A Beautiful Child

A Beautiful Child is the best selling non-fiction book by author Matt Birkbeck published by Berkley/Penguin in 2004 and in paperback in 2005. It tells the story of a young woman known by many names, including Sharon Marshall, who was kidnapped as a toddler and raised by a convicted felon, Franklin Delano Floyd. The book was also published in several foreign countries, including Denmark, Germany and Poland. A Beautiful Child spurred numerous web sites dedicated to finding Sharon's true identity. Through suggestions from those sites along with reader suggestions from around the world, Birkbeck, in partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, conducted DNA testing on relatives of several girls who went missing in the early 1970s. World-wide interest in the book kept the Sharon Marshall story alive and lead to the discovery by Birkbeck of her biological daughter, who had been given up for adoption in 1989. Sharon's DNA was believed to have been degraded, but testing comparisons to her daughter provided a positive match and her DNA was placed into CODIS, the FBI's database.
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