The Lost Girls of Willowbrook, Ellen Marie Wiseman, author: Morgan Hallett, narrator
Sage and Rosemary Winters were identical twins. Their mother and father were divorced and they believed they had been abandoned by their father. Their mother remarried, but after she died, her second husband, Alan, their stepfather, was not happy to have the responsibility of the girls. He drank too much and was not a good parent.
When Rosemary was about ten-years-old, she was sent to live in the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island. She was diagnosed with manic depressive, schizophrenic, split personality disorder. This part of the story is based on the real Rosemary. Yet, listening to this book, I wondered if this novel could truly be about a real event and real people. I thought surely no parent would abandon her child to such a place, and I wondered if such horrific conditions really existed. Yet, I do remember when Geraldo Rivera, a young journalist at the time, broke the story about the scandalous treatment of human beings at Willowbrook. He blew the lid off of the place as he exposed the hidden horrors, but I don’t remember them being as graphic as this author has painted them. I do feel certain that her descriptions are probably accurate, but were not normally presented so broadly to the public in the 1970’s. News was far more controlled then.
Concentrating on the main character of the real Sage Winters, who travels to the school in search of her sister when she discovers she is not dead, but is missing, the author lays bare the barbarism of the school that was not a school, but more of a large holding cell for people who were intellectually or physically challenged, who could not survive alone in the world without appropriate care. Yet, they did not get much care at all. They survived, but barely. They were starved, poorly clothed, slept in filth and in a place that was vermin infested and poorly staffed by those who were cruel and unyielding. If they were not terribly ill when they arrived, they soon deteriorated because of the abominable conditions there.
There was no supervision of the place, no oversight, patients were never reevaluated. The residents were always mistreated, if this story is accurate. The punishments of the patients for minor infractions were inhumane, for major infractions the punishment was barbarian. In 1972, when this was revealed, it started the snowball rolling that would eventually dismantle the poorly run institutions around the country that treated the mentally incompetent, the very institutions that housed these victims of circumstance, but no new supervised housing was provided. The main problem that developed was placement of the residents. There were no facilities, and still seem to be none today, to adequately care for those who cannot care for themselves.
The conditions described seem worse than those described in the movie, “The Snake Pit”. Magnifying the problems there, were the unexplained large number of deaths that were dismissed with diagnoses of pneumonia, etc., rather than the true cause which was the existence of a serial killer who lived at the school and worked there from the time he was found abandoned at age 9. It is thought that he murdered almost 100 victims, “to relieve them of their misery”. He believed he set them free. He had a set of stolen keys and having lived there since so early an age, he was able to navigate through the maze of tunnels, unseen by anyone else.
Reading this, one will surely wonder how any parent could leave any child, disabled or not, in this house of horrors. However, based on the real Sage Winters, this is indeed a place in which children were abandoned and/or many parents turned their backs on them. This is a horrifying story, made more horrifying by the fact that Sage Winters actually lived it. She travels by bus to the school, to try to help in the search for her sister. However, she is the identical twin to Rosemary and when she appears, they believe she is Rosemary and capture her and lock her up in Willowbrook as an inmate. Her purse and ID’s had been stolen on the bus to Willowbrook, so she had no real way to prove who she was. When the school called her stepfather, and said they had found Rosemary, Alan never questioned it. Sage grew desperate. Would her friends miss he and sound the alarm? Would Alan notice she did not return. She had not told anyone where she was going. Would anyone miss her? She pleads with the head of the school to let her go, to believe her, but the more she pleads, the more delusional they believe she is because Rosemary had had imaginary friends, and one of them was called Sage.
There were no classes in this school. There were empty hours of being drugged, underfed, poorly clothed, ignored and abused. Human waste was everywhere. The smell was foul. The nursing staff was cruel and they protected each other. No one turned anyone in for breaking the rules or abusing the inmates. They turned a blind eye to the horrors of the place. The disabled, the feeble-minded, the disturbed were neglected and no one bore witness to the lack of response to their needs.
Sage appears to be a well-meaning teenager, but is unable to navigate this world to save herself, until the “janitor” says he will help her escape. What she discovers in that attempt is horrific. What is further discovered is even more outrageous as the deaths of so many on that “campus” have gone unreported. Who was killing the inmates? How were so many dying? Were they dying by their own hand, from disease or from the system? Were they experimented upon? Did the parents understand the mistreatment there and ignore it, or were they unaware since they were also unable to visit.
Although this is based on a true story, parts of it felt like it was part fairy tale. Perhaps it is because of the way the story is presented, but Sage appears alternately mature and sophisticated or immature and confused. A concise picture of her personality evaded me. She is described as someone who does weed and alcohol, so is somewhat savvy, but then she is naïve when it comes to interpreting her dire situation until it goes from one extreme to the other and from bad to worse. The story is a bit too long, a bit repetitive and though true, feels hardly believable. There is a Kafkaesque feeling of being trapped in corridors that go on and on with no exit and that feeling remains throughout most of the book.
Geraldo Rivera’s name became a household term in 1972, when he exposed the horrors of Willowbrook. Perhaps it is one of the things that defined his future career. The closing of this school, the largest facility in the United States, was a worthwhile endeavor, but better places for people in the mental or emotional, or physical state of those who cannot live in the real world, have never been established, unfortunately.