her name is pepper. i lived a secret life. she was kidnapped at age four. we got in the car, and we never went back. she spent decades trying to find her way home again, and she finally made it. or, so she thought. i said, i think that i am rhonda patricia christine. i said, do you know her? and there was a long pause. her story had many ups and downs. when i looked at the email, i just could not even believe it. but after so many tears, so many years and so many turns in her story. i was like, wow. there are still more stunning twists to be revealed. it is amazing, the best gift ever. welcome to dateline. a four year old girl was adopted and raised by her kidnappers. for decades, she searched for her family, and her identity. her story has an extraordinary ending, but as it turns out, that ending was just the beginning. here is keith morrison. our story begins with this much mother of a teenage daughter. a woman who had spent much of h
four. we got in the car, and we never went back. she spent decades trying to find her way home again, and she finally made it. or, so she thought. i said, i think that i am rhonda patricia christine. i said, do you know her? and there was a long pause. her story had many ups and downs. when i looked at the email, i just could not even believe it. but after so many tears, so many years and so many turns in her story. i was like, wow. there are still more stunning twists to be revealed. it is amazing, the best gift ever. welcome to dateline. a four year old girl was adopted and raised by her kidnappers. for decades, she searched for her family, and her identity. her story has an extraordinary ending, but as it turns out, that ending was just the beginning. here is keith morrison. our story begins with this much mother of a teenage daughter. a woman who had spent much of her life trying to figure out who she was. what was her name? where did s
and terribly frightened at first. she begged, take me home. shirley ignored her. she imagined running away. i have nowhere to go. and 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 bobby actually give her away? shirley told pepper that rene was her sister. the two girls listened wide eye as shirley explained to strangers that she was their grandmother. that their parents had been killed in a car accident. i knew that everything that was happening to us was completely wrong, at a very, very young age. why had she been taken? she didn t know. not for money, certainly. there were no ransom demands. and without pepper s birth certificate, shirley couldn t use her to score public assistance. though she did use rene that
way. frightened, compliant rene. eager for a mother s love. even if that mother figure was shirley. i never wanted to do anything wrong. i felt like if i did something wrong she wouldn t love me. she would give me away. wouldn t love me? shirley told her that she was born to a prostitute drug addict named jerry. that surely save baby renee, race or as a doctor. but kept renee in line by threatening to abandon her. did she ever threaten to do that? yes, many times you would do something wrong and she would say, you stop doing that or i m going to send you off to jerry s house. and so they lived a life of packing up and fleeing state to state, one flop house to the next, searching for the cheapest place to stay. hunger constant. medical care, nonexistent. when money ran out, as it often did, shirley drove to the nearest truck stop. the girls would bend down in
what about the birth certificate? never gave me a concrete answer, you could not get anything out of her. the lies stayed with her. shirley of course knew the answers, knew the whole bizarre story, but she looked pepper in the eye, through her obvious pain, and told her nothing. she left the lies behind and took the truth to her grave. on july 29th, 1986, at the age of 63, she was buried here, in this cemetery, in an unmarked grave. rene, now at 19, got on with life, moved in with her boyfriend. soon, pepper showed up at their apartment, homeless and nowhere else to turn to. and everywhere pepper went from then on, shirley s poison gift followed, because of that woman, and what she did, pepper was officially at least a non-person. so it took a little while for determination to come back. she was in her mid twenties, a single mother by then. if only she could find her birth certificate, that could lead her to her parents. anyways, she needed documents to live.