00:00:00
Her name is Pepper. I lived a secret life. She was kidnapped at age four. We got in the car and we never went back.
00:00:14
She spent decades trying to find her way home again. And she finally made it, or so she thought.
00:00:22
I said, I think I'm Rhonda Christie, or do you know Rhonda Patricia Christie? And then there was a long pause.
00:00:29
Pepper's story had many ups and downs. When I looked at the email, I just couldn't even believe it.
00:00:39
But after so many tears, so many years, and so many turns in her story, I was like, whoa.
00:00:47
There are still more stunning twists to be revealed. It's amazing. It's the best gift ever.
00:00:54
I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Keith Morrison with Lost and Found.
00:01:10
Our story begins with the mother of a teenage daughter. A woman had spent most of her life trying to figure out who she was.
00:01:21
What was her name? Where did she come from? We'll tell you about her long search.
00:01:29
Her discovery, finally, of what felt like truth. But as you'll soon hear, real truth can be elusive.
00:01:40
It can hide. Let's begin at the beginning. But at the beginning, all she had was a memory.
00:01:50
A twin canopy bed with pink ruffles around it. Kind of wave over the top of it. It was dreamlike, really.
00:01:59
And for years, it was all that felt real in her upside-down life. And it was all pink and white.
00:02:06
It was everything matched. The closet full of dresses, the dolls, the teddy bears.
00:02:12
And actually, there was a little old-fashioned where you put the baby in the wagon.
00:02:16
And the reason for those tormenting memories? It's a lot of hurt and sadness. Sadness for the little girl that didn't have a life.
00:02:26
For most of her life, the part after that little girl's bedroom, she has been peppered.
00:02:32
And the baffling, terrifying story of what happened to her, kidnapped, held captive for years,
00:02:37
is the reason she gripped that life preserver of a memory. Shocking where that memory will lead by the end of this hour.
00:02:46
She was, she is certain of this, an only child. And spoiled, most likely, showered with attention and toys and dresses
00:02:53
by the parents whose faces she cannot quite pull into focus. There in their little apartment.
00:02:59
Was it San Diego, perhaps? It looks like a very happy childhood. Like love was there.
00:03:07
She knows there were two parents. Blonde beehive and her mother, that she remembers.
00:03:10
But her mother's name, lost now. Though there was a nickname, Bobby. And in those early years, she was always, always there.
00:03:18
Her father, on the other hand, was absent mostly. Long stretches away, punctuated by glorious reunions.
00:03:24
When she'd be bundled up like some china doll and bustled off to the harbor where the Navy ships come in.
00:03:30
We would go see him because he was coming in from the Navy. And so it was an exciting moment and she would get us all dressed up.
00:03:37
And it was the anticipation of going to the shipyard and having a lot of attention, I think, as a child.
00:03:45
The memories of how she survived it all, of course, all the trouble. Holding my mom's hand, having fun with my mom.
00:03:51
Being in the moment of joy, I don't have bad memories. Oh yes, those, the bad memories.
00:03:58
Like the day everything good went away. It was 1973, though she and her happy little childhood bubble had no idea what year it was.
00:04:09
She knows she was not yet five, that it was autumn, that someone came to the door with a plan.
00:04:15
I remember a woman coming over and knocking on the door. Her name was Shirley. She was a friend of her mother, she said.
00:04:22
She said the little girl she brought with her was Renee, and that Renee was six.
00:04:26
A little older then. Didn't matter. They dashed off to her bedroom to play. This is Renee now.
00:04:32
That room is stuck in her memory, too. Her room was gorgeous. A nice size room for a little kid.
00:04:39
You know, she had an academy bed. She had tons of dresses, toys galore. And you had none of that?
00:04:45
No. And I was like, wow, this is nice. An alien world to Renee, the most wonderful thing she'd ever seen.
00:04:52
And while the little girls played in the bedroom, Shirley was with Bobby in the living room, talking.
