Dark secrets behind America’s dancing quadruplets who were driven to madness by their Hitler-worshipping dad’s sick perversions – as last of the tragic Morlok sisters dies aged 95

Before they had names, they had initials. There was baby A, baby B, baby C and baby D – and their birth from a single egg in Lansing, Michigan, on May 19, 1930, was hailed as a modern-day miracle. 

No sooner had the quadruplet sisters taken their first breath than their notoriety had spread throughout America and the rest of the world.

However, within just a few years, the ‘Morlok Quads’ – Edna, Wilma, Sarah and Helen – had become a freak show of the most sinister kind, orchestrated by their perverted, Nazi-sympathiser father.

Many of the family’s darkest secrets have now been taken to the grave after the last-surviving sister, Sarah, died at the age of 95 last month. 

But the shadowy legacy of the so-called ‘house of horrors’ in which they grew up lingered long into the 21st century.

First though, back to 1930, when the Great Depression hung heavy in the air and the 79,000 people then living in Lansing – the capital of Michigan – were desperate for something to celebrate.

Among them was Carl Morlok, a 41-year-old unemployed factory worker, and his wife Sadie, a nurse ten years his junior, who was so heavily pregnant she believed she was expecting twins.

There were no ultrasound scans then, but Carl, a vehement white supremacist, wasn’t happy about the thought of his wife giving birth to more than one child at the same time. He believed it was a sign of low-breeding and something that happened mainly to black women.

‘Aren’t you a white woman?’ he is said to have shouted at his heavily pregnant wife, according to Audrey Clare Farley’s 2023 biography of the Morloks, Girls And Their Monsters. ‘What will they think my wife is? A b**** dog?’ 

The girls were born one month prematurely and astonished the city’s medical teams, with the Historical Society of Greater Lansing proclaiming their birth to be that of the world’s first identical quadruplets. 

Once the news spread, the city – and the country – soon went into a frenzy.

Sadie wanted to call her daughters Jean, Jane, June and Joan. But local newspaper the Lansing State Journal organised a naming competition for the girls, which attracted 12,000 entries.

The winner was ten-year-old Nancy Haynes, daughter of the physician who delivered the quads. She selected four names which started with E, W, S and H – matching the initials of the E.W. Sparrow Hospital where they were delivered.

They were the talk of the town – and it wasn’t long before Lansing was investing in their future. The local authority passed a resolution to enable the Morloks to move into a bigger house, which would be rent-free for one year.

That house was 1023 East Saginaw Street in Lansing, which, over the following decades, turned into their ‘house of horrors’.

The babies became celebrities long before they could crawl, with people driving by or lining up near the front porch to get a glimpse of them. 

The Massachusetts Carriage Company donated a custom-made baby pram with four seats, locals turned up with gifts, and businessmen opened bank accounts for each child.

Carl became known as ‘jolly Carl, daddy 4-of-a-kind’ in news coverage – and he quickly realised that he could capitalise on his daughters’ extraordinary birth, erecting a sign that allowed visitors to enter the Morlok home to see them for 25 cents.

But the dark side of their fame quickly became clear. Shortly after their birth, two men were admitted into the house by the girls’ grandmother. 

The men grabbed two of the babies and were about to escape when Carl walked through the door and scared them off.

From that moment on, their father would patrol the house and garden with a shotgun, and sleep with a revolver under his pillow every night. 

He was protective of his daughters – but for all the wrong reasons.

‘The Morloks had this reputation of being the “all-American family”, US academic Dr Farley told The Mail on Sunday. ‘The newspapers, locally and nationally, would write one puff piece after another about these girls – everything was picture-perfect.’

Except it wasn’t. Everything was horrific.

When they were less than a year old, German-born Carl – a vocal supporter of Adolf Hitler – put himself up for the role of Lansing constable, a senior position within the city’s police department. 

He used photos of his daughters on his campaign advertisements, with the slogan: ‘We will appreciate your support.’

He won by a landslide and held the post for 26 years, allowing him to serve warrants, notices and other legal papers, as well as carry a gun and badge.

With his newly-invested powers, he poured his resources into his daughters and trained them to be a stage troupe. By the age of seven, they were touring music halls across the Midwest, earning hundreds with their matching dresses, cherubic smiles and performances of patriotic, religious tunes. 

Offstage, their lives were no song and dance. The older they became, the more their father exerted control over everything they did. 

Carl wrote them a list of 20 rules, which included no wearing of trousers, no holidays, no friends, no weekend jollies, no swimming lessons, no birthday parties, no picnics, no church activities – and certainly no boyfriends.

