Suzanne Sevakis

Case background and investigation

In the spring of 1990 a young woman known as Tonya Hughes was struck in an apparent hit-and-run in Oklahoma City. According to the FBI, she died five days later, a few months before her 21st birthday. The Oklahoman places her death in April 1990. The FBI describes the death as suspicious, and it has never been solved. It took 24 years to establish that she was Suzanne Marie Sevakis, born on September 6, 1969 in Michigan.

The man who presented himself as her husband, Clarence Hughes, handed her two-year-old son Michael to Oklahoma welfare officials shortly after her death and left. The FBI says the hit-and-run inquiry revealed that he was in fact Franklin Delano Floyd, a federal fugitive wanted since 1973. He was arrested in Georgia two months later and returned to prison. A blood test showed that he was not the boy's biological father.

According to the FBI, Floyd had married Suzanne's mother in North Carolina in 1974 under the name Brandon C. Williams, and the family moved to Texas. Floyd later told agents that, after the mother was jailed in Dallas on minor charges, he took Suzanne away with him and left her sisters at a children's home. He introduced her to others as his daughter. She lived under several names, among them Sharon Marshall, and was later married to him as Tonya Hughes.

On September 12, 1994, Floyd abducted six-year-old Michael Hughes at gunpoint from his elementary school in Choctaw, Oklahoma. Floyd was caught in Kentucky two months later without the boy, was convicted of federal kidnapping and, according to The Oklahoman, was sentenced in 1995 to 52 years. In 2002 he was convicted in Florida of the 1989 murder of Cheryl Ann Commesso and sentenced to death.

The FBI and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reopened the case in 2013. In 2014, FBI agents Scott Lobb and Nate Furr interviewed Floyd in prison over several days. He admitted shooting Michael on the day of the kidnapping, and he named the woman known as Tonya Hughes as Suzanne Sevakis. The FBI confirmed the identification with court records and DNA and traced her birth parents. Michael's remains have not been found despite a search near the Oklahoma-Texas border in 2015.

Floyd was never charged in connection with Suzanne Sevakis's death. Newsweek reported in 2022 that he remained a person of interest, and the FBI agent who interviewed him said her death was the one subject Floyd would not discuss. Floyd died in January 2023 while on Florida's death row, according to the Tampa Bay Times.