The documentary America’s most inbred family has left many horrified. It features the Whittaker family from Odd, a tiny rural town in West Virginia.
The family gained widespread attention through a series of YouTube documentaries created by filmmaker Mark Laita for his channel, Soft White Underbelly, starting around 2020. Today, however, Laita says the series wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows for him and his career.
When Laita first learned of the family, they lived in extreme poverty and were largely cut off modern society. They faced intense exploitation from neighbors and passersby who treated them as like a local spectacle.
Laita’s documentary showed the Whittakers from a completely different angle and soon, people learned that despite their heavy disabilities and lack of communication, they were incredibly protective of one another and shared deep emotional bonds.
Following the documentary series, their lives changed drastically, with people donating through different fundraisers, including GoFundMe started by Laita. With the money raised, they received a new home and secured better medical care.
The members of the family featured in the series were siblings Ray, Betty, Larry, and Lorene, alongside Lorene’s son, Timmy.
The family’s history is incredibly tangled. Not only are the siblings descendants of two generations of first cousins, but it goes a step further: one pair of cousins who married were actually the children of identical twins.
Those twin brothers, John and Henry Whittaker, were born back in 1897. John ended up marrying his own first cousin, Ada, and they had nine children together, including a daughter named Gracie Irene, born in 1920. Meanwhile, Henry married a woman named Sally and had seven children, including a son named John, born in 1913.
In 1935, these two first cousins, John and Gracie, got married. They went on to have 15 children, all of whom were born with distinct physical and mental health conditions.
What’s interesting about this family is that they seemed to be unaware that their mental and physical conditions were due to inbreeding. Asked why their eyes weren’t facing forward, one of them, Kenneth, told Laita that is “might be coal mining.”
Although Mark Laita eventually became close with the family, his first encounter was incredibly tense as John’s brother actually pulled a gun on him. Later on, the documentary filmmaker also discovered that the Whittakers hadn’t been entirely truthful with him.
In March 2024, Laita shared the sad news that one of the family members, Larry, had passed away from what appeared to be a heart attack. As reported by The Mirror, Mark stated: “There’s some news with the Whittaker family. Sadly, Larry Whittaker passed away last week. I think he had a heart attack.”
He went on to say: “Larry was always a great dude to me. He was always really nice. Larry was always a standup guy and he and Betty really ran the show very well. Larry will be greatly missed. It’s going to be hard on Betty now,” he added.
Laita donated money for the funeral, but it later turned out that Larry was in fact very much alive, after a YouTube videos showed Larry sitting outside the family’s home.
Laita later said that the family had been “lying to me all this time.” The money had been given to Larry’s daughter, BJ, who later reached out to apologize to the filmmaker.
BJ explained: “I’m very sorry for what I done. I mean, it was because I was on drugs, and you’ll do anything to get it. Yep…I was on heroin and crack cocaine.”
Despite being lied to, Mark Laita didn’t walk away. He continued to support the Whittakers through a GoFundMe campaign, which went on to raise thousands of dollars for the family.
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