They were never to marry or have children – although Sarah was eventually the only one who did after her father’s death in 1957.

Carl went to such lengths to maintain his daughters’ ‘purity’ that he even had a surgeon circumcise Wilma and Helen – a common medical procedure for ‘oversexed’ women in that era – so they could not masturbate. 

He removed all the doors in the house so he could watch as they changed their clothes or used the bathroom, even when they changed their sanitary pads.

His obsession with their virginity was fuelled by Nazi fears of mixing races, and yet, as Dr Farley pointed out: ‘The media were always portraying the girls as these emblems of cheerful white American girlhood, and, during the war, as fighters of fascism.’

It later emerged that, although Carl never raped his daughters, he would ‘fondle’ them to test whether they were allowed to socialise with men; if they resisted his advances, he concluded they must be ‘good girls’.

By the time the Morlok Quads reached the age of 24, they were severely struggling with their mental health – which was soon diagnosed as schizophrenia. All of them, except for Sarah, were given electroconvulsive therapy. All spent their 20s in and out of psychiatric institutions.

However, even throughout their illnesses, they were used as pawns. They were referred to the National Institute of Mental Health, a newly formed body in Maryland, where a team of 30 researchers, led by Dr David Rosenthal, studied them from 1955 until 1958.

The culmination of this research was Dr Rosenthal’s 1963 book snappily titled: The Genain Quadruplets: A Case Study And Theoretical Analysis Of Heredity And Environment In Schizophrenia. The Morloks were given the pseudonym ‘Genain’ – Greek for ‘dire birth’ – to protect their identity.

Dr Rosenthal’s report comprised no fewer than 636 pages, but was hardly revelatory. One of his conclusions was that the quads were victims of an ‘unhappy collusion of nature and nurture’.

The girls were called back in the 1980s and 1990s for further research. They were subjected to lumbar puncture – a medical procedure to collect fluid from their spines – as well as blood, urine and hormonal tests. However, according to Dr Farley, ‘no one bothered to discern what occupied their minds’.

Three of the quads – Edna, Wilma and Helen – were eventually institutionalised at Northville Psychiatric Hospital, in the suburbs of Detroit, which closed in 2003.

The only one who went on to lead what could be described as a near-normal life was Sarah. Following her father’s death, she found work as a legal secretary and typist in Washington DC.

In 1961, she met George Cotton, an American Air Force officer, at a church group and they married that same year. They had two sons – one of whom, William, died from Aids in 1994 – and a daughter, who died at birth. Their only surviving child is David Cotton, who is now 55 and living in Canton, Michigan.

‘If my grandfather, Carl, hadn’t died I would not be here today,’ he told The Mail on Sunday. ‘My mother would never have married while he was alive. He was clearly a devil who exerted such extreme control over his daughters.’

Sarah and George, however, were not together for long. ‘My father was completely messed up and left when I was very young,’ said David. 

‘He never wanted contact with me, but I remained so close to my mother. She was a loving person, who somehow got a perspective of her life despite everything she went through.’

In 2015, Sarah wrote a memoir, The Morlok Quadruplets: The Alphabet Sisters, which glossed over many of the wretched details of her early life. 

The only clue to her traumatic relationship with her father is found in one extract in which she wrote: ‘[We] felt like tin soldiers marching to my father’s rules. It was kind of sad growing up. We felt so restricted.’

She was full of praise for her mother who died in 1983 – even though Sadie has since been the subject of criticism for not trying to stop her husband’s brutality.

‘Our mother used to dress us in pretty little identical crocheted sweaters and bonnets in spring and summer, or snow pants in winter,’ Sarah wrote in her memoir. ‘Then she would carefully seat two of us facing the other two in the carriage and go for a nice stroll around the block.’

Sarah was once asked when she first realised that she was different from other children. ‘Well, I think it was in our dancing chorus rehearsal when I glanced to the right, then to the left, and saw three other people who looked just like me, danced just like me and sang just like me,’ she said.

She went on to outlive her sisters by more than 20 years. Edna died in 1994, Wilma in 2002 and Helen in 2003.

In her latter years, Sarah opened up to Dr Farley and they spoke regularly on the telephone – the last time just two weeks before her death. ‘Sarah never had it in her to write a tell-all memoir,’ said Dr Farley. 

‘It just wasn’t in her nature. Her father was a monster and her mother clearly went along with it to some degree, not least for financial reasons.

‘Sarah’s Christian faith was so important to her. She believed God was going to have the last word – and she held on to that until the end.’