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 me whatever evidence she had. in that meet, 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. her name was geri. i asked her immediately, geri, would you be willing to do a dna test? she said i ll take the dna test. but these are my children. i know it. allred put the dna test on the fast track and waited. and within a week called pepper and renee to her office to hear in person the results of the test. 99.99% probability.
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 you know you have to go to an official and ask for something that you really, really, really need and you kind of know, you think how it s going to go. i get emotional usually.
off to stay with the kids and spend some time with them. so then i had called her and told her that i was coming to get the kids, and the next day, i went out there, and gone. not a sign of them. no kids. no shirley. frantic then, she went to the police. what did you tell them? your children had been kidnapped. yeah. and they took the report. that s the last i heard. did you go back and talk to them again. i went down there two, three times. they hadn t found anything. geri didn t know who else to talk to. so she looked on her own and found year after year nothing. had no idea, she said, that shirley had left pepper with barbara. that barbara persuaded a court that pepper had essentially been abandoned and, thus, could be adopted or that shirley stole her back again. and then there they were telling their story on dateline. telling how shirley and barbara
story about pepper smith and her lifelong journey to find her family, her identity, it was a friday night in march 2011. and the following monday morning my office received a call, and then i received an e-mail. attorney gloria allred found herself looking at a remarkable message. allred had been helping the two sisters deal with their new identity issues, and there it was. the ping of a message on her blackberry. when i looked at the e-mail, i just couldn t even believe it. i looked at it about three times. 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.
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 quickly died after that. with shirley on her death bed, pepper tried to act like