Child of a Lesser God

It was a modern-day horror story: a little girl hidden away in rat-infested squalor for most of her life. When the authorities took her away from her mother and grandmother, the nine-year-old had never been to school or played outside.

by Skip Hollandsworth

December 2000

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What happened next is still a mystery to CPS caseworkers. They do think that the dynamics of the family changed significantly when Diana's father, who had kept the house in some order, fell seriously ill in the early nineties and eventually died in 1995. Without him, Edna and Diana were lost. They withdrew with Victoria into their home, even as it crumbled around them. Perhaps, one CPS supervisor would later surmise, they felt they needed to hide Victoria as a way of protecting themselves. With Victoria out of sight, they'd never have to worry about a social worker arriving and declaring them unfit to raise a child. But Diana told me that they kept Victoria inside "because we didn't know what else to do for her. She was acting different, funny. She wasn't talking. She wasn't responding the way a little girl should." Diana began blinking back tears. "I didn't want her to have to go through what I did. I didn't want her going to school and being teased like they did to me."

Experts who have studied Victoria say it is likely she suffered from some sort of brain disorder. But to what degree? How much of her behavior was because of a birth defect, and how much of it was a result of years in her isolation tank of a home? While Diana's father was still alive, Victoria was taken to a pediatrician until she was just shy of two years old. (After the father's death, neither Diana nor Edna took Victoria to a doctor again.) The doctor's records never noted any abnormalities in the child. There was no sign of retardation, autism, or muscle or nerve damage that would have prevented Victoria from speaking. After she was taken from the home in 1997, she underwent a battery of tests—an MRI, an EEG, an autonomic brainstem response, and more recently, a Fragile X test—all designed to look for abnormalities in the brain or chromosomal damage that would suggest mental retardation. Every test suggested she was normal. After giving her another series of intelligence and behavior tests, a researcher reported that Victoria scored "profoundly retarded." But, the researcher also warned, "This can by no means be accepted as an accurate picture of her abilities due to her language deficit, lack of motor skills, and lack of exposure to the outside world."

In other words, as disturbed as Victoria appeared, there was no way of gauging her potential. There was no way of telling what might happen to her if she were given a chance at a new life, with new surroundings. Would she be able to learn? Would she be able to speak? Would she be able to someday take care of herself?

For all of these reasons, Victoria's case stirred enormous academic interest. Here was a chance to prove or disprove theories about how the brain works, how a child acquires language, and how significantly humans are affected by their environment. The calls started flooding in, including one from an anthropologist in California who had studied wolves in the wild and thought he would have special insight into Victoria.

But those in charge of Victoria's future—Richard LaVallo, a feisty Austin lawyer who had been appointed by the court to represent Victoria while she remained in the state's custody, and Kristene Blackstone, one of the most respected CPS supervisors in Austin—were not going to allow Victoria to endure the kind of glaring public attention that Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, was forced to endure in 1800. LaVallo told me that when he first met Victoria, "she reminded me of the children I used to see on the back wards of state schools—children you thought were lost forever." But what also struck him was her gentleness, especially since it seemed so incongruous with her past. "Most kids who come from her kind of background or who cannot communicate are extremely frustrated, often violent," he said. "And yet Victoria remained so strangely sweet. It was a mystery."

LaVallo did allow one professor to work with Victoria. Dena Granof, from the University of Texas' department of communication sciences and disorders, specialized in teaching communication skills to children with traumatic disabilities. Still, she was amazed when she met Victoria. "She was one of the most severe cases of social and educational deprivation I have seen," Granof told me. Victoria spent hours rocking back and forth, flapping her arms and hands, tapping one finger against another—behaviors known as "stimming" (for self-stimulation) that to Granof represented a way for Victoria to cope with a world she didn't understand. What was most baffling was that Victoria never responded when people addressed her. She didn't even look their way. Although she clearly was capable of producing a range of sounds, she limited herself to her squeaking and an occasional "bah." Victoria had been exposed to language: There had to have been at least some conversation in the house between Edna and Diana, and Diana had said that she occasionally put Victoria in front of the television to watch Barney and Friends and that Edna had read her Bible stories. "But Victoria's language skills were like an infant's, an infant who had not learned the most basic prelinguistic communication such as eye contact," said Granof. "No one had any way of knowing what she was thinking."

