The Family Next Door

by John Glatt

  * * *

  Two weeks later, David and Louise posted their official wedding renewal video on Facebook, as well as some photographs of them and the children with “Elvis.”

  “I watched your wedding video,” commented one Facebook friend. “It was great. Your children are so well behaved. I am so proud of you Louise and David. You have a great family.”

  15

  PERRIS

  That Thanksgiving, according to Jordan, David summoned her into the television room upstairs. All her siblings were in their rooms, and Louise was out of the house. He beckoned her over to the recliner he was sitting on, and when she got close, he pulled her pants down.

  “I didn’t like that,” Jordan told him, and she pulled her pants up. Ignoring her, he pulled them back down and lifted her onto his lap. But before he could go any further, they heard Louise arrive home and come up the stairs. Jordan jumped off his lap and pulled her pants up just before she walked into the room.

  Later, David ordered her never to tell anybody what had happened.

  Over the next several years, David would continue his inappropriate advances on his underage daughter.

  “Forcible kissing,” she later told an investigator. “He would try and force kisses on my mouth.”

  * * *

  In April 2014, Mother caught fourteen-year-old Jeanetta playing with her Barbie doll and ordered her to stand in the corner of the upstairs bathroom as punishment. After a couple of hours, Jeanetta became “light-headed and dizzy.” She was unable to stand and felt a tingling in her fingers. When Jeanetta shouted that she felt sick, Louise was on the phone and ignored her. Jeanetta then asked her sister Joanna to tell Mother she wasn’t feeling well, and Jeanetta got into trouble for interrupting the phone call.

  Finally, Jeanetta collapsed on the bathroom floor. When she came to, she was covered in blood, with a fractured chin and broken teeth. She still felt woozy and did not know what had happened.

  When Louise finished her phone call, she came upstairs to find Jeanetta in terrible pain. It was another hour before she took her to Loma Linda University Medical Center, instructing Jeanetta to say she had slipped on a wet bathroom floor. At the hospital, doctors took an x-ray and found the teenager had suffered a hairline fracture to her jaw. She was treated and told to come back for a checkup in a couple of days. But she never did.

  * * *

  One month later, David and Louise bought a brand-new four-bedroom, three-bathroom house in Perris, California, for $350,000. Despite having multiple discharged bankruptcies on their record, they still arranged a thirty-year mortgage for $344,446 from the Federal Housing Administration.

  A few days after signing the mortgage, the Turpin family moved to 160 Muir Woods Road, a ranch-style family home in a new development called the Sequoia at Monument Park. They left the Saint Honore Drive house in such a deplorable state that it had to be fumigated.

  Their new home was just north of Murrieta and still in Riverside County, adding only a few minutes onto David’s daily commute to Northrop Grumman. The brown, tile-roofed, stucco house, sporting an entryway and garage, was a model home in the new development, full of trimmed lawns and landscaped gardens.

  Perris—pronounced like Paris, France—is a bedroom community halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. With a mostly Hispanic population of around seventy-six thousand, the cost of living in Perris was far lower than Murrieta, and the poverty rate was almost 25 percent, one of the highest in Riverside County.

  Perris is best known as a world-class sky-diving center, where well-heeled parachutists gather to try to break records. During free falls, skydivers enjoy perfect views of Monument Park, about a mile away from the town’s luxurious private airport.

  “This is one of the premier skydiving centers in the world,” said the manager of Skydive Perris, Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld. “We do 150,000 jumps every year, and people come from all over the world.”

  But Mother and Father would never let their children leave their new home to watch the adventurous skydivers falling from the skies. Their beautiful new home would become yet another prison for their twelve children and fall into rack and ruin.

  Once they moved to Perris, Louise’s violent abuse knew no bounds. With David working long hours at Northrop Grumman, Louise was now solely in charge of punishing the children. She would slap them around and beat them for the slightest infringement of her rules, regularly chaining up “suspects” for long periods of time as punishment for stealing food and other perceived offenses. And she always made sure the heavy metal chains were bound tightly around their wrists so they couldn’t wriggle out, leading to heavy bruising.

