’s story.
Among those were notes from former classmates at Forest Park High School, many familiar with the story but unaware of the tragic details. All shared good memories, including Sharon’s tenderness, her photographic memory, and the ease with which she navigated through her schoolwork.
Also e-mailing from Atlanta was a woman whose daughter was a classmate and friend of Sharon’s. The woman told me that Sharon and “Warren” were at her home in November 1985 celebrating Thanksgiving and, like the accounts from the Fisher family, this family embraced Sharon, though all considered “Warren” to be an oddball.
But again, like the Fishers, no one ever thought or considered that something so sinister and diabolical was afoot.
I also received an e-mail from a man who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. He met Sharon during a visit to the Mons Venus in Tampa in March 1988, and then again upon a return visit that summer. They exchanged lengthy letters, and Sharon wrote of one day attending college and working in the aerospace field. She also wrote that she was nineteen years old and born in Detroit, Michigan.
The man was so taken with Sharon that, sixteen years later, he still had her four-page letter, which was written in blue ink on pink paper and in pristine condition.
He contacted me after he happened to walk by a bookstore and, quite innocently, noticed the cover of A Beautiful Child, which features Sharon’s photo. He immediately recognized her, ran inside and bought a copy. In his e-mail he described Sharon as a “bright, lovely young woman who seemed quite out of place at the Mons Venus.”
Word of the book and Sharon’s story circulated throughout the country, and the world, and within several months there were more than 20,000 hits on my website, www. mattbirkbeck.com, with readers from as far away as the UK and Italy searching for more information, and trading their own thoughts and opinions in the forum section.
There were, they wrote, so many questions left unanswered, most of which centered on Sharon herself. Why, they asked, didn’t Sharon tell someone about her predicament and seek help?
It’s a question I thought I addressed in the book, but given the number of queries, was quite certain I did not.
To help find a more definitive and satisfying answer I turned to Dr. Robi Ludwig, a psychotherapist and regular commentator on various programs such as Larry King Live, Nancy Grace, and Oprah, who, after reading A Beautiful Child, provided a clear and concise analysis.
Sharon’s relationship with Floyd was all about power, says Ludwig. Floyd had it. Sharon did not. She had been stripped at a very young and tender age of any power to make decisions, thus becoming totally dependent on Floyd. And given the nature of their relationship, in which Floyd was, in fact, the only parental figure Sharon had ever known, he was her only constant in what was a dysfunctional and dangerous life, which produced a somewhat strange and even bizarre mixture of loyalty and fear.
It was that combination, says Ludwig, that kept Sharon from telling anyone.
Perhaps most important for Sharon, says Ludwig, is that her life with Floyd was all about survival.
She was an abused child and abused wife all wrapped into one, yet through her inner strength she found a way to survive—and excel—under horrendous conditions. And as a testament to that inner strength and courage, Ludwig believes that, after all those years with Floyd, by attempting to leave Floyd, Sharon was, in large measure, finally doing something for herself.
And as further testament to her courage, says Ludwig, Sharon was not only acting for herself, but was also trying to save her son, Michael. She was acting like a mother.
Despite the odds, and facing almost certain death, Sharon’s attempt to finally break free from Floyd’s grasp and control was her final emancipation, says Ludwig.
Perhaps the one single question most asked, and pursued, is he one concerning Sharon’s identity. Soon after publication, suggestions came forward via e-mail and letters, particularly from those involved in searching for missing persons via Internet sites such as The Doe Network (www. doenetwork.org) and Websleuths (www.websleuths.com).
The first and most promisi
ng lead was Jennifer Klein, a three-year-old kidnapped in 1974 from a campsite in Moab, Utah. Klein had a cowlick, as did Sharon, and Floyd was in the region at the time and believed to have broken into the Boulder, Colorado, home of his sister Tommye. Given that Floyd was camping during the week before he kidnapped Michael, the lead developed strong interest.
Two other leads came directly from law enforcement. One retired detective from the Toronto, Canada, area was keen on Cheryl Hanson, a seven-year-old who disappeared near her home in Aurora, Ontario, in 1974. Another detective from San Jose, California, was investigating the case of Cynthia Sumpter, a child who also disappeared in 1974.
In all three cases, Sharon’s DNA profile, taken from the blood delivered by the Oklahoma City police, was sent to test against the DNA profile of family members of each of the missing girls.
The California Department of Justice lab handled the testing of Jennifer Klein. In December 2004 word came that the test proved negative.
By mid-March 2005 testing had yet to be completed on Cheryl Hanson or Cynthia Sumpter.
But that same month there was a curious and disturbing development concerning Sharon’s blood samples: Questions arose concerning the validity of the blood, specifically, whether it was really Sharon’s blood. During their investigation following the kidnapping of Michael Hughes, the FBI in Oklahoma City searched for but was told no DNA evidence from Sharon existed. Authorities also questioned why, if it was indeed Sharon’s blood, it had been held in custody for so many years after her death. With Floyd in jail, and no open investigation, samples are usually thrown away.
Was there a mix-up of some kind? No one knows for sure but officials are investigating and while as of this writing the answers still are not clear, the DNA testing continues under the premise that the blood is indeed Sharon’s.
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