‘GIRL IN THE PICTURE’ is an original Netflix documentary about a true crime story.
Based on the books “A Beautiful Child” and “Finding Sharon” by Matt Birkbeck, who is also the docu’s executive producer, it starts in April of 1990 at Oklahoma, with the discovery of a young woman on the roadside, the victim of hit and run.
She was still breathing when found and an ambulance takes her to the hospital where she eventually died due to a serious head injury.
The woman is said to be Tonya Hughes, who is only 20 years old, and her much older husband is named Clarence Hughes.
But subsequent investigation would show her real name is Sharon Marshall and Clarence is also an alias for Warren Marshall, who is said to be her dad.
It is later discovered that she was abducted as a 5-year old child and raised by a fugitive, Franklin Delano Floyd, a convicted criminal and pedophile.
He would raise her as his own child and would later rape her and physically abuse her. A beautiful blonde girl, Floyd would also make her perform in a strip club in Tulsa to earn money for him.
When “Girl in the Picture” was shown on Netflix last year, it became a worldwide hit and stayed on number one for several weeks. We’ve been watching a lot of true crime docus lately and many of them seem stranger than fiction.
Many of them are so horrifying and disturbing it makes you realize that there is really so much evil in this world.
Some of the docus we’ve watched include “American Murder: The Family Next Door”, “Mind Over Murder”, “The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker”, “Worst Roommate Ever”, “Elize Matsunaga: Once Upon a Crime”.
The criminals here show that some people are really born evil to the core. That’s why documentary film makers will never run out of materials for true crime flicks like this.
In “Girl in the Picture”, Tonya or Sharon left a two-year old son, Michael, who was given to very caring foster parents for adoption.
When he was six years old, a man with a gun kidnapped him while attending a grade school in Oklahoma and even took the principal as hostage. The man is Franklin Floyd, who said Michael is his son with Tonya.
The docu then becomes quite a heartbreaking search for the true identity of Tonya and whatever really happened to her little boy.
As directed by Skye Borgman (also known for “Abducted in Plain Sight”, another true crime story), it shows all the shocking, sickening twists in the tragic story of Tonya and Michael.
It has revealing interviews with the strippers Tonya got to work with in a club called Passion, some classmates she had in high school in Georgia who say she’s friendly and intelligent, and the dedicated veteran law enforcers who were assigned to handle and investigate the case through the years.
It juggles a lot of convoluted elements involving memories and pictures about Tonia and Michael, showing some re-enactments, and jumping around in time as it introduces new clues to the case. But all throughout, everything is presented coherently.
We don’t want to give out all the other horrifying elements in the story.
We believe you should watch this yourself and experience for yourself all the harrowing secrets and the depths of depravity Tonya/Sharon had to experience in the hands of her psychotic captor who really has an outrageous history of doing violent sexual crimes.
And Tonya/Sharon’s case is not the end of the story but leads to new evidence of other crimes and more victims. The director succeeds in making all of them connected and well clarified.
And just when you thought things have settled down, the docu’s final act becomes ever more complex and mind-blowing. It reveals the true identify of Tonya/Sharon (it turns out she has a totally different real name) and has had other kids.
It’s painful and depressing knowing that she must have had a really miserable life.
It also shows what really happened to her little boy as perpetrated by this monster of a human being who has no reluctance in destroying the lives of other people.
We’re so glad and it feels quite cathartic that the docu shows this disgusting criminal is finally arrested and imprisoned. If there’s divine justice, he deserves to really suffer in hell in the afterlife.
