The Rescue of Baby Jessica McClure

Description

On October 14, 1987, Reba McClure and her eighteen-month-old daughter, Jessica, stopped by the Midland, Texas home of her sister for a visit. As Reba sat in the backyard watching Jessica play with some neighborhood children, she heard the phone ring and went inside to answer it. When McClure returned to the backyard a few minutes later, she saw the other children staring at the ground on the far-side of the yard, but Jessica was nowhere to be seen. To Reba McClure’s absolute horror, while she was inside on the phone, Jessica had fallen twenty-feet down into the well on her sister’s property and become lodged in a section only fourteen-inches wide. Rescue teams arrived at the house not long after Jessica fell into the well, but the situation proved far more complicated than anyone had expected; they needed to dig a parallel shaft to rescue the girl, but any amount of significant vibration in the earth could have collapsed the well entirely. In the early days of cable news twenty-four-hour news coverage, the rescue of Jessica McClure became one of the most watched events in the United States. However, while the rescue of the girl was everyone’s primary concern, the wall-to-wall coverage itself quickly became a major part of the story, as ordinary smalltown Americans were shoved into the spotlight and questions over rights to the story (and rights to privacy) took center stage. References Belkin, Lisa. 1988. "Baby Jessica's rescuers fighting over TV rights." New York Times, March 24. Bone, Mark, and Gregory Rosati. 2021. How 58 hours in Midland, Texas, changed the future of TV news. July 30. Accessed March 24, 2026. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/30/opinions/baby-jessica-cnn-films-shorts-mark-bone-opinion. Comiter, Jordana, and Carolina Blair. 2025. Where Is ‘Baby Jessica’ Now? Inside Her Life 38 Years After Her Harrowing Rescue from a Texas Well. October 16. Accessed March 24, 2026. https://people.com/all-about-baby-jessica-life-now-11830322. Crimmins, Patrick. 1987. "Toddler's rescue 'matter of time'." Midland Re