The Family Next Door

by John Glatt

  “They probably had a level of trust within their bonds with each other,” she explained. “So while they didn’t trust their parents most likely, they might have developed that trust with their older siblings. And vice versa.

  “They can develop some of those [emotional] skills, because you have older kids taking care of younger kids. And as they’re healing in the outside world, the relationships they develop with folks over time, and building intimacy and authenticity into those relationships, they can develop an ability to trust. They can experience and learn that not all humans are the same as their mom and dad.”

  According to Maxon, the abrupt removal of the siblings from the connections they’d made at the hospital could be detrimental to their healing.

  “Children who have horrific childhood experiences with both parents can develop loving, trusting relationships with people who are there for them on an ongoing basis over their life span. It doesn’t happen quickly, and it shouldn’t. What they are going to need are folks permanently committed to them,” Maxon said. “Not a lot of temporary people rotating in and out of their lives, but people that are very committed to them and their healing over the long haul. And that’s really healing that relational dance and what we call the corrective experience, making sure they have access to meaningful, long-term, safe, loving, and healing relationships.”

  * * *

  The day after the older siblings were discharged from Corona Regional Medical Center, senior investigator Wade Walsvick interviewed Jordan Turpin, who was now living in a foster home. Jordan told him about her miserable life in Murrieta, saying she barely received any education.

  “She equated her level of education to that of a first grader,” said Walsvick.

  The investigator, trained in questioning child abuse victims, said Jordan had accused her father of sexually assaulting her at the Murrieta house. Giving more detail than she had earlier, Jordan said it happened during Thanksgiving 2013, when she was only twelve. Father had been sitting in a recliner in the upstairs TV room, when he beckoned her over.

  After he pulled her pants down, she pulled them back up, saying she didn’t like that. But he pulled them down again, lifted her up, and placed her on his lap. At that point, they heard Mother coming up the stairs, and he let her go.

  “She said her father directed her not to tell anyone,” said Walsvick. “She described it as one of the worst days of her life.”

  Jordan said that she was so upset, she decided to kill herself. She went into the bathroom and filled up the sink, planning to drown herself. But then she changed her mind.

  Three weeks later, Walsvick interviewed the oldest siblings, Jennifer and Joshua Turpin. Jennifer told him she had reached third grade at Meadowcreek Elementary in Fort Worth before her parents had taken her out of school. Jennifer said Mother had eventually presented them with high school diplomas.

  “She said it wasn’t real,” said the investigator, “because you just simply ordered it online, which is what her mother did for her. She said that’s for homeschoolers.”

  The investigator also asked her whose idea it was to start chaining up the children as punishment.

  “She told me it was her father’s idea to utilize chains,” Walsvick later testified. “He said, ‘Things were going to continue to keep missing in the house if we don’t chain all of them.’”

  Jennifer said that Mother had opposed it, only wanting to chain up “suspects” who had stolen food or other things.

  When Walsvick interviewed Joshua, he was extremely agitated.

  “To say that he was nervous and anxious would be an understatement,” said the investigator. “Joshua could barely speak at some points of the interview.”

  Joshua described the different levels of punishment his parents had inflicted on the siblings, and their progression over the years.

  “The low threshold would be slapping, knocking on the head, hitting, and/or throwing across the room,” the investigator testified. “And he made a point to explain to me that being pushed was not as simplistic as it sounds. If you were pushed by either his mother or his father, it threw you to the ground or across the room. It was to that degree.”

  The next level of punishment would be whipping with a belt. It would start with the leather end, but his parents soon progressed to using the buckle end, which would break skin. If a sibling continued to disobey after that, their parents would use a paddle and then an oar to beat them on the lower back, buttocks, and legs.

  “He described the oar as the worst of the worst,” said Walsvick.

  “Joshua said his parents also beat them with what he called ‘a switch,’ which was a metal tent pole wrapped in fiberglass, with metal tips on the end that would break the skin. [His parents] would both implement and utilize these devices. He preferred it if his mother would do it [as] she did not have the strength [his father] did.”

  If these punishments still did not work to curb their behavior, they would be caged up like animals. Mother and Father used two types of cages while they lived in the trailer in Rio Vista, Texas. The first, a metal-framed cage with a thick pegboard siding, could hold two offenders. At the bottom, there was just enough space to slide food inside. But they stopped using it after Jonathan managed to escape.

  Then Mother and Father brought in a three-by-three-foot dog cage, which Joshua referred to as “a common shepherd dog kennel.”

  “That would be locked with an additional lock and key,” said the investigator. “You cannot stand up in it and you cannot escape from it.”

  His parents had once locked him in the cage for a day, Joshua said, after Mother caught him watching a Star Wars movie.

  Joshua also explained that they had moved into the double-wide trailer in Rio Vista after their house had become uninhabitable. Soon afterward, Mother and Father left, moving into a more comfortable apartment with their two youngest children, Jolinda and Julissa.

  “They abandoned the children for … three years,” explained the investigator, “[to live] in an apartment approximately fifty miles away.”

