DAILY NIGHTMARE OF CAPTIVE KIDS
Taunted with toys & pies, tied up for months, allowed one shower a year
The parents who shackled and starved their 13 children in a squalid Southern California home were sicker than anyone had imagined and now face life behind bars for their twisted acts, prosecutors revealed Thursday.
David and Louise Turpin allowed their children to shower only once a year, taunted them with desserts and new toys they couldn’t touch, and left them chained up in soiled beds for months at time during decades of abuse that only grew worse as the years went on.
And David Turpin allegedly touched one of his daughters in a “lewd” way, Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin said as he announced the litany of charges against the couple.
“This is severe emotional, physical abuse. There’s no way around that. This is depraved conduct,” Hestrin told reporters.
David Turpin, 57, and Louise Turpin, 49, showed no emotion later Thursday as they appeared before a packed courtroom in the Riverside County Superior Court for their arraignment, both dressed in ill-fitting suits provided by their lawyer.
Each pleaded not guilty to 37 counts of torture, child abuse and false imprisonment. And David denied an additional charge of performing a lewd act on a child under age 14.
The abuse against the children, now ages 2 to 29, began as “neglect” at a Texas house where the family lived for 17 years, Hestrin said while announcing the charges earlier that day.
The older children had at one point been allowed to play outside with other kids, a childhood friend from the late 1990s told the Daily Mail on Thursday.
And one of the sons was even allowed to attend college — albeit with Louise standing sentry outside the classroom, investigators said.
But the harsh punishments and isolation became more and more depraved over time.
By the time a 17-year-old daughter broke out of their Perris, Calif., home Sunday and called 911 — carrying out a plan the siblings had been hatching for two years — they lived an entirely nocturnal existence with almost no contact with the outside world.
First, the Turpins started tying the kids up with rope. When the children learned to escape those, the parents switched to chains.
“One victim at one point was tied up with a hog tie, and then when that victim was able to escape the ropes, these defendants eventually began using chains and padlocks to chain up the vic- tims to their beds,” Hestrin said.
They were left like that for weeks, even months at a time, and the condition of the house suggests they often weren’t let out to use the bathroom, he said.
The punishment was meted out for even the most minor “infractions,” like washing their arms.
“If the children were found to wash their hands above the wrist area, they are accused of ‘playing in the water’ and they would be chained up,” Hestrin said.
The Turpins fed their children “very little, on a schedule,” leaving the siblings so malnourished that they look far younger than they really are, he said.
One 12-year-old is the weight of
an average 7-year-old. The eldest daughter is 29 years old but weighs just 82 pounds.
Meanwhile, the portly parents bought plenty to eat for themselves, Hestrin said.
“They would buy food, including pies — apple pies, pumpkin pies — leave it on the counter, let the children look at it but not eat it,” he said. They did the same with toys. The children “were not allowed to have toys, although there were many toys found in the house that were in their original packages and had never been opened,” he said.
The children were “supposedly” home-schooled, but, Hestrin noted, they lacked “even a basic knowledge of life.” Many did not know what a police officer was.
“The 17-year-old, when asked if there was medication or pills in the home, didn’t know what medication or pills were,” Hestrin said.
Just about the only thing they were allowed to do was write in their journals. The hundreds of books that the youngsters filled are now being combed for evidence of their nightmarish lives.
Several of the kids now suffer from cognitive-impairment nerve damage from the years of abuse, he said. None has seen a doctor in at least four years, and they have never been to a dentist.
Still, the youngest child, age 2, appears to have been well fed, the prosecutor said, adding that that is why the parents are facing 12 counts of torture and not 13.
And it seems the sickos treated their two dogs better than any of their children.
The two 1-year-old Maltese mixes that belonged to Louise were in “good condition” when they were handed over to animal control after her arrest, Perris city spokesman Joe Vargo told the Riverside County Press-Enterprise newspaper.
The pups, one black and one white, appear hearty in photos taken by officials. The city is putting the dogs up for adoption, according to Vargo.
Other animals apparently did not fare so well under the couple’s care. A kitten was found abandoned in the trash when foreclosure forced the family out of a Rio Vista, Texas, home in 2010, according to the Daily Mail.
“They had a huge garbage dumpster at their house, and we heard a baby kitten crying. We pulled a baby kitty from the dumpster and kept it,” said former neighbor Shelli Vinyard, whose daughter Ashley tried to befriend three of the older Turpin children.
The house in Perris was registered with the state as private school named the Sand Castle Day School — but fire marshals never inspected the property, despite local laws requiring them to do so, records reveal.
Another reason the horrific conditions at the home went unnoticed for so long was the bizarre hours the family kept — sleeping all day and staying awake until around 5 a.m.
“Crimes like these happen behind closed doors, in dark rooms, and so of course people who commit these types of crimes have to hide their crimes, and we think that was part of it,” Hestrin explained.
The Turpins’ next court appearance was slated for Feb. 23. Their bail was set at $12 million.