  Mother encouraged her favorites—Jennifer, Joshua, Julianne, and Jeanetta—to spy on their siblings, handing out gifts and other incentives as payment, possibly in an attempt to foster distrust and drive the children apart. These “hall monitors,” as she called them, were the only ones allowed out of the house to accompany Mother on shopping trips and other chores.

  They also guarded the kitchen around the clock to stop their hungry siblings from stealing food or sneaking into Mother’s bedroom. Later, Jordan would refer to the quartet as “their real children,” as they were treated far better than the others. Joshua watched television with his parents, and Jennifer even had social media accounts on her cell phone before it was taken away after she downloaded an app Mother didn’t approve of.

  Like they had in Murrieta, David and Louise forced their children to live a nocturnal existence, yet another method of control.

  “They would go to sleep at four or five in the morning [and] sleep all day,” Riverside County district attorney Mike Hestrin would later explain. “When the rest of the world is up and active, they’re sleeping. Then they would get up and do whatever activities they were going to do throughout the night.”

  Again, Mother and Father confined their kids in different parts of the house. The younger sisters—Jordan, Julissa, Joanna, and Jolinda—shared one bedroom. The middle sisters—Julianne, Jeanetta, Joy, and Jessica—shared a second. Eventually, Jeanetta would sleep out in the hallway. The third bedroom, at the other side of the house, was shared by Jennifer, Joshua, Jonathan, and James. Louise and David had the master bedroom.

  Each bedroom had two sets of bunk beds. There were padlocks on many of the beds so a “suspect” could be chained up as punishment.

  None of the siblings were allowed to leave their bedrooms without Mother’s or Father’s permission. The only other rooms in the house they were allowed in were the bathroom and kitchen / dining room area, when it was their turn to eat.

  The siblings’ schedule depended on what shift Father happened to be working at Northrop Grumman. It was dark when they woke up and dark when they went to bed.

  Though exercise was strictly forbidden, Jordan would walk back and forth in her bedroom for hours at a time, trying to strengthen her unused muscles. She told police that she had to be careful not to get caught, as she was supposed to be sitting down. When she wasn’t pacing in her room, Jordan played with her Barbie dolls and wrote songs and stories in her journal.

  “She told me she had problems with her back,” said Riverside County Sheriff’s Department deputy Manuel Campos. “When she would wake up, her head felt weird. She described it as oozing and vibrating.”

  The only times all the siblings socialized with one another was when Mother and Father were both out of the house. Then they could sneak out of their rooms and hang out. There was Wi-Fi and a landline in the new house, but by then, they were too terrified of Mother and Father—and the overwhelming, overstimulating world outside—to ever try to escape.

  The siblings were fed lunch and dinner during their waking hours. Eventually, this was combined into a single meal, as they were not up long enough to eat two. Under Mother’s direction, mealtimes had developed into a strange, elaborate ritual.

  All meals were prepared by Jennifer, who, after getting Mother’s permission, called her siblings down one at
a time in strict order. They would eat standing up by the kitchen counter, drinking water out of the faucet. Every meal consisted of either a peanut butter sandwich, a baloney sandwich, or a burrito and chips. After they finished eating, they returned to their bedroom, and Jennifer would wait until Mother signaled that the next sibling could come and eat.

  While their children starved, Mother and Father feasted on pizza, Jersey Mike’s, and hearty Mexican food. They brought in mouthwatering pumpkin and apple pies, leaving them on the counter as their starving children watched the pies turn moldy and eventually get thrown away.

  The siblings were still only allowed one bath a year and were filthy, never changing their soiled clothes or getting clean bedclothes. While they were chained up, oftentimes the children soiled themselves.

