When i looked at the email, i just couldnt even believe it. But after so many tears, so many years, and so many turns in her story i was like whoa. There are still more stunning twists to be revealed. Its amazing. Its the best gift ever. Lost and found. Hello. Welcome to dateline extra. A young girl was abducted at the age of four and raised by her kidnapper. For the next four decades she searched for her family, her name, and herself. Her story has an extraordinary ending and as it turns out, that ending was just the beginning. Here is keith morrison. Our story begins with this mother of a teenage daughter. A woman who had spent most of her life trying to figure out
was absent mostly. Long stretches away, punk wa. We would go see him because he was coming in from the navy, and so it was an exciting moment, and she would get us all dressed up, and it was the anticipation of going to the shipyard and having a lot of attention. I think as a child. The memories are how she survived it all
14. that s when he found his birth certificate. started calling himself ray smith and began puzzling after the unanswerable questions of his life. why did ann name me jim brown if my name was really ray? how commie never knew about jerry? things like that, i wondered. was i kidnapped? no answers from anna brown who died soon after that. as for life in colorado, by the time he was 16 things were getting a little rough, maybe because of my past i wasn t an easy kid. so i was put into foster care. and then he graduated from high school. he got a job, moved in with some friends and started his own rock band. this youtube video shows him singing lead. and for all he s wondered about his past, he had come to believe
Where did they go? the little girl had no idea. but she did know that from now on, she had a new name. they called her pepper. pepper smith. she was not yet 5 years old. we lived in cars and motels and going from state to state staying at salvation armies to get a meal here and there. just what s it like to live in a car? it s horrible. it s embarrassing. she was confused, of course, and terribly frightened at first. she begged, take me home. shirley ignored her. she imagined running away. i had nowhere to go. i was too scared. then as the weeks and months and then years went by, as her powers of reasoning grew, the question grew, too. did her mother bobbie actually give her away? shirley told pepper that renee was her sister. the two girls listened wide-eyed
We did everything together. renee was feeling abandoned. i was telling her, don t go. stay here. i need you. you re my sister. so she went. she did her thing. and i was upset and sad. by 1986 and on her own now, pepper had all but given up hope that she d ever find her real parents. now she began to encounter a more immediate problem. the inevitable trouble that comes with having no real name, no birth certificate, no i.d. though she was enrolled in school under the name rhonda smith at shirley s urging, she had no way to prove this was her legal name, and without some cooperation from shirley, her search for such documents seemed hopeless. and then how did you find out that she was sick? she turned completely yellow when they diagnosed her with pancreatic cancer and she literally died quickly after that. with shirley on her death bed, pepper tried to act like
Where was he now? geri gave us a copy of his birth certificate. he would be about 40 now. and our chances of finding him seemed, frankly, slim. we called 40-year-old ray smiths all over the country. there was ray smith in colorado, ray smith in maryland, in new jersey, in kansas. but did he go by the name ray smith? and then a call back. it was the ray smith from colorado. he had the right name, the right age, place of birth, had had grown up without knowing any blood relatives. all this ray smith knew was his mother s name. according to his birth certificate was jerry. he was starting to sound a lot like our ray. we asked if he d submit to a dna test. he agreed. and there was no doubt we had found him. we brought ray and his fiancee