00:04:58
And then she called Renee. So I guess when it was time to leave, I didn't want to go.
00:05:02
I said, can we stay longer? No, but your new friend is coming with us, said Shirley.
00:05:08
I'm like, oh, okay. You know, so she came and that's how everything started. So it did.
00:05:15
It was to be an overnight, the girls were told, a little fun. They'd stay with Shirley in her Los Angeles motel room, return the next morning.
00:05:22
That was the plan, said Shirley. But Shirley lied. We got in the car and we never went back.
00:05:30
And my life completely changed from that point on. Completely. This woman took you away?
00:05:37
Yes. And this was our... And you weren't being taken home again? No. Never back again.
00:05:42
Do you remember that feeling? Yes. It was... I wanted to go home. She had been kidnapped. Must have been.
00:05:50
There was no little girls overnight in Shirley's motel room. They stopped there only to pack some belongings hit the road and a blissful childhood entered the fog of history The memory of the beautiful bedroom All she had to confront the nightmare just beginning
00:06:08
Coming up, a four-year-old on the road with her kidnapper. I knew that everything that was happening to us was completely wrong at a very, very young age.
00:06:18
When Dateline continues. The story you'll hear now lives in the vivid, so real you could touch them, memories of two frightened girls.
00:06:35
It began in a downmarket motel whose L.A. neighborhood was most decidedly not child-friendly.
00:06:43
It was to be a one-night sleepover with new friend Renee. Instead, a woman named Shirley simply didn't take her home again.
00:06:51
Instead, she packed some belongings, put the girls in her car, and hit the road.
00:06:55
Where did they go? The little girl had no idea. But she did know that from now on, she had a new name.
00:07:03
They called her Pepper. Pepper Smith. She was not yet five years old. We lived in cars and motels.
00:07:14
And going from state to state, staying at Salvation Army is to get a meal here and there.
00:07:19
you know just what's it like to live in a car it's horrible it's embarrassing she was confused
00:07:26
of course and terribly frightened at first she begged take me home surely ignored her she imagined
00:07:34
running away i had nowhere to go and i was too scared then as the weeks and months and then
00:07:40
years went by as her powers of reasoning grew the question grew too did her mother bobby actually
00:07:47
give her away? Shirley told Pepper that Renee was her sister. The two girls listened wide-eyed as
00:07:55
Shirley explained to strangers that she was their grandmother, that their parents had been killed in
00:08:00
a car accident. I knew that everything that was happening to us was completely wrong at a very,
00:08:06
very young age. Why had she been taken? She didn't know. Not for money, certainly. There were no
00:08:12
ransom demands. And without Pepper's birth certificate, Shirley couldn't use her to score
00:08:17
public assistance, though she did use Renee that way. Frightened, compliant Renee, eager for a
00:08:23
mother's love, even if that mother figure was Shirley. I never wanted to do anything wrong. I
00:08:31
felt like if I did something wrong or whatever, she wouldn't love me. She would give me away.
00:08:38
wouldn't love me? Shirley told her, says Renee, that she was born to a prostitute drug addict named Jerry,
00:08:47
that Shirley saved baby Renee, raised her as a daughter, but kept Renee in line by threatening to abandon her.
00:08:55
Did she ever threaten to do that? Yeah, many times we'd do something wrong, and she would say,
00:09:00
well, you stop doing that, or I'm going to send you off to Jerry's house. And so they lived a life of packing up and fleeing, state to state, one flophouse to the next,
00:09:11
searching for the cheapest place to stay and then skip out of. Hunger, constant.
00:09:17
Medical care, non-existent. When money ran out, as it often did, Shirley drove to the nearest truck stop.
00:09:25
The girls would bed down in the car and watch Shirley sneak off to do... Well, they didn't know.
00:09:32
and, alone and frightened, they held on to each other and watched the shadows of strange men pass by their car.
