Genie Wiley spent years in an unbelievable reality. But when someone from the outside realized what was going on, her life was finally turned around...
October 1970
In October of 1970, a girl l and her nearly blind mother wandered into the LA County welfare office. Her mother had come to the office to find services for the visually impaired but the officers were more interested in learning more about what was going on with her daughter…
An Unusual Case
They looked at the girl in the waiting room with confusion. It appeared to them that she may have been a bit strange, but her sunken posture told them there had to be more to the story...
Feral Child
The name “Genie” was given to her as a means of protecting her identity. Her case made news as one of the nation’s most horrific instances of child abuse. One question swept the nation: what kind of unmentionable conditions could have transformed this harmless young girl into what the officers called a “feral child?” But the answer laid at the bottom of a grave in Arcadia, California…
Clark Wiley
Genie’s father had grown up being passed in and out of orphanages and foster homes. He worked as a machinist on aircraft assembly lines during WWII before marrying Irene Oglesby, a woman twenty years his junior. After a severe head injury as a child, Irene suffered from an array of neurological problems and degenerative vision…
Mama’s Boy
Wiley’s father was killed after being struck by lightning when he was very young, so the majority of his childhood was spent with his absentee mother…
Clark’s Mother
Because of this, he had a lot of resentment harbored towards her. She had operated a brothel leaving him ignored throughout the majority of his childhood. Their relationship was a contemptuous one, and over the years, it became a fixation…
A Thin Skin
Wiley was a hot-tempered and angry man. He hated noise and was always moments from a dangerous rage. As his wife’s vision deteriorated, she became increasingly dependent on her husband…
Going Blind
From the outside, it appeared that the pair was content in their marriage, but this was far from the truth. This was just a facade for the secrets they were really hiding…
Fatherhood
Wiley never wanted to be a father. He found them noisy and annoying, just as his mother had found him. To him, they were just a nuisance…
Expecting
Yet, as fate would have it, Wiley and Irene would soon be parents to a little girl…
One by One
But Wiley and Irene’s first child died from pneumonia at just ten weeks. But this was totally preventable, as Wiley simply hated the sound of her cries and left her in a freezing garage…
More Children
Their second child passed away from complications during birth. Their third child, a boy named John, survived, but Wiley did not want to hear a peep from him. So Irene did her best to keep him silent, causing severe developmental delays…
A Baby Girl
Five years later, another girl arrived: Genie. Wiley had all but lost it at this point, and he began to totally unravel. He isolated himself from family and friends and spiraled out of control…
Odd Connections
As Genie grew, doctors discovered that she suffered from a congenital hip dislocation and subsequently had to walk with a splint from several months old. Genie’s father, however, linked this issue to an intellectual problem…
Neglecting Genie
Due to Genie’s splint and her physical issues, Wiley refused to speak to her. To him, she was abnormal and strange. He encouraged his son and wife to ignore the child, too…
Malnourished
Genie grew thinner as she grew up. By the time she was just shy of one year old, her weight had fallen into the eleventh percentile. She was shockingly malnourished…
Tragedy Strikes
In 1958, when Genie was almost two, a drunk driver killed Wiley’s mother. He grew unstable, affected in ways that were far beyond the normal scope of grief…
Fit of Rage
He blamed his son, John, who was walking with his mother at the time of her death and became blinded with rage when the truck driver who killed her only received a probationary sentence…
Secluding His Family
Genie’s father still believed Genie was mentally disabled and decided he had to hide her existence entirely out of shame and his own bout of mental illness…
Untouched
Wylie left his job suddenly and moved them all into his late mother’s house, where he demanded her car and bedroom remain untouched as shrines to her…
Genie’s Childhood
Genie spent years in this home in a terrifying situation, prisoner by her own parents. If Genie made even the slightest noise, Wiley would beat her with a wooden plank. For 13 hours every day, he would strap Genie to a children’s potty in a makeshift harness designed to function as a straitjacket. While secured in the harness, Genie wore diapers and was only able to move her extremities…
Confined to One Room
Genie was kept in a bedroom alone. At night, he would tie her into a sleeping bag and place her in a crib with a metal-screen cover to keep her arms and legs immobilized. Sometimes, Wiley would forget about Genie and leave her on the child’s toilet overnight…
Scared Silent
To frighten her into submission, Wiley would bark and growl at her like a wild dog. He grew out his fingernails so he could scratch her. If she did something he didn’t like, he would make noises outside the door, instilling Genie with a terrible fear of cats, dogs, and of course, him…
Starving
Genie’s father refused to feed her normal meals. To keep her alive, he spoon-fed her baby food, cereal, Pablum, or soft-boiled eggs as quickly as possible, and if she didn’t eat fast enough, he would rub her face in it…
Kept in Darkness
Genie’s room was kept dark, and her mother and brother were not permitted to interact with her or each other. Both the windows were blacked out. During this time, Wiley would sit in the living room, crazed, with a shotgun in his lap…
