Genie Wiley: The Story of a Feral Child Lost to Tragedy and Science
Updated: Nov 4
On 4 November 1970, a nearly blind woman walked into the wrong office in Temple City, California. She'd meant to apply for disability benefits. Instead she'd wandered into the social services office next door, and the girl shuffling along beside her stopped a caseworker dead. The child looked about six or seven. She was hunched and silent, moving in an odd little hop with her hands held up in front of her like paws. She was wearing a nappy. She was 13.
Her real name was Susan Wiley. The world came to know her as Genie, a pseudonym picked to protect her privacy. What followed was one of the worst child abuse cases ever recorded in America, and one of the most argued-over case studies in the history of psychology. Scientists called her situation the Forbidden Experiment. Nobody would ever be allowed to deprive a child of language to see what happened. Her father had done it anyway.
Quick Answers
Who was Genie Wiley? A Californian girl, born Susan Wiley on 18 April 1957, who was kept restrained and isolated in a back bedroom by her father for most of her first 13 years.
When was she found? On 4 November 1970, after her mother took her to a welfare office in Temple City by mistake.
Why does science care about her? She was a rare real-world test of the Critical Period Hypothesis, the idea that full language has to be learnt before puberty.
Did she learn to talk? She picked up hundreds of words but never mastered grammar.
Is Genie Wiley still alive? There's no public confirmation either way. If she's still alive, she turned 69 in April 2026 and is thought to be a ward of the state of California.
A Family Built Around One Man's Rules
Genie was the last of four children born to Clark Wiley and his much younger wife, Irene. Clark had been born in 1901 in Oregon and was christened Pearl, a name that got him relentlessly mocked as a boy. He spent much of his childhood in orphanages and grew into a controlling, violent man with an obsessive attachment to his mother.
Irene was a Dust Bowl migrant from Oklahoma, roughly 20 years younger than Clark, who'd been left with neurological damage after a childhood accident. Her eyesight was failing too. Clark never wanted children, and the children he fathered didn't fare well. Their first daughter was left in a cold garage because her crying annoyed him. She caught pneumonia and died at ten weeks old. A second baby, a boy, died two days after birth. A third child, John, survived.
Then came Genie. She seemed healthy at birth, but at around 14 months a paediatrician tentatively suggested she might be developmentally delayed. That throwaway remark was all Clark needed. When his mother was killed by a drunk driver in 1958, he fell apart completely. He quit his job, moved the family into his late mother's house in Arcadia and decided his daughter would be hidden from the world.
Thirteen Years in a Back Bedroom
From around 20 months old, Genie's world was one small back room. By day she was strapped into a homemade harness on a child's potty chair, able to move only her hands and feet. By night she was zipped into a sleeping bag and shut inside a cot with a wire mesh lid. The windows were almost entirely blacked out. Her only playthings were the odd plastic container, empty cotton reels and old copies of TV Guide with most of the pictures cut out.
Clark couldn't stand noise. There was no radio or television in the house, and nobody was allowed to speak above a whisper. If Genie made a sound, he beat her with a wooden plank he kept in her room. Instead of talking to her, he barked and growled at her door like a dog. She learnt fast that the safest thing was to make no noise and show no expression at all.
Feeding was rushed and rough. She lived mainly on baby food, cereal and milk, spooned in so quickly she never learnt to chew. If she choked, her face was rubbed in the food. Clark sat in the living room with a shotgun across his lap to make sure nobody went for help. He was convinced Genie wouldn't live past 12 and had promised Irene she could seek help if she did. Genie made it to 12. Clark went back on his word.
How Genie Was Found
In October 1970, after a blazing row, Irene finally left. Clark had agreed to let her ring her parents, and while he was out she took Genie to her mother's home in Monterey Park. John, by then 18, had already got out and was living with friends.
About three weeks later, on 4 November, Irene set off to apply for benefits for the blind. She was almost sightless from cataracts and walked into the general social services office by mistake. The caseworker who saw Genie knew straight away that something was badly wrong and called her supervisor. Within days both parents had been charged with child abuse.
Clark never made it to court. On the morning he was due to appear, 20 November 1970, he shot himself. One of the notes he left behind, quoted by ABC News, read: "The world will never understand."
The charges against Irene were dropped. Her lawyers argued she'd been a victim herself, cowed and isolated by her husband and too blind to act alone.
The Girl Who Arrived From Nowhere
Genie was taken into Children's Hospital Los Angeles, where physician James Kent examined her. He later said it was the most severe case of child abuse he'd ever seen.
She stood 4 feet 6 inches and weighed just 59 pounds (about 27kg). She couldn't straighten her arms or legs, couldn't chew solid food and was incontinent. She didn't seem to notice heat or cold. Her eyes were healthy, but she couldn't focus on anything further away than about 10 feet, roughly the width of her room. She walked with the strange hopping gait staff nicknamed her bunny walk.
