Missing: Dead or Alive season 2, the Netflix true crime documentary, is following a weird pattern, and I don’t understand what the need was to include another case while the investigators were already dealing with the Duncan case. I understand that they wanted to show what officers like Vicki Rains dealt with on a daily basis, but it didn’t really work well, as it broke the momentum for me. Duncan’s body was still not found, so the case was not over. I don’t see why it took almost 6 months for the law enforcement authorities to find the body, and in between they wanted to show what the officers were busy doing. But still, they could have taken the creative liberty to jump forward six months and just stick to one case. If not that, then they should have dealt with Shandon Floyd’s case more elaborately and made creative choices that made the audience invested in her story. I found the narrative lacking the human touch, as I stated in the Morgan Duncan article too, which was primarily the primary reason I felt that the series wasn’t able to leave any sort of impact. Also, I felt that the makers weren’t able to decide if they wanted to show the life of an investigative officer and the challenges they have to face on an everyday basis, or if they wanted to tell the story of the victims, who unfortunately lost their lives in the most bizarre manner. In my humble opinion, the narrative didn’t justify the title, and the quest to find a person and ascertain if they were dead or alive wasn’t as impactful as it could have been. Anyways, coming back to the case, Shandon Floyd was the second major case (technically the third, but I felt that the missing kid’s case was just a tone setter for the series) that Vicki Rains investigated, and I felt it was more harrowing than that Duncan case because till the very end the authorities weren’t able to figure out what exactly happened to her. Yeah, they had a theory, and probably it was true too, but there was no evidence to support it, and the man who was involved in it never got caught. So let’s find out what happened in the case and if Shandon was ever found.
What happened to Shandon Floyd?
Shandon Floyd, hailing from Marion County, had apparently come to South Carolina to spend some downtime with her employer, Michael Eaddy. I use the word “apparently” here because I don’t think that was the truth. Eaddy was the one who had filed a complaint with the Missing Persons Unit and told them about Shandon’s disappearance. He told Officer Rains that Shandon worked with him on his food truck and they just came to have some fun and spend some quality time in South Carolina. Shandon was approximately 15 years younger than Eaddy, and it just didn’t make sense that she would come on a vacation with him and not go with her own friends. But Rains didn’t question Eaddy, and she started her investigation. If you ask my personal opinion, I felt that Eaddy paid the woman to come with him, and she would have hoped to earn some quick cash in the process. I feel Eaddy could have been her manager, her pimp, and that was the reason he felt the need to file a complaint, because had he been a customer, he couldn’t have cared for her safety.
Shandon was a transwoman, a fact the officers got to know while they were investigating the case. They saw Shandon’s old social media posts and realized that she didn’t dress as a woman in the past. Even when Rains talked to Shandon’s mother, she kept changing pronouns from “he” to “she.” Shandon’s mother told Rains that Shandon had some hairdressing work in South Carolina, and there were a few bookings made because of which she had to go there for a couple of days. The poor woman didn’t have a clue that her daughter was in the escort business and that she was putting her life at risk by doing that. Shandon was seen getting into Eaddy’s car late at night with an unknown man, and after that she was nowhere to be found. Rains knew that if she was able to locate this man, then probably she would be able to find out where Shandon was.
Was Shandon Murdered By The Mystery Man?
Shandon’s dead body was found abandoned in the car, and soon after that, Rains took a woman into custody who was in the same vehicle when Shandon died. I believe a man paid Eaddy for Shandon’s services and then took her out on the night she went missing. After the autopsy, it was found that Shandon had consumed drugs, and not just one type of drug. She had taken methamphetamine, cocaine, fentanyl, THC, and tramadol, and the deadly cocktail led to her fateful end. The White woman who was with this mystery man stated how paranoid the latter became when he realized that Shandon had overdosed. He decided to leave the body in the car and at a place where the police officers would find it. He told the White woman that, considering his criminal history, the police wouldn’t believe him if he told them that it was an accident. He said that only after the officers conducted an autopsy would they come to know that it was not his fault and it was merely an accident.
I don’t know if the man was telling the truth or not, because the police couldn’t find him till the end. Maybe he lost his temper and made Shandon consume those pills forcefully. Whatever the case, the real truth never came out. So it could be surmised that Shandon’s death was believed to be because of an overdose, because there was no evidence to suggest otherwise. Shandon’s death came as a shock to her family, who didn’t know how to process whatever had happened. They had no clue what she did for a living; they didn’t know why she had come to South Carolina, and also they didn’t know who she was hanging out with or working with. It was one of those unfortunate cases where not only a poor soul lost her life, but the family members just couldn’t get the answers they craved.
