One stormy night in April 1990 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, three men were making their way to a motel when they spotted a shoe in the middle of the road. It was blue, with a high heel, journalist Matt Birkbeck would later write in the book A Beautiful Child. Two hundred feet further, the men made a startling discovery. “There, on the edge of the road, was what looked like a young woman lying facedown in the gutter, her body convulsing, her arms and legs twitching in different directions,” Birkbeck wrote. She was taken to a hospital, where her husband, who went by Clarence Hughes, identified her as Tonya Hughes.
The woman died days later of her injuries. Her death set in motion a series of discoveries, all chronicled in the new Netflix documentary Girl in the Picture. Tonya Hughes, we learn, was never Tonya Hughes. She had previously been known as Sharon Marshall, although that, too, was an alias. One nickname after the other, the documentary tells the story of this woman, of her husband, and of his crimes — which included the kidnapping and murder of her young son, as well as the murder of a different woman. It’s the story of a woman who lost her name, whose life was overtaken by the man who alternately called himself her father and her husband. It’s the unraveling of a mystery that endured for decades until finally, in 2014, investigators uncovered the woman’s real identity.
