Twenty-Sixth Issue: Hidden Identity

Warning for topics such as murder, kidnapping, and mention of sexual abuse.

I read a long and interesting article about a man who had memory loss and did not know who he was, called: The Last Unknown Man | New Republic. I’ve been thinking a lot about true crime lately. It seems like it has gone from a sort of ‘trashy true crime book’ kind of past time to a more mainstream genre. I wonder about what that means in terms of accountability. So often we get caught up in the mystery or the salacious details without thinking about the victim or the fact that the victims so often have family who are still alive and grieving. Specifically I’m thinking of Serial that was the podcast that was so popular a while ago. It kind of sucks that the victim and her family were not really able to have any input in it at all. There’s also the tendency for true crime to revolve around violence to women, but violence against women is a whole different conversation that I don’t particularly want to get into now. It is being covered elsewhere extensively at this point in time. I just think about Serial and how I would hate if someone could make a podcast and create a national conversation about my family member who was murdered years ago and there was nothing I could do about it. Regardless, I am not better than anyone else and have spent a lot of time reading about serial killers and true crime mysteries. I’ve read a few lately about people who still haven’t really been identified. I wonder about the families of these individuals. I don’t know if it’s worse to know that your relative is dead, or if it is worse to just never know if they’re alive or not. I hope some of those unidentified people can be identified someday.
 
The first person I started looking at is called the “El Dorado Jane Doe”. She was murdered in 1991. She used many names, such as Mercedes, Cheryl, Kelly, Shannon, and Sharon, none of which were apparently her real name. Her past was mainly reconstructed based on her arrest records. She was arrested in Dallas for prostitution, and also worked at KFC there. She went to Louisiana and worked as a topless dancer in Little Rock, Arkansas. She lived with a black family in Irving, Texas for some time. She was arrested for public lewdness and writing bad checks at various points, and eventually ended up in El Dorado, Arkansas.

 

 

 
Mercedes, as she was known at the time, started dating James McAlphin in Dallas. It was abusive, and she was in the ER several times from injuries that he had caused her. Mercedes got out and left, moving in with a friend. James kept coming after her, threatening her. He got her to come to his room in the motel he was staying at by offering her money. A neighbor saw James hit Mercedes and abuse her verbally and physically. There was a gunshot, and then James got in his car and drove away.
 
James was arrested, and did not cooperate with police, so they had to look at Mercedes’ purse to find out who she was. They found her social security card and ID card but it was for Cheryl Ann Wick, in Minnesota. Cheryl said her identity had been stolen and did not know who Mercedes was. They began to ask her friends. Unfortunately, that did not help, as she told different people different stories. She said she was out of town and had two kids that were raised by their grandmother. She said that she was in the witness protection program because her father was in the Mafia. She said that she had committed bank robberies on the East Coast. She said that she used to work with a black man as her partner, luring truck drivers at rest stops and then robbing them. One time she said this ended in a murder, which may have been the unsolved 1988 case of a truck driver’s murder. His name was Dwayne McCorkendale. There is no way to prove any connection between her and his death though. Mercedes said that she lived at a homeless shelter in Dallas for a while, but the shelter could not verify the information as they had destroyed their records.
 
Mercedes’ murderer, James, said he knows Mercedes’ true story and said he would tell anyone for money, but no one has paid. He keeps sharing bits and pieces of information to try to prove that he knows the truth. James said that Mercedes was on the streets as a teenager and her boyfriend, an African American man, forced her into prostitution in Dallas. He said that she also had a boyfriend, a pimp named JJ, and then she ran from him to go be with another pimp, Tyrone. He also said that she was friends with three other girls who were kidnapped and then victims of sex trafficking in the Dallas area. Police say James is an unreliable source of information on Mercedes.
 
Another case of a woman who was unidentified after her death is the case of Lori Erica Ruff, but her identity was finally discovered six years after her death. In 1988, Lori requested the birth certificate of a two year old girl named Becky Sue Turner who died in a house fire over a decade earlier. She used this birth certificate to get a state ID from Idaho. Lori went to Dallas and legally changed her name to Lori Erica Kennedy, then obtained a social security number, also getting herself a Texas driver’s license and getting her GED. She enrolled in community college, and graduated from a four year college in 1997 with her degree. She worked as a stripper while in college, getting breast implants and a nose job. She basically became a different person and erased her past.

 

 

 
In 2003, she met Blake Ruff in a Bible Study class and got married. She was secretive of her past and said her family was dead, and though Blake’s parents had questions about her, they got married in 2004. The only person there was the preacher. Lori and Blake moved to Leonard, Texas, and tried to have kids, but had difficulty. Finally Lori had a daughter in 2008.
 
