The Family Next Door

by John Glatt

  “This is a highly respectable family,” she said, “[who] had annual passes to Disneyland.”

  The siblings’ grandmother also spoke to Time, accusing the media of distorting everything.

  “We don’t believe anything until we find definite proof,” she told reporter Melissa Chan. “It’s just a one-sided story. You can’t always go with that.”

  She said her college-educated son had had a good upbringing, and she was very proud of him.

  “He’s very likeable,” she said. “Raised in a Christian home all his life. Gone to church all his life.”

  To the Southern California News Group, she called the whole family “model Christians,” saying David shared her Pentecostal faith. She reflected on her own five-day visit to Murrieta six years earlier and said she’d witnessed nothing untoward to raise her suspicions.

  “They are the sweetest family,” she explained. “They were just like any ordinary family, and they had such good relationships. I’m just not saying this stuff. We were amazed.”

  Their grandmother said she never heard any of the kids argue.

  “Some [now] say they were told to behave,” she said. “But you take a household of kids over five days, they’re going to be themselves. It was wonderful.”

  Though Betty was a staunch and outspoken supporter of her son, when reporters attempted to contact David’s older brother, Dr. Randy Turpin, they were told that he had taken a leave of absence from his position as president of Valor Christian College. In a prepared statement, the Ohio-based college said Dr. Turpin was on a sabbatical while he dealt with “revelations about estranged family members.”

  “The Valor Christian community joins with millions of Americans who are shocked and saddened by these terrible stories from California and we are praying for the full recovery of all involved.”

  Soon afterward, David Turpin’s employer, Northrop Grumman, issued a formal statement as well.

  “We are deeply troubled by the nature of the allegations against Mr. Turpin,” it read. “We have no information regarding the case and would refer any inquiries to the authorities.”

  After press reports that Joshua Turpin attended Mt. San Jacinto College, its public information office also felt the need to speak out.

  “Mt. San Jacinto College is aware that one of the children of the Perris couple accused of torture and child endangerment was previously enrolled at MSJC,” a statement read. “These allegations are extremely disturbing. We at Mt. San Jacinto College are deeply saddened and horrified to hear of the allegations involving these children. Our hearts go out to the victims.”

  The college refused to give out any information about the student, citing privacy laws.

  * * *

  On Wednesday morning, Elizabeth Flores appeared on Good Morning America. Producers had flown her to New York the night before for an exclusive interview by Robin Roberts in ABC’s Times Square studios.

  “I know this is a difficult time for everyone,” Roberts began. “It was so hard for all of us to hear about your nieces and nephews. What was it like when you first heard the news?”

  “Well, I was shocked,” Elizabeth replied. “I was devastated, just like the rest of the world.”

  As a series of Facebook pictures of the Turpins at Disneyland flashed up, Roberts asked Elizabeth about the summer she’d spent living with the Turpins in Fort Worth back in 1996.

  “I thought they were really strict,” Elizabeth said, “but I didn’t see any type of abuse.”

  “I heard,” Roberts continued, “that your brother-in-law at the time made you uncomfortable. How so?”

  “Yes,” replied Elizabeth. “If I went to get in the shower, he would come in while I was in there and watch me. And it was like a joke. He never touched me or anything.”

  When Roberts asked what she would like to say to her sister, Elizabeth burst into tears.

  “I want her to know she’s still my flesh and blood, and I love her,” she said, struggling to compose herself. “I don’t agree with what she did … and I want her to know that I’m praying for her salvation. But mainly, we want to reach out to the kids … to know that they do have family that love them, whether they know us or not.”

  * * *

  On Wednesday afternoon, a forensics team from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office removed dozens of boxes of evidence from 160 Muir Woods Road. They also seized two safes and pieces of a bed frame, throwing hundreds of bags of trash into the backyard.

  “Our investigators are combing the scene,” said Deputy Mike Vasquez of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office, “making sure they cover all the angles.”

  Since the Turpin siblings’ rescue, Muir Woods Road had become a tourist destination. Curiosity seekers lined the road, taking photographs. A steady stream of cars drove slowly past the now infamous Turpin house, with rubberneckers snapping pictures on their cell phones.

  “This isn’t Disneyland where you take pictures,” complained Kimberly Milligan. “Who does that?”

  Residents were becoming increasingly upset by all the questions of how all this could have happened without anyone in the neighborhood realizing.

  “How could you blame the community?” asked Andria Valdez. “When we were outside, cars would stop and say, ‘You didn’t know anything?’”

  Mayor Vargas went to the Monument Park community’s aid, comforting neighbors and urging them to be positive.

  “This is something you wouldn’t suspect in an urban-type city,” said the mayor, who is a former Los Angeles police officer. “It’s a fairly new community, so obviously the immediate neighbors were devastated that something like that could happen right underneath their eyes. I don’t want to backseat quarterback anybody … and put the blame on anybody. This could have happened anywhere.”

  With global attention now firmly fixed on Perris, Mayor Vargas said his main concern was for his residents.