00:09:39
Until the night went, terrified and unable to sleep, Renee followed Shirley. She's taking a long time and I'm getting scared
00:09:48
because I'm thinking she left or she's died or something. So I go into where they work on the cars
00:09:55
and she's like on the side over here and he's on top of her. and I didn't know what was going on.
00:10:03
I got scared and then she seen me and she yelled at me and said, Get out of here. Go.
00:10:10
At least then they had a bit of money. But always, Pepper was afraid. Afraid to ask for help.
00:10:17
Afraid to ask why she'd been taken. Afraid of Shirley's threats. She would scare us to believe
00:10:24
that we were in a better place. She was doing something good for us. Did you ever understand why she wouldn't take you back home?
00:10:33
Her personality was very up and down, like very angry. And so if I asked questions, she would say stuff like,
00:10:42
if you want to find your mom, she's on the streets shooting heroin and a prostitute.
00:10:47
Tirades were frequent. Neglect, part of life. Verbal and physical abuse are regular occurrence.
00:10:53
She would whip us with the belt, slap us, verbally cuss at us, verbally abuse us.
00:11:03
And threaten to send you away. I just took the belt. If you take it, it calms. She gets out of the rage faster, so to speak.
00:11:18
They went to school when they could, made very few friends and lost the ones they did make.
00:11:24
Struggled to be ordinary kids and then normal teenagers. All I wanted to be is loved. That's it.
00:11:32
And I never got any kind of love that I wanted. Instead, they were trapped. Truck stop nomads in the care of a woman who, it seemed clear, had kidnapped at least one, if not both of them.
00:11:43
and they drifted, one dump to another, across any number of state lines for years.
00:11:49
And then, sometime in the early 80s, they settled down. Shirley pulled up to a motel in Los Angeles County and took a job as the motel cleaning woman in exchange for a free room And if it wasn much at least it gave them some measure of stability
00:12:05
And they signed up at a local school, junior high for Pepper, high school for Renee.
00:12:11
Much to Shirley's disapproval. Shirley would tell us, girls don't go to school. They get married.
00:12:18
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.
00:12:25
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,
00:12:35
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.
00:12:45
And when the family moved out of the motel, Pepper went with them. But it didn't last long.
00:12:52
Pepper's new household, caught in its own spiral of alcoholism and dysfunction, was as troubled and messy as her own life was.
00:12:59
She swallowed her pride and moved back to Room 110 Colonial Motel, even though by then, says Pepper, Shirley didn't seem to care much what she did.
00:13:09
I remember when I was trying to so-called run away, plot my escape, before it went into action, I was in my mind going,
00:13:17
I'm going to show her, she'll care. Like, I remember thinking that, but she didn't care.
00:13:24
She didn't come to get me. Still, having tasted freedom once, Pepper was determined to get away from her kidnapper for good.
00:13:32
A second time she took a chance, moved out with the family, and a second time had to return.
00:13:37
And then finally, by the time she turned 16, Pepper left for good. But that meant she left Renee behind, too.
00:13:45
Renee, who so needed Pepper and was alone now with Shirley. She was my best friend growing up.
00:13:51
That was my best friend. You know, we did everything together. We fight like sisters.
00:13:55
We did everything together. Renee was feeling abandoned. I was telling her, don't go, you know, stay here.
00:14:03
You know, I need you. We're my sister. So she went, she did her thing, and I was upset and I was sad.
00:14:10
By 1986 and on her own now, Pepper had all but given up hope that she'd ever find her real parents.
00:14:16
But now she began to encounter a more immediate problem, the inevitable trouble that comes with having no real name,
00:14:23
no birth certificate, no ID. Though she was enrolled in school under the name Rhonda Smith,
00:14:29
that Shirley's urging, she had no way to prove this was her legal name. And without some cooperation from Shirley,
00:14:36
her search for such documents seemed hopeless. And then, how did you find out that she was sick?
00:14:43
She turned completely yellow, and they diagnosed her with pancreatic cancer, and she literally died quickly after that.
