Jessica McClure Morales ("Baby Jessica") became famous in
1987 when at 18 months old she fell down a 22 foot well in her aunt's
backyard. She remained trapped in the well for 58 hours, while America
watched on CNN, before being rescued.
Remembered worldwide as "Baby Jessica," Jessica McClure
Morales was born March 26, 1986 in the oil city of Midland, Texas. She
was born to teenage parents, Reba "Cissy" McClure and Lewis "Chip"
McClure, who had fallen on hard times in the depths of the Texas oil
bust of the mid-1980s.
The first 18 months of Baby Jessica's life
passed without the world at large taking much notice. Then, on the
morning of Wednesday, October 14, 1987, she suddenly became the most
famous child in the country. Jessica's aunt Jamie Moore ran a daycare
center out of her home, where that morning Jessica was playing with four
other children in the backyard under the supervision of her mother,
Cissy, who briefly went inside to answer a phone call, leaving the
children momentarily unattended. Minutes later she heard the kids
screaming and rushed back outside to find that her daughter had
disappeared. She soon discovered that Baby Jessica had fallen into an
eight-inch diameter well and become trapped deep down in its shaft. How
exactly Baby Jessica fell into the well remains unclear. According to
her mother, the opening had been covered up by a heavy rock to prevent
just such an accident. "I didn't know what to do," Cissy McClure later
recalled. "I just ran in and called the police. They were there within
three minutes, but it felt like a lifetime."
Baby Jessica
remained trapped in the well, 22 feet below ground, for the next 58
hours, while frantic rescue crews attempted to save her life and the
entire nation watched transfixed as the drama played out on television.
Because she had fallen so deep into the earth—beneath layers of rock
harder than granite—and because the diameter of the well was so narrow,
the rescue mission was extraordinarily difficult. Using a large rat-hole
rig, a machine normally used to plant telephone poles in the ground,
rescue teams drilled a 30-inch wide, 29-foot deep hole parallel to the
well. They then began the difficult process of drilling a horizontal
tunnel between the two wells about two feet below where Baby Jessica was
trapped.
In the meantime, rescue workers pumped oxygen into the
well and attempted to maintain constant communication with Baby Jessica,
who moaned, wailed and for a while even sang nursery rhymes to pass the
time. "After listening to her for so long, I could tell her moods," a
detective on the scene recalled. "At one point she was singing. At
another point, when a jackhammer started up, she didn't say any words
but used kind of a huffy little voice. You could tell it was an angry
voice. I would say 80 percent of the time she was either crying or
making some kind of noise we could hear. When we weren't calling words
of encouragement, we'd tell her to sing for us. I'll never forget her
singing 'Winnie-the-Pooh.'"
The entire rescue ordeal was covered live on CNN, the nation's first—and
at that time only—24-hour news network. For only the second time in
American history (the first being the explosion of the space shuttle
Challenger a year earlier) the entire nation watched literally
around-the-clock as a dramatic news story unfolded live on television.
Dubbed "everybody's baby," Baby Jessica tugged at heartstrings of
millions of viewers; thousands of strangers sent her family flowers,
toys,cards and money. Donations, totaling in the hundreds of thousands of
dollars, were set aside in a trust fund for her to inherit at the age
of 25. In fact, many point to CNN's coverage of Baby Jessica's rescue as
a turning point in the history of news media, the genesis of the era of
the 24-hour news cycle.
Finally, on the evening of Friday,
October 16, Baby Jessica was lifted safely out of the well. The Pulitzer
prize-winning photograph of her rescue, snapped by Scott Shaw, shows
Baby Jessica cradled in the arms of a paramedic, her head wrapped in
white gauze, her arms caked in dirt, her bleary eyes just barely open.
Over the next few years, Baby Jessica underwent 15 surgeries to treat
all of the complications from her three days trapped without food or
water inside a dirty, 8-inch wide well. She ultimately did regain full
health. Chronic but controllable rheumatoid arthritis, a missing small
toe on her right foot and a prominent diagonal scar across her forehead
are the only permanent physical signs of her ordeal.
Once she grew older, Baby Jessica did not remember anything
about her three days trapped in a well in her aunt's backyard or her
lengthy recovery. She did not even learn her own story until she was
five years old and saw an episode of
Rescue 911,
recounting the story of a baby girl's rescue from a well three years
earlier. Moved to tears by the story, she asked her stepmother (her
parents had since divorced) what the girl's name was and learned it was
her.
Ever since those dramatic three days in 1987, Jessica
McClure Morales has lived an extraordinarily ordinary life. She
graduated from Greenwood High School outside Midland in 2004, and in
2006 she married a man named Daniel Morales. She has two children, Simon
and Sheyenne, and stays home to care for them. On March 26, 2011, her
25th birthday, Morales gained access to her trust fund, now worth
approximately 800,000 dollars, which she plans to save for her
children's college education. Morales does not often speak about her
rescue, and in a recent interview she insisted it has had very little
impact on her life. "Couldn't cage me then, why should it cage me now?"
she asked rhetorically. And while people who recognize her by the scar
on the forehead still call her "Baby Jessica," Morales says the name
does not bother her. "Like they told Lil' Bow Wow, you'll never get rid
of the 'little' part," she said. Cause you'll always be what you are
remembered as."
