Long before Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped in 1991, a young girl went missing in Tennessee’s Smokey Mountains in 1973. After 36 years, her mystery may finally be solved.
Christina Lynn Carter in 1973 (left) and “Sharon Marshall” circa 1976 (right).
Christina Lynn Carter was only three when her mother was found dead at the bottom of a ravine in September 1973. Janet Carter had been strangled and the FBI focused its investigation on her boyfriend, Jerry Riley, a police officer in Hueytown, Al, which is near Birmingham. But Riley was never charged and Christina was never found.
Nearly four decades later, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is facilitating a DNA test to see if Christina actually ended up in the hands of convicted rapist and murderer Franklin Delano Floyd.
Floyd’s horrific, violent story is revealed in A Beautiful Child, a book I wrote in 2004 that tracks the life of a young, brilliant woman known as “Sharon Marshall.” Sharon, as she was known in Forest Park, Ga. in the 1980s, was a gifted student was a Who’s Who in America, a Lt. Colonial in the ROTC, and earned a full scholarship to Georgia Tech University to study aerospace engineering, all the while living with Floyd, the man everyone knew as “her father.”
Floyd had several aliases, using Warren Marshall in Atlanta and in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1989, where he forced Sharon, the brilliant student, into a life of stripping and prostitution. After murdering an exotic dancer, Cheryl Commesso, he fled to New Orleans with Sharon and her young son Michael and, taking names off of tombstones, he changed his name again to Clarence Hughes. Sharon’s new name was Tonya Hughes and, unbelievably, she would become her tormentor’s wife. After years as “father and daughter,” Floyd married her before allegedly killing her in 1990 in Oklahoma City. Floyd later kidnapped Sharon’s son Michael from his first grade class in 1994. Michael was never found.
Floyd was convicted of kidnapping Michael and in 2002 was sentenced to death for the murder of Cheryl Commesso. He is now on death row in Florida. I spent six hours with Floyd in prison and he wouldn’t divulge Sharon’s true identity or what he did with Michael.
But good often has a way of overcoming evil and it was Sharon’s tragic story, as told in A Beautiful Child, that prompted readers to suggest more than half a dozen possible identities.
The National Center retrieved Sharon’s DNA and has graciously compared it to the DNA taken from family members of the missing girls. All were negative. Only one possibility remains, and that’s Christina Carter.
Christina is, by far, the most intriguing possibility. She was with her mother and boyfriend Riley when they left for a brief vacation to the Smokey Mountains. Witnesses spotted them in Tennessee before Janet Carter was strangled. Floyd was free, having been released from prison in late 1972 and remained in the Atlanta area through 1973 after assaulting a woman there. He had a penchant for friendships with police officers and often traveled to the Birmingham area. Janet Carter had relatives in Atlanta and visited there in June 1973 with Riley. During my interviews with Floyd he told me that Sharon’s “father” gave her to him. Floyd told a lot of stories, but the idea that he may have known Riley and was handed a little girl after her mother was murdered isn’t far fetched.
Perhaps most intriguing, according to Christina’s great-grandmother, Christina was supremely intelligent, bypassing baby talk for full sentences. There is also the uncanny facial resemblance of a three- year-old Christina and a five-year-old Sharon.
Of course, it’s all circumstantial and conjecture and only a positive DNA match will finally provide closure for Christina’s family and end a 36-year old mystery. But with closure will come the knowledge of the tragic life Christina led traversing the country under assumed names, the horrors she was subjected to, the brilliant future that was lost and the strength and heroism she exhibited in trying to save herself, and her son. It’s incomprehensible that that men like Phillip Garrido and Franklin Floyd can gain and maintain the custody of a young girl. But then, there were no Amber Alerts, and even today states are paying little attention to the issue of sex offenders. The Adam Walsh Act, a 2006 law approved by Congress that streamlines the nations sex offender laws, has languished. A July 2009 deadline for approval has come and passed and an extension has been given until 2010, or states risk losing federal law enforcement funding.
With all the attention being paid to the Jaycee Lee case, perhaps state legislators will be spurred to action. No one deserved the life of Jaycee Lee Dugard, who was held prisoner for 18 years by a madman. And no child deserved the fate of “Sharon Marshall.”
Matt Birkbeck is the author of A Beautiful Child: The True Story of Hope, Horror and an Enduring Human Spirit
www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Child-Matt…/dp/0425204405
