|
|
FBI
Cold Case
Investigation
Solving a Decades-Old Mystery
08/03/15
Tonya Hughes was just shy of her 21st birthday on a spring day in 1990
when she was struck by a hit-and-run driver in Oklahoma City. She died
five days later, but the investigation into her suspicious death led to
a mystery—and a murder—that took decades to fully unravel.
That’s because Tonya Hughes was not who anyone thought she was—and
neither was her husband, Clarence Hughes, who now sits on death row in
a Florida prison.
“The FBI has been chipping away at this one,” said Special Agent Scott
Lobb, who began working the cold case investigation in 2013 out of the
Bureau’s Oklahoma City Division. “There were a lot of peculiar twists
to this case.”
Tonya left behind a child, Michael Hughes. Her husband claimed he was
Michael’s biological father, but shortly after Tonya died, Clarence
gave Michael to Oklahoma state welfare officials and promptly
disappeared. “He knew the truth would come out,” Lobb said, “and so he
fled.”
The truth—discovered during the hit-and-run investigation—was that
Clarence Hughes was actually Franklin Delano Floyd, a federal fugitive
from Georgia wanted since 1973.
Floyd was arrested in Georgia two months later and sent back to prison
to serve the rest of his sentence. A blood test revealed that he was
not Michael’s biological father. That fact apparently didn’t matter to
Floyd, because when he got out of prison in 1993, he was determined to
get custody of Michael. And he did—by kidnapping the 6-year-old from
elementary school on September 12, 1994.
When authorities caught up with him in Kentucky two months later,
Michael was nowhere to be found, and Floyd would not say what happened
to the boy. Floyd was later found guilty of a federal kidnapping charge
and sent to prison.
During the kidnapping investigation, photos were found taped to the gas
tank of Floyd’s pickup truck that showed a young woman who appeared to
be bound and beaten. Years later, the woman—Cheryl Ann Comesso—was
identified and matched to remains that had previously been discovered
near a freeway on-ramp near Tampa, Florida. Floyd was charged with her
1989 murder, convicted, and sentenced to death in 2002.
The investigation into Michael’s kidnapping also determined that Tonya
Hughes, too, had been kidnapped by Floyd—sometime between 1973 and
August 1975—and when he surfaced in Oklahoma City, he began introducing
his future wife as his daughter.
In 2013, the FBI and the National Center for Missing & Exploited
Children conducted a cold case review of the Hughes kidnapping and
reopened the investigation.
A year later, Lobb and Special Agent Nate Furr spent several days
interviewing Floyd in prison regarding Tonya and Michael Hughes.
The death row inmate was generally uncooperative, Lobb said, but during
the course of many hours of conversation, he told the agents that in
1974, under the name Brandon C. Williams, he married a woman in North
Carolina who had three daughters, and the new family made its way to
Texas. He identified the oldest daughter as Suzanne Marie Sevakis, born
September 6, 1969, in Michigan. Floyd said that after the mother was
jailed for minor charges in Dallas, he took Suzanne and moved to
Oklahoma City, dropping the other two daughters at a children’s home.
Lobb later confirmed the marriage through court records, and, using DNA
samples, concluded that Tonya Hughes was indeed Suzanne Marie Sevakis.
It had taken 24 years to learn her true identity. “We were able to find
her birth parents and give them some closure about their daughter,” he
said.
Eventually, Floyd told the investigators what happened to Michael
Hughes: He murdered the first-grader on the same day he kidnapped him.
They were driving from Oklahoma City to Dallas, and “Michael was being
a typical six-year-old. He was out of control, and that pushed Floyd
over the edge,” Lobb said. “Floyd felt the pressure and he just ran out
of patience.” Lobb vividly remembers the moment Floyd confessed. “He
turned and looked at me and said, ‘I shot him twice in the back of the
head to make it real quick.’”
Why did Floyd finally confess? “I think he just ran out of excuses,”
Lobb said, adding that Floyd is now 72 and has serious health issues.
With no date set for his execution, Lobb believes it is likely Floyd
will die of natural causes on death row.
On the day of Michael’s murder, someone called the police and described
a suspicious man with a young boy at an Oklahoma interstate rest area
near the Texas border. That fit with Floyd’s story—he told Lobb he had
buried the boy near the last interstate exit leaving Oklahoma.
With the help of the FBI’s Evidence Response Team and anthropologists
from the University of Oklahoma, Lobb narrowed down a search area.
After 20 years, nothing would likely remain of Michael’s body—even his
bones would have been eaten by feral animals—but investigators thought
they might find the two shell casings, or possibly metal eyelets from
Michael’s sneakers. After two days of sifting dirt in a
2,000-square-foot area, though, no evidence was found.
In the end, Floyd’s confession put to rest a 20-year-old murder case
and revealed the true identity of Tonya Hughes, whose suspicious death
remains unsolved. “That’s the one thing Floyd won’t talk about,” Lobb
said.
The veteran investigator with more than two decades of experience hopes
to interview Floyd again. Maybe more mysteries will be unraveled.
“There is still a great deal we can learn from him,” Lobb said. “Maybe
now that he is nearing the end of his life he will want to make a full
accounting, to set the record straight about everything he has done.”
For now, though, Lobb is content. “This has been one of the most
fascinating cases I have ever worked.”
|
|
|
|
