The alert to police came through at 6 am on Sunday, a panicked call from a teenage girl with a deeply disturbing story to tell.
She said she had just escaped through a window from a house in the California town of Perris after managing to get hold of a deactivated mobile phone that could still make emergency calls.
Her 12 siblings were still inside, she said, starving and some of them chained to their beds. Their captors, she revealed chillingly, were their own parents.
Riverside County sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to find the 17-year-old. They got their first inkling that something was terribly wrong when they found a girl so small and emaciated that she looked like she was only ten.
When acting on phone pictures she had taken as evidence, officers went into the nondescript, single-storey house on Muir Woods Road, they found the teenager had not exaggerated the nightmare going on inside.
25 horrific things you need to know about the Turpin family:
1. Police confirmed yesterday they found three of the children shackled to furniture with chains and padlocks in ‘dark and foul-smelling surroundings’.
2. Officers said it wasn’t yet clear how long they had been held in such conditions in the filthy home but it appeared to have been a ‘prolonged’ period.
3. The children – ten of them female – were ‘malnourished and very dirty’. They admitted they were starving and begged their rescuers for food and drink.
4. While the youngest of those they rescued was only two, it gradually dawned on the horrified officers that some of the ‘children’ were nothing of the kind.
5. Seven were adults, their frail and malnourished appearances hiding the fact they were aged 18 to 29. Still dressed in their pyjamas, they were all immediately taken to hospital for treatment.
6. Their parents, David and Louise Turpin, ‘were unable to immediately provide a logical reason why their children were restrained in that manner’, said police. While a neighbour insisted Mrs Turpin, 49, spat twice on the ground before she and her husband were led out in handcuffs, police chief Capt Greg Fellows claimed she had appeared ‘perplexed’ when officers arrived. He praised the ‘courage’ of the girl who escaped.
7. The parents have been charged with torture and child endangerment – and America has been plunged into one of its most disturbing cases of child abuse for decades.
8. Police say there is no sign that the siblings were sexually abused. Mark Uffer, chief executive of a hospital treating the seven grown-up children, said: ‘It’s hard to think of them as adults, they are so small.’ He added that they were stable and very friendly. ‘I believe they are hopeful life will get better for them after this event,’ he said.
9. The picture emerging yesterday of the parents, who have yet to issue a plea, was of an intensely religious but deeply odd and controlling couple who managed to raise a vast brood without their neighbours or even close relatives realising there was something terribly wrong.
10. Some of those who lived in the quiet suburban road didn’t even know there were children inside the house. Others, who did see them, dubbed them ‘vampire children’ as they only emerged at night and always looked drawn and deathly pale. Some say they saw them scavenging in bins, probably looking for food.
11. The Turpins had been struggling themselves financially as they raised their huge family. They had filed twice for bankruptcy, most recently in 2011, stating in court papers they were up to $500,000 (£362,000) in debt. At the time, David Turpin, 57, had a $140,000 (£101,000) job as an engineer at the defence industry giant Northrop Grumman.
12. Ivan Trahan, a bankruptcy lawyer who acted for the Turpins, described them as ‘very nice people who spoke highly of their children’. He said the couple, who in 2011 had been spending $1,000 more a month than Mr Turpin earned, had never seemed particularly upset about going into bankruptcy. Mrs Turpin didn’t bother trying to get a job and remained at home with the children.
13. David Turpin’s parents, James and Betty Turpin, insisted yesterday they were ‘surprised and shocked’ at the allegations. Not that they seemed to know much about their son’s family other than what he told them. His parents, who live in West Virginia, said they had not visited the family for four or five years but had spoken to their son and daughter-in-law – but never their grandchildren – on the phone.
14. They insisted they were a happy family and went on regular holidays together, holding passes to California’s Disneyland theme park. Betty Turpin admitted, however, that the last time they saw the children, they looked thin. They described their son and his wife as very religious. David had told them he had so many children because ‘God called on them to’, they said.
