Monster parents who held their 13 kids captive
Devout Christians David and Louise Turpin have been charged with torture and child endangerment after their starving children were found shackled inside their filthy California home
Daily Express Wednesday January 17 2018
THEY appeared such a closeknit, wholesome all-American family that at times it seemed like they were joined at the hip. David and Louise Turpin and their 13 dark-haired children drew attention whenever they ventured from their home in the small desert town of Perris in California.
Posing for family photographs in Las Vegas and at Disneyland, all smiles and hugs, there was barely an inch of space between them.
The 10 girls and three boys never seemed happier than when all donning blue jeans and Dr Seuss-inspired red T-shirts numbered “Thing 1” and “Thing 2” up to “Thing 13”.
All were smiling again when they posed as David and Louise renewed their marriage vows in Las Vegas two years ago in a ceremony officiated by an Elvis impersonator.
Louise wore her white wedding gown, David and their three sons sported tuxedos and the nine girls were all clad in matching fuchsia plaid dresses, with white tights and white shoes. The eldest daughter held the 13th and youngest Turpin baby daughter in her arms and the children clapped as their parents sealed their vows with a kiss.
But neighbours mysteriously began to see less of the family around town and soon it seemed as if they had almost disappeared.
The shocking reality was revealed on Sunday when police found the children imprisoned in their house of horrors, filthy and malnourished, many chained and padlocked to their beds in the dark.
They were discovered after their 17-year-old sister made a daring escape, stole her parents’ mobile phone and called 911. Starving, the children begged the police for food and water.
Riverside County sheriffs could hardly believe that the small, underfed child alleging such terrible abuse was actually 17.
“She appeared to be only 10 years old and slightly emaciated,” said a sheriff spokesman. “Several children were shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings but the parents were unable immediately to provide a logical reason as to why their children were restrained in that manner.”
The children were so frail and malnourished that deputies initially believed that all 13 of the children held in captivity were minors. Despite their diminutive size it later emerged that they ranged in age from two to 29 years old – seven of them were over the age of 18.
The children “claimed to be starving” and wolfed down food supplied by the deputies before being taken to local hospitals.
David Turpin, 57, and Louise, 49, were arrested on charges of child endangerment and torture, each now held on £6.5million bail.
“They didn’t look like monsters,” said one neighbour. “They were just ordinary suburban folk.”
Even in their police mugshots the duo hardly appear sinister. David Turpin still styles his dirty blond hair in the outdated pudding bowl haircut he has worn since his teens, paired with silvery grey stubble. Louise’s wild mane of black hair is streaked with grey although she stares intensely from her mugshot with dark, challenging eyes and a self-satisfied smirk on her lips.
The community of Perris, about 70 miles east of Los Angeles, was last night asking how such nightmare abuse could happen right under their noses.
“We’re not acres apart,” confessed Kimberly Milligan, 50, who lives across the street. “How did no one see anything?”
Neighbour Jennifer Luna lamented: “It’s so sad, so horrible. I just can’t believe this.”
The Turpins’ £280,000 home on Muir Woods Road is typical of thousands of neat, nondescript ranchstyle California tract homes: a singlestorey house with terracotta painted stucco walls and a tile roof.
A nativity star still hung
window yesterday and their driveway was a picture of suburban middle-class normality, with a van and three newer model Volkswagens parked beside the house.
Neighbourhood children rode their bicycles and skateboards past the Turpin home and an ice cream truck routinely passed by playing its jangling siren-call.
But in recent years neighbours saw very few of the Turpin children emerge from the home. Milligan wondered why the children always appeared so very pale and rarely came out to play.
“I thought the kids were homeschooled,” she says. “You know something is off but you don’t want to think bad of people.”
Two years ago Milligan saw the Turpins’ pre-teens – or at least children who looked far younger than 13 – stringing Christmas lights across their home.
But when she said hello the children shrank away. “They looked at us like a child who wants to make themselves invisible,” she recalled. “I thought they were like 12 because they looked so malnourished and so pale.”
Several neighbours recall seeing many of the children labouring late at night under floodlights in the front garden last year, laying fresh sod in the yard.
City officials had recently inspected the neighbourhood and were issuing citations to homes with unkempt yards, probably prompting the garden chore. Yet neighbours were baffled why the children would be toiling under cover of darkness. Their mother Louise stood in the archway beside her front door, watching over them.
“That was kind of weird,” admits neighbour Wendy Martinez, 41. “All four of them were on the ground rolling out sod.”
The Turpins hid their children from authorities by home-schooling them and by registering their home as The Sandcastle Day School, a private, non-religious, co-ed institution for children aged five to 18. David named himself headmaster.
Official records show that during the last school year there were six children enrolled, from the ages of 10 to 18.
David’s father James Turpin, of West Virginia, said he was “surprised and shocked” at the horrors within his son’s home. James and his wife Betty have not seen their grandchildren in at least four years.
The Turpins had lived for many years in Texas before moving to California about a decade ago. David worked as an engineer at aeronautics giant Lockheed Martin, earning more than £100,000 a year, but was drowning in debt as his family continually grew in size and he lost his job in 2011.
The Turpins filed for bankruptcy that year, listing assets of about £110,000 and debts of around £175,000. It was their second bankruptcy, having previously filed in 1992. Court documents in 2011 reveal that their expenses were £730 more than David’s income every month. Louise, listed as a homemaker, had no income. The family registered their home as a school that same year.
DAVID went on to work for aeronautics company Northrop Grumman but struggled financially. The Turpins’ bankruptcy lawyer Ivan Trahan found them “very nice people who spoke highly of their children. They seemed like very normal people who fell into financial problems.
“They spoke lovingly of their children and even showed me their photos from Disneyland.”
But sightings of the children grew scarcer with each passing year. Their captivity comes as a shock to their grandmother Betty Turpin, who even last night insisted: “This is a highly respectable family” and “a good Christian family” with “very strict home schooling”, memorising lengthy passages from the Bible. “God called on them” to have a large family, she explained.
When they went out the children were usually all dressed alike for safety reasons: the Turpins found it easier to keep watch over them that way.
“They were very protective of the kids,” says Betty. “When they went out the couple would line the children up according to age and the parents took their positions at the front and back of the line.”
Louise was just 17 when she married David and the couple renewed their wedding vows for their 26th anniversary in 2011 in Las Vegas with the help of an Elvis impersonator. They had so much fun that they renewed their vows again in Las Vegas in 2013 and once more in 2015, each time with all their children in tow. The boys stood with their father while the girls led their mother in the processional.
“I’m speechless,” says Elvis impersonator Kent Ripley, who presided over all three ceremonies. “They seemed to enjoy themselves as a family, they seemed to get along. And the children were wellbehaved.”
Police are now trying to understand how within a few short years the children could have become prisoners in their own home.
David and Louise Turpin were last night being held at the Robert Presley Detention Centre in Riverside, California, and are set for arraignment in court tomorrow.