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

The house was on Blanco Street, in the heart of Old West Austin, less than a mile southwest of the state capitol. The front porch was rotted and sagging. Instead of curtains, a tattered blanket had been placed across the front window. When the wind was right, the smell of urine and feces seeped past the wildly overgrown hedges in the front yard and drifted toward the street.

It was the autumn of 1997, and Old West Austin was becoming one of the city's hottest neighborhoods for urban baby boomers. Less than two blocks away from the house on Blanco Street, venture capitalists and high-tech entrepreneurs were meticulously restoring grand two-story homes worth as much as $1 million. A developer was building luxury condos. Even the smallest tear-downs on 50- by 120-foot lots were selling for more than $100,000. Real estate agents were canvasing the neighborhood, looking for older residents who would be interested in selling.

But few people dared to approach the dilapidated frame house. Sometimes a mysterious high-pitched squeal could be heard coming from inside the home—a sound that a small wild animal might make. "It was like a haunted house in a fairy tale," said one area resident. "You'd walk past and ask yourself, 'What could possibly be going on in there?'"

It was assumed by the residents of the neighborhood that two women lived there—an elderly lady who rarely brushed her hair and a pale, tiny, birdlike woman, probably in her mid-forties, who wore faded, flowery dresses. The younger woman was seen more often around the neighborhood. A few days a week she walked to the bus stop to catch a bus to a Furr's cafeteria, where she worked for minimum wage on the serving line. But, like the older lady, she didn't speak to others. Some people thought she was mentally handicapped. She timidly averted her head when anyone said hello to her.

It wasn't those two women, however, who stirred the neighborhood's greatest curiosity. Every now and then, a child's face peered briefly through one of the dirty windows of the house on Blanco Street. At least that's what a few of the neighbors thought they saw: the face of a little girl, her palms against the glass, regarding whatever she was looking at with a solemn, almost sorrowful expression. Then, ghostlike, her face would disappear.

That was what prompted the first anonymous call, in December 1994, to the state's Child Protective Services hotline, asking about the people inside the house. But the CPS never followed up, citing insufficient information. Another call about the girl came in about a month later. After a third call in late 1995, a young, inexperienced CPS investigator did drop by and talk to one of the women, but if he saw any problems with the girl, he didn't report it to anyone.

It wasn't until October 14, 1997, after a fourth call was made about the girl, that a caseworker named Kathryn Allen went to the house and told the old woman that she needed to step inside. What she saw nearly made her knees give way. The older lady, Edna Barr, and the woman in the faded, flowery dress, her 49-year-old daughter, Diana, had abandoned the house except for the dining room, the living room, and a small bathroom that was full of dirt, with dried feces smeared on the walls. A refrigerator, a microwave, and several decaying couches were crammed in the living room. In the dining room were a small cot and couches covered with tattered quilts. Trying to hold back the feeling of nausea rising in her throat, Allen counted nine large rats climbing up the molding around the windows and rooting through the trash, soft-drink cans, and stacks of paper on the floor. In a court affidavit, she later wrote, "The rats were not afraid of humans and did not run away."

Allen then turned toward the girl. Her name was Victoria. She was nine years old, and she was wearing a torn, dirty nightshirt. She was an obese child, maybe 160 pounds. Most of her teeth had rotted, and the only noises she made were squeaking sounds. It was as if she was imitating the rats who lived with her.

It was almost impossible to believe that something so horrific could have happened: In the midst of a bustling, urban neighborhood, a child had been hidden away in squalor for most of her life. She had never played outside. She had never been around other children. She had never been to school. She didn't speak—not even a single word—nor did she seem to recognize other people's speech. She was, in many ways, the modern-day version of the infamous "wild boy of Aveyron," who in 1800 had emerged naked and grunting out of the forests of southern France. That boy, who later was named Victor, became a cause célèbre among the Rousseau-influenced scientists and philosophers who believed they could find a way to restore him to a civilized life. He was also the inspiration for François Truffaut's 1969 movie, L'Enfant Sauvage (The Wild Child). Their experiments were only mildly successful, however, and Victor was put in a small house and eventually forgotten, dying alone when he was about forty years old.

