Captive children are slowly providing information

RIVERSIDE — The California children who authorities say were tortured by their parents and so malnourished that their growth was stunted are slowly providing valuable information to investigators, a prosecutor said Wednesday.

“Victims in these kinds of cases, they tell their story, but they tell it slowly. They tell it at their own pace,” Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin said. “It will come out when it comes out.”

David and Louise Turpin are accused of abusing their 13 children — ranging in age from 2 to 29 — before they were rescued on Jan. 14 from their home in Perris (Riverside County). They have pleaded not guilty to torture and other charges.

A judge signed a protective order Wednesday prohibiting the couple from contacting their children, except through attorneys or investigators. Before the brief hearing, Louise Turpin looked at her husband and smiled.

All of the children remained hospitalized and were relieved to be out of the home that authorities have described as a torture chamber, Hestrin said.

Deputies arrested the husband and wife after their 17-year-old daughter climbed out a window and called 911. Authorities found the siblings in the family’s filthy home, with three of them shackled to beds.

Investigators have learned that the children were isolated from each other and locked in different rooms in small groups, Hestrin said.

The children did not have access to televisions or radios but were able to read and write and expressed themselves in hundreds of journals that were seized from the home, the district attorney said.

“It appears to me that they lacked any kind of understanding about how the world worked,” Hestrin said.