'The Whittakers': Inside the tragic and startling story of America's most inbred family
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA: America has its most popular inbred family in West Virginia known as The Whittakers. Filmmaker Mark Laita has created a new 12-minute short film titled 'Inbred Family-The Whittakers' and launched the same on his YouTube channel called 'Soft White Underbelly'. Laita explained how the family would bark at people, communicate through grunts, and would often run away when people tried to speak to them.
Laita met the family initially in 2004 and then filmed them in 2020. The family lived in the southern part of the country, 75 miles away from Charleston. Earlier, there were also reports on another inbred family called the Colt family. The 38-member Colt clan was found living in squalor in 2012 by police in a bush camp in the Australian outback. Since then, investigations have shown that at least 14 of the children born were the result of parents being related to each other.
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Who are the Whittaker family?
The family with members of older generations living in a small town in the Appalachian region work at their father's farm. They are of British descent and the members are Ray, Lorraine, Timmy (only cousin), Freddie, and an unnamed sister. Freddie died a long time ago due to a heart attack. Recent studies claim that their parents were cousins and not brother and sister as earlier found. "They are kind of protected by the neighbors and the relatives don’t like these people coming to ridicule them," claimed Laita in one of the earlier episodes of 'Koncrete Klips' podcast, as per The Sun.
What did Mark Laita claim in the interaction with Koncrete?
Laita said, "The individuals in this video are brothers and sisters, except for Timmy who is a cousin. There is no way I would be able to confirm that the Whitaker parents were related, but given that this does happen in this part of the country and the Whitakers are the most extreme case I’ve seen so far, I would bet that inbreeding was at least partly responsible for the mental and physical abnormalities seen in Lorraine, Freddie, Ray, and Timmy.”
He further warned everyone to stay away from the family. He said, “I strongly discourage anyone attempting to look for the Whitakers as their armed neighbors and the Raleigh County deputies both make it clear that curious visitors are not welcome," as per Daily Mail. He also recalled one of the most bizarre moments with the family. "It was out of control," he said. "There's these people walking around and their eyes are going in different directions and they are barking at us. And [this] one guy, you'd look at him in the eye or say anything and he would just scream and go running away and his pants would fall around his ankles."
He also explained about the protective neighbors. "They don't like people coming to ridicule these people." One relative told Laita, "They understand what you talking about. If they don't like it, they start yelling - let you know they don't like that idea."
Meanwhile, Inbreeding which is mating between two closely related people can have dangerous effects on human lives. "The potential for sexual abuse and lasting trauma is high, and the odds of inheriting rare genetic diseases goes up exponentially among children who are the result of human inbreeding," states Discover Magazine.