00:14:50
With Shirley on her deathbed, Pepper tried to act like the dutiful daughter, went to see her regularly, tried to make her comfortable.
00:14:58
But there was another terribly important reason to see her then, maybe the most important.
00:15:03
One last opportunity to find out who she was. As she was dying, did you try to find, you know, I mean, maybe she'd make a deathbed confession and say, yes, I did take you and here are what your parents' names are and how to find them.
00:15:18
And any of that happened? Did you ask? Oh, yeah. And Shirley had a response for the girl she renamed Pepper.
00:15:26
The question was, what could she do with that answer? Coming up If J.C. Dugard could be found after 18 years
00:15:37
Certainly there must be hope for Pepper It triggered a lot of my own personal memories
00:15:42
You know, and how come I didn't get found And I felt still missing But would she be missing much longer
00:15:49
When Dateline continues The girl they called Pepper Smith sat at the deathbed of the woman who'd stolen her,
00:16:07
with questions burning in her brain. She had to know, who was she? Where did she come from?
00:16:13
Who were her parents? What was her true identity? And at the very least, where could she find the documents that could give her a real life?
00:16:21
She took a roundabout route. She asked the question indirectly. I took drivers that, just like any 16-year-old wants to get their driver.
00:16:29
I want to be free. I want to go work and be free from all this. I have a plan. And I asked her, I need my birth certificate.
00:16:38
I need this. And she told me, they changed the laws. You can't get your driver's license until you're 18 years old.
00:16:47
Yeah. And I'm supposed to believe this. As I sit in a classroom where I've got friends who are getting permits.
00:16:53
Of course. So she took the lies with her. She was not going to tell. What about the birth certificate?
00:16:58
Never really gave me a concrete answer. Nothing. You couldn't get anything out of her.
00:17:03
The lies stayed with her. Shirley knew the answers, of course. Knew the whole bizarre story.
00:17:10
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 29, 1986.
00:17:21
At the age of 63, she was buried in an unmarked grave. Renee, now 19, got on with life, moved in with her boyfriend
00:17:31
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
00:17:41
Because of that woman and what she did, Pepper was officially at least a non-person
00:17:46
So it took a little while for determination to come back She was in her mid-twenties, a single mother by then
00:17:53
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
00:18:10
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, really need.
00:18:17
And you kind of know, you think how it's going to go. I get emotional usually. I usually cry.
00:18:27
It was really, I would cry. It just brings me to a sad place. So you'd be sitting across the desk from somebody crying.
00:18:33
Oh, absolutely. And they wouldn't do anything for you. Would say, I can't do anything for you, probably.
00:18:38
You need this document. This is what you need to provide. Sorry. I have no way to get this document, because I don't know my parents' name.
00:18:46
And I don't know my real name. Pepper. and once again pepper felt perhaps understandably like giving up but by then she was living with
00:18:57
her daughter in south lake tahoe working as a waitress and what do you know hometown girl jc
00:19:03
dugard kidnapped years and years earlier was found the community was just buzzing all over the place
00:19:10
with joy and i was happy for jc lee but it triggered a lot of my own personal memories you
00:19:17
know, and how come I didn't get found? And I felt still missing. So once again, charged up with
00:19:25
determination, she launched a fresh attempt. Turns out there's such a thing as adult adoption.
00:19:31
Find someone to adopt her. And even if she couldn't find her parents, at least she could
00:19:35
get an official identity and a birth certificate and thus a passport. A friend offered to adopt
00:19:41
her. So Pepper and friend applied and waited. And something quite amazing happened. Someone
00:19:48
in that great California bureaucracy did some research. A lot, apparently. Actually talked
00:19:54
to Pepper, asked her questions, hauled out records not readily available online. All
00:20:00
Pepper could offer were the names Bob and Bobby and the date of her birth. And somehow,
00:20:08
buried among all those files in all their hundreds of millions, a match. And there it was, came in the mail, after all these years,
00:20:17
a copy of her actual birth certificate. The key to unlock her past, though she had no idea then,
00:20:24
looking at that birth certificate, that the appropriate question should have been this.
