what did that feel like? it felt great. i was hoping i could find my children before i died because i m getting old. i would just like a miracle. geri s story. the shirley who took the girls had been her friend. turned roommate, turned baby-sitter. she said, i ll baby-sit for you and i ll take care of her while you work. i said, well, that s great. because i really thought i was blessed. first it was renee she looked after, then renee and pepper and then two years later, little brother leonard smith jr. wait, brother? it wasn t just the two girls. there was a younger brother the girls never knew they had. the father wasn t around very much. geri supported them all with what she could make as a waitress. then shirley made a change, a positive one it seemed, financially. she got this job supposedly at the motel managing.
i love her very much. did you love her on. february 7, 2009? very much so. did you have anything to do with her death? not at all. before closing arguments, the prosecutor had one more card to play in the form of a surprise t that one week before dar was murdered she went to the farm to baby sit. she told us not to go out on the back porch without shoes because tom had dropped a frame and there might be still some glass out there. but the judge ruled that amber s testimony was hearsay and therefore, inadmissible. the jury never heard her challenge tom s claim, but what the boys heard the day she was murdered was him dropping a
that s it. yep. that s confirmed. i can t believe this is actually happening. how soon could they meet gerry, the sisters wanted to know and what s she like and how did she know shirley. we arranged the reunion the next day. gerry arrived first and told how she saw her long-lost girls on our program. i saw the pirk tours of shirley. i went crazy. i was hysterical because i knew that s who she was. then when i saw the girls, i knew they were mine. after all those years 37 years, there they are. what did that feel like? it felt great. i was hoping i could find my children before i die because i m getting old. it was just like a miracle. gerry s story? shirley, who took the girls, had been her friend turned roommate, turned baby-sitter. she said, i ll baby-sit for
it would be that guy. right. rachel: teachers said the same thing. he gets expelled from the school. what happens? if you get expelled by three different schools and you are an orphan, who is taking care of this? where was the social safety net to pick that up? it s really complicated. it s very complicated. and i don t have an answer for that. you know, we can t assign a police officer to every one of these people in this type of situation to baby-sit. you know, a lot of things come down to funding. where do we place people like this. and it s i don t know. rachel: the thought that comes to me if he was troubled, at least the family that had taken him in. right. rachel: might have gotten a knock on the door to go hey, i know he is staying with you. you got to watch out. correct. speaking of us in tulsa we get a threat similar to this whether it s on this or terrorist type level. you know, we go out and do a knock and talk. go out to the house and try to make contact when you
up with a hidden tape recorder to ask him all these years later about the murder aut tt da he remembered every detail he said vividly. what were you going out to your car for? i was going out to my brother s. i remember it very good because the kids get ready to go to school because my brother was working nighttime. oh. so this is something you arranged with your brother? well, yeah. wait a minute? didn t he say back then he was going to do laundry? his version was his brother called him because a babysitter had to go to school and he had to take over baby sitting that morning and he was on his way to the house to baby sit. the baby sitting thing was a brand new alibi. he never mentioned that before. we sent detectives out to interview the brother afterwards. he didn t know the story janos had given. so that pushed me over the top. a few weeks later cops