[News announcer] Officials in the
Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia
have taken custody of a 13 year old girl,
whom, they say, was kept in such isolation by her parents,
that she never even learned to talk.
The girl still wore diapers,
and was uttering infantile noises,
when a social worker discovered the case
two weeks ago.
The authorities are hoping
she still may have a normal learning capacity.
[Narrator] Among the first to see the child
was Temple City detective,
Sergeant Frank Linley.
[Eerie music]
[Sgt. Linley] I already knew that
the child was 13 1/2 years old,
and I took one look at her,
and she wasn't much bigger
than my daughter, Beverly,
who had just turned seven about 3 months earlier.
And, I really had a hard time
conceiving of the idea that the child
was the age that she was.
The child, uh, obviously,
had been severely mistreated.
She was still in diapers, couldn't walk,
she had no verbal skills at all, at that point.
[Eerie music]
The last time I was on this street
was probably 30 years ago.
[Eerie music]
Yep, there it is.
Hasn't changed much.
The back yard looks the same.
It's all weeds and dead grass.
[Eerie music]
Looks the same as it did in 1970.
[Eerie music]
[Narrator] The house belonged to Clark Wiley.
A loner, Clark had turned his
back on the world,
after his mother had been killed
in a hit and run accident.
After the accident,
things in the Wiley house
would never be the same again.
[Eerie music]
[Sgt. Linley] The house was completely dark.
All the blinds were drawn.
There were no toys.
No clothes.
Nothing that would ever indicate to you
that a child of any age lived there.
[Eerie music. Passing cars whoosh.]
The child's bedroom was
back in this corner.
That was the bedroom.
The, uh, windows were covered
to about 3 inches from the top,
which was the only natural light
that had ever come in there,
in all the time the child was
in the bedroom.
The entire furnishing to the bedroom
consisted of a cage,
with a, uh, pull-down chicken wire lid,
and some type of -- piece of wire,
securing it, when they closed it down.
There was a potty chair,
with some kind of homemade strapping device.
[Narrator] For thirteen years,
Genie had spent her nights
locked in bed,
her days strapped to a potty chair.
During that time,
Clark had ordered his son John,
and wife Irene,
never to talk to her.
In her darkened room,
she had led a life
or near total isolation.
[Eerie music]
Even close neighbors
were completely unaware
of her presence.
[Neighbor] I came home from work,
and the police was here,
and they came to question us.
That's when we found --
found out, you know,
what happened, and uh, you know,
that they had a little girl.
Nobody knew. Nobody knew before.
And, uh, then we found out
what happened, how she was treated.
I mean, everybody was shocked,
and, just -- unbelievable.
[Narrator] For their whole marriage,
Clark had imposed his will on Irene.
Blind with cataracts,
she had been too scared to resist.
But one day, something broke.
While Clark was out buying groceries,
she seized her chance, and fled.
It was the first glimpse the world would have
of Clark and Irene's dark secret.
[Sgt. Linley] I met Clark and Irene
at Temple City sheriff station,
and they were both under arrest, at the time.
When we interviewed Irene,
she would make no mention
of the family, whatsoever;
particularly, the children.
I attempted, along with my partner,
to interview Clark.
He refused to talk to us.
He wouldn't say a word.
He never even acknowledged
that he understood what we were talking about.
[Reporter] Mr. Wiley?
[Clark] Yes ma'am.
Why did you keep your daughter
in a room --
[Lawyer] Mr. Wiley has no comment.
[Clark] No comment.
[Lawyer] We haven't had time to discuss the charges.
We haven't even seen them.
[Narrator] Unable to face the truth,
Clark took matters into his own hands.
[Eerie music]
[News announcer] This morning,
the authorities reported
that 70 year old Clark Wiley
shot and killed himself,
just before he was to go to court
and be arraigned
for child abuse.
[Narrator] After 13 years,
Genie was, at last, free.
For scientists, she was just the case
they had been waiting for.
For 13 years,
Genie had lived a life
of complete isolation.
Raised in a city bedroom,
Genie was as much a feral child
as if she had been
brought up by wolves.
At 13, she was the size
of a six year old.
Worst of all,
she had never been taught to speak.
The question now:
Could she ever learn?
[Traffic softly whooshes.]
Genie's case was so scientifically important,
that the government funded a team of scientists
to help answer the many questions she posed.
[Clomps up the steps.]
[Narrator] Two of the scientists
who would become especially important to Genie
were child psychologist James Kent,
and linguist Susan Curtiss.
[Susan] So good to see you.
[Narrator] Neither had ever
encountered a case
as extreme as Genie's.
[Eerie music]
[James Kent] We looked at her
as a newborn, in a way,
even though we know she hadn't.
She came with 13 years
of memories and experiences,
not all of them wonderful.
Most of them not, I think.
And so, we thought we needed
to start to expose her
to what the world was going to
be like for her,
outside the hospital bed.
[Narrator] To Genie,
everything was a new experience.
