Psychiatric Halfway House Inmate Caught
A woman committed to a state hospital in 1981 for killing her mother and slashing her daughter’s throat was captured Tuesday after escaping from a psychiatric halfway house in March, Los Angeles police said.
Officers arrested Arlyne Louise Genger, 46, as she arrived at a Fountain Valley medical complex to pick up a paycheck from a telemarketing firm, Detective Walter DeCuir of the department’s Mental Evaluation Unit said.
She was being held at Sybil Brand Institute for Women pending a hearing.
Genger failed to return to the Gateways Satellite residential mental health facility in Silver Lake after leaving without permission on March 7, said Dr. Harry Goldberg, the facility’s program director. She had been at the facility since a judge, on the recommendation of psychiatrists, ordered her release from Patton State Hospital in April, 1988.
Genger had admitted that on New Year’s Day, 1980, she stabbed her mother more than 20 times and cut her daughter’s throat and wrist in the family’s North Hollywood apartment. Her daughter, Selena, then 13, survived.
A Superior Court judge found Genger not guilty by reason of insanity.
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