There was a time, not long ago, when the brown stucco bungalow 70 miles southeast of Los Angeles was considered a dream home. The developer who laid out the neighbourhood on the outskirts of the small Californian city of Perris set the house up as his show home. The sales office was in the attached garage and nearly everyone who lives on the quiet cul-de-sac passed through the four-bedroom property at some point. For many of them the house at 160 Muir Woods Road helped to seal their decision to buy a patch of parched earth to build on and join the growing new community of young families and retirees halfway between the coast and the desert, in the shadow of the snow-capped San Gorgonio Mountain.
“Honestly, it was a gorgeous home, before,” said Salynn Simon, who bought the plot immediately across the street. Standing on her front lawn, taking in a view that was repeatedly beamed into horrified homes around the world last week, she remembered the developer telling her three and a half years ago that No 160 had been snapped up. “He said it was a family, a huge family: 12 children with a 13th on the way. I’m, like, ‘Holy heck!’ I was excited because I thought that my kids would have buddies.”
Then the Turpins moved in. They turned out not to be the sort of family who went in for playdates.
Just before dawn nine days ago an emaciated teenage girl escaped through a window from the Turpins’ house and alerted police to what Michael Hestrin, the Riverside County district attorney, would later call a haunting case of “human depravity”.
Hestrin described how the girl and her 12 siblings, aged between 2 and 29, had been held captive inside the house for years by their parents, David and Louise Turpin. They were beaten, strangled and sometimes chained to their beds for months at a time and not even released to go to the lavatory. They were allowed to bathe only once a year and were punished for “playing in water” if they were caught washing their arms above their wrists. They were systematically starved. Sometimes their parents would buy apple or pumpkin pies and leave them on the counter uneaten just to taunt them.
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Many of the siblings had been left mentally and physically stunted by their “prolonged” ordeal. Some of them had nerve damage. All of them are likely to face lifelong psychological consequences.
The abuse described by Hestrin is said to have remained a secret for so long because all but one of the children were home-schooled, the siblings had little or no contact with their extended families and they lived to a nocturnal schedule so that the neighbours almost never saw them. Social services were never called to any of the homes that the Turpins lived in.
The first inkling that Simon, 32, had that something was badly wrong over the road was when the parents were arrested that Sunday. “I had friends staying and they were, like, ‘Salynn, you’ve got a bunch of cop cars outside your house.’ ” She saw David Turpin sitting in a police car parked a few feet away from her home. “He was staring at me. The mum was in another car. She kept laughing and smiling and spitting, like she was hacking a loogie. It was weird. If it was me I would have been crying my eyes out.
“Then the kids came out, single file in pyjamas and pants. One girl had a leather jacket on. They [the police] didn’t wait for the CPS [social services], which to me means they were trying to get them the hell out of there. They used the family’s own van to take them away.”
On Thursday David Turpin, 57, and his wife, Louise, 49, both pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of torture, child abuse and false imprisonment. David Turpin was also charged with sexually abusing one of the female children, to which he also pleaded not guilty. If found guilty the couple could spend the rest of their lives in prison. David Turpin’s government-appointed lawyer said that “the case will be tried in court. It will not be tried in the media,” but he acknowledged that defending his client against such serious charges “is going to be a challenge”.
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David Turpin met Louise Robinette when he was in his mid-twenties and she was a 16-year-old schoolgirl in Princeton, West Virginia. Not long afterwards they ran away together. Turpin persuaded her high school to let him sign her out of class and they took off in his car for a new life halfway across the country, according to her younger sister Teresa Robinette.
Her family learnt what had happened only when police intercepted the couple in Texas and forced Louise to call home. The couple returned to Princeton for a small wedding attended by just their families, but afterwards they went back to Texas. They largely kept to themselves after that, apart from a few trips to Disneyland and at least three visits to Las Vegas to renew their wedding vows. They made the second and third trips with their “smiling” children in tow, according to the Elvis impersonator who presided on each occasion.
David Turpin’s parents, who still live in West Virginia, last visited the family about six years ago. “The kids were fine. They were healthy and nothing was wrong,” James Turpin told the Bluefield Daily Telegraph. His wife, Betsy, said that the family were “highly respectable”. The older Turpins said that their grandchildren were receiving “very strict home schooling” and added that their son and daughter-in-law believed that “God called on them” to have so many children. The children were expected to learn long passages of the Bible. Some of them aimed to memorise the whole book.
The Robinette family had even less contact with the family after the couple went west. Two years ago Louise Turpin failed to visit either of her parents on their deathbeds or to attend their funerals.
Her family had always believed that she had an enviable life with her computer-engineer husband and their growing brood. “He earned good money. The day he came and picked her up from school I was told he told her that if she would elope with him and marry him he would give her everything she ever wanted,” Teresa Robinette told Daily Mail TV. “In the family we always joked that Prince Charming had lived up to his end of the bargain.”
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The reality was grimmer than the Robinettes could have imagined. The couple were spending far beyond their means, leading to two bankruptcies, most recently in 2011, when they stated in court records that they were between $100,000 and $500,000 in debt. Ivan Trahan, a lawyer who represented the couple in that bankruptcy, said last week that the Turpins had struck him as “very normal people who fell into financial problems”.
They had also begun to neglect and abuse their children, Hestrin, the prosecutor, said. While they still lived in Texas they used rope and “hog-tied” the children. After one child escaped briefly they switched to chains and padlocks. At one point the parents lived apart from most of their children and delivered food to them “from time to time”, Hestrin said.
The couple had lost their home in Fort Worth, Texas, to foreclosure in 1999. They moved to a remote farm on 36 acres outside Rio Vista, a small