  “It’s a very negative thing, and we don’t need that in our city, but I wasn’t worried about that. I was more worried about the neighboring folks, how they were doing and how they were affected by this.”

  Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld, who manages Skydive Perris, said the House of Horrors had been on everyone’s lips.

  “It’s only a mile away from here,” said the six-time world skydiving champion. “It’s insane. It’s on the news everywhere. It just really shows you that maybe you want to know your neighbors better.”

  But along with the backlash came an outpouring of support for the thirteen Turpin siblings from the local community and all over the world. The Corona Chamber of Commerce had donated a bag of new clothes to each of the siblings and opened a fund that would eventually raise more than $200,000 for them.

  “The chamber has been given a gift,” said president Bobby Spiegel. “It is truly an opportunity for us to do something good, because Corona Regional Medical Center is one of our premier members.”

  He said everyone in Corona, a forty-minute drive from Perris, had been moved by the siblings’ plight and wanted to embrace them.

  “I refuse to even call them by their last name,” said Spiegel. “The parents, or those idiots who consider themselves parents, don’t deserve to have their family name carried on. So we changed the whole thing. When people call in, we refer to them as ‘the Magnificent Thirteen,’ as we want to be able to speak it into existence that they’re going to have a magnificent life. And they’ll each be a big contribution to the society.”

  In the days after the escape, the Chamber of Commerce was inundated with offers of support.

  “We were taking two hundred calls a day from people wanting to know how they could help,” said Spiegel. “From every tragedy, good things happen, and this horrific situation has brought the best out of so many people.”

  The Corona Regional Medical Center staff bought each of the seven adults a pair of shoes. These were the first shoes they had ever owned, and they slept in them so they wouldn’t be taken away like their parents had always
done.

  “They were afraid that anything that they got was going to be taken away,” said hospital CEO Mark Uffer. “There was always a question, at least from one or two of them, ‘Is anybody going to take my things?’”

  Uffer promised them that nothing would ever be taken away from them while they were at his facility. During their first few weeks there, the siblings formed close attachments with staff members. It was the first time in their lives they had ever been fussed over and made to feel important.

  “They really thrived on the attention from nurses and staff,” said Uffer. “When they saw certain nurses, they would run to them … a little bit overwhelming when you first experienced it.”

  * * *

  On Thursday morning, Taha Muntajibuddin, who had been in Jennifer Turpin’s third-grade class at Meadowcreek Elementary School, apologized to her on Facebook.

  “Jennifer Turpin was the one girl at Meadowcreek Elementary that nobody wanted to be caught talking to,” he wrote. “Every grade level had a designated ‘cootie kid’ and she held the title for our year.”

  Describing her as “frail” with “pin-straight hair with bangs,” he wrote that she had worn the same purple outfit to school every day and smelled bad. He recalled the entire class “scoffing” at her one day because the teacher had asked her to discard a scrunchie made out of an old Hershey bar wrapper, which she had used to tie her hair back.

  After she moved away at the end of the third grade, Taha had forgotten about Jennifer until reading about the horrific coverage of her siblings’ escape.

  “I can’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of guilt and shame,” he wrote. “Of course, none of us are responsible for the events that ensued, but you can’t help but feel rotten when the classmate your peers made fun of for ‘smelling like poop’ quite literally had to sit in her own waste because she was chained to her bed. It is nothing but sobering to know that the person who sat across from you at the lunch table went home to squalor and filth while you went home to a warm meal and a bedtime story.”

  There was an important lesson to be learned from how his third-grade class so cruelly mocked Jennifer.

  “A simple act of kindness and acceptance may be the ray of hope that that person needs. Befriend the Jennifer Turpins of the world.”

  And he wrote that despite “being vehemently vilified by her peers” Jennifer had always maintained a cheerful disposition, which would ultimately prevail.

  “That despite being let down by her parents and by her peers alike,” he wrote, “Jennifer rose above it all. And I’m going to be rooting for her, as her peer, as her classmate, as her friend. Jennifer Turpin: from ‘cootie girl’ to ‘conquered the world.’”

  22

  “THIS IS DEPRAVED CONDUCT”

  At 11:00 a.m. Thursday morning, Riverside County district attorney Michael Hestrin held a press conference to announce that he was filing seventy-five felony charges against David and Louise Turpin. If convicted of all of them, they faced ninety-four years to life in prison.

  To the right side of the conference room stage were two blown-up mugshots of Louise and David Turpin. So many reporters and camera crews were there that some sat on the stage, just feet away from Hestrin.

  “What I’d like to do today is first tell you what we’ve charged and the potential consequences of those charges,” Hestrin began, “and then give you a snapshot of some of the evidence.”

