Captive siblings ‘found starving’
INVESTIGATORS this week have conducted an exhaustive search of the foulsmelling, filthy tract home east of Los Angeles where a California couple are accused of keeping captive and nearly starving their 13 minor and adult children, police said.
“We have investigators on scene, combing through everything they can find for additional evidence,” Riverside Sheriff’s Deputy Mike Vasquez said.
“They’re trying to gather more information that may assist them in providing a full description of what was going on there.
“The whole house is a crime scene,” he added.
Officers raided the house in the small city of Perris, about 113 kilometres east of Los Angeles, on Sunday after the 17-year-old, girl whose name was not released, called the 911 emergency number on a cellphone. She was so small and emaciated, officers at first thought she was about 10 years old.
David Turpin, 57, and Louise Turpin, 49, are accused of keeping their 13 offspring, aged two to 29, in filthy and fetid conditions, chaining some to their beds and giving them so little food the adult children were initially mistaken for minors, police said. They are all believed to be the couple’s biological children. Neighbours and family members have offered little insight into the couple’s motivations or actions. Experts have said it may have been easier for the parents to shield their children from scrutiny because they were homeschooled.
Reached by telephone on Wednesday at the West Virginia home of David Turpin’s parents, his mother, Betty Turpin, said she was busy preparing paperwork and entering information into a computer to help her son. She said the family had engaged an attorney, who advised them not to speak about the case.
But Louise Turpin’s sister, Elizabeth Jane Flores, told ABC News on Wednesday that in hindsight there were concerning signs, including a refusal to allow family visits or talks with the children on Skype.
Neighbour Kimberly Milligan, 50, said on Wednesday that over the three years she had lived across the street from the Turpins she had seen a few of the older children, looking pale and always accompanied by a parent, but never the entire group.
“It was something that always nagged at me,” she said. “Why don’t I see those kids?”
Kidnapping survivor and advocate Elizabeth Smart said on Wednesday that the 13 siblings suffered the “ultimate betrayal” and will likely find it difficult to trust others. Ms Smart, abducted as a teenager from her Utah home in 2002, nevertheless expressed optimism that they could eventually overcome the trauma of physical confinement, malnourishment and social isolation.
“The human spirit is incredibly resilient, so I do believe each one of them can go on to live a full life, to reclaim what’s been taken from them,” she said.
Psychiatrists and child abuse experts said intensive therapy would likely be required for the children.
She said that occasional outings the Turpins took with their kids, like those she went on with her abductors, were likely used as both “a show of control” by the parents and to give their children some sense of normalcy.