00:20:29
Was this her real past? Coming up, a journey ending. This is it, you know, I was like, whoa.
00:20:38
Or was it just beginning when Dateline continues? For 37 years, she'd been searching for her parents, her life, her name.
00:20:56
And now, just as she'd given up ever finding the answer, she had it. A copy of her birth certificate with her real name in black and white.
00:21:06
Rhonda Patricia Christie. And there were the names of her parents, too, Robert and Barbara Christie.
00:21:14
This is it. You know, I was like, whoa, they were my parents, that Bobby and Bob, you know, they were my parents.
00:21:20
With their names and Social Security numbers, Rhonda and her friends tracked down a phone number in Ohio.
00:21:26
She dialed the number. A man answered. It was June 5, 2010. I said, are you Robert Team Christie?
00:21:34
Because I was on the first certificate. And he said, yes. And I said, are you married to a Barbara Blackwelder?
00:21:39
Or were you married? You know, I didn't know. He said, yes. And then I said, I think I'm Rhonda Christie, or do you know Rhonda Patricia Christie?
00:21:48
And then there was a long pause. The man she was talking to was Bob Christie. I almost dropped the phone.
00:21:57
She knew I'd hesitated. She said, this is your daughter, Rhonda. and there was something that clicked in my mind
00:22:05
that I reckoned the voice rang a bell. And he called to my mom, Barbara, to pick up the phone.
00:22:14
She said, Rhonda's on the phone. She picked up the phone and the first thing out of her mouth was,
00:22:18
Shirley stole to you. Pepper was shaking inside and out. I went into the most emotions I think I've ever had in my entire life, ever.
00:22:29
The memories were true, or so it certainly seemed. She got on a plane for Ohio. They were all, of course, 37 years older and in a way strangers now,
00:22:41
but there they were, together on a couch, looking at all the images she had clung to in fantasy,
00:22:49
dreamed about for those 37 long years. And there you are in your bath. All those rolls, too.
00:22:57
Yeah, you was the chubby little baby. And happy. And look at you, just learning to walk and smiling the whole way.
00:23:09
You had a good life, honey. I know. So it was happy and sad, comforting, but also deeply strange.
00:23:17
Because sitting on that couch, Pepper heard some stunning revelations, such as, these were not her birth parents.
00:23:24
She had been adopted. and the arrangement was mysterious. And now it was Barbara's turn to tell a story.
00:23:33
Shirley had been her friend, she said, had told her about a woman working in the sex trade
00:23:37
named Jerry Smith who didn't want her babies. And one day Shirley showed up at Barbara's house
00:23:42
with a three-month-old baby she called Rhonda Patricia Smith. Barbara could see it was a little iffy,
00:23:49
but she wanted that baby so badly. And so, she said, she ignored the red flags. Nope, didn't care.
00:23:58
Didn't really care. She was going to see to it, she said, that Rhonda was loved and cared for by the best parent she could ever possibly have.
00:24:07
Bob and Barbara legally adopted their little princess four years later, in the fall of 1973.
00:24:14
And it was shortly after that, said Barbara, when Shirley and Renee showed up at her door.
00:24:20
And the kids played together and we visited together and she asked if Rhonda could come spend the night with Renee and took me a while to get an answer to that.
00:24:36
I really had to think about that hard. I'm one of these tender hearted people and I said, well, I want her to know her sister.
00:24:45
Sister? Why, yes. Barbara told Rhonda she and Renee were half-sisters, daughters of the same mother, the woman who worked the streets.
00:24:54
Barbara said that by then, she didn't trust Shirley with Rhonda, but... I want Rhonda to know her sister.
00:25:03
I wanted her to have family and stuff. And I asked Bob, and he said no, she couldn't at first.
00:25:11
And then he relented, let her go. and next morning we went to get her and they were gone.
