Page 8 - Geri Smith News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Did she ever threaten to do that? >> yeah, many times. we'd do something wrong, and she would say, well, you stop doing that or i'm going to send you off to geri's house. >> and so they lived a life of packing up and fleeing state to state, one flop house to the next, searching for the cheapest place to stay and then skip out of. hunger constant. medical care, nonexistent. when money ran out, as it often did, shirley drove to the nearest truck stop. the girls would bed down in the car and watch shirley sneak off to do -- well, they didn't know. and alone and frightened, they held on to each ot...

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 ...

And it 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....

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 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 ...

Shirley had been her friend, she said. told her about a woman working in the sex trade named geri smith who didn't want her babies. and one day shirley showed up at barbara's house with a 3-month-old baby she called rhonda patricia smith. barbara could see it was a little iffy but she wanted that baby so badly. and so she said she ignored the red flags. >> nope, didn't care. didn't really care. >> she was going to see to it, she said, that rhonda was loved and cared for by the best parents she could ever possibly have. bob and barbara legally adopted their little princess four years later in t...