see her regularly, 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 deathbed 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 hope for pepper. it triggered a lot of my own personal memories, you know, and how come i didn t get found. and i felt still missing. but would she be missing much longer when lost and found continues. your best all summer long?
it was a godsend, really, since geri had to be hospitalized for weeks after raymond was born. and then get back to work and find a new home to take the kids to. i come out there on my days 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 kept telling me the same thing. 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
16-year-old wants to get 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. as i 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.
i thought you gave me away. no. they spent hours together here talking about their pasts, their likes and dislikes. their amazing similarities. we gave them a few weeks to get to know each other, and then sat down again with pepper and renee. so there it is. you have your mother, but what now? are you will you have a relationship with her? well, we re going to move her in with me. move into your house? yes, yes, once she gets all her affairs in order. we re going to move her in. why? because i want her. my husband wants her, too, there, so. i want to have a relationship with my mom. like i was telling you earlier, i want to go shopping. i want to have lunch. i want to go buy stuff. i want to have christmas, thanksgiving, her there with me. and pepper? well, for one thing, pepper has adopted her real birth name, the
did her mother bobbie actually give her away? shirley told pepper that rene was her sister. the two girls listened wide-eyed as shurlly explained to strangers that she was their grandmother, that her parents had been killed in an accident. i knew everything happening to us was wrong. why had she been taken? she didn t know. not for money certainly and without pepper s birth certificate, shurlly couldn t use her to score public assistance, though she did use renee that way. i never wanted to do anything wrong. i felt like if i did something wrong over and over she wouldn t love me and she would give me away. wouldn t love me? shirley told her said rene she was born to a prostitute drug