She knew a handful of words, mostly negatives like stop it and no more. She didn't cry. When she was upset, she'd scratch and hit herself without making a sound or changing her expression. And yet staff kept noticing how curious she was. New objects, new sounds, new people all pulled her in.
Some of the most touching details come from the 1994 NOVA documentary Secret of the Wild Child. Linguist Susan Curtiss remembered a butcher who, without saying a word, handed Genie meat and bones through his shop window, which she explored with her lips as though she were blind. Kent recalled the first time he saw her face fall when he got up to leave, which he took as the first real sign she'd formed an attachment to anyone. He read her bedtime stories and said her full laugh was infectious.
The Forbidden Experiment
Genie couldn't have turned up at a more charged moment for science. In 1967 the neuropsychologist Eric Lenneberg had set out his Critical Period Hypothesis, the idea that there's a window in early childhood, closing around puberty, when the brain is primed to learn language. Miss it and you'd never fully catch up, or so the theory went. It had never been tested on a human because it couldn't ethically be done.
By May 1971, psychologist David Rigler had won a three-year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study her. The team included linguist Victoria Fromkin, psychiatrist Howard Hansen, Kent and a young UCLA graduate student called Susan Curtiss, who'd end up spending more time with Genie than anyone.
Hansen later recalled that about a week after Genie was found, the team went to a private screening of François Truffaut's film The Wild Child at a cinema in Los Feliz. It's based on Victor of Aveyron, a boy found living wild in 18th century France who never learnt to speak properly. They hoped Genie's story would end differently.
What Genie Taught the World About Language
At first, the results were thrilling. Genie soaked up words at a speed that stunned the researchers, with a real hunger for names of colours, shapes and objects. Curtiss described taking her into Woolworth's, where Genie wanted a separate word for every shade of thread on the spool display and got frustrated when Curtiss could only offer things like very dark blue.
Her non-verbal communication was remarkable too. She drew pictures to explain what she couldn't say and had an uncanny way of getting strangers to give her things just by looking at them. Curtiss once watched a woman stop her car at a busy junction, get out and hand Genie her purse.
Grammar was another story. Genie spoke in strings of words with almost none of the rules that hold sentences together. One early example Curtiss quoted on NOVA was "Applesauce buy store." She muddled pronouns, couldn't form questions properly and never got the hang of the passive voice.
Listening tests offered a clue. In most right-handed people, language lives mainly in the left side of the brain. Genie seemed to be processing it on the right. In their 1974 paper in Brain and Language, Fromkin, Curtiss, Stephen Krashen and the Riglers suggested that because she'd heard so little speech as a child, her left hemisphere had never specialised for language. Meanwhile her right hemisphere, the part that handles faces, shapes and space, scored extraordinarily well, reportedly among the highest results the testers had seen.
In her 1977 study of the case, Curtiss concluded that Genie backed a softer version of Lenneberg's theory. She could clearly learn words after puberty. She couldn't learn the grammar that connects them.
Speaking About Her Father
As her vocabulary grew, Genie started to talk, in fragments, about what had been done to her. She described her father hitting her arm with a big piece of wood and making her cry. Researchers noticed she'd often mutter about him under her breath, and before she understood that he'd died, she'd sometimes ask where he was, scared he might come back for her.
Role play was revealing too. In games with the Riglers, she'd repeatedly say she slept in the potty chair.
The Fight Over Who Got to Care for Her
Genie's progress was tangled up with a bitter row over who should look after her. In the summer of 1971, her teacher, Jean Butler, took her home, saying she'd been exposed to German measles. Curtiss told NOVA she thought it was only a rash. Curtiss and Kent were then kept out of Butler's house for over a month. Several team members said Butler talked openly about becoming the next Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller's famous teacher.
Social workers turned down Butler's application to foster Genie on 13 August 1971, partly on the hospital's advice. Rigler and his wife, Marilyn, took her in instead. They'd planned on three months. She stayed almost four years.
By most accounts those were the best years of her life. Marilyn worked with her on chewing and swallowing, and on something Genie had never been allowed to do: get angry. She taught her to have a proper tantrum, slamming doors and stamping her feet, so the rage went outwards rather than into hurting herself. Genie learnt to say rough time and would use her fingers to show how upset she was. She went to school, learnt to sew and loved live piano music, possibly because a neighbour's piano practice was one of the few sounds that ever reached her room.
She also had a terror of cats and dogs. The Riglers eventually learnt from Irene that Clark had growled and barked at Genie to frighten her, which finally explained it.
Then the money ran out. In the autumn of 1974, the NIMH refused a further grant, saying the team hadn't collected data in a scientifically meaningful way. Without funding, the structure holding Genie's life together began to fall apart.