  Joshua said that their parents had left him and Jennifer in charge of their eight younger siblings, changing their diapers and feeding them. Father occasionally came by with food, but they never saw Mother. However, they continued to control their children over the phone, ordering Joshua and Jennifer to punish their siblings for any misdeeds or risk being put in “time-outs” in the cages themselves.

  During the interview, Joshua struggled to explain how he had once tried to rebel. But he was so overcome with emotion that he could not finish telling Walsvick the story.

  “I chose to take the correct path to keep my siblings alive,” Joshua said.

  * * *

  On Friday, March 23, David and Louise Turpin were back in Riverside County Superior Court for a felony settlement conference to discuss the exchange of discovery and other issues. A few minutes before the hearing started, Elizabeth Flores, Tricia Andreassen, and Melissa Moore arrived with Denise Perdoux, an attorney from The Dr. Oz Show, and waited outside the courtroom. They were allowed in to take their seats before the press entered.

  Inside, David and Louise Turpin were already at the defense table with their respective attorneys. For the first time, neither of the defendants were shackled.

  Before the hearing began, Judge Emma Smith summoned all the attorneys into her chambers for a conference. Alone at the defense table and just three feet apart, the defendants smiled at each other. Louise whispered something to David, but a female bailiff ordered her to be quiet. She smiled at her sister and cousin, who sat in the back row of the public gallery directly behind her.

  During the five-minute hearing, a representative of Riverside Adult Protective Services handed over two boxes of evidence containing information about the seven adult siblings. It was immediately sealed by the judge.

  After court adjourned for the day, reporters and TV crews besieged Elizabeth and Tricia outside the Riverside Hall of Justice, shouting q
uestions about Louise. At one point, a tearful Elizabeth had a panic attack and had to sit down on a bench to recover. Once she regained her composure, she was escorted to a waiting car by Tricia and Melissa Moore.

  Outside his law offices, defense attorney David Macher was asked about Elizabeth’s recent announcement that she was writing a book and the ongoing coverage on Louise from The Dr. Oz Show.

  “Isn’t that nice. Family,” he said. “It does sound like people are trying to turn it into a reality show and make a profit off it.”

  * * *

  Two weeks after the seven adult Turpin children moved into their new home, their attorney, Caleb Mason, gave People an update on their progress. Their main priority, he said, would be to get an education.

  “They are all bright and articulate,” said Mason, “and incredibly eager to study. The thing they want more than anything else is an education.”

  The attorney said a local university was drafting an educational plan to help them get their GEDs or high school diplomas.

  “That is what we are trying to remedy right now,” explained Mason. “They do not want to be sequestered doing their education online. They want to get the same sort of education as anyone else. We are hoping that we can find them, within the next couple of years, sitting in a college campus taking notes like anybody else. They have the same … educational aspirations as any other group of young adults.”

  Mason said it had been inspirational to witness the siblings adapting to their new lives after leaving the hospital.

  “It is pretty new and different,” he said, “and, I think, quite extraordinary to have some freedom, really for the first time, and experience life outside the type of constraints they had experienced. It is an extraordinarily positive thing for them, and it will take some time to get used to. They are moving to the next phase of their journey, which is actually beginning to rejoin the community.”

  The siblings’ transition into the outside world would deliberately be slow, to help them acclimatize.

  “Eventually, they are going to be just regular people, going to classes, getting jobs … and you would never know,” said Mason. “The problem is that they have been through some unparalleled trauma, so it is going to take a little time. But I think they are very resilient, and they are going to ultimately be fine.”

  * * *

  The Dr. Oz Show flew Elizabeth Flores and Tricia Andreassen back to Princeton, West Virginia, to film a two-part special tracing the Turpin family roots.

  On March 27, John Taylor had turned ninety-four. Days later, his granddaughter and grandniece arrived at his house in Bailey Hollow Road to finally confront him about his sexual abuse—“the original House of Horrors,” as Melissa Moore described it.

  From the car, Tricia spotted their grandfather outside in the backyard, pottering around.

  “Oh my god!” cried Elizabeth. “My heart is racing.”

  Then Tricia got out of the car to confront him. She marched up to the front door and knocked, and Taylor opened the door and let her in. Half an hour later, she came out again, a blank look on her face.

  Three weeks later, in front of a studio audience, Dr. Oz asked Tricia what had happened inside the house.

  “I told him that I was Patty,” she said, “and he remembered me. And I said, ‘I’d like to address something with you right now. No matter what you say, I forgive you.’”

  As the studio audience listened in rapt attention, Tricia explained that she had been “armored up” with her Bible, asking him about what he had done to Louise and other female family members.

  “He had the opportunity to share that,” she explained, “and he said, ‘I don’t remember what you’re talking about.’ He denied everything.”

  Tricia announced that she soon would be filing a criminal complaint against him.

  “I’m going to press charges,” she declared to the applause of the audience. “It’s time for me not to live in the past.”

