Suzanne Marie Sevakis: Her Life, Death, and Identification

Suzanne Marie Sevakis was a Michigan-born girl kidnapped as a small child in the mid-1970s by Franklin Delano Floyd, a convicted sex offender and federal fugitive who had married her mother under a false name. Floyd raised her under a series of aliases, abused her for years, eventually married her, and she died at twenty in an unsolved 1990 hit-and-run outside Oklahoma City. Her true identity was not confirmed until 2014, twenty-four years after her death, when DNA from a daughter she had placed for adoption matched the family she had been taken from.¹

Who She Was Before the Kidnapping

She was born on September 6, 1969, in Michigan, the eldest daughter of Sandi Chipman and Cliff Sevakis. Chipman went on to have three more children — Allison, Amy, and Phillip — and later married Dennis Brandenburg. Through church, Chipman met a man who called himself “Brandon Williams.” His real name was Franklin Delano Floyd. After a natural disaster left Chipman in difficult circumstances, she placed the children temporarily with the state, and Floyd offered to marry her and help raise them.²

Sometime between 1973 and 1975, while Chipman was serving a thirty-day sentence for writing a bad check, Floyd took all four children. He put the infant Phillip up for adoption, dropped Allison and Amy at a social services agency, and kept Suzanne, the oldest, for himself.³ When Chipman was released, she eventually located Allison and Amy at an orphanage. Suzanne and Phillip were gone for years.²

Floyd had been a federal fugitive since 1973, when he absconded from parole in Georgia. His prior record included a 1962 conviction for the sexual assault and kidnapping of a four-year-old girl in Atlanta.⁴

Life as “Sharon Marshall” and “Tonya Hughes”

Floyd introduced Suzanne as his daughter and renamed her Sharon Marshall. Under that name she attended Forest Park High School in Georgia and was placed in the gifted program.⁵³

Floyd sexually abused her and forced her to work as a stripper.⁶ The two moved through several states. In the Tampa Bay area, where Floyd went by “Warren Marshall,” Suzanne danced at the Mons Venus club and became friends with another young dancer, Cheryl Ann Commesso.⁷ Floyd then took the name “Clarence Hughes” and married Suzanne in New Orleans. On paper, she became his wife “Tonya Hughes.”³

In 1988 she gave birth to a son, Michael Anthony Hughes, in Tampa. A daughter, Megan, was born in New Orleans in 1989 and placed for adoption. Journalist Matt Birkbeck later documented that Suzanne was pregnant at least three times and may have given up additional children, apparently believing they would be safer away from Floyd.¹

Her Death in Oklahoma City

In April 1990, Suzanne was found unconscious on the side of a highway outside Oklahoma City with groceries scattered around her, the apparent victim of a hit-and-run. She had severe bruising and a large hematoma. She was nearly twenty-one. She died at an Oklahoma City hospital; accounts differ on whether she survived five days or died the day after she was found.⁸⁹

The case has never been solved. Some investigators suspected Floyd was the driver, but he was never charged in connection with her death. FBI Special Agent Scott Lobb, who later spent years working Floyd’s crimes, said her death was “the one thing Floyd won’t talk about.”⁹ At the time she died, no one knew who she really was. She was buried in Oklahoma under the name Sharon Marshall.

After her death, Floyd handed their son Michael over to state welfare officials and fled, apparently to avoid exposure as a federal fugitive. Michael was placed in foster care with Ernest and Merle Bean, who began adoption proceedings.¹⁰

How She Was Finally Identified

For more than two decades, investigators knew “Tonya Hughes” had been married to a fugitive but could not match her to any missing child. The breakthrough came through investigative journalist Matt Birkbeck, whose book A Beautiful Child traced the life of the woman known as Sharon Marshall and drew public attention to the case.¹

Megan Dufresne, the daughter Suzanne had placed for adoption in 1989, came forward after learning of Birkbeck’s work and gave her DNA to the FBI. In 2014 the results confirmed what investigators had long suspected: the woman who had lived and died under a string of aliases was Suzanne Marie Sevakis, the child taken from Sandi Chipman decades earlier.¹

