Page 28 - Pepper Smith News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

In los angeles county and took a job as the motel's cleaning woman in exchange for a free room. and, if it wasn't much, at least 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 dismay. girls don't go to school, she said, they get married. i didn't like being late to school, 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 u...

We fight like sisters. we did everything together. >> renee 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 inevitable trouble that comes with having no real name, no birth certificate, no i.d. though she was enrolled in school under the name rhonda smith at shirley's urging, she had no way to prove this was her l...

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, do you try to find -- i mean, maybe she'd make a deathbed confession and say, i did take you and here are your parents' names and how to find them. did you ask? >> oh, yeah. >> and shirley had a response for the girl she renamed pepper. the question was, what could she do with that answer? coming up -- if jaycee dugard could be found after 18 years, certainly there could be hope for pepper. >> ...

It was really -- i would -- it just brings me to a sad place. >> so you'd be sitting across the desk from somebody crying. >> oh, absolutely. >> and they wouldn't do anything for you. >> huh-hu. >> would 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 parents' names 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 her daughter in south lake tahoe working as a waitress, and...

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. 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 one her parents gave her before it was lost in the abductions and adoption. it's ronique smith. >> i feel very content that everything has taken place the way it has played out, findin...