  * * *

  Ten days after The Dr. Oz Show aired, John Taylor died at Princeton Community Hospital of natural causes. In his obituary posted online by the funeral home, he was saluted as a highly decorated war hero and the former owner of the Shell station on Athens Road.

  “John proudly served his county in the United States Army,” it read. “During his time in the Army he was awarded two purple hearts; Silver Star; five bronze stars; Good Conduct Metal [sic] and French Fortiche metal [sic]. John was also the Past State President Purple Heart; Past Commander of the VFW, Mercer County Veterans Counsel, Member of the American Legion and DAV and was Chaplain for the Military funerals. John was also a member of the Church of God.”

  No mention was made of his granddaughter Louise or her children.

  * * *

  On April 9, Riverside assemblyman Jose Medina introduced a bill into the California State Assembly to tighten up regulations for homeschools. It was a direct response to the Turpin case and the lack of oversight it highlighted.

  “I think it was clear [from the incident in Perris] that we don’t have a lot of information on homeschooling in the state of California,” Medina explained.

  But the assemblyman knew it would be a difficult bill to get passed, as homeschooling was such a controversial subject.

  “I call it swimming upstream,” he said, “struggling to make it to the finish line—to make it to the governor’s desk. That’s the process.”

  In an editorial in The Californian, homeschooling advocate Maximo A. Gomez took issue with Medina’s bill, labeling it progressive socialism.

  “No doubt everyone … has heard of the tragedy in Southern California in which home-schooling parents were arrested in January for the psychological and physical abuse of their thirteen children,” he wrote. “Louise and David Turpin were charged with multiple felony counts of torture, child abuse, abuse of dependent adults and false imprisonment. Now, the state of California, but principally … Assemblyman Jose Medina, [is] endeavoring to paint every home-schooling parent with the same brush. Every home-schooling parent in California has suddenly been transformed into a sexually depraved, masochistic, cultist, gun-toting nut job.”

  At the Assembly Education Committee meeting on Wednesday, April 25, Medina argued against this claim. “I do not see a problem in the homeschool community,” he told the committee. “I respect parents as educators, being an educator myself. This bill is not an attempt to in any way attack homeschooling.”

  But after a three-hour debate, Medina’s bill died without a vote even being taken. Hundreds of homeschool parents and students from all over California had written to their assemblymen, opposing the bill.

  After the meeting, Medina vowed to continue his fight to make homeschools more accountable. If they were, he said, “perhaps what happened with the Turpin family could have been avoided.”

  * * *

  At the end of April, Teresa Robinette announced that she was writing “a tell-all book” about her family, to compete with her sister Elizabeth’s Sisters of Secrets, about to be published.

  After the Turpin story first broke, Elizabeth had posted on Facebook that she had started writing her childhood memoir two years earlier.

  “It went into editing the same week the news hit,” she wrote.

  One of her Facebook friends then asked if Teresa was also participating in it.

  “No,” replied Elizabeth. “I’m an author. Teresa doesn’t write books.”

  On April 28, Teresa and her half brother Billy Lambert appeared in a two-hour Oxygen cable special called The Turpin 13: Family Secrets Exposed. Hosted by Soledad O’Brien, the show retraced David and Louise’s life in West Virginia, Texas, and California.

  Teresa said she had talked to her nieces and nephews since their escape, and they remember all their Skype sessions with her.

  “It was the best phone conversation I’ve ever had in my life,” she told O’Brien. “It was a very happy conversation. But as soon as I hung up, the tears came.”

&nbs
p; Louise’s youngest sister, now thirty-seven, said she would love to adopt two of the siblings, and Billy wanted three.

  “I feel like I could do that fine,” he said. “If I could get three of the kids, I would love to try and help in any way I can.”

  In an interview on Fox News to promote the special, Teresa revealed that Louise had called her several times collect from jail since her arrest.

  “I wasn’t planning on talking to her,” she said. “I’m still pretty mad. But I did accept one collect call from her … a month ago.”

  Teresa refused to reveal the details of their conversation, saying she wanted no further communication with her sister.

  “She’s tried to call me several times since then,” she said. “I have not accepted them because I am not paying to talk to her.”

  * * *

  On Friday, May 4, David Turpin was hit with an additional eight counts of perjury, one for each of the years he’d filed a private school affidavit with the California Department of Education. He now faced a total of fifty felony charges.

  At a brief hearing at Riverside Superior Court, the two defendants were again unshackled. David did not enter a plea to the new charges but was expected to do so at the next status hearing on May 18. Judge Emma Smith also agreed to postpone the preliminary hearing until June 20 to give the defense more time to prepare.

  Outside the courtroom, deputy public defender David Macher said his client still had the presumption of innocence to the new charges, as well as the older ones.

  The following week, Macher filed a motion known as a demurrer, objecting to the eight new charges of perjury against his client. Macher argued that the perjury charges were unrelated to the other charges, as they didn’t involve force, violence, or the physical neglect or abuse of David’s children.