Baby Jessica biography

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 October 16, 1987, 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 the 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.

Later Life

Once she grew older, Baby Jessica could 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."

© 2013 A+E Networks. All rights reserved.

© 2013 A+E Networks. All rights reserved.