There were problems with Blake’s in-laws from the start. She wouldn’t talk about her past, was very protective of her daughter and wouldn’t let anyone else hold her. She was socially inappropriate, and eventually the marriage broke down and Blake moved in with his parents, filing for divorce. Lori began to behave erratically, and harassed Blake and his family in emails and physically. Blake’s family filed a cease and desist order.
 
Just before Christmas in 2010, Lori’s body was found in her car in Blake’s driveway. She had shot herself. She wrote two suicide notes, but they were “ramblings from a disturbed person” and had no details about her past.
 
After Lori’s funeral, her in-laws went to her house. It was a mess. They did find a lock box with some documentation of Lori’s past. They found the birth certificate of Becky Sue Turner and the documentation of her name change. There were many theories as to who she really was, and the public was solicited for help. In 2013, a forensic genealogist named Colleen Fitzpatrick took a DNA sample from Lori’s daughter and began to try to find a match. She eventually did, and Lori was identified as Kimberly McLean. In 2016, it was finally uncovered that Kimberly’s parents divorced when she was a teenager, and when her mother remarried, she wasn’t able to deal with it. She left town and told her mother to never look for her. What she did after that and before she came to Dallas is a mystery and likely will remain so.

The final case I decided to look at was the story of Franklin Delano Floyd. He is a criminal, sentenced to death. In April 1990, his wife was found dead in a hit and run accident. She went by the name of Tonya Tadlock at the time, but was called Sharon Marshall. When she died, Sharon’s former coworker, Cheryl, had just disappeared, and she and her husband were suspects in the disappearance. When Sharon died, her husband Franklin was the suspect in her death. He put their two year old son into foster care and left the state. The son, Michael, had several disabilities. Franklin was arrested in a parole violation six months later. The boys’ DNA was tested to see if Franklin was his father during the adoption proceedings – Michael’s foster parents wanted to adopt him in 1994.

It was discovered that Franklin was not Michael’s father. When Franklin was released from jail, he tried to take Michael back, but when it was found he was not biologically related to him, he was not allowed to do so. In September of that year, Franklin walked into Michael’s first grade class and forced the principal and Michael at gunpoint out of the school and into his truck. The principal was handcuffed to a tree in a wooded area, and Franklin drove off with Michael.

Two months later, Franklin was arrested in Kentucky, without Michael. No one knows where he is. Some say that Franklin drowned Michael and buried him, but some said that Michael was still alive. Franklin only gave vague information. In 2015, Franklin finally admitted he had killed Michael the same day he took him from his school.

It was Michael’s kidnapping and the death of Sharon Marshall, Franklin’s wife, that prompted even further investigations. It turned out that Sharon was raised as Franklin’s daughter since she was small, but she was not his daughter. Franklin said that he rescued Sharon when she was abandoned by her parents and he took her in when she was nine or ten years old.

 

 

In 2014, Sharon’s identity was finally revealed. Her name was Suzanne Maree Sevakis, and Franklin was her stepfather. Franklin was supposed to look after his wife’s four children while she was in jail for a month. When the woman came out of jail, she found two daughters, but not Suzanne or her baby brother. The baby has disappeared and his fate is still unknown to this day. Suzanne’s mother was told by police that she could not file charges against Franklin because he was Suzanne’s stepfather.

Sharon graduated from high school in Georgia in 1986. She was a good student and got a full scholarship to study aerospace engineering, but instead she moved to Florida and had a son two years later, working as an exotic dancer. She married Franklin a year after her son was born, and the two of them used the names Clarence Hughes and Tonya Tadlock.

Cheryl’s disappearance was finally solved in 1995 when her skeleton was found. Cheryl apparently reported Sharon for lying about her income and making her lose her government benefits. The two of them worked at the same club as dancers. Franklin and Cheryl got into a fight, and then Cheryl disappeared. Franklin and Sharon fled to Oklahoma soon after.

In 1995, a mechanic also found an envelope in a truck he bought at an auction, and it was full of pictures of a woman, bound and beaten. The truck was traced to Franklin, and the woman in the pictures was found to be Cheryl. Using the pictures as evidence, Franklin was tried and convicted for Cheryl’s murder. There were also pictures in the truck of Sharon being sexually abused from childhood, early as age four.

Franklin has had a history of committing crimes – everything from abduction, rape, to even bank robberies. He had schizophrenia, and was found incompetent to stand trial. However, he fought this, and the ruling was reversed. He has been sentenced to death.