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. i asked her to come in and
give her away? shirley told pepper that renee was her sister. the two girls listened wide-eyed 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 renee that way. frightened, compliant renee, 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 or whatever, she wouldn t love me. she would give me away. wouldn t love me? shirley told her, says renee, she was born to a prostitute drug addict named geri.
a woman who it seemed clear had kidnapped at least one if not 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 babysitter for the couple next door in room 109.
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 me 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. her name was geri. i asked her immediately, geri, would you be willing to do a dna test?
it felt great. i had been hoping to find my children before i die because i was getting old and that was like a miracle. geri s story, that shirley who took the girls had been her friend turned roommate turned babysitter. she said i ll babysit for you. 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 raymond 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. and shirley made a change, a positive one, it seemed, at least financially. she got this job supposedly at the motel managing, which was