am i really seeing this? it was a woman claiming to be the biological mother of both pepper and renee. claiming to be the woman who, according to shirley and barbara, was a child abandoning drug addled prostitute, probably dead. could this woman really be their mother? hardly a claim allred could take on simple faith. i asked her to come in and see me the very next day, which she was very anxious and happy to do. i asked her to bring whatever evidence she had. in that meeting, the woman presented her evidence. she brought some photos that she had of pepper and renee when they were very little. she told allred she had been a waitress when the girls were little. brought a photo of that, too, and a picture of shirley and also a photo of a man she said was the girls father, long since dead. she said her name was geri. i asked her immediately,
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, this cemetery, in an unmarked grave. renee, now 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 nonperson. so it took a little while for determination to come back. she was in her mid-20s, a single mother by then. if only she could find her birth certificate. that could lead her to her parents. anyway, she needed documents to live. she needed a passport. so she contacted state offices. their departments of vital records with perhaps predictable results. tell me what it feels like when
celebrated. renee joined them for rhonda s birthday and the christies 38th wedding anniversary. an amazing reunion. dateline was happy to broadcast it all around the country on march 25th, 2011, no idea that something quite unbelievable would happen because one of the people who tuned in that night was a woman named geri, and oh, what a story she had to tell. coming up it was a story two sisters had waited a very long time to hear. 99.99% probability. that means it s confirmed. when lost and found continues.
both of them. and they drifted one dump to another across any number of state lines for years. and then some time in the early 80s they settled down, here. shirley pulled up to this motel in los angeles county and took a job at the motel s cleaning woman in exchange for a free room. and if it wasn t much, at least it gave them some measure of stability. and they signed up at a local school, junior high for pepper, high school for renee. much to shirley s disapproval. shirley would tell us, girls don t go to school. they get married. why do you want to go to school? i didn t like being late to school. i didn t like being absent all the time. so they got themselves up every morning and went to school and kept going. and then, pepper was 12. eight of those years with shirley when she saw her chance to escape and seized it. she made herself useful as a
such as these were not her birth parents. she had been adopted. and the arrangement was mysterious. and now, it was barbara s turn to tell a story. shirley had been her friend, she said. told her about a woman working in the sex trade named geri smith who didn t want her babies. and one day shirley showed up at barbara s house with a 3-month-old baby she called rhonda patricia smith. barbara could see it was a little iffy but she wanted that baby so badly. and so she said she ignored the red flags. nope, didn t care. didn t really care. she was going to see to it, she said, that rhonda was loved and cared for by the best parents she could ever possibly have. bob and barbara legally adopted their little princess four years later in the fall of 1973. and it was shortly after that, said barbara, when shirley and renee showed up at her door.