What Happened to Genie After the Study Ended
In 1975, when Genie turned 18, she moved back in with her mother. Irene couldn't cope and within months Genie was handed to the state. What came next was a string of foster homes, and in one of them she was abused again.
Her carers there punished her harshly for vomiting, something she'd always struggled with because of her swallowing problems. She was told that if it happened again she'd never see her mother. Terrified of opening her mouth, Genie stopped speaking almost entirely. Her incontinence came back and the language she'd worked so hard for began to slip away. It's a pattern that's sadly familiar from other cases of children failed by the people paid to protect them, such as the foster mother Eunice Spry.
Curtiss was the only member of the team who kept seeing her regularly through this period and pushed for months to get her moved. Genie was readmitted to Children's Hospital in 1977, and the Riglers helped her recover. But by the time of the NOVA film, she'd been through at least six homes since the research ended.
In 1978, after Irene had cataract surgery and could see again, she was made Genie's legal guardian and cut the scientists out. Only psychiatrist Jay Shurley was still allowed to visit.
The Lawsuit
In 1979, Irene sued Children's Hospital and several members of the team, including Rigler, Curtiss, Kent and Hansen. ABC News reported she accused them of using Genie for prestige and profit, and NOVA said the suit also alleged excessive testing. The scientists denied it. Rigler later said Butler, by then going by her married name of Jean Ruch, had encouraged the case. It was eventually settled in 1984.
Butler herself died in 1988. Her journals, which surfaced later, showed she'd worried that Genie was being tested too much.
Where Is Genie Wiley Now?
Shurley saw Genie at her 27th birthday party in 1984 and again in 1986. He described her as deeply depressed and barely communicating. The journalist Russ Rymer, who wrote the book Genie: A Scientific Tragedy, also met her at that birthday.
In 2008, ABC News reported that Curtiss had spent 20 years trying to find her and could only ever get as far as her social worker. The same report said a private investigator had tracked Genie down around 2000 to a small private home for six to eight adults with learning disabilities. A source said she seemed happy, and records of her spending included a bathing suit, a towel, a hula hoop and a Walkman. It's one of the only glimpses anyone's had of her adult life, and a strangely ordinary one.
Irene died in 2003. John, by then a house painter in Ohio, gave ABC a rare interview in 2008 in which he admitted he'd often been in the room while his sister was being hurt and felt powerless to stop it.
Since then, the trail's gone cold. Britannica notes there's no public record of whether she's alive or where she lives. If she's still alive, she turned 69 in April 2026 and is believed to still be a ward of the state of California, living somewhere in the Los Angeles area under her real name. Nobody who studied her has been able to reach her.
Did the Scientists Fail Her?
The researchers weren't villains, and many of them clearly loved her. But the set-up was flawed from the start. The same people who tested Genie were also her carers, her therapists and, in Rigler's case, her foster parent. Modern research ethics wouldn't allow those roles to overlap.
Shurley later admitted that everyone involved, himself included, had at times treated Genie as an object of study rather than a person. Child psychologist David Elkind walked away from the project early because he thought research was being put ahead of her welfare.
Cases like this one and the Turpin family's house of horrors decades later show how a child can be hidden in plain sight in a suburban street. What makes Genie's story so hard to read is the second loss. She was rescued and started to bloom. Then the funding stopped and the people who'd helped her were shut out. That collapse seems to have done as much damage as anything before it.
Genie's Legacy
Genie's case is still taught in linguistics, psychology and neuroscience courses all over the world. It showed that learning words and learning grammar are separate skills, it refined the Critical Period Hypothesis and it became a textbook warning about what happens when vulnerable research subjects have nobody fighting their corner.
But she was more than a case study. She loved live piano music and brightly coloured plastic pails. She could get a stranger to hand over their purse with one look. She learnt to laugh, to stamp her feet when she was angry and to tell someone she was having a rough time. Wherever she's living now, she deserves to be remembered as Genie, not just as the Forbidden Experiment.
Suggested Reading
Want the full story? This is the book to read.
Genie: A Scientific Tragedy by Russ Rymer. The book-length account of Genie's rescue and the scientists who fell out over her care, written by a journalist who met her as an adult.
As an Amazon Associate, Utterly Interesting earns from qualifying purchases.
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Sources
Wild child 'Genie': A tortured life, ABC News, May 2008
Review: Nova, Secret of the Wild Child, Variety, 1994
Genie (feral child), Encyclopaedia Britannica
Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day 'Wild Child', Susan Curtiss, Academic Press, 1977
The development of language in Genie: A case of language acquisition beyond the critical period, Fromkin, Krashen, Curtiss, Rigler and Rigler, Brain and Language, 1974
Genie: A Scientific Tragedy, Russ Rymer, HarperCollins, 1993
