The Family Next Door

by John Glatt

  8

  DL4EVER

  In the summer of 2001, four-year-old Joy Turpin was bitten in the face by the family’s white-and-black border collie. More than a day passed before David Turpin called 911, and emergency responders rushed her to the emergency room at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, where she got stitches. The Turpin dog, which had not been vaccinated for rabies, was taken to a local veterinarian and put down. The incident was reported to the Hill County Sheriff’s Office, but no officers were ever sent to 595 Hill County Road to investigate further.

  “Nobody,” said Hill County chief deputy Rick White, “had anything that led them to believe that there were any concerns.”

  That Christmas, James and Betty Turpin spent the holidays in Rio Vista with their eight grandchildren. It was the first of two visits they would make over the next several years. Later, they maintained they never saw anything untoward during their stay, and all the children seemed fine.

  In a family photo dated January 4, 2002, the Turpin grandparents pose on the living room sofa, flanked by David and a grinning Louise, with her arm around her mother-in-law. One of their small daughters hovers in a doorway behind them like a ghost.

  A few months later, fifteen-year-old Billy Lambert came to visit. His half sister Louise was now pregnant with her ninth child, James. He was impressed by their apparently affluent lifestyle.

  “They didn’t want for nothing,” he later told Sunday Mirror reporter Chris Bucktin. “David had a good job in the airplane industry in Texas and was well paid.”

  The highlight of his visit was his brother-in-law taking him to the Lockheed Martin plant in Fort Worth, where he worked.

  “He worked in Air Force One when Bill Clinton was president,” said Billy.

  Billy liked David, whom he found very generous and who always tried to make him laugh, but during his visit, he observed how strictly David and Louise had trained their children. On family trips to the Fort Worth Stockyards and Six Flags, Billy watched the identically dressed children line up in single file, standing at attention, before they were allowed to board the minibus.

  “It was military-like,” recalled Billy. “Everything was so regimental … and everything they did had its own routine. Any sign of dissent and they would be punished.”

  Billy also saw the classroom in the living room, where David and Louise supposedly homeschooled their children.

  “There was schoolwork there,” said Billy. “I did see some books and four or five desks. There were papers, reading tests, math, equations. I didn’t watch Louise physically teach them, but there was some evidence of schoolwork there.”

  During his stay, Billy found all his nieces and nephews remote and standoffish.

  “The oldest just seemed like she didn’t want to hold a conversation with you,” he explained. “She didn’t really want to make eye contact. They just didn’t seem like they wanted to go out there and play.”

  It was the last time he would ever be invited to Rio Vista for a family visit.

  * * *

  In early 2003, one of the Turpins’ starving pigs escaped and waddled onto Ricky Vinyard’s uncle’s property, devouring fifty-five pounds of dog food under the carport. The giant pig then charged Ricky’s uncle, who fired his pistol into the air to scare it away. His uncle filed a complaint with the Hill County Sheriff’s Office, who dispatched a deputy to investigate. The officer interviewed David Turpin outside his house but never went in. After Turpin agreed to replace the dog food, the case was dropped.

  In a subsequent report by the Hill County Sheriff’s Office, it was noted that Turpin had “penned” the hog after it escaped and would ensure it never got free again.

  Soon afterward, one of the Turpins’ cows escaped and wandered onto neighbor Nellie Baldwin’s property. When she walked over to inform them, no one came to the door.

  * * *

  A few months later, Louise gave birth to her tenth child, Joanna. It was a milestone for the Turpins, who sent photographs of their new baby back to Princeton, along with their annual Christmas card. Allen Robinette took great satisfaction in having so many grandchildren, although he had never met some of them. He would often talk about them to his colleagues in the Mercer County Assessor’s Office.

  “He was really proud about how large the family was,” recalled his friend and colleague Verlin Moye. “He spoke to me when they had just had their tenth child, and I told him that I couldn’t imagine a family that large. But he mentioned that David made good money, so he was able to have a large family.”

  After the family moved to Rio Vista, Allen Robinette had only visited them once. It had been during the summer, and he was not used to the withering Texas heat.

  “I remember him being impressed with the new surroundings,” said Moye, “and being able to see his grandkids. He was a family man, and he cared for them deeply. He loved them.”

  That was the last time he ever saw Louise, David, and his grandchildren, but they continued to talk regularly on the phone.

  Louise frequently sent photographs of her ten children to family members. The children were always smiling and well dressed in matching clothes. Teresa, who hadn’t seen her oldest sister for five years, thought her nieces and nephews looked very thin. When she asked her sister about it, Louise explained that David was “lanky” and their children took after him. Teresa accepted her explanation.

  “The pictures we got always looked like healthy kids,” she explained. “They always had smiles. They were always dressed in the nicest of clothes.”

  David and Louise often ate out at Applebee’s Grill and Bar, a few miles away in Cleburne. They were regulars at several local restaurants, although they always dined alone. Their children stayed home.

  “We saw the parents out at Applebee’s a couple of times when we would go out on date night,” said Shelli Vinyard. “She looked slim in a pair of jeans and a vest. She’d be with her husband but not with the kids.”

