USA TODAY International Edition
Hundreds of journals found in Calif. home
Writings of 13 children may detail their captivity
PERRIS, Calif. – The children weren’t allowed to eat. They weren’t allowed to bathe.
They couldn’t play with toys that were kept in the closet, still packaged. They couldn’t go outside. They couldn’t escape.
Their depraved parents allowed them to do only one thing, prosecutors said. They could write.
On Sunday, Riverside County law enforcement discovered 13 siblings — ages 2 to 29 — imprisoned in an unassuming four-bedroom, three-bathroom suburban home. A teenage captive had escaped through a window and called for help, revealing a crime that has horrified and captivated the nation.
The children’s parents, David and Louise Turpin, now face life in prison for multiple counts of torture, child abuse and false imprisonment that lasted for years. While describing the case Thursday, prosecutors revealed the Turpin children’s only freedom was writing in journals.
Authorities have recovered hundreds of them.
Riverside County law enforcement officials are combing through those journals. District Attorney Mike Hestrin said he believes they will be very significant to the coming court case and will provide “strong evidence of what occurred in that home.”
The diaries also have sparked the interest of academics who research trauma and language. Writing in the journals was, quite possibly, what allowed the children to survive a life of fear, hunger and torture, said James Pennebaker, a renowned expert on using writing to heal from traumatic experiences.
“There is a good chance that being able to write may have kept them sane,” he said. “In an interesting way, this may have helped them come to terms with the bizarre world they lived in.”
Pennebaker, a University of Texas-Austin psychology professor who has been following the Perris case from afar, described the child torture as the “most horrific story imaginable.” In an interview Friday, he wondered why the Turpins would have allowed their children to chronicle their captivity and still kept the journals in the house, basically stockpiling evidence of their crimes.
But the unlikely existence of these journals creates a unique research tool that might allow academics to design therapies to help victims of torture, maltreatment and prolonged captivity, Pennebaker said.
The children’s stunted language skills might make the journals hard to decipher, he said. But this challenge also would be valuable in the study of communications barriers and the evolution of language.
From a research perspective, the only writings that could even loosely compare to the children’s journals would come from prison inmates or the famous diary of Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager who chronicled her life as she hid from the Nazis during World War II, Pennebaker said.
“Anne Frank lived in an insane world, but her family life was remarkably normal,” he said. “This is the exact opposite.”
The journals will also have tremendous value for the criminal investigation, even though they might not be admissable as evidence, said Laurie Levenson, a criminal law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.