[Music] officials in the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia have taken custody of a 13 year old girl and 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 social worker discovered the case two weeks ago but the authorities are hoping she still may have a normal learning capacity among the first to see the child was Temple City Detective Sergeant Franklin Lee I took one look at her and she wasn't much bigger than my daughter Beverly who had just turned
seven about three months earlier and I really had a hard time conceiving of the idea that the child was the age that she was the child obviously had been severely mistreated after she was still in diapers didn't walk she had no verbal skills at all at that point the last time I was on this street was probably thirty years ago there it is hasn't changed much the backyard looks the same it's all weights indeed grass [Music] looks the same as it did in 1970 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 [Music] 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 the child's bezel wires back in this corner that was the bedroom the windows were covered to about the 3 inches from the top which were the only natural light that had ever come in there and all the time
the child was in the bedroom entire furnishings as a bedroom consists of a cage with a pulldown 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 for 13 years Jeannie 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 of near total isolation even close neighbors were completely
unaware of her presence and the police was here and they came to question us that's when we found found out you know what happened and you know nobody no-nobody knew before we found out what happened and how she was three that I mean everybody was shocked and just unbelievable for their whole marriage Clark had imposed his will on Irene and 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 I met Clark and I really Temple City sheriff's station they were both under arrest at the time when we interviewed Irene she would make no mention of the family whatsoever particularly the children he 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 mr. Wylie why did you keep your daughter mr. Wylie has no comment no we haven't had time to discuss the charge we haven't even seen them unable to
face the truth Clark took matters into his own hands [Music] this morning the authorities reported the 70 year old Clark Wylie shot and killed himself just before he was to go to the court of the arraign for firing after 13 years Jeannie was at last free and for scientists she was just the case they had been waiting for for 13 years Jeannie had lived a life of complete isolation raised in a city bedroom Jeannie 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 [Music] Jeanne's case was so scientifically important that the government funded a team of scientists to help answer the many questions she posed two of the scientists who would become especially important to Jeannie or child psychologist James Kent and linguist Susan Curtis neither had ever encountered a case as Extreme as Jeannie's we looked at her yes he as a newborn in a way even though we know she hadn't she came with 13 years of memories and
experience it's not all of them wonderful most of them not I think so we thought we needed to start exposure to what the world is gonna be like for her outside the hospital bed - Jeannie everything was a new experience we did what you would do with with your own kids if you were introducing into the world you take them out and hold them up and show them sort of judged from how they reacted to whether this was too much or not enough and you could move on and do the next thing Jeannie 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 so we seized this wonderful opportunity that she provided us in as loving away 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 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 and according to the theory genie who was now a teenager had missed her chance forever but incredibly Jeannie seemed to be proving the theory wrong as this footage shows Jeannie 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 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 [ __ ] it was clear as day and as she began to learn more more words hundreds of words much more rapidly than they ever imagined and swinging 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 but Jeanne 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 and linguistically she had stopped making
progress she learned tons of which she has an enormous vocabulary but language is not words language is grammar languages sentences how do you make a sentence what can be a sentence what is esand how do you automatically know something sentence so wasn't because he was cognitively deficient in other respects it was because she was cognitively deficient in this island of human mind the mental faculty that we called Grammer at the time Jeannie was found brain science was in its infancy but today we have a much clearer picture of what actually happens in cases of extreme
neglect like genies in genies brand the left part of her her brand they her cortex that that has those neural systems responsible for speech and language because she never heard any words and because she was never taught 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 today with modern imaging technology we can actually see what happens in the brains of feral children and the effects are shocking without normal stimulation their brains are smaller and
malformed and the earlier this neglect begins and the longer it carries on the worse the damage will be starved of stimulation Jeanne'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 closed part of everyone's life but there was more trouble ahead [Music] 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 have like a family that she
could belong to what happened what did happen is about the worst outcome I think we would have envisioned on her 18th birthday Janie 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 Jeannie was moved into State care with terrible consequences 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 with her medical history Jeannie 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 and a tug of war erupted over the child as Jeannie's condition deteriorated Irene decided that Susan Curtis and the other academics had become too close to Jeannie a lawsuit followed I went from being asked to be her guardian - one week later being prevented from
seeing her or phoning her and ever since then I've been prevented from having any contact at all so although I have lots of you know that 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 now a ward of the court Jeanne lives in an adult care home somewhere in Los Angeles prevented from seeing the people who once meant so much to her
