WHY DIDN’T ANYONE RAISE THE ALARM OVER THE ...

THe alert to police came through at 6am on Sunday, a panicked call from a teenage girl with a deeply disturbing story to tell.

She said she had just escaped through a window from a house in the California town of Perris after managing to get hold of a deactivated mobile phone that could still make emergency calls.

Her 12 siblings were still inside, she said, starving and some of them chained to their beds. Their captors, she revealed chillingly, were their own parents.

Riverside County sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to find the 17-year-old. They got their first inkling that something was terribly wrong when they found a girl so small and emaciated that she looked like she was only ten.

When, acting on phone pictures she had taken as evidence, officers went into the nondescript, single-storey house on Muir Woods Road, they found the teenager had not exaggerated the nightmare going on inside.

Police confirmed yesterday they found three of the children shackled to furniture with chains and padlocks in ‘dark and foul-smelling surroundings’. Officers said it wasn’t yet clear how long they had been held in such conditions in the filthy home but it appeared to have been a ‘prolonged’ period.

The children – ten of them female – were ‘malnourished and very dirty’. They admitted they were starving and begged their rescuers for food and drink. While the youngest of those they rescued was only two, it gradually dawned on the horrified officers that some of the ‘children’ were nothing of the kind.

Seven were adults, their frail and malnourished appearances hiding the fact they were aged 18 to 29. Still dressed in their pyjamas, they were all immediately taken to hospital for treatment.

Their parents, David and Louise Turpin, ‘were unable to immediately provide a logical reason why their children were restrained in that manner’, said police. While a neighbour insisted Mrs Turpin, 49, spat twice on the ground before she and her husband were led out in handcuffs, police chief Capt Greg Fellows claimed she had appeared ‘perplexed’ when officers arrived. He praised the ‘courage’ of the girl who escaped.

The parents have been charged with torture and child endangerment – and America has been plunged into one of its most disturbing cases of child abuse for decades.

Police say there is no sign that the siblings were sexually abused. Mark Uffer, chief executive of a hospital treating the seven grownup children, said: ‘It’s hard to think of them as adults, they are so small.’ He added that they were stable and very friendly. ‘I believe they are hopeful life will get better for them after this event,’ he said.

The picture emerging yesterday of the parents, who have yet to issue a plea, was of an intensely religious but deeply odd and controlling couple who managed to raise a vast brood without their neighbours or even close relatives realising there was something terribly wrong.

In fact, some of those who lived in the quiet suburban road didn’t

‘The children begged for food and drink’