Franklin Delano Floyd

Franklin Delano Floyd (June 17, 1943 – January 23, 2023) was an American murderer, rapist and death row inmate. He was convicted of the 1989 murder of Cheryl Ann Commesso, as well as the kidnapping of six-year-old Michael Anthony Hughes, whom he claimed was his son. Floyd was also considered a person of interest in the 1990 hit-and-run death of Sharon Marshall, Michael's mother and Floyd's second wife. It was later discovered that before becoming his wife, Sharon had been kidnapped by Floyd as a child and raised as his daughter.

Sharon's true identity remained a mystery until 2014, when she was positively identified as Suzanne Marie Sevakis, the daughter of a woman to whom Floyd was briefly married. Floyd disappeared with Sevakis, her two sisters and infant brother Phillip (also known as "Stevie") while her mother was serving a thirty-day jail sentence in 1975. Sevakis' brother remained missing until 2019 when a man came forward believing he was Phillip; DNA tests confirmed his identity in 2020.

Early life

Franklin Delano Floyd was born in Barnesville, Georgia, the youngest of five children born to Thomas and Della Floyd. Shortly after Floyd's first birthday in 1944, his father, a cotton mill worker and alcoholic, died from kidney and liver failure at age 32. His mother, a widow at age 28, struggled to make a living independently, so she and her children lived in a small apartment with her parents. Over the next year caring for the large family became too difficult for Floyd's grandparents, and by 1946 they asked Della and her children to leave.