their i want to be free. i want to go work and be free from all of this. i have a plan. and i asked her for i need my birth certificate. i need this. she told me, they changed the laws. you can t get your driver s license until you re 18 years old. yeah. and i m supposed to believe this. s as a sit in a classroom where i ve got friends who are getting permits. she took the lies with her. she was not going to tell. what about the birth certificate. never gave me a concrete answer, nothing. couldn t get anything out of her. the lies stayed with her. shirley knew the answers, of course. 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, this cemetery, in an unmarked grave.
the dutiful daughter, tried to make her comfortable. but there was another terribly important reason to see her then. maybe the most important. one last opportunity to find out who she was. as she was dying, did you try to find, do you know, maybe she d make a death bed confession and say, i did take you and here are what your parents names are and how to find them. any of that happen? did you ask? oh, yeah. and shirley had a response for the girl she renamed pepper. the question was, what could see do with that answer? coming up if jaycee duggard could be found after 18 years, certainly there must be hopeor pepper. it triggered a lot of my own personal memories, you know, and how come i didn t get found. but would she be missing much longer when lost and found continues.
with determination, she launched a fresh attempt. there s such a thing as adult adoption. find someone to adopt her and even if she couldn t find her parents, at least she could get an official identity and a birth certificate and a passport. a friend offered to adopt her so pepper and friend applied and waited. and something quite amazing happened. someone in that great california bureaucracy did some research. a lot apparently, asked to pepper, asked her questions, hauled out records not readily available online. all pepper could offer were the names bob and bobbie and the date of her birth. and somehow, buried among all those files in all their hundreds of millions, a match. and there it was, came in the mail, after all those years, a copy of her actual birth certificate. the key to unlock her past, though she had no idea then, looking at that birth
dysfunction was as troubled and messy as her own life was. she swallowed her pride and moved back to room 110 colonial motel, even though, by then, shirley didn t seem to care much what she did. i remember when i was trying to so-call run away, plot my escape, before it went into action, i was in my mind going, she i m going to show her. she ll care. like i remember thinking that. but she didn t care. she didn t come to get me. still, having tasted freedom once, pepper was determined to get away from her kidnapper for good. the success time she took a chance, moved out with the family and a second time had to return. and then finally by the time she turned 16, pepper left for good. but that meant she left renee behind, too. renee who so needed pepper and was alone now with shirley. she was my best friend growing up. that was my best friend. we did everything together. we fight like sisters.
it s a lot of hurt, sadness. sadness for the little girl that didn t have a life. for most of her life, the part after that little girl s bedroom, she has been pepper, and the baffling, terrifying story of what happened to her, kidnapped, held captive for years, is the reason she gripped that life preserver of a memory. shocking where that memory will lead by the end of this hour. she was certain of this, an only child and spoiled, most likely. showered with attention and toys and dresses by the parents whose faces she cannot quite pull into focus. they re in their little apartment. was it san diego perhaps? it looks like a very happy childhood. like love was there. she knows there were two parents. blond beehive on her mother. she hers that but her mother s name lost now. though there was a nickname, bobbie, and in those early years