In 2017, Megan and her family traveled to Oklahoma to replace the “Sharon Marshall” gravestone with one bearing Suzanne’s true name.¹¹

What Happened to Her Children and Siblings

Her son Michael was taken from Indian Meridian Elementary School in Choctaw, Oklahoma on September 12, 1994, when Floyd confronted principal James Davis at gunpoint, forced him to pull the six-year-old from class, and drove them away in Davis’s pickup. Floyd handcuffed Davis to a tree in a wooded area and left him; Davis was rescued hours later.¹² Floyd was arrested in Kentucky two months later without the boy, convicted on federal kidnapping and firearms charges, and sentenced to 627 months in prison.¹³ Michael’s fate stayed unknown for twenty years.

In 2014, FBI Special Agents Scott Lobb and Nate Furr reopened Michael’s case and interviewed Floyd on Florida’s death row over several days. On the third day Floyd admitted he had killed the child: “I shot him twice in the back of the head to make it real quick.” Lobb described the confession as flat and without remorse.⁹¹⁴ Floyd said he had buried Michael near the last interstate exit leaving Oklahoma, close to the Texas border. In 2015, an FBI Evidence Response Team and anthropologists from the University of Oklahoma searched a 2,000-square-foot area at the location he described and found nothing. His remains have never been recovered.

Megan, raised in Louisiana by Mary and Dean Joseph Dufresne, eventually connected with her biological maternal grandfather Clifford Sevakis. She later named her own son Michael, after the brother she never knew.¹⁵ Suzanne’s half-brother Phillip, taken as an infant and placed for adoption by Floyd, was raised in North Carolina by Mary and Bob Patterson as Steven Patterson. He learned his birth surname only after his adoptive father’s death and reached out to Birkbeck through Facebook in March 2019. A DNA test arranged by the FBI confirmed in February 2020 that he was Sandra Chipman Brandenburg’s son and Suzanne’s half-brother; he later met his biological uncle and grandfather in Florida.¹⁶

Suzanne’s biological mother, now known as Sandra Willet, appeared in the 2022 Netflix documentary Girl in the Picture, directed by Skye Borgman, which brought the full story to a wide audience.⁶

What Happened to Franklin Floyd

Floyd was also convicted of murdering Cheryl Ann Commesso, the Tampa dancer who had befriended Suzanne. Commesso disappeared in April 1989, and her skeletal remains were found in March 1995 near Interstate 275 in St. Petersburg; she had been shot twice in the back of the head. A packet of ninety-seven photographs recovered from a stolen pickup showed Commesso bound and beaten inside Floyd’s mobile home, and the FBI matched items in the images to evidence found with her body. He was sentenced to death in Florida in 2002.⁷¹⁷

Floyd died of natural causes in 2023 at seventy-nine at the Union Correctional Institution in Florida, still on death row for Commesso’s murder and still serving the federal sentence for kidnapping Michael.⁸ He was never charged in Suzanne’s death, and he died without ever explaining what happened to her on the Oklahoma highway in April 1990.

1
Variety. Girl in the Picture Unanswered Questions
2
Yahoo. Girl in the Picture’s Mom Had Another Child Who Went Missing
3
A&E. Franklin Delano Floyd and the Kidnapping of Suzanne Sevakis
4
The Macon Telegraph. Franklin Floyd’s Georgia Roots
5
Matt Birkbeck. Sharon Marshall Update
6
Chicago Sun-Times. Girl in the Picture Review
7
Tampa Bay Times. A Tortured Trail
8
People. Franklin Delano Floyd and the Girl in the Picture
9
FBI. Cold Case Investigation
10
The Oklahoman. Kidnapping in Choctaw Haunts Family 8 Years Later
11
Matt Birkbeck. Finding Sharon – A Thank You
12
FindLaw. U.S. v. Floyd, 81 F.3d 1517
13
The Oklahoman. Judge Finds Floyd Guilty in Kidnapping
14
Daily Mail. FBI Agent Reveals How He Solved the Riddle of Girl in the Picture
15
Oxygen. What Happened to Suzanne Sevakis’ Kids
16
Matt Birkbeck. Finding Baby Philip
17
FindLaw. Floyd v. State, SC03-35