How a ‘cult’ can hide in plain sight
The Californian ‘house of horrors’ is not the first to be concealed under neighbours’ noses – Peter Stanford pieces together the clues
The neighbours have been gathering in shock outside 160 Muir Woods Road in Perris, an affluent Californian town inland from Los Angeles.
None can claim any real knowledge of David and Louise Turpin, or of their 13 children, despite this unmissably large family having lived in their midst for most of the past decade. Or of what went on inside the Turpins’ terracottapainted bungalow, from where a 17-year-old girl escaped earlier this week to summon the police, who found all of her emaciated siblings living in filthy conditions, with at least three of them shackled to their beds.
The authorities have so far carefully avoided using the word “cult”, but the parents’ devout Christianity – they felt called by God to have so many children, David Turpin’s parents have explained, and homeschooled their children to recite large chunks of the Bible – is already causing many to use it. For the neighbours, though, the question on their lips is why on earth they didn’t realise what was happening on their doorstep.
Many have since shared stories of incidents that happened in plain sight that could have been crucial clues. Wendy Martinez, who lives directly behind the Turpins’ outwardly smart, four-bedroomed home, recalls how, as recently as October, she saw four of the children kneeling on the front lawn, looking “very thin and very albino” and acting strangely. When she tried to talk to them, they ignored her. Their mother was hovering menacingly in the doorway.
Another neighbour said the Turpins were known as “the vampire family” because they were so pale-skinned, and were only spotted when the children scavenged through neighbours’ bins at night.
The local Riverside social services are now caring for the undernourished Turpin children – though with the eldest aged 29, six of them are already classed as adults. The teenager’s escape four days ago was, according to department head Suzan von Zabern, “the first opportunity to intervene”.
Louise Turpin’s younger sister, Elizabeth Jane Flores, told reporters: “We’ve been so worried about them because it’s been so strange, but there was nothing we could do.”
Or was there? Her offers to visit were turned down, she said, the family’s address withheld, and her sister refused to put any of the children on the phone when Flores called. Her own parents, she added, had flown to California to try to see their grandchildren, but the Turpins wouldn’t have anything to do with them.
For those who have studied modern-day cults, this tale of years of hidden suffering – followed by a dramatic escape to get help – is all too familiar. In his book, The Family, Australian author Chris Johnston chronicled how a charismatic former yoga teacher, Anne Hamilton-byrne, ran a religious cult in and around Melbourne for 20 years.
She was both messiah and mother figure (though she had no children of her own) in what she originally called The Great White Brotherhood, but later changed to The Family. Adult members came from professional backgrounds, and the doctors and lawyers in its ranks bypassed normal procedures to allow Hamilton-byrne to adopt and raise around 30 children. Starvation was used as punishment and LSD injections were given to youngsters under 10 to encourage hallucinations about her supernatural status.
“The similarities between the Turpins and Hamilton-byrne are eerie,” Johnston reflects, especially in the way they both somehow managed to keep the outside world at bay. Homeschooling was preferred, to avoid awkward questions, routine checks with doctors and dentists eschewed, and all contact with the outside world kept to an absolute minimum. The children were, effectively, prisoners.
“Both used propaganda,” Johnston continues; the Turpins posted pictures of themselves and their
The question is why they didn’t realise what was happening on their doorstep
children at Disneyland, all smiling, all in matching outfits, while Hamilton-byrne circulated home movies that showed her children dressed impeccably and playing in a large, well-tended garden. “It was all about giving an impression to the outside world that things were normal,” Johnston explains.
In another striking parallel, online pictures posted of the Turpin children featured the boys with the same pudding-bowl haircut as their father, and the girls the same style as their mother.
Hamilton-byrne had dyed and styled the hair of her “family” to match her own blonde locks. It should have made them stick out like a sore thumb, but apparently didn’t ring any warning bells on the rare occasions when they did come into contact with the outside world.
When the abuse was finally uncovered in the mid-nineties after one child ran away and set fire to a local school, many questioned how she could have got away with it for so long. The same was asked in 2013 of the Workers’ Institute of Marxismleninism-mao Zedong Thought, a secretive collective that had existed for 30 years at various addresses (including local authority housing, visited by maintenance teams) in busy Brixton, south London.
Its founder, Aravindan Balakrishnan, restyled himself Comrade Bala and claimed to have a mind-control machine called Jackie, which would kill any member who disobeyed him.
He controlled, abused and raped female members. One gave birth to his daughter, but later died after falling from a window. The daughter, Katy, was banned from going to school, beaten and psychologically abused by her father. “I used to think that the best way would be to die,” she said later. “That would be the only way to get out of his control.”
The women who were allowed out to work never breathed a word to colleagues until, finally, they plucked up the courage to contact a helpline. Balakrishnan was jailed in 2016 for 23 years. “I’ve been a non-person all my life,” Katy said after his imprisonment, “and now is my chance to be myself.”
Award-winning filmmaker Vanessa Engle made a BBC documentary, The
Cult Next Door, about Comrade Bala. “As I was making it, I was asking myself the question, how could this be going on next door? I know some of my neighbours, but I don’t know what goes on when they close the front door. It doesn’t make me a bad person. I just respect their privacy and they respect mine.”
No one wants to risk being labelled a busybody, and most would endorse each individual’s right to live without being cross-questioned. However, that didn’t stop the director Crystal Moselle in 2010 from stopping six curiouslooking teenage brothers, aged between 16 and 23, who were walking down First Avenue in Manhattan in odd clothing and sunglasses, with waist-length hair.
What she managed to coax out of them became the starting point for her acclaimed 2015 documentary, The
Wolfpack, about a family of six boys and one girl who, for 14 years, had been kept locked up in their Lower East Side apartment by their tyrannical father, and homeschooled by their mother.
When Moselle met them, it was one of the first times the six boys had ever been let out, after they had rebelled against their father’s rules. The Angulo brothers subsequently gave interviews about their “imprisonment” and appeared to be adapting to their new freedoms. Their parents were not prosecuted, but for the Turpin children, with David and Louise now facing charges of torture and child endangerment, a different fate awaits.
That new life may be gruelling, as Rebecca Stott writes in her memoir In
the Days of Rain, which earlier this month was awarded the Costa Prize for biography. It tells how, aged eight, she escaped the harsh discipline and segregation from the rest of society that came with being “caught up” in the Exclusive Brethren, a fundamentalist Christian sect in the UK. She likens her fresh start to “being in a town where all the signs have been changed into a language I didn’t know”.
For the 13 children from Muir Woods Road, that new normal is only just beginning.