  Louise and David also loved going to Billy Bob’s Texas rodeo show at the Fort Worth Stockyards. Once they posed for a souvenir photo, riding a bull together in full cowboy gear, which they used on the family Christmas card.

  That Christmas, Louise and David went on a shopping spree, buying ten expensive new children’s bicycles. They lined them up under the carport with the price tags on the handlebars and stickers on the wheels for all the neighbors to see. There they remained, unridden, for years, as the sun bleached all the stickers.

  “It was disgusting,” said Ricky Vinyard. “There was a lot of money spent on toys that were never used.”

  Shelli said that even when the children ventured out at night to play, they never touched the bicycles.

  “And they just sat and rotted,” she remembered. “No one ever played with them.”

  Louise actually boasted to family members about the top-of-the-line bicycles they had bought their kids as Christmas presents.

  “We were led to believe that the kids had all these bikes and nice clothes,” said Billy Lambert. “They always said that anything their kids wanted, they had.”

  * * *

  In May 2004, a gleaming new Clayton double-wide mobile home—worth $63,000—suddenly appeared on the Turpin property. David Turpin pulled it through a fence and onto his land, parking it 150 yards behind their house. He laid an aboveground water line from the house to the trailer, as well as electric cables with a meter.

  Then David and Louise and their ten children moved into the trailer, leaving their house empty. It was now uninhabitable, garbage and feces strewn everywhere.

  “You never saw them again,” said Ashley. “As I got older, I realized, ‘There are a lot of kids over there growing up or half-grown-up. What are they doing?’”

  Barbara Vinyard could still hear the younger Turpin children playing in their yard at night. She decided to make one final attempt to befriend them, taking her jump rope across the street and knocking on their trailer door.

  The door
was opened by a rail-thin girl with long brown hair. She looked as pale as a ghost, staring at the visitor.

  “Her eyes just got real wide,” Barbara remembered. “She closed the door back in my face.”

  A few minutes later, the girl emerged from the back of the trailer and approached her.

  “[She] looked at me,” said Barbara, “and then ran back away into the house, through the back door.”

  * * *

  Soon after the move, Louise gave birth to their eleventh child, a baby girl named Jolinda. Once again, Louise sent photos of the newest Turpin baby to family members, saying how blessed she and David were to have so many children.

  That summer, James and Betty Turpin returned to Rio Vista for a five-day visit to see their grandchildren. It was a brutally hot day, over a hundred degrees, when they arrived at the Turpin trailer and knocked on the door. There was no answer.

  When Ricky and Shelli Vinyard saw the well-dressed elderly couple waiting outside in obvious discomfort, they invited them into their house until David and Louise returned.

  “It’s blistering hot here in August,” said Ricky. “They looked like regular people, and we let them in to use the facilities.”

  Shelli remembers the Turpin grandparents as being “strange in an uptight way.” She became uncomfortable when Betty started asking whether she religiously instructed her children.

  “The grandparents came here to use the facilities,” she remembered, “and she was like, ‘Well, I hope you spend a lot of time with your children, reading and praying and all this hands-on stuff.’ I felt like I was being grilled in my own home.”

  An uncomfortable silence set in. Finally, the senior Turpins stood up, saying they were going to drive around in their car and wait for Louise and David to come home.

  A few days later, David and Louise came over to thank the Vinyards for looking after their parents and brought them some cupcakes.

  * * *

  In 2006, David and Louise Turpin’s twelfth child was born. They named her Julissa. The proud parents celebrated by setting up a new email address, lessbythedozen@gmail.com, a spoof on the Steve Martin comedy Cheaper by the Dozen, which had come out two years earlier. Louise had finally achieved her childhood ambition to have twelve children. She even had a personalized car plate made for their Mustang—DL4EVER.

  The Turpins now had twelve kids in just seventeen years—but ten years would pass before they had another.

  Soon after Julissa was born, Elizabeth Flores suffered a miscarriage and telephoned her big sister for support.

  “Louise [told] me that she had a couple of miscarriages herself,” Elizabeth later wrote in her memoir. “‘I know how you feel,’ she said while crying. ‘It’s like losing a part of yourself.’”

  9

  LORD OF THE FLIES

  After moving into the trailer, Father built a makeshift cage to imprison any children who dared to break his rules. The large metal cage was seven feet wide by five feet tall and divided in half to accommodate two offenders. It had thick pegboard siding with holes in it, the type usually found in a garage for hanging tools. There was a five-inch gap at the bottom where food could be pushed through.

  According to prosecutors, Mother and Father started locking their children in the padlocked cage for days at a time. But before long, Jonathan, now eight, discovered how to escape by lifting the bottom up and crawling out.

  To prevent this, Father brought in a dog kennel with a padlock. The three-by-three-foot metal kennel was far too small for the children to stand up in.

  Joshua, then a lanky sixteen-year-old, would later tell investigators how he was locked up in the kennel for a day after Mother caught him watching a Star Wars video.