  He then outlined some of the charges:

  Twelve counts each of torture, against all their children except two-year-old Janna

  Twelve counts each of false imprisonment

  Seven counts each of cruelty to a dependent adult, against their seven children aged eighteen and over

  Six counts each of willful child cruelty, against their six minor children

  One charge against David Turpin of committing a lewd act by force or fear on his daughter Jordan when she was under the age of fourteen

  All the charges ranged from June 11, 2010, when they first moved to Riverside County, to their arrest on January 14, 2018. Hestrin said he would be requesting bail to be set at $13 million for each defendant—$1 million for each child.

  “We’re fully prepared to seek justice in this case,” he said, “and do so in a way that protects these victims from further harm.”

  The youthful, collegiate-looking district attorney, wearing a brown tailored suit and glasses, appealed to anyone with any additional information to contact his senior investigator, Wade Walsvick.

  “We’re asking for the public’s help,” he said. “Not only here in California but in Texas. Someone must have seen something. Someone must have noticed something. We need your help.”

  Hestrin then continued by finally revealing some of the heartbreaking details of the case.

  “First of all, I want to tell you these individuals sleep all day and are up all night,” he said. “All thirteen of the victims, including defendants, typically got to sleep around four or five in the morning.”

  He went on to specify some of the horrific punishments David and Louise Turpin had employed to condition and control their own children.

  “Starting many years ago, they began to be tied up,” said the DA. “First with ropes. One victim … was tied up and hog-tied. When that victim was able to escape the ropes, these defendants eventually began using chains and padlocks to chain up the victims to their beds. These punishments would last for weeks or even months at a time.”

  The DA revealed that three of the victims had actually been chained up when police first arrived.

  “Circumstantial evidence in the house,” he continued, “suggests that the victims were often not released from their chains to go to the bathroom.”

  He then discussed the escape, which Jordan had been planning with her siblings for more than two years.

  “She escaped through a window,” said Hestrin, “and took one of her siblings with her. That sibling eventually became frightened and turned back and went back into the house.”

  The DA told reporters that the “neglect and abuse” had started when the family lived in Texas. At one point, the parents had lived apart from most of the children, occasionally dropping off food. After the family moved to Murrieta in 2010, the abuse and severe neglect intensified.

  “All the victims have now been examined by doctors and medical professionals,” he said. “All the victims were and are severely malnourished.”

  He said that twenty-nine-year-old Jennifer weighed just eighty pounds, and thirteen-year-old Jolinda was the weight of a seven-year-old. Several of the victims had suffered cognitive impairment and nerve damage, the result of years of physical abuse. The punishments, he said, included frequent beatings and even strangulation.

  None of the victims, said Hestrin, had seen a doctor in over four years and had never been to the dentist. They were allowed to shower only once a year. When the siblings were not chained up, they were locked in different rooms and fed meagerly on a schedule. Although they were not allowed toys, investigators had found many unopened toys in the house, still in their original packaging. To gasps from reporters, the DA explained how David and Louise would cruelly taunt their starving children by leaving scrumptious pies on the kitchen counter. They could see and smell the pies but were forbidden from eating them, having to watch them rot before being thrown away.

  “Supposedly homeschooled,” he continued, “the children lacked even a basic knowledge of life. Many of the children didn’t know what a police officer was.”

  The only thing the siblings were allowed to do was to keep journals. Hundreds of them were now being “combed through” by investigators for evidence.

  “It’s a very complex case,” said the DA. “It’s important that we gather and analyze this evidence. Based on the information I’ve shared with you today, it’s my hope that members of the public will come forward with any information about this family or these crimes.”

  Hestrin then introduced his director of Vi
ctim Services, Melissa Donaldson, to talk about help the children would be receiving.

  She told reporters they would need long-term help, and her department would be working closely with Child Protective Services to ensure they were not revictimized.

  “We have a crisis response team,” she said, “and those victim advocates are specially trained in mass casualty and victimization [and] are ready and serving the victims.”

  Then DA Hestrin opened the floor for questions. The first was what the lewd act charge was in reference to.

  “We’re alleging that David Turpin,” he said, “touched one of the victims in a lewd way by using force or fear.”

  Asked if David and Louise were the biological parents of all thirteen children, Hestrin said it was too early to know, but investigators would certainly be looking into it.

  A TV reporter asked why they had done this to their children.

  “I don’t know that I can answer that completely,” Hestrin replied. “But I’ll tell you that as a prosecutor, there are cases that stick with you, that haunt you. Sometimes in this business we’re faced with looking at human depravity, and that’s what we’re looking at here.”

  He was then asked to characterize the type of control the parents put the children under twenty-four hours a day.

  “This is severe emotional, physical abuse,” he answered. “There’s no way around that. This is depraved conduct.”

  A reporter asked whether the parents were “partly nuts.”

  “I can’t answer that question,” replied the DA.

  Finally, he was asked how his team of investigators was dealing with this “horrendous case” on a personal level while remaining objective.

  “Well, we’re not robots,” Hestrin said, “and this is difficult for everybody that sees these images and hears these stories. So it breaks our heart. But we’re professionals. Ultimately, our job is to go into court and seek justice, and we’re going to do that.”