[James Kent] We did what you would do
with your own kids,
if you were introducing them to the world.
Take them out,
hold them up, and show them. [Chuckles]
Sort of judge, from how they reacted,
whether this was too much,
or not enough.
And you could move on,
and do the next thing.
[Narrator] Genie was making
amazing progress.
As the experts looked on,
they realized that she might be the answer
to the question that
had troubled science for so long.
[Susan Curtiss] So, we
seized this wonderful opportunity
that she provided us,
in as loving a way as we could,
but, using it to...
finally get our chance to
address, head on,
specific hypotheses,
and notions about
human language,
and the human mind.
[Narrator] These hypotheses
were based on the latest ideas
about how children's brains developed.
According to the theory,
young children
could only learn certain things
at certain times,
called 'critical periods.'
Language was one of these
'critical periods.'
According to the theory,
Genie, who was now a teenager,
had missed her chance forever.
But, incredibly,
Genie seemed to be
proving the theory wrong.
As this footage shows,
Genie was blossoming.
Not only was she delighted
by the world around her,
but she was learning the words
for the new things she was seeing.
[Wistful piano music]
[Susan Curtiss] She was extremely
interested in everything around her.
She wanted to know the word
for everything around her.
She wanted to engage people
all around her.
She was not mentally deficient.
Her lights were on,
and everyone who worked with her,
from teachers, to therapists,
to me, knew
that she was not retarded.
It was clear as day.
And, as she began to learn
more and more words,
hundreds of words,
much more rapidly
than they ever imagined,
and stringing them together,
I began to think 'Maybe
I will be wrong.
Maybe she will be the one
that will prove
that this hypothesis is incorrect.'
[Narrator] But Genie could not escape
the effects of her past so easily.
She was still haunted
by her traumatic upbringing,
trapped by the memories
of the awful fate she had suffered.
Linguistically, she had stopped making progress.
[Susan Curtiss] She learned tons of words.
She has an enormous vocabulary.
But language is not words.
Language is grammar.
Language is sentences.
How do you make a sentence?
What can be a sentence?
What is a sentence?
How do you automatically know
something is a sentence?
So, it wasn't because she was cognitively deficient,
in other respects.
It was because she was cognitively deficient
in this island of human mind,
the mental faculty that we call 'grammar.'
[Narrator] At the time Genie was found,
brain science was in its infancy.
Today, we have a much clearer picture
of what actually happens
in cases of extreme neglect, like Genie's.
[Dr. Bruce Perry] In Genie's brain,
the left part of her brain, her cortex,
that has those neural systems
responsible for speech and language,
because she never heard any words,
and because she was never talked --
spoken to very often,
they didn't get stimulated.
And, because they weren't stimulated,
they got smaller, and less functional,
and disconnected, and ultimately,
that part of the brain literally, physically changes.
[Narrator] Today,
with modern imaging technology,
we can actually see what happens
in the brains of feral children.
The effects are shocking.
Without normal stimulation,
their brains are smaller, and malformed.
The earlier this neglect begins,
and the longer it carries on,
the worse the damage will be.
Starved of stimulation,
Genie's brain had simply
not developed the capacity for language.
And, now that she was a teenager,
she would never be able to learn.
Despite this,
Genie continued to be a close part
of everyone's life.
But, there was more trouble ahead.
[James Kent] Children have to
belong to somebody when they grow up,
and she was still a child,
and she needed a family to belong to.
So, that's what we would've liked.
A family that she could belong to.
And, that's not what happened, unfortunately.
What did happen
um, is about, I think,
the worst outcome we would've envisioned.
On her 18th birthday,
Genie moved back with her mother Irene,
into the house in which
she had been so terribly abused.
But after only a few weeks,
it was clear that Irene couldn't cope.
From here, Genie was moved into state care,
with terrible consequences.
[Susan Curtiss] I was a student,
and people wouldn't listen to me.
People who needed to intervene
did not listen to me.
And, so, I spent lots and lots of time
on the phone, pleading with people
to intervene, and save this person
who had had the worst experience of deprivation,
and isolation, in all recorded medical history.
[Narrator] Genie moved
from home to home,
sometimes with the very people
who served as her therapists.
This potential conflict of interests
raised tensions among the many people
involved in her life.
A tug of war erupted over the child.
As Genie's condition deteriorated,
Irene decided that Susan Curtiss
and the other academics had become too close to Genie.
A lawsuit followed.
[Susan Curtiss] I went from being asked
to be her guardian,
to, one week later,
being prevented from seeing her,
or phoning her.
Ever since then, I've been prevented
from having any contact, at all.
So, although I have lots of,
you know, I'm still a scientist,
I'm still interested in knowing things
about her language now, and
all kinds of interesting things
I would like to pursue academically,
primarily I would just like to see her.
[Narrator] Now a ward of the court,
Genie lives in an adult care home
somewhere in Los Angeles,
prevented from seeing the people
who once meant so much to her.