00:25:20
And they didn't come back. Bob and Barbara called the police right away, of course.
00:25:26
But here's what they said they were told, that the police could do nothing for them
00:25:30
since they'd allowed Rhonda to leave with Shirley. They were on their own. And so, desperate, they said, they started their own search,
00:25:40
discovered Shirley had taken the girls to a relative's house several states away.
00:25:44
But when they got there, it was too late. All that remained sitting on the porch were the little red shoes.
00:25:50
Rhonda wore the day she was kidnapped. It was hopeless. They returned to their childless home.
00:25:56
Nothing left but the photographs of the little girl who stopped growing up for them at four.
00:26:03
And now, out of the blue, that phone call. And here she was. Pretty good, how are you?
00:26:09
I'm good. It is definitely a gift. Not only did we get a daughter, we got a granddaughter.
00:26:14
Just in time, it turns out. Barbara had terminal cancer. She would die a year later.
00:26:20
Still, back then, they celebrated. Renee joined them for Rhonda's birthday and the Christie's 38th wedding anniversary.
00:26:28
An amazing reunion. So, of course, Dateline was happy to broadcast it all around the country on March 25, 2011.
00:26:36
No idea that something quite unbelievable would happen. because one of the people who tuned in that night was a woman named Jerry.
00:26:47
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.
00:26:58
99.99% probability. Yep, that means it's confirmed. When Dateline continues. When we first told you the story about Pepper Smith
00:27:16
and her lifelong journey to find her family, her identity, it was a Friday night in March 2011.
00:27:23
And the following Monday morning... My office received a call. And then I received an email.
00:27:31
Attorney Gloria Allred found herself looking at a remarkable message. Allred had been helping the two sisters deal with their new identity issues.
00:27:39
And there it was, the ping of a message on her BlackBerry. When I looked at the email, I just couldn't even believe it.
00:27:49
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,
00:28:00
claiming to be the woman who, according to Shirley and Barbara, was a child-abandoning, drug-addled prostitute, probably dead.
00:28:07
could this woman really be their mother? Hardly a claim Allred could take on simple faith. I asked her to come in to see me the very next day which she was
00:28:19
very anxious and happy to do I asked her to bring whatever evidence she had And in that meeting the woman presented her evidence She brought some photos that she had of Pepper and Renee when they were very little
00:28:34
She told Allred she had been a waitress when the girls were little. Brought a photo of that, too.
00:28:40
And a picture of Shirley. And also a photo of a man she said was the girl's father,
00:28:45
long since dead. She said her name was Jerry. I asked her immediately, Jerry, would you be willing to do a DNA test?
00:28:56
She said, I'll take the DNA test, but these are my children. I know it. Allred put the DNA test on a fast track and waited,
00:29:06
and within a week, called Pepper and Renee to her office to hear in person the results of the test.
00:29:13
99.99% probability. That's it. Yep, that means it's confirmed. That's it. I can't believe this is actually happening.
00:29:21
I really can't right now. How soon could they meet Jerry? The sisters wanted to know.
00:29:25
And what's she like? How did she know Shirley? We arranged a reunion for the next day.
00:29:31
Jerry arrived first and told us how she saw her long-lost girls on our program. I saw the picture of Shirley.
00:29:39
I went crazy. I was satirical because I knew that's who she was. and then when I saw the girls
00:29:47
I knew they were mine. After how all those years of looking there they are. What did that feel like?
00:29:56
It felt great. I had to hope I could find my children before I die because I'm getting old
00:30:03
and that was just like a miracle. Jerry's story? The Shirley who took the girls had been her friend
00:30:11
turned roommate turned babysitter. She said, I'll babysit for you, and I'll take care of her while you work.
00:30:19
I said, well, that's great, because I really thought I was blessed. First it was Renee she looked after,
00:30:25
then Renee and Pepper, and then two years later, little brother Raymond Leonard Smith Jr.