  Strangely, David and Louise still encouraged them to keep daily journals and even brought in two Maltese dogs as pets, who they fed far better than their children.

  “What was going on in their minds?” asked forensic psychiatrist Dr. Michael Stone, wondering at the Turpin parents’ motives. “That they didn’t allow them to bathe or use the toilet so they would stink. And why is it that they themselves didn’t mind the odor? This is something very strange that is close to the edge of madness.”

  The idea of parents only allowing their children to have one bath a year on special occasions like Mother’s Day, Dr. Stone said, was a special kind of torture.

  “It’s almost like psychotic,” he said. “These [people] are crazy and yet they seem not to be crazy. He’s finished college and has a good job. It’s as if they have some sort of paranoid, weird philosophy.”

  Dr. Stone posited that they had initially based their methods off certain passages in the Bible before rejecting their Pentecostal roots to explore more obscure religions once they’d solidified complete control over their children.

  “Little by little, you might discover,” he explained, “that they had a very bizarre reason for not letting the kids [wash or be hygienic]. As if they were doing God’s work in some fashion.”

  * * *

  Soon after moving to Perris, Louise became pregnant with her thirteenth child. She announced the news on Facebook, beside an old picture of the family at Disneyland.

  “In 9 months we will have a new little one to add,” read the caption.

  * * *

  That summer, Allen Robinette was diagnosed with dementia, and Elizabeth Flores moved to Princeton, West Virginia, to take care of him. Since his retirement two years earlier, and Louise’s refusal to allow him to see his grandchildren, his health had declined rapidly. The once portly man had lost a huge amount of weight and was wasting away.

  “It was sad,” said his friend Verlin Moye.

  By the time Elizabeth arrived from Cleveland, Tennessee, her sixty-five-year-old father was unable to look after himself. She was granted power of attorney and began selling off his possessions, including his valuable autograph and model car collections and NASCAR memorabilia.

  Over the next eighteen months, Elizabeth sold his home and auctioned off everything he owned. Then Louise accused her sister of misappropriating their dying father’s money.

  “She called [our family] bashing me,” wrote Elizabeth in her book, Sisters of Secrets, “and saying she knew I was stealing Daddy’s money, which I was not. It was so hurtful.”

  According to Elizabeth, their bedridden father would often ask to speak to Louise on the phone, but she would not take his calls. She also refused to give her new address to any family member, a clear sign of her increasing paranoia and mental instability.

  * * *

  In October, David officially registered his new Sandcastle Day School with the California Department of Education. He signed an affidavit that the private nonreligious school had eight pupils, once again listing himself as the principal.

  There would be little to no homeschooling in Perris for the children, who, with the exception of Jennifer and Joshua, were still at the kindergarten level. Jolinda, now eleven, had worked her way up to the letter I.

  On the rare occasions Mother did teach her curriculum, she could become violent.

  “If they didn’t do straight lines or stay within lines,” said lead investigator Thomas Salisbury of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office, “Mother would pull their hair and throw them across the room.”

  Before long, Mother stopped giving lessons entirely, leaving the children in educational limbo.

  However, inexplicably, she did enroll Joshua, now twenty-two, in a music course at the nearby Mt. San Jacinto College in Menifee. Over the next three years, he would also take courses in algebra, English fundamentals, public speaking, freshman composition, and guitar. Amazingly, he was an honor student, taking up to fifteen credits a semester and earning As in many of his classes.

  Each day, Louise would drive her rail-thin son, who had thick black glasses and his father’s bangs, seven and a half miles to the college. She would escort him across campus from the parking lot to his classroom and then wait outside in the hallway. When the lesson had finished, she would walk him back to the car for the drive home.

  Angie Parra, who was in Joshua’s class, described the tall, painfully thin student, who wore the same clothes each day, as a “sweet” but “odd introvert” who kept to himself.

  “I could see sadness in his face,” she recalled. “His eyes … he never wanted to make eye contact with anyone.”

