At first glance it was an ordinary family photo of a daughter with her father. However, one look at this card by an experienced psychologist-criminalist changed everything. The expert saw signs that the girl had been mistreated, which revealed the details of her sad fate.
Family Secrets
The story of the strange family was initially very dark. The mother of the family, Sandra Chipman, was arrested for forging a paycheck. She served only one month, then was released because of her family. When Sandra arrived home, where her four children and husband were supposed to be waiting for her, she found no one there.
The husband was the stepfather of the older children and had taken them to a local church orphanage, but his own children had been taken to an unknown location. They could not be found.
It wasn’t until ten years later that the case began to make progress. At that time, a new schoolgirl named Sharon showed up in Atlanta. She was 15 years old, and her teachers saw great talent in her.
Such teenagers were considered gifted, and Sharon was an orphan – her mother was killed in a car accident. The girl’s father was strict and pious. He wouldn’t even let her go out with her classmates, he was a strange person.Soon neighbors and school teachers noticed the discrepancy.
Warren Marshall (that was the father’s name) cut off all attempts by society to give more freedom to the child. When asked about Sharon’s mother, the father said she had died of cancer. And that didn’t coincide with Sharon’s accounts of the accident.
Then the girl fell in love with a boy and they ran away together, but Warren found them and brought his daughter home. After that, they left Atlanta so that Sharon could not socialize with her friends.
Searching and Finding
Already in 1990, the next phase of this story happened. On a dark night, three Americans were walking along a road near Oklahoma City, where they saw a half-dead girl. She was very cold, could barely breathe, and had apparently been hit by a car. The girl was delirious and calling for her father.
The clinic got her out and contacted her husband. His name was Clarence Hughes, and he arrived and told them that Antonia had gone out to the store toward nightfall and that he himself had not waited for her because he had fallen asleep at home. In the morning he noticed that his wife had not returned. The family was a bit unusual – the husband was much older than Antonia and they had a son named Michael growing up.
Antonia Hughes could not be saved. They did an autopsy and were horrified – there were many internal injuries, old fractures, and strange breast implants. It was as if she had had artificial breasts done under the knife by an inept surgeon.
Another peculiarity of the family was that Antonia worked in the striptease industry, which made her husband jealous. He may have beaten her frequently. On the day of the funeral, several girls from the club came to say goodbye to their friend.
Clarence placed a baby picture of Toni on the casket — she was sitting on her daddy’s lap. It was a rare snapshot from her childhood, and no one saw it as a big deal. But an expert forensic psychologist arrived at the place of the funeral. He looked at the photo and noted that the girl clearly lived a very difficult life, her childhood was certainly filled with cruelty. This helped give impetus to the investigation. They began to dig into the past of the girl and her husband, and their story turned out to be just unbelievable.
The outcome of the investigation
Toni Hughes’ death was investigated, and the child was placed in her foster parents’ home for the duration of the investigation. But Clarence Hughes stole their son and fled, and his papers turned out to be fake. He was later recognized as a criminal – drug dealer Franklin Floyd, who escaped from prison and lived under another name – Brandon Williams.
He met and married single mother Sandra Chipman and took custody of her children. He kidnaps her children, taking the name Warren Marshall. The son is missing and there is no word on his fate. He names his daughter Sharon and raises her, telling everyone about the loss of his beloved wife. Sharon’s running away with the boy enraged him wildly. He takes his daughter, already pregnant, to another state. There, Sharon gives birth to a baby boy, who is placed in an orphanage.
After moving to Oklahoma, they change their names and become husband and wife. Everyone knows them as Antonia and Clarence Hughes. They share a son, Michael, and the girl works as a stripper. At the same time, the father forces his daughter to go for cheap plastic surgery to improve her breasts. Clarence, aka Floyd, was then arrested and convicted.
So a complicated case was solved, unfortunately, already after Sharon’s death – just thanks to one expert’s glance at a photograph.