00:30:31
Wait, brother? It wasn't just the two girls. There was a younger brother the girls never knew they had.
00:30:40
The father wasn't around very much, Jerry supported them all with what she could make as a waitress.
00:30:46
And Shirley made a change, a positive one, it seemed, at least financially. She got this job, supposedly, at the motel managing,
00:30:56
which was further from where I worked, so I arranged with her to watch the kids while I worked.
00:31:03
It was a godsend, really, since Jerry had to be hospitalized for weeks after Raymond was born,
00:31:09
and then get back to work and find a new home to take the kids to. I'd come out there on my days off and stay with the kids and spend some time with them.
00:31:18
And 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.
00:31:27
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?
00:31:36
Yeah, and they took the report, and that's the last I heard. Did you go back and talk to them again?
00:31:41
I went down there two or three times, and they kept telling me the same thing. They hadn't found anything.
00:31:46
Jerry says she didn't know who else to talk to. So she looked on her own and found, year after year, nothing.
00:31:56
Had no idea, she said, that Shirley had left Pepper with Barbara, that Barbara persuaded at court that Pepper had essentially been abandoned
00:32:04
and thus could be adopted. Or that Shirley stole her back again. And then there they were, telling their story on date lines.
00:32:14
Telling how Shirley and Barbara had described her. Yes, I heard what they said about me.
00:32:21
I was not a streetwalker. I was a waitress all my life. They also said you didn't really want your children.
00:32:29
You were happy to abandon them. I never abandoned my children. Never. Ever. and would never ever do that.
00:32:40
And she wasn't a drug addict either, she says. She's not had a smooth or easy life.
00:32:46
And for much of it, she has missed her children and blamed herself for what happened Trusting Shirley Yes And for not having those kids under your wing all the time That right Tell me about that Because to me I feel like it was my fault because I put him in the hands of this monster
00:33:08
We're in a hotel room in Los Angeles. Jerry is eager, anxious, terrified, visibly shaking.
00:33:16
and then they come around the corner their first meeting of 37 years wow it's been a lifetime we've missed
00:33:33
oh my god I feel like I'm streaming still I can't really get it yet I can't either
00:33:39
I just want to see how I'm just can I just hear it Yes, you can't do anything, honey.
00:33:46
I don't have a memory. I'm sad because I was there with you guys. You're my mom.
00:33:53
Yes, you're my babies. You're my babies. It's been 37 years, it's sad. And just about here, as they cling and cry,
00:34:05
something rather magical happens. The center of gravity shifts. What happened? What happened?
00:34:12
It's Renee who wants the answers now. You will know. You will know. You will know, I promise you.
00:34:20
You were kidnapped. You were illegally adopted. Me? But what happened to me? She was adopted.
00:34:27
But what happened to me? I thought I would never find you ever. I thought I'd never find you either.
00:34:34
I searched and I searched and I searched. I didn't know where to go. I had no money for attorney.
00:34:38
And when I turned Dateline on and saw you girls, Come on, honey. It's okay. I thought you didn't care about me.
00:34:52
No, I loved you, both of you. I could never not love you, I had you. I was so mad at you.
00:35:00
I'm sure you were. I was so mad at you. Honey, I understand. No, I thought you gave me away.
00:35:05
No. They spent hours together here, talking about their pasts, Their likes and dislikes, their amazing similarity.
00:35:15
We gave them a few weeks to get to know each other, then sat down again with Pepper and Renee.
00:35:21
So there it is. You have your mother. But what now? Will you have a relationship with her?
00:35:28
Well, we're going to move her in with me. Move into your house? Yes. Once she gets all her affairs in order, we're going to move her in.
00:35:39
Why? Because I want her. My husband wants her too. 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.
00:36:00
And Pepper? Well, for one thing, Pepper has adopted her real birth name, the one her parents gave her before it was lost in the abductions and adoption.
00:36:09
It's Ronique. Ronique Smith. I feel very content that everything has taken place, you know, the way it has played out.