  At one class potluck, Parra watched Joshua scarf down as much food as he could as if he were starving.

  “[He was] famished,” she said. “It was very apparent that he was hungry and he stood by the table and didn’t sit down. He literally ate plate after plate after plate [of food].”

  Another student in his music class, Marci Dunker, remembers Joshua was always “hiding” from his classmates, never hanging around after class to socialize.

  “As soon as the class was over, he’d leave,” said Dunker, “and didn’t really talk to anybody. I tried to say hi a couple of times, but all he did was look. I just thought it was strange.”

  Classmate Josh Boldt thought he could be suffering from a serious vitamin deficiency.

  “He was really pale, and it was kind of odd,” said Boldt. “Really malnutrition-like looking. And on top of that, he always had this depressive aura about him and really kept to himself. He was very enclosed.”

  * * *

  Soon after moving to Muir Wood Road, Louise placed statues of Mickey and Minnie Mouse in the yard. Now two of their three vehicles had personalized Disney license plates, and one had a pink Disney car seat. There was also a small stone rattlesnake by the front door, which Louise had bought years earlier at a rattlesnake festival.

  Their new neighbors would occasionally see David and Louise or a couple of their older children collecting mail at the communal mailbox across from their house, but no one suspected their new neighbors had twelve children, with another on the way.

  “[David] looked like Moe of The Three Stooges or Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber,” said Ricardo Ross, whose garden backs up to the Turpins’ house. Ross said that he never saw more than one of two Turpin kids at a time, and they only came out if the road was deserted.

  “When I went to the mailbox,” he said, “they’d wait till I came back in, and that’s [when they came out]. They weren’t very friendly. They avoided everybody.”

  Soon after the Turpins arrived, Salynn Simon, who lived across the street, and her small daughter knocked on their front door to sell them Girl Scout cookies. Louise snapped up eight or nine boxes.

  “Louise would never open the door all the way,” she said, “but I would see children jumping up and down behind her because they were so excited for the cookies. I just thought they were really private.”

  Another neighbor, Kimberly Milligan, said she rarely saw the children and had no idea there were twelve living there. One night, she saw one of the older Turpin boys rummaging for food in a neighbor’s trash can and wondered why
.

  “I thought they were isolated,” said Milligan. “Standoffish … not in a mean way, just ‘don’t bother me.’ I’m in my land, [and] I’m not going to pay attention to you [so] you don’t pay attention to me.”

  * * *

  Throughout her pregnancy, Louise posted photographs on Facebook, proudly showing off her growing belly. In her final trimester, the forty-seven-year-old expectant mother posted a sideways shot of herself next to a large white crib, wearing a bright pink Mickey Mouse maternity T-shirt that read, EMBRACE YOUR BUMP.

  In early 2015, Louise gave birth to her thirteenth child, a baby girl they named Janna. It was their first baby in more than a decade, and some family members questioned it.

  “There’s many years between the two last ones,” said her sister Elizabeth. “And when the family asked about that, [Louise] said, ‘I don’t know. I just couldn’t get pregnant during those years.’”

  Over the next few months, Louise sent picture after picture of her new red-haired baby to her and David’s families. She and David brought their new baby to Disneyland for photo opportunities. The new mother even donned a low-cut Snow White outfit to pose with her chubby baby and posted it on Facebook.

  When Teresa asked Louise to send photographs of her other nieces and nephews, she demurred.

  “She told me, ‘It’s hard to get them all together,’” Teresa recalled. “There was always an excuse.”

  * * *

  On March 27, 2015, John Taylor had a party to celebrate his ninety-first birthday. As he stood in his kitchen by his birthday cake in the shape of a cross, with the words HAPPY 91ST BIRTHDAY DAD iced on it, his daughter, Phyllis, and last surviving son, James, sang “Happy Birthday” to him.

  “Yeah, light that candle,” said Louise’s mother. “It’s a beautiful cake, isn’t it?”