ONE OF 13 HELD CAPTIVE USED DEACTIVATED PHONE TO CALL POLICE.
PARENTS FACE TORTURE, CHILD ENDANGERMENT CHARGES
To tell the police the horrific tale of how her parents were holding her and 12 siblings captive, a 17- yearold girl escaped before dawn Sunday through a window in the family’s Southern California home and used a deactivated cellphone to call the only telephone number that still worked: 911.
Why the parents, David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, kept their 13 children locked up — and for how long — remains unknown.
But the few details the authorities revealed Tuesday painted a disturbing portrait of prolonged abuse and neglect for the siblings, seven adults and six children, ages two to 29. The police found three of the siblings chained to furniture inside the house. All were malnourished, to the point that the adults were so small they looked much younger.
“I wish I could come to you today with information that would explain why this happened,” Capt. Greg Fellows, a spokesman for the Riverside County Sheriff ’s Department, said Tuesday.
The parents, both arrested on nine counts of torture and child endangerment, remain in jail. When sheriff ’s deputies arrived at the house on Sunday, “the mother was perplexed as to why we were at that residence,” Fellows said.
Sheriff ’ s deputies had never before been called to the house in Perris, an exurb about 100 kilometres southeast of Los Angeles, since the Turpin family moved there in 2014. Neither had the Riverside County Department of Public Social Services, said its director, Susan von Zabern. Sunday “was the first opportunity we had to intervene,” she said.
“I don’t think we have enough information to know how long any of the children have been subjected to this,” Von Zabern said. “Their con- dition indicates it has been a prolonged period of time.”
The agency will seek court authorization to provide oversight and care for the children, including the adults if necessary, she added.
The family previously lived in Murrieta, Calif., and in Texas, and Fellows said he had no information on whether the family was religious, as their social- media posts indicated.
The state had given Turpin approval to run a private school, the Sandcastle Day School, at home. The only children enrolled were his own, as far as investigators can tell, Fellows said.
For now, the seven adults —five women and two men — have been hospitalized, where they are staying together in a secure area, said Mark Uffer, the hospital’s chief executive. He described their condition as stable.
“They’re very friendly, they’re very co-operative, and I believe that they’re hopeful that life will get better for them,” Uffer said.
The police described the Turpins’ home as filthy, dark and foul smelling. News crews were stationed outside on Tuesday, as neighbours continued to wrestle with the idea that so many children were being neglected in the one- storey, rusty red house with the tiled roof.
Early Tuesday morning, Kimberly Milligan, 50, who lives across the street, said she had only encountered the Turpins once, when she and her son saw three of the siblings — who they thought were 11 to 14 years old — hanging Christmas lights in 2015.
“We said, ‘ Hey, your decorations look really nice.’ And they froze,” she said. “They looked absolutely terrified. They were childlike in the sense that, ‘ I’m invisible, you can’t see me.’ That was their only defence mechanism.”
The family’s three Volkswagens remained parked in the driveway on Tuesday, sporting vanity plates that proclaimed the Turpins’ love for Disneyland.
Until the summer of 2016 the family’s activities were documented on Facebook; photos showed trips to the beach and to visit Santa, and a smiling clan at Disneyland, wearing matching outfits. The last photographs, posted in July 2016, showed them gathered in what appears to be Las Vegas, with an Elvis impersonator performing a vow-renewal ceremony.
It was the third time they had been photographed with the same Elvis, in the same outfits, at the Elvis Chapel in Downtown Las Vegas.
Kent Ripley, the Elvis impersonator, said he was “disturbed” by the reports of abuse. “I mean they were sitting right around here three different times,” he told Fox News.
The outings appear to have stopped last July, five months after Phyllis Robinette, Louise Turpin’s mother, died at age 66 in Princeton, West Virginia.
Shortly before she died, Robinette wrote on Facebook: “Would love to come and see you all.”
Louise Turpin was one of six siblings, living as far afield as Guam, Georgia and Tennessee. Her sister, Elizabeth Flores, an author, has previously written about being abused as a child.
Tuesday she said she had not seen her sister in 19 years but knew that something was “not right” with her parenting style. She added that she was never allowed to visit her sister or speak to her nieces and nephews.
The 41-year-old, who lives in Cleveland, Tenn., told DailyMailTV: “Something didn’t seem right about her parenting but never would I have expected it to be like this. We have been so worried about them because it’s been so strange, but there was nothing we could do. They wouldn’t let anyone visit and we didn’t know their address. I haven’t seen her in 19 years. We would talk on the phone from time to time, but every time I would ask to talk to her kids, she wouldn’t let me.
“My parents booked several flights to go see them but when they got there they wouldn’t tell them where to go and my parents left crying every time.”
David Turpin’s parents, James and Betty, who live in West Virginia, described their son and his wife as “deeply religious” and believed God had “called on them” to have so many children. They told ABC that their grandchildren, who they had not seen in five years, were given “very strict home-schooling” and would memorize long passages in the Bible.
The family had filed for bankruptcy in 2011 and were said to have debts of up to $ 500,000 despite David Turpin’s job as an engineer earning $140,000 a year.