There was little reason to believe that Victoria's future would turn out any better. When she was found, her behavior was more like that of a frightened feral animal than that of a human being. She was so terrified about being put in a car that she had to be picked up by CPS caseworkers and Austin police officers and placed in the back seat. At the Children's Shelter and Assessment Center of Texas (now the Austin Children's Shelter), one of the organizations that handles the city's severest cases of child abuse and neglect, the staff and volunteers—even the other abused and neglected kids who were there—stared at her as if they couldn't believe what they were seeing. Draped in a sheet, her hair matted down, she urinated on the floor and attempted to cover it up like a cat. Because she had never been given the chance to exercise, her balance was off; she swayed from side to side as she walked. When female staffers tried to give her a bubble bath, she stared at the bathtub in bewilderment. Apparently, she had no idea what a bathtub was used for. It took more than an hour to get her into the water. Staffers blew soap bubbles and gave her little rubber ducks. But Victoria seemed oblivious to what was happening around her. Her eyes never met the eyes of other people. Afterward, she huddled in a corner next to a mattress that had been put on the floor for her and she made her squeaking sound over and over. She drank water and ate only bread. All other foods she threw to the ground.

The news of Victoria's discovery sent shock waves through Austin. A citizen's commission was convened to determine how a little girl could have been missed by all of the city's and the state's social service agencies. A state district judge used Victoria's story as a catalyst to write a scathing report about the need for additional, better-qualified CPS investigators. Neighborhood residents found themselves justifying to reporters—and to one another—why they had not done anything to intervene. For one thing, they said, they were never sure there was a problem. What were they supposed to do? Break down the door and grab her? What if she was someone's grandchild paying a visit? Still, the lack of response by the neighbors was remarkable. "It's amazing to me that no one had gone up there and asked if there was anything they could do to help the family out," said one social worker who later became involved in Victoria's case.

What most Austin citizens wanted to know was why Victoria's mother and grandmother were not immediately thrown in jail for child abuse. Outside the county courthouse, where a hearing had been held to give the state permanent custody of Victoria, television crews raced down a sidewalk to get shots of Edna and Diana Barr in their ancient dresses and carrying cheap vinyl purses as they waited for a bus to take them home. "They looked like something out of Deliverance," says an Austin newspaper reporter.

Social workers who worked with Edna believed she was afflicted with a mild form of dementia, and a court-ordered psychological examination of Diana revealed that she was at a first-grade level in reading, spelling, and arithmetic. The examination also found that Diana had "little inclination to independently assess or judge situations herself." Except for Diana's work at the cafeteria and occasional trips to the grocery store, the two women had almost no contact with the rest of the world when they were raising Victoria. They apparently liked to spend long stretches of their days saying little, with the lights off. They didn't cook. The food in their house consisted mostly of juice, milk, cereal, bread, and TV dinners. They rarely turned on the television, and their only reading material was a Bible.

But were they the monsters the press was making them out to be? To CPS investigators, who didn't ask that criminal charges be filed, Edna and Diana didn't even begin to fit the profile of abusive adults. "I know this sounds strange," said CPS caseworker Maryann Fisher, who has a Ph.D. in educational psychology, "but the more time you spent with them, the more you realized they didn't have a mean bone in their bodies. They loved Victoria. They never abused her. They just didn't have the skills or the mental facilities to take care of themselves, let alone to take care of her."

Recently I spoke to Diana, and she was indeed a meek, fragile woman, wringing her hands anxiously as she talked. (After Victoria had been taken and had become a ward of the state, Diana and Edna sold the Blanco house and moved into a North Austin apartment.) It was also obvious that Diana was limited intellectually. When I asked her, for instance, why she and her mother didn't try to kill the rats in the house, she said, "Well, we were afraid."

Afraid of what? I asked.

"Afraid our little dog would eat the rat poison and die."

Diana's father, who married Edna in the forties, worked as a butcher at the Texas School for the Deaf in Austin. Because of learning disabilities, Diana spent her school years in special-education classrooms, and after high school, she remained at the house on Blanco Street. In 1987, when she was 36 years old, the unmarried Diana, still living at her parents' house, got pregnant (she has never said who impregnated her). Victoria was delivered on January 30, 1988.

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