15. The grandparents said the children were given a very strict schooling at home, and had to memorise long Bible passages. According to Betty, the children’s parents made them dress alike for safety reasons. She describes how the children would line up according to age, and one parent would walk at the front of the line, with another at the back. ‘It was easier to keep up with the kids that way,’ she said.
16. Safety concerns wouldn’t explain, however, why the children were given identical haircuts, the girls all wearing long hair parted in the middle and the boys saddled with the same comical mop top sported by their father. They also all appear to have been given names beginning with a J, perhaps a tribute to Jesus or maybe even to the Old Testament’s Joseph, who is believed to have had 12 siblings.
17. ‘They were very protective of the kids. This is a highly respectable family,’ said Betty Turpin. However, Louise Turpin’s sister was not nearly so positive. Elizabeth Jane Flores said she hadn’t seen her for sister for 19 years. While they talked on the phone, the Turpins did not let their relatives visit them, not even giving Mrs Turpin’s parents their address after they flew out to see them. ‘Something didn’t seem right about her parenting but I would never have expected it to be anything like this,’ said Ms Flores, a mother of seven and Christian motivational speaker.
18. ‘My sister never let us talk to her kids. She wouldn’t even accept my Facebook request. We all wondered what was going on. ‘My parents booked several flights to go see them but when they got there they wouldn’t tell them where to go and my parents left crying every time. They died before they got to see them again. It’s just heartbreaking.’
19. Possibly in an attempt to avoid official scrutiny of their education arrangements, the Turpins started their own private school – the Sand Castle Day School – at their home. David Turpin was the principal but neighbours say they never saw any other children coming to the Turpin home.
20. Andria Valdez said the children reminded her of the vampire family in the Twilight films and books. ‘They only came out at night. They were really, really pale,’ she said. Kimberly Milligan, who lives opposite, wondered why – if there were so many children in the house – they never came out to play. The parents, she said, were ‘standoffish’.
21. Two years ago, she went outside to find some of the Turpin children putting up Christmas lights. She said hello to them and ‘they looked at us like a child who wants to make themselves invisible’, she said. ‘They were terrified.’ She said she had seen so little of the children that she ‘wouldn’t be able to pick them out of a line-up’.
22. Wendy Martinez, another neighbour, recalled seeing four of the children outside late one night last October, on their hands and knees working on the lawn. She saw Mrs Turpin and said ‘Hi’ to the family. She said: ‘There was like no movement, not even to look over to see who’s saying “Hi”,’ she recalled. It appears the children were not complete prisoners in their home. Mrs Martinez said she saw one of the older girls driving down the road a month ago in a VW Jetta.
23. ‘They’re mobile. I don’t understand why they would wait so long to say something,’ she said. For all their alleged horrific treatment of their children, the Turpins outwardly portrayed themselves as a loving, caring family. On their Facebook page are pictures of several family trips to Disneyland. The children appear thin in the photos but not alarmingly so, although they certainly don’t look remotely as old as they really are.
24. A series of videos posted on social media show the couple renewing their marriage vows at the Elvis Chapel in Las Vegas. They did it not once but three times, in 2011, 2013 and 2015. These supremely tacky affairs were presided over by an Elvis impersonator who peppers the ceremonies with references to Elvis songs, and frequent musical breaks. The children joined them in the two most recent ceremonies, the girls both times clad in identical pink and purple plaid dresses, while the three boys wore black dinner jackets and magenta ties. Mrs Turpin wears a white wedding dress and her husband, in black dinner jacket, cannot contain his emotion, frequently dabbing his eyes.
25. The children all manage to smile and applaud their parents’ gooey embraces but they look ill at ease when the Elvis impersonator tries to get them to dance along. In an apparent illustration of their social isolation, none of them appears to know even how to click their fingers. The impersonator, Kent Ripley, said yesterday that ‘nothing seemed unusual’ about the family ‘apart from the fact there was a lot of them’. On their last visit, he crooned the Elvis hit Memories and told the children: ‘Thank you for making me a very special part of your memories.’
– Daily Mail
