Episode 11: Feral Children: Lost in the Wilderness, the Genie Wiley Story
In November 1970, a woman, accompanied by her young child accidentally stumbled into the wrong building, setting off an unprecedented chain of events. What followed was the discovery of one of the worst cases of neglect and abuse that most of the people investigating this case had ever come across. This episode covers the case of Genie Wiley, who was, for all developmental purposes, a feral child. She was an enigma that researchers hoped to unlock, sometimes crossing the line into potentially unethical behaviour.
Discovery
On the 4th of November 1970, a middle-aged woman paced the corridors of a Temple City building with her young child in tow. She looked lost. Unsure as to where her next move should be. Despite being only 50, she looked at least a decade older than her true age. She had cataracts in one eye, and significant neurological damage that made her almost completely blind. With her, was her daughter, Susan.
It’s unclear as to whether Irene was attempting to flee from her husband with her daughter or was simply attempting to gain some financial independence, so she could eventually escape. Her husband, Clark, had always been a violent and dangerous man, but something had shifted for Irene several weeks earlier, after a particularly violent argument. She was attempting to apply for disability benefits for the blind but had inadvertently entered the building next door to those offices. Instead, she found herself in the offices of social services.
A social worker approached the mother and child and was shocked to discover that the child was not six or seven years old, as they had assumed, but 13, a teenager! The girl weighed 59 lbs or 26 Kg, was incontinent, and couldn’t speak. In addition to this, she had difficulty swallowing, and could not extend her limbs or focus her eyes on objects.
The social worker asked their supervisor to intervene, and together they questioned Irene about her daughter’s condition. They sensed that there was more to the situation than just a disabled child. With their suspicions aroused, they contacted the police, who arrested both parents and made the child a ward of the court. The child was taken to UCLA Children’s Hospital for assessment and treatment.
Feral Children
Feral children are children raised in either isolation or outside of human society from a young age. These can be cases of abuse, with children deliberately locked away from the world, or accidental separation. There have been cases where children who were unintentionally separated from their families were taken in and cared for by animals. A feral child is often referred to as a ‘wild child’. They develop without the basic learned social skills that young children acquire from being in proximity to other people. This can relate to language skills, gross or fine motor skills or even how they walk and move.
Genie’s Background
Susan M. Wiley was born on the 18th of April 1957 in Arcadia, California to parents Irene and Clark Wiley. Genie is the name given to Susan after her rescue, to protect her identity. Genie was the youngest of four children. Two of which had died in infancy. Her only surviving sibling, a brother, was five years older.
When Genie was three months old, she was diagnosed with congenital hip dislocation at a pediatric appointment. Treatment can range from wearing a harness or other stabilising device for an extended period, or even surgery. Genie was prescribed a Frejka splint, a restrictive hip brace that she wore full-time until she was 11 months old. Wearing this device, while helpful to set the hip joint, can temporarily impact mobility and learning to walk.
Genie began walking later than she would have, had she not worn the splint, but Clark interpreted this as evidence that she was, in his words, ‘mentally retarded’. Clark had already begun to isolate from the outside world and decided that it wasn’t worth putting any effort into Genie’s development. Instead, he ordered his wife and son to ignore Genie, and not to speak around her.
Clark Gray Wiley & Irene Wiley’s Background
Clark Gray Wiley was born in 1901 in Oregon to Judson and Pearl Wiley (nee Cook). His mother, Pearl, was a brothel owner, and was a dominant, yet frequently absent presence in his early life. His father, Judson, was reportedly killed by a freak lightning strike, and he spent much of his childhood in various orphanages throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Clark worked as a flight mechanic during World War II, and later met and married Oklahoma native, Irene Oglesby in 1944, and the two settled in California. Clark and his previously estranged mother Pearl reconnected later in life. Reports suggest that Clark became fixated on his mother, and their relationship, at least from Clark’s side, became obsessive.
Irene had grown up during the Great Depression, an economic recession spurred on by the Wall Street stock market crash in October 1929. Born in Oklahoma, Irene saw the devastation of the Dust Bowl firsthand. She had a serious accident resulting in a severe head injury and degenerative vision problems.
Clark was violent and abusive. He was extremely controlling and isolated Irene from friends and family. Clark had a hatred for children and had no wish to have any of his own. In 1949, Irene became pregnant with their first child. Clark was furious and violently beat her throughout the pregnancy.
Irene eventually gave birth to a healthy daughter, however, she died from pneumonia at ten weeks old. It’s unclear whether or not this child died at home or was taken to the hospital for treatment. The following year, Irene gave birth to a son, who died two days later, due to hemolytic disease of the newborn, a blood disorder, where the mother and baby have incompatible blood types. Antenatal screening and drug interventions can now prevent serious complications due to this disorder, but these were not available when Irene gave birth in the 1940s.
In 1952, Irene gave birth to another son, John, who was also diagnosed with HDN, but was treated in time and survived. Clark’s attitude towards children had not warmed in the intervening years since his first two children had died. He frequently snapped at his wife and child, and Irene was forced to keep her son as silent as possible. Genie was born in 1957 and was also diagnosed with HDN. She received a blood transfusion soon after birth.
Neglect
In 1958, when Genie was 20 months old, a catastrophic loss instigated what would become Genie’s long-term confinement. Prior to this, her father, Clark, had taken a hostile stance towards his children and was increasingly focusing this disdain towards Genie. He had become convinced that she had a mental defect, due to the delay in her walking unassisted.
When she was 14 months old, she attended an appointment with a pediatrician for the first time, due to fever and lung inflammation. The pediatrician stated that they could not fully assess Genie, due to her illness, but suggested that there may be some underlying issue impacting her development. For Clark, this was the confirmation that he had been searching for to confirm that she was, in his words, ‘severely mentally retarded’.
In the months following this, Clark began to ignore Genie, and instructed Irene and John to do the same. Several years earlier, Clark had reconnected with his mother Pearl. On the 29th of December 1958, Pearl was on a walk with her grandson John, who had recently turned six. As the two crossed the street, a pick-up truck driving erratically, and at speed, slammed 77-year-old Pearl to the ground, dragging her body under its wheels. She died from her injuries. John Wiley witnessed the entire incident.
Ongoing Abuse
Clark was overcome with heavy grief. In the years before her death, Clark’s singular fixation on his mother had grown, while his paranoia and mistrust of the outside world intensified. His abuse of his family was ongoing. After Pearl’s death, Clark tightened his grip on his household like a vice. He quit his job and moved his family into his mother’s two-bedroom home. Here, his abuse, now hidden from the world, was amplified. For Genie, her world was about to get very, very small.
Genie was confined to a tiny bedroom at the back of the house, with a tiny window that was mostly blacked out. The door was always closed. Clark crudely constructed a cage out of her crib or cot. He covered the sides with wire mesh. There was also a toilet seat or commode in the room. John and Irene were forbidden from interacting with, speaking to or around Genie. During the day, Genie was tied to the commode with a harness. At night, she was placed in a straitjacket-type contraption, and locked in the crib-turned-cage.
Clark, Irene and John all slept in the living room of the small home. Clark was always home. Always looming. Always a threat. He continued to beat John, Irene and Genie for the slightest infraction, and often for no reason at all other than he could. If Genie made any noise, Clark would bark or growl at her. His beatings were frequent, and often involved makeshift weapons. It was a suffocating environment for all involved. Genie never left the back bedroom. She was never enrolled in school, and neighbours were not even aware that the Wileys had a daughter.
Genie’s ongoing malnourishment led authorities to believe that she was fed as little as possible and was frequently denied food. According to reports, the person feeding her, usually Irene or John, would spoon her food into her mouth as quickly as possible. If she choked, vomited or otherwise made any sounds, her face was pressed into her food, and it’s been suggested that she was denied the remainder of her meal.
Clark kept detailed notes of his abuse and often sat in the shared living room with a shotgun perched on his lap, while his family sat in silence around him. As his delusions increased, he began to predict that Genie would die at the age of 12. Surprisingly, he had agreed to allow Irene to seek outside assistance for Genie if she lived past the age of 12. This was a promise that he did not honour.
Rescue
By October 1970, the environment within the Wiley home had deteriorated to such an extent that there were frequent violent altercations between Clark and Irene, instigated and escalated by Clark. On the 4th of November, when Irene had mistakenly entered the offices of social services, staff were immediately alerted to a potential case of neglect. They contacted the police, and Irene and Clark were both arrested on charges of felony child abuse. John, now 18, had run away from his abusive home several months earlier. Genie was made a ward of the court, meaning that the State of California were now responsible for her treatment and care.
Psychology professor and therapist, David Rigler, and Head of Psychiatry at UCLA Children’s Hospital, Howard Hansen oversaw Genie’s case. James Kent, a medical doctor undertook preliminary physical examinations of Genie, however, there were large gaps in the information pertaining to Genie’s background, and her parents were reluctant or unable to fill them. In December 1970, just weeks after Genie’s recovery, Rigler was awarded a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to study Genie.
Linguistics professor, Susan Curtiss, who was a graduate student working with Genie in the early weeks after her discovery explained why the name Genie was selected to protect Susan Wiley’s identity. She described the reasoning as follows, saying that ‘a genie is a creature that comes out of a bottle or whatever but emerges into human society past childhood. We assume that it really isn't a creature that had a human childhood’.
Public Outcry & Trial
A single photograph of Genie was released to the media on the 17th of November, almost two weeks after her discovery, and the public was transfixed on the strange girl with the large eyes who couldn’t speak.
Temple City social services staff contacted local police, and Detective Franklin Lee was tasked with investigating the case. Lee recalled that it was clear that Clark ‘had turned his back on the world after his mother had been killed’. When he approached the Wiley home, he described it as being extremely dark with all of the blinds drawn. He said that there were ‘no toys, no clothes’, and that there was nothing in the home that would ‘ever indicate to you that a child of any age lived there’.
Clark and Irene were taken to Temple City Sheriff’s Station for interrogation. When Lee and other officers interviewed Irene, she refused to acknowledge her family or the children. Detective Lee said that Clark refused to speak to the authorities. He said that Clark wouldn’t even acknowledge that he understood the circumstances of his arrest.
Clark Wiley’s arraignment was scheduled for the 21st of November, however, the previous day, while at home on North Golden West Avenue, he took a 38-revolver and shot himself in the head. His son John found his body. Clark left two suicide notes. One addressed to John, and one to the police. The note to authorities stated the following: ‘The world will never understand’. When Irene went to trial, lawyers argued that she was not responsible for Genie’s neglect, as Clark’s violence and control had also made her a victim. All charges against Irene were subsequently dropped.
Genie’s Treatment & Development
For the first 13 years of her life, Genie led a solitary existence. Her experience of neglect and abuse was one of the most extreme that most of the team involved in her care had ever encountered. Staff at UCLA’s Children’s Hospital described Genie as ‘the most profoundly damaged child they had ever seen’.
Everything that we take for granted in life was a new experience for Genie. Tasting food, hearing language and music, playing with toys, feeling the sun on her face – uttering her first words. Dr James Kent explained that in many ways, they looked at Genie as a newborn experiencing life for the first time.
Genie had weak gross motor skills and was unsteady on her feet, a result of years of confinement. Although her eyesight was within a normal range, she had difficulty focusing on anything further than 10 feet, or 3 metres away. Sadly, researchers theorised that this was the approximate size of the room that had been her prison cell.
Many of the team working on Genie’s case viewed her as an opportunity to apply previously untested hypotheses around language acquisition and child development. Susan Curtiss explained that the team were excited to seize ‘this wonderful opportunity that she provided us in as loving a way as we could’.
Critical Periods of Development
Linguist and media critic Noam Chomsky, alongside neurologist and linguist Eric Lenneberg separately proposed the idea of critical periods in child development and language acquisition. It was believed that young children could only learn things like language at certain stages in their lives. Once they had passed these critical periods, language acquisition, for example, would simply not be possible. It was believed that Genie would not be able to acquire language, as she had missed these critical periods in child brain development.
Susan Curtiss remembers Genie as a curious child, extremely fascinated by the world around her. She tells us that Genie ‘wanted to engage people all around her. She was not mentally deficient. Her lights were on’. Genie appeared to make significant progress to a point and then became stuck and couldn’t past it.
Dr Bruce D. Perry proposed that Genie’s brain had developed differently to most other children, due to her extreme environment. She had never heard words, or had people speaking around her, and as such, those parts of her brain, those ‘neural systems responsible for speech and language’, were not stimulated.
Genie’s Progress
By January 1971, Genie’s receptive vocabulary consisted of approximately 15-20 individual words, mostly of objects, and also her own name. There were only two phrases that she could speak in active vocabulary, these were ‘stop it’, and ‘no more’. Genie treated both phrases as individual words. The linguists working with Genie determined that due to her extreme social isolation and neglect, she had not developed a first language.
Experts were flown in from around the United States to study and assess Genie. Jay Shurley, Professor of Psychiatry was one such researcher. He spent several three-day stints observing and testing Genie, including sleep studies. He did not find any evidence of autism or brain damage; however, he did discover indications of intellectual disability that were possibly present from birth. Not every member of Genie’s team agreed with Shurley’s assessment. Susan Curtiss disagreed and argued that for every calendar year that Genie had been working with them, she had made a year of developmental progress.
The Forbidden Experiment
There are significant ethical concerns around experimenting on children. In most cases, no medical professional, scientist, or psychiatrist would implement experiments around the deliberate deprivation and isolation of young children. The ‘Forbidden Experiment’ is a theorised experiment that has never been implemented or studied. Hypothetically, this experiment involves separating a newborn baby from their mother and locking them in a room with minimal interventions, aside from keeping them alive.
Starved of love, affection, touch, language, and other kinds of mental or physical stimulation, the experiment proposes releasing the child after a set period to observe their reactions. Aside from the moral and ethical concerns that human social experiments like this would raise, there is no real way to measure the results, as each child could potentially react differently to their captivity based on many distinct factors. The closest that researchers have come to testing these hypotheses is with feral children, who have, intentionally or not, been cut off from human society for any period.
Care & Lawsuit
Genie’s case was so rare, and the research potential was not lost on the team looking after her. Many have described the situation as being a kind of ‘tug of war’ between different factions on her care team. Psychiatrists, linguists, medical doctors and teachers – each group had a vested interest in the research potential of Genie’s case. Genie first spent several months in hospital, before going into foster care. Jean Butler was one of Genie’s teachers, and occasionally took Genie out on day trips, and even had her spend the night in her home. Other researchers observed that Butler was becoming more and more possessive of Genie. Someone reportedly overheard Butler compare herself to Anne Sullivan, the famous teacher who had taught Helen Keller how to communicate. Eventually, Butler was removed from Genie’s care team, and Genie lived with David Rigler and his family for several months. By 1975, the research funding had run out, and Genie was returned to her mother’s care. At this time, she had just turned 18.
Irene found Genie’s care to be overwhelming, and after several months, surrendered Genie to State care. She was placed into a succession of foster homes, the first of which was extremely rigid and abusive, causing Genie to regress. In 1976, Susan Curtiss submitted her dissertation, titled, ‘Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day ‘Wild Child’’, which was published as a book the following year. Irene took great offence to the title of the book, and to the implications of Clark’s abuse of Genie.
In 1978, Susan Curtiss says that she was approached by Irene and asked to become Genie’s legal guardian, but this potential arrangement was suddenly halted without explanation. Susan says that she ‘went from being asked to be her guardian, to one week later being prevented from seeing her, or phoning her’.
Genie was moved between foster homes and was eventually settled into a private state facility, where she remains to this day. At the time of publishing, Genie is 66 years old. Dr James Kent described what happened to Genie in foster care and later, as being ‘perhaps the worst outcome we could have envisioned’.
Critics of Genie’s care team have since suggested that there were several conflicts of interest. They viewed Genie as a miraculous wonder to be studied, and a kind of tabula rasa, or blank slate upon which to study exposure to language, relationships, and the world.
Genie was an extremely vulnerable individual who had survived some of the worst abuse and deprivation in living history, yet she did not receive the ongoing care she required and deserved. Genie continues to be a ward of the state. Irene Wiley died in 2003. John Wiley married and had a daughter but couldn’t escape the trauma of his early life. He died in 2011, at the age of 59.
Susan Curtiss asks if language is the thing that makes us human and separates us from other animals. She says that it’s ‘possible to know very little language and still be fully human. To love, form relationships and engage with the world’. Genie’s humanity was never in question, but she was denied the opportunity to explore her own humanity and find her own place in the world. We can only hope that no other child or vulnerable adult has the same negative life experiences as Genie.
Sources:
Carroll, Rory, ‘Starved, Tortured, Forgotten: Genie, the Feral Child Who Left a Mark on Researchers’, The Guardian, 14th July 2016.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/14/genie-feral-child-los-angeles-researchers
Cherry, Kendra, ‘The Story of Genie Wiley’, Very Well Mind, 28th October 2022.
https://www.verywellmind.com/genie-the-story-of-the-wild-child-2795241
Clark Grey Wiley, Family Search
https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/LRM3-GQ3/clark-gray-wiley-1901-1970
Clark Grey Wiley, Geni
https://www.geni.com/people/Clark-Wiley/6000000000099959539
Degregory, Lane, ‘Feral children through the ages’, Floridian, Tampa Bay, 3rd August 2008.
https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/girl-in-the-window/feral-children/
Developmental Dysplasia of the Hip, NHS.
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/developmental-dysplasia-of-the-hip/
‘Dust Bowl’, Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
‘Feral Child’, Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child
‘Genie (feral child)’, Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)
Genie Wiley – TLC Documentary (2003), Apollo Eight Genesis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjZolHCrC8E
Genie Feral Child, Britannica
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Genie-feral-child (Date of birth)
‘Great Depression’, Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression
‘Hemolytic disease of the newborn’, Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemolytic_disease_of_the_newborn
Hemolytic Disease, Children’s Hospital
https://www.childrenshospital.org/conditions/hemolytic-disease
‘List of Billboard Hot 100 Number Ones of 1970’, Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Hot_100_number_ones_of_1970
‘List of 1970 Box office Number One Films in the United States’, Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1970_box_office_number-one_films_in_the_United_States
‘Little Albert Experiment’, Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment
‘Marina Chapman’, Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Chapman
Milne, Andrew, ‘Abandoned, Abused, Exploited: Inside the Tragic Life of the Feral Child, Genie Wiley, All That’s Interesting, 31st October 2021.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/genie-wiley-feral-child
‘Noam Chomsky’, Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky
‘Oxana Malaya’, Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxana_Malaya
‘Pearl May Cook Martin-Wiley’, Find a Grave.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/61257930/pearl-may-martin_-_wiley
‘Wild child ‘genie’: A tortured life’, 6abc Action News, 8th May 2008.