The secret case of Genie Wiley, the wild child. TLC Documentary

[News announcer] Officials in the

Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia

have taken custody of a 13 year old girl,

who 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.

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.

Yep, there it is.

Hasn't changed much.

The back yard looks the same.

It's all weeds and dead grass.

Looks the same as it did in 1970.

[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.

[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 what, you know,

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.

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,

the government funded
a team of scientists

to help answer the many questions
she posed.

[Clomps up the steps.]

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.

[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 would 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.

[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 that maybe

I will be wrong.

Maybe she will be the one

who 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 got 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.