Wilde-his foster father had come up with that apropos name-became something of an urban legend. His only early memories came in incomprehensible snap-flash visions and dreams: a red banister, a dark house, a portrait of a man with a mustache, and sometimes, when the visions decided to be audible, a woman screaming. That wasn’t true, Wilde knew, but whatever.
Something awful had happened to little Wilde, these people surmised-something so traumatic that the boy’s coping mechanism had blocked out all memory of the incident. Others theorized that the little boy’s memories were faulty, that he couldn’t really have survived on his own in the harsh woods for years, that he was too articulate and intelligent to have raised himself with no parents. Some believed that Wilde had been born into a mysterious and secretive local mountain tribe, that the little boy had run off or been handled in a somewhat negligent manner, and so the tribespeople feared admitting he was one of their own. With the onslaught of media attention, most speculated that someone would come forward immediately and claim “Little Tarzan.” But days turned into weeks. Sometimes he slept in empty homes or in tents he’d stolen from garages mostly, if the weather was cooperative, young Wilde liked to sleep outside under the stars.Īfter he was located and “rescued” from this untamed existence, Child Services placed the little boy with a temporary foster family. That little boy stayed alive by breaking into empty cabins and summer homes, raiding the refrigerators and pantries. He had no memory of parents or caregivers or any life other than scrounging around to survive in those mountains alone. Thirty-five years ago, when young Wilde was first discovered living alone in the woods, doctors estimated his age to be between six and eight years old. He worked as a residential general contractor for his own company, DC Dream House Construction. Carter lived in a four-bedroom ranch on Sundew Avenue in Henderson, Nevada. They had three grown daughters-Wilde’s half sisters, he assumed-Cheri, Alena, and Rosa. Carter was sixty-one years old and married to a woman named Sofia. His father’s name, he had recently learned, was Daniel Carter. Now, more than three decades after being “rescued” as a little boy- “abandoned and feral!” one headline had put it “a modern-day mowgli!” shouted another-Wilde sat no more than twenty yards from a blood relative and the elusive answers to his mysterious origin. He didn’t know their names or where he was born or when or how he, as a very young child, ended up living alone in the woods of the Ramapo Mountains, fending for himself. At the age of somewhere between forty and forty-two-he didn’t know exactly how old he was-Wilde finally found his father.
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