It was decided that Victoria, who was still living in the shelter in Central Austin, should try to attend Rosedale, the Austin public school devoted to students with special needs. One staffer went out and bought her a dress and pair of pink Keds as her first school outfit. But for at least a week she would not budge when staffers tried to get her onto a school bus. She liked staying in one room; the sight of doorways made her backpedal. Finally, she was lured outside by someone holding a can of Coca-Cola, which Victoria had learned to savor since coming to the shelter.

At Rosedale, she was put in a class with the most severely disabled: children with cerebral palsy, children who suffered from grand mal seizures, children who had to be fed through tubes. "Victoria required constant, minute-by-minute supervision," said her teacher, Dedra Standish. She was constantly trying to take off her clothes. She'd squat and urinate on the floor whenever she felt like it. If she was given a crayon or a ball or a doll, she'd try to put it into her mouth. "I'd show her things over and over and over—like how to sit on a potty—hoping she'd get the message," said Standish.

Weeks passed. The Rosedale teachers noticed Victoria was starting to look around the classroom. They saw her trade looks with an autistic child. These were tiny improvements, perhaps, but nothing that suggested any real intelligence. Then early one morning at the Children's Shelter, the director, Susan Wills, came into Victoria's room to check on her. As Victoria squatted in a corner, rocking back and forth, Wills set down her coffee cup to pick up the stuffed animals that had fallen from Victoria's bed. Then she walked over to a window. "I was looking out the window, feeling so deeply sad, wondering what would happen to Victoria," Wills recalled. "We were just getting nothing from her."

She heard a noise. She turned around, and there was Victoria, shuffling toward her. She was carrying Wills's coffee cup, which she then set on the windowsill beside her.

"I stared at the coffee, then I stared at Victoria," Wills said, her eyes brimming with tears at the memory. "I thought, 'There's a light on in this little girl. There's a light on.'"

If there was a light on, it barely flickered. By November 1997 LaVallo and Blackstone's determination to keep Victoria out of a state hospital had resulted in her moving in with foster parents—a kindly, good-humored middle-aged couple who had three grown children and who now lived alone on a five-acre plot of land just outside Austin, with horses and dogs. (To protect Victoria's privacy, they asked not to be identified.) For more than four months, the foster mother slept on a mattress next to Victoria's bed. "She didn't cry like other children. She didn't make any sound at all," the foster mother told me. "So I would wake up through the night and check on her. That's the only way I could find out if she was sick or in pain."The foster couple—"Rare, wonderful people, with reservoirs of patience," said attorney LaVallo—decided to talk to her all day long about everything they were doing with her. In a videotape made of Victoria in the spring of 1998, she sat at a counter while her foster mother fixed soup and fired off a barrage of sentences. "Doesn't this soup smell good? I bet you're hungry. Do you want to drink? Why don't we get your milk glass right here?" Like a child who was blind, deaf, and dumb, Victoria stared blankly into the distance, occasionally making a high-pitched squeal or a singsongy moan.

There were moments when she did come alive—at least a little. On a trip with her foster parents to Wal-Mart, she stared intently at the shopping carts. When the foster couple took her to eat at a restaurant, she turned and picked up food from a family sitting at the next table. She once became very attentive when she heard a tape of Barney's "I love you, you love me" song. Was she having a memory of her days watching television in the Blanco house? Her foster mother found it curious that the only book Victoria did not try to stick into her mouth was the Bible that had belonged to her grandmother. When the foster mother handed Victoria the Bible, her hands ran up and down the cover.

One of her foster father's biggest goals was to teach Victoria to laugh. When he tickled her along her ribs, she'd make a guttural groan. He, in turn, would laugh in an exaggerated fashion so that she'd know what a laugh sounded like. One day he put on a silly-looking hat and made a funny face to try to get her to laugh, and she murmured something. He believed she said, "Ugly."

"What did you just say, Victoria?" he asked. But within seconds, she had withdrawn.

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