What Happened to Michael Hughes?
While Franklin was in prison, a 1992 blood test confirmed that Tonya's son, Michael, was not Franklin's (aka Clarence Hughes') biological child.
But when he was released from prison in 1993, as Birkbeck detailed in his book, Franklin appealed a lower court's custody ruling and won visitation, the Oklahoma Supreme Court judging that Franklin's rights had been violated when he'd been prevented from contesting the paternity test results. He had also $80,000 from Tonya's life insurance policies.
The legal wrangling prevented Michael's foster parents, Merle and Ernest Bean—who fought Franklin's efforts to win back custody every step of the way—from finalizing his adoption. But by the time Michael was 6, the once palpably traumatized child was said to be an increasingly well-adjusted first-grader.
In July 1994, according to court documents, Franklin was arrested for attacking a woman whose apartment he'd broken into, and he was sent back to the halfway house to await his court date, his efforts to regain custody seriously jeopardized. (He was later convicted of burglary with intent to commit assault and assault with a dangerous weapon.)
Then on Sept. 12, 1994, he kidnapped Michael from his elementary school at gunpoint, leaving the scene in a truck that belong to school principal James Davis, who was found handcuffed to a tree in some nearby woods.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7prvNpaCnnV6YvK57zZ6urGdhaIB3hJJyZqKmo56xpnnToZxmnZ6Zuaa%2F0qWwZqynnsC1scNmqq2noq56sLKMp5ytnpyexbR5xqKppWWZo3q1tMRmp6KbpKq%2Fpg%3D%3D