When rescuers brought her to the surface 2 1/2 days later, her head was bandaged, she was covered with dirt and bruises and her right palm was immobilized to her face. The image was ingrained in millions of people's memories and won a Pulitzer Prize for Odessa American photographer Scott Shaw.
A poll taken by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in 1997 that measured coverage of Princess Diana's death earlier that year found that in the previous decade, only Jessica's rescue rivaled the Paris car accident in worldwide attention.
Chip McClure remembers being "absolutely floored" by the media coverage once the family got to the hospital with Jessica. Vice President George Bush and his wife, Barbara, former Midland residents, visited. President Ronald Reagan called.
"It's a little surreal," Chip McClure said about the passage of so many years. "It's difficult to comprehend."
About three years after the TV cameras left Midland, Chip and Cissy divorced. Each has remarried.
Throughout their daughter's childhood, they worked to give her a normal life.
"At the end of the day, she went through a lot, and was loved by millions and millions," said Chip McClure, 38, who sells real estate in the Dallas — Fort Worth area.
Jessica has no memory of the ordeal, the loss of part of one foot, and the 15 operations that followed the 2 1/2 days she spent wedged all alone in the well, singing about Winnie the Pooh.
Jessica talks often about having another child, Chip McClure said.
"We encourage her to wait a little while," he said.
Chip McClure said that he and Jessica's mother allowed their daughter to decide whether to talk to the media once she got old enough. Jessica has spoken publicly only twice since 1987.
In June, Jessica told NBC that the ordeal "couldn't cage me then, why should it cage me now?"
In 2002, she told Ladies Home Journal that talk of her "incident" bored her and referred to the scars she bore.
"I'm proud of them," she said. "I have them because I survived."
Richardo Morales said the rescue still comes up, but with a touch of humor.
"There's times when we sit down and talk about it," he said. "We'll be saying, 'Watch out, there's a well.'"
Life didn't turn out as smoothly for others involved in the toddler's rescue.
In 1995, paramedic and rescuer Robert O'Donnell, who wriggled into the passageway and slathered a frightened Jessica in petroleum jelly before sliding her out into the bright television lights, shot and killed himself at his parents' ranch outside Midland.
His brother, Rick, has said O'Donnell's life "fell apart" because of the stress of the rescue, the attention it created and the anticlimactic return to everyday life.
In 2004, William Andrew Glasscock Jr., a former Midland police officer who helped in the rescue, was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison on charges of sexual exploitation of a child and improper storage of explosives. A year later, he was sentenced to 20 years on two state charges of sexual assault.
Meanwhile, Jessica graduated from high school in Greenwood, not far from Midland, and married Daniel Morales, 34, in early 2006.