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An official and ask for something that you really, really, really need and you kind of know you think you know how it's going to go? >> i get emotional usually. i usually cry. it just brings me to the sad place. >> sitting across the desk from somebody crying. >> oh, absolutely. >> and they -- >> they would say i can't do anything for you. >> 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 and i don't know my real name. pepper. >> once again, pepper felt perhaps understandably, like giving up. by th...

Question grew, too. did her mother, bobbi, actually 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 demand. without pepper's birth sert, shirley couldn't use her to score public assistance. though she did use renee that way. frightened, complia...

That she was sick? >> she turned completely yellow and diagnosed her with pancreatic cancer. she died quickly after that. >> with shirley on her deathbed, pepper tried to be the dutifully daughter. there was another reason to see her, maybe the most important. one last opportunity to find out who she was. >> as she was dying, did you try to find -- maybe she'd make a deathbed confession and say i did take you and here are your parents' names and how to find them, any of ha happen? did you ask? >> oh, yeah. >> and shirley had a response for the girl she renamed pepper. the question was, what co...

Everything together. >> rene was feeling abandoned. >> i was telling her, don't go, you know, stay here. i need you. you're my sister. so, she went, she did her thing. and i was upset and i was sad. >> by 1986 and on her own now, pepper had all but given up hope that she'd ever find her real parents. but now she began to encounter a more immediate problem. the inhe feevitable number thats with having no real name, no birth certificate, no i.d. though she was enrolled at school as rhonda smith, she had no way to prove this was her legal name. with some cooperation from shirley, her search for s...

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. she had been helping the two sisters deal with their identity issues. there it was, 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...