00:36:18
Finding my mom, my identity, the real identity, my biological father, seeing a picture of him,
00:36:24
all these exciting things going on. But I think it's not over yet. I don't feel the journey's quite over yet.
00:36:32
It's just starting. This part of it is just starting. So it is. Because, of course, one of them is still missing.
00:36:43
Coming up. Our brother Raymond is still missing. We know he's out there somewhere.
00:36:49
So he is, but not for long. When Dateline continues. It was Pepper's story when we began.
00:37:04
Pepper, now officially Ronique, who set out to find a birth certificate and discovered a past richer and more complex
00:37:13
than even she dreamed possible To find first the mother of her memory and then her long birth mother To discover that Renee was her actual sister And now to learn she had a brother
00:37:29
Raymond Leonard Smith Jr. is what Jerry called him before he too was snatched away.
00:37:34
Abducted by the babysitter, Shirley. Where was he now? Jerry gave us a copy of his birth certificate.
00:37:42
He'd be just about 40 now. and our chances of finding him seem, frankly, slim. We called 40-year-old Ray Smith all over the country.
00:37:52
There was Ray Smith in Colorado, Ray Smith in Maryland, in New Jersey, in Kansas.
00:37:58
But did he go by the name Ray Smith? And then, a callback. It was the Ray Smith from Colorado.
00:38:07
He had the right name, the right age, place of birth, had grown up without knowing any blood relatives.
00:38:14
All this Ray Smith knew was his mother's name. According to his birth certificate was...
00:38:20
Jerry. He was starting to sound a lot like our Ray. We asked if he'd submit to a DNA test.
00:38:28
He agreed. And there was no doubt we'd found him. We brought Ray and his fiancée to a Los Angeles hotel
00:38:38
and showed him the story of his sisters. In a way, his story, too. I thought that the story itself was sad.
00:38:48
It sounded like they had a rough life. And it was really similar to mine. So it was.
00:38:55
And it began the same way, too, when Shirley took him from Jerry. Except Ray was turned over to a woman named Anna Lee Brown,
00:39:03
who named him Jimmy Brown, the only name he knew growing up. She told me that she had adopted me, but I was also shipped around a lot from home to home because she had a lot of health problems, from what I was told.
00:39:20
He was neglected, he said, and often abused, bounced around for years, until Anna Brown shipped him off to a Colorado couple when he was 14.
00:39:29
and that's when he found his birth certificate, started calling himself Ray Smith,
00:39:35
and began puzzling over the apparently unanswerable questions of his life. Why did Ann name me Jim Brown if my name was really Ray?
00:39:44
How come I never knew about Jerry? Things like that. Then I wondered, you know, was I kidnapped?
00:39:52
No answers from Anna Brown, who died soon after that. And as for life in Colorado,
00:39:58
So by the time he was 16, things were getting a little rough. Maybe because of my past, I wasn't a real easy kid.
00:40:08
So I was put into foster care. And then he graduated from high school. He got a job, moved in with some friends and started his own rock band.
00:40:21
And for all he's wondered about his past, he'd come to believe he'd go to his grave without ever meeting a blood relative.
00:40:28
Until now. Wow. They're actually in the same building I'm in right now. That's amazing to me.
00:40:38
And here they were. Oh, my baby. Oh. Oh, it's good forever. It's great to see you.
00:40:49
Meeting family for the first time. You guys kind of look like me. After so many years.
00:40:56
So this is my first time meeting my blood. Oh, no! Oh, no! It's great. It's so great.
00:41:06
And this is how Pepper's desperate search for a warm memory of a lost childhood ended.
00:41:11
You look like our dad. You're great. Far bigger than she imagined. Far better. It's good to see you.
00:41:17
Oh, it's good to see you, too. The family that was stolen. It's amazing. It's the best gift ever.
00:41:25
Yes. They sat here for hours, shared their photos, got to know each other, and made plans like families do.
00:41:38
That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us.