Wicked and Grim: A True Crime Podcast · Ben Gibson

Sharon Marshall - The Name That Wasn’t Hers - Part 2

·1 hr 7 min·4 clips

Floyd walked into an elementary school with a handgun and told the principal he was there to take Michael.

1. Wicked and Grim: A True Crime Podcast revisits Sharon Marshall’s case in part two, following the story after her 1990 death in Oklahoma. 2. Hosts Ben and Nicole recap Franklin Delano Floyd’s aliases, his control over Sharon, and why Michael Hughes became central to the investigation. 3. This episode asks how Floyd’s paperwork, custody claims, and violence unraveled once investigators started checking names, records, and photographs. 4. After Sharon’s death, Floyd presented himself at the hospital as Clarence Hughes while Sharon appeared on paper as Tanya Dawn Hughes. 5. His attempt to collect life insurance led investigators to mismatched Social Security numbers and employment records. 6. Floyd left Oklahoma and placed Michael Hughes into state care, where foster parents described the toddler as nonverbal, fearful of adult men, and emotionally distressed. 7. With routine, stability, and patience, Michael gradually improved in foster care before Floyd’s custody claims were challenged. 8. In 1994, paternity testing at the hospital confirmed Floyd was not Michael’s biological father. 9. That result destroyed Floyd’s legal claim to Michael and blocked his attempt to regain custody. 10. On September 12, 1994, Floyd entered Michael’s elementary school in Indian Marietta, New York, showed a handgun to Principal James Davis, and forced him to help take Michael from the building. 11. Floyd handcuffed Davis to a tree on a rural dirt road, wrapped duct tape around his face, and left him restrained in the heat while he drove away with Michael. 12. Police were delayed because the school did not immediately realize a kidnapping had happened, giving Floyd more than three hours to leave the area. 13. Merle and Ernest Bean later said they had warned social services that Floyd might try to take Michael and believed they had seen his truck near their home. 14. The FBI joined the case, and Special Agent Joe Fiske and Special Agent Patrick Fitzpatrick began tracking Floyd across multiple states. 15. The Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit warned that Floyd would probably become a liability to Michael and might kill him within about a week. 16. APBs went out for the principal’s truck, and media outlets including America’s Most Wanted broadcast Michael’s photo nationwide. 17. A breakthrough came when an FBI agent saw a private photograph of Floyd with a young blonde girl and compared her face to Sharon Marshall. 18. The likeness pushed investigators toward the conclusion that Sharon had been hidden in plain sight since childhood and was not simply an adult victim who met Floyd later. 19. The episode keeps a tense, chronological true-crime format with hosts reacting to each development as the evidence tightens. 20. Listeners who follow long-form abduction cases and identity mysteries will get the most out of it; listeners wanting a light, self-contained story may skip it.

As heard by us

A patient true crime follow-up that follows the kidnapping case to a Kansas truck discovery.

This part two keeps the Sharon Marshall case moving, moving from recap into the harder details of the kidnapping investigation. Ben and Nicole keep the pace measured and conversational.

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Why you'd press play

When part two of Sharon Marshall's story opens with a recap and a hidden envelope of photos, the case turns grim fast.

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