  * * *

  A free video-calling service called Skype had recently been introduced, and Louise began making regular Skype calls to her family back east. It was the first time they had ever seen all her children, although Louise would never let them talk to more than two at a time.

  “She would bring in one or two,” said Teresa, “and then she would send them out and tell them to send down so-and-so. They were friendly, but it was a very weird conversation every time, because they weren’t real talkative.”

  Over the next few years, Louise became increasingly reluctant to let the family talk to the children on Skype. It was as if she didn’t want them to see the children.

  “It got really strange,” said Teresa. “She would just start making up excuses of why she couldn’t video chat.”

  Louise would explain how she and David were too busy looking after all their children, promising to Skype them the following weekend.

  “And then it just never happened,” said Teresa. “Then seven to eight years passed, and we didn’t video chat or anything.”

  * * *

  At some point after moving into the trailer, Mother and Father abandoned their children for four years. They found an apartment forty miles south in Benbrook, Texas, taking Julissa and Jolinda with them.

  Jennifer and Joshua were put in charge of their eight younger siblings. Every few days, David would arrive at the trailer to drop off frozen food. Louise never visited.

  The ten remaining Turpin children had to fend for themselves, a real-life version of William Golding’s 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies. In the book, a group of British adolescents are stranded on a remote island after their plane crashes. They soon become savages, turning on one another as they try to survive on the tropical island by themselves.

  Over the next few years, the children lived in appalling conditions in the trailer, which was overflowing with excrement and rubbish. Under the parents’ orders, the children were still forbidden to wash above their wrists. Their pet animals defecated inside, and the smell was often unbearable in the long hot summers. There was also no medical treatment for any of the children if they hurt themselves. Jonathan still has three scars on his head from living in the cramped trailer and bumping into various pieces of furniture.

  Although they now lived almost an hour’s drive away, Mother and Father still completely controlled their children over the phone. Joshua was ordered to change diapers and Jennifer put in charge of preparing basic meals for her siblings. The two oldest children were also instructed to punish any of their brothers and sisters who broke their parents’ rules, by locking them in cages. “Time-outs in the cage is how [Joshua] described it,” said Wade Walsvick, a senior investigator for the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office. “He said if he didn’t do it, he would then be put in the cage.”

  Cult expert Rick Ross said this is typical family cult behavior.

  “The family members spy on each other,” he explained. “When you are a child in a family cult, you are raised, from your earliest memory, embedded in this kind of system. And you know nothing else. These children are typically homeschooled. They don’t have contact with the outside world, unless it’s managed by their father—by their leader. And so the other children are going to monitor you, and they will inform on you.”

  For more than three years, Joshua and Jennifer were both torn by having to maintain their parents’ reign of terror in the trailer. Eventually, they both tried to escape.

  During an emotional interview with Investigator Walsvick in 2018, Joshua attempted to explain how he had once tried to confront Mother and Father but became too overwhelmed by fear to continue.

  “He wanted to rebel,” Walsvick would later testify, “and he tried to tell me about a conversation between his mother and his father where they instilled this fear. He could not finish the conversation.”

  After composing himself, Joshua told Walsvick, “I chose to take the correct path and try to keep my siblings alive.”

  Early one morning, Jennifer actually managed to escape from the trailer in a desperate attempt to live outside the family. She ran across neighboring properties, scaling several fences, before doubling back to Hill County Road to summon help.

  Shelli Vinyard was taking her daughter
Barbara to school when she saw Jennifer running toward her.

  “She was coming out of the woods behind me,” said Shelli, “which means she would have had to have snuck out of her house.”

  A neighbor then stopped her pickup truck, and Jennifer climbed inside.

  “From what I was told,” said Shelli, “she didn’t seem to know who the president was.”

  The terrified girl refused to give her name or age, asking how she could get a job, an apartment, and a car.

  The neighbor drove Jennifer into town, where she attempted to get a job. But without a driver’s license or any identification, she never stood a chance.

  “She had no real prospects,” said deputy DA Kevin Beecham. “No socialization whatsoever. So what did she do? She called her mother. And her mother came, picked her up, and took her away.”

  Ricky Vinyard still remembers the incident, which was the talk of Hill County Road at the time.

  “It was terrifying,” he said.

  Neither the Hill County Sheriff’s Office nor the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services have any record of it.

  Sheriff Rodney Watson said the runaway Turpin girl should certainly have raised red flags at the time.

  “A lot of people will dismiss some things that they hear as just crazy talk, which is sad,” he said in 2018. “We could have stopped a lot of years of suffering.”

  * * *

  At around 1:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 6, 2007, five-year-old Mikey Vinyard was playing outside his parents’ house, when his father, Ricky, backed up his car. The little boy suddenly ran out behind him, and Vinyard accidentally hit him. Mikey was rushed to Harris Methodist Walls Regional Hospital in Cleburne, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

  The tragedy shocked Rio Vista and made the front page of the Cleburne-Times Review. Even David and Louise, who happened to be in town at the time, visited their grieving neighbors.