House of horrors: parents may have used home-schooling to hide abuse

Police investigating how 13 brothers and sisters came to be kept starving and chained inside a California house have turned their attention to how their parents may have used home-schooling to hide their family from authorities.

Officials said home schools were not subject to the same inspections as private or state schools and this could have allowed the children to be kept “off the radar”.

The squalid living conditions were discovered on Sunday when an emaciated 17-year-old girl climbed through a window of the single-storey house in Perris, 100 kilometres from Los Angeles, and called police.

David Turpin, 57, and his wife Louise Turpin, 49, were arrested when officers found the girl’s 12 siblings – ranging in age from 2 to 29 – in their dark, foul-smelling house.

“I wish I could come to you today with information that would explain why this happened,” said Capt Greg Fellows of the Riverside County sheriff’s department. He said the children’s mother seemed confused about why the officers had come to the house and had been shocked by what they found.

“If you can imagine being 17 years old and appearing to be a 10-year-old, being chained to a bed, being malnourished, and injuries associated with that – I would call that torture,” said Capt Fellows. The family was not known to the social services department and neighbours said there were no indications of what was happening inside.

Sherryll Kraizer, a child abuse prevention expert and the founder of the Coalition for Children, said: “One of the things that was interesting was he set up his own home school so the kids were unaccounted for and not really seen by anybody.”

Staff at private schools are required to submit to fingerprinting and background checks, but there is no such scrutiny of parents teaching their children at home.

“Under current California law, the CDE does not approve, monitor, inspect or oversee private schools,” the California Department of Education said.

Some states require homeschooled children to take standardised tests or bar parents with the sort of criminal convictions that would disqualify them from teaching at a public school. A child abuse case involving eight home-schooled children prompted California in 2008 to introduce a law requiring parents to obtain a teaching qualification, but there was so much opposition it was quickly overturned.

Grant Bennet, superintendent of the Perris Union High School District, said: “We really knew nothing about them. If they were in home school from the beginning, they wouldn’t even have been on our radar.”

Relatives were kept away, according to Mrs Turpin’s sister Elizabeth Jane Flores.

“She never let us talk to her kids. She wouldn’t even accept my Facebook request,” she said.

“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.”

She said she knew something was not right, but had no idea what was really going on.

“It’s just heartbreaking and I’m so embarrassed about all of this,” she said.

“Something didn’t seem right about her parenting but never would I have expected it to be like this.”