It took three decades to untangle the mystery of Sharon Marshall’s tragic death, but her story is finally coming to light in a new documentary, Girl in the Picture. In the 1980s, Marshall was a smart teenager with a promising future, but her untimely death and her son’s subsequent kidnapping led to a decades-long search for her true identity — and the murderous federal fugitive at the center of it all.

In a five-episode podcast miniseries unpacking what happened to Marshall, featured in Netflix’s You Can’t Make This Up, we start our story with a high school-aged Sharon Marshall, whose dark home life and controlling father cause the people around her to question what exactly is going on behind the scenes. When Marshall was forced to abandon her college aspirations, she turned to sex work and eventually gave birth to her son. Her new friends tried to help her escape this life she had built — but she couldn’t. 

In Episode 2, critical care and forensic nurse Rosario Sanchez, who frequently works with victims of crime (and particularly victims of sex trafficking), explains why Marshall might not have been able to leave: “Trauma bonding is a general term that we use to understand this strong emotional bond that happens between the trafficker and a victim,” she tells documentary director and podcast host Skye Borgman. 

The bond perpetrated by a trafficker — in Sharon’s case, her own father — is based on pure exploitation and uses multiple tactics to create a primal fear in the victim. “The trafficker may use isolation, isolating the child from friends, from families, so that this way they have nowhere to run away,” Sanchez says. Essentially, the trafficker brainwashes the victim to create a difficult-to-break bond.

The Girl in the Picture premieres July 6 on Netflix; although both the film and podcast series are standalone pieces. If you want to avoid spoilers, we recommend watching the film before listening to Episode 3. For now, you can find out more in the first two episodes of the podcast, available now in the You Can’t Make This Up feed. Future episodes will also include interviews with detectives and Marshall’s family members. New episodes will be released weekly.