Violent Threats
Wiley forced John to beat Genie, but he ran away to live with friends when he finally reached 18. Wiley was convinced, and hoped, Genie wouldn’t survive past age twelve. However, in October of 1970, when she was 13 years and 6 months old, Irene took Genie with her to apply for disability benefits…
Sensing Trouble
Instead, Irene accidentally wandered into the welfare office next door. The social worker who greeted them knew something was very wrong…
The Shocking Truth
The caseworker thought Genie was 6 or 7 years old and suspected she might be autistic. However, upon learning Genie’s true age, she contacted the police. Officers were immediately sent to their home to arrest Irene and Wiley…
November 1970
The day before Wiley was scheduled to appear in court, though, he shot himself in the head. He left two suicide notes—one for his son, which read, “Be a good boy, I love you,” and another declaring, “The world will never understand.” The charges originally brought upon Irene were dropped, because of the abuse she suffered herself. But now, the state had to help Genie…
A Scientific Spectacle
Genie was shuffled around LA Children’s Hospital, falling into the hands of various pediatricians, psychologists, linguists, and other child experts from around the nation who had petitioned to examine her development. Genie presented a unique opportunity…
Barely Responsive
The severity of Genie’s case allowed doctors to study the way in which language was integral to human growth. She could only speak a few words, like “blue”, “orange”, “mother” and “go”, but otherwise remained completely silent. The physician assigned her case, James Kent, claimed Genie was the most profoundly damaged child he had ever seen…
Pessimistic Prognosis
Genie was grossly malnourished and stood at 4 feet 6 inches weighing 59 pounds. She could not chew, and she was unable to focus her vision on anything further than 10 feet away—the dimensions of the room Wiley had locked her in for nearly all her life…
Motor Skills
Her walking was strange as she moved with a sort of bunny hop, and she was completely incontinent. Genie did, however, express interest in her new environment and seemed to enjoy exploring her new surroundings. Kent noticed that Genie would try to search for the sources of new sounds she heard…
No Body Language
Genie’s demeanor was totally foreign and feral. She was only able to nonverbally communicate a minimal amount of basic needs. When upset, Genie would violently and silently attack herself, never crying or vocalizing her feelings…
Lack of Verbal Language
The only phrases Genie knew were “stop it” and “no more.” It was determined by researchers that due to her extreme isolation, Genie had never acquired a first language at all…
Slow Progress
Despite the unfortunate truth that Genie’s language development would never improve, she learned to play, chew, dress, listen to music and draw. The hospital staff was enamored with her…
The Future Looked Bleak
Sadly, by 1972, accusations of exploitation were being made by both rehabilitation instructors and researchers, and funding began to dry up. Once Genie left the hospital, Irene was overwhelmed with the responsibility of caring for her, and so Genie was moved to a foster home. Her progress came to a serious halt…
A Scientific Tragedy
Russ Rymer, a journalist who studied Genie’s case in the 1990s, described Genie on her 27th birthday: “A large, bumbling woman with a facial expression of cowlike incomprehension…her eyes focus poorly on the cake. Her dark hair has been hacked off raggedly at the top of her forehead, giving her the aspect of an asylum inmate.” Genie was clearly miserable…
Heartbreaking
A professor of psychiatry and behavioral science, Jay Shurley, who attended both Genie’s 27th and 29th birthdays said she was hunched, visibly unhappy, and seldom made eye contact. He said the reversal of her progress was “heartwrenching.” Since then, Genie has disappeared behind a veil…
Plagued with Regret
Scientists who studied her case are anguished about the way in which Genie’s life panned out. “She was this isolated person, incarcerated for all those years, and she emerged and lived in a more reasonable world for a while, and responded to this world, and then the door was shut and she withdrew again and her soul was sick,” said Shurley, stricken with guilt…
Locked Away
Susan Curtiss, a linguistics professor who befriended Genie, has been unable to get in contact with her for years. Curtiss wrote a book about her and is one of the only researchers to have maintained credibility throughout the debacle. “There is a hole in my heart and soul from not being able to see her,” said Curtiss, “and that doesn’t go away.” Genie’s case cast a shadow on Rymer’s life…
Disturbed
Rymer stated that much about Genie’s case had traumatized him. “It made for a pretty intense and disturbing several years. This took over my life, my worldview,” he said. He described that when he visited the room that Genie had been locked in for all those years was completely unbearable…
Depressing Reality
John, Genie’s brother, was never able to escape the abuse of his father, even after Clark Wiley’s death. “I feel at times God failed me,” he told ABC News in 2008. “Maybe I failed him.” He saw Genie for the last time in 1982 and lost touch with his mother, who died in 2003. His marriage failed, and John then passed away in 2012…
Where is Genie?
It’s been speculated that Genie is now living in a facility for mentally-underdeveloped adults somewhere in California. She is said to communicate via sign language and lives in general isolation. Although this isn’t the happy ending Genie deserved, she is free from the abuse of her father. What haunts researchers and scientists the most is that Genie had the potential to be saved, but the world, as it sometimes does, sadly gave up on her.