Page 18 - Pepper Smith News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

They called her pepper. pepper smith. she was not yet 5 years old. >> we lived in cars and motels and going from state to state staying at salvation armies to get a meal here and there. just -- >> what's it like to live in a car? >> it's horrible. it's embarrassing. >> she was confused, of course, and terribly frightened at first. she begged, take me home. shirley ignored her. she imagined running away. >> i had nowhere to go. i was too scared. >> then as the weeks and months and then years went by, as her powers of reasoning grew, the question grew, too. did her mother bobbie actually give he...

Desk from somebody crying. >> oh, absolutely. >> and they wouldn't do anything for you? >> no. they could say i can't do anything for you probably. >> 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 parent's name. 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 her daughter in south lake tahoe working as a waitress and, what do you know. hometown girl jaycee dugard, kidnapped years and years earlier, was found. >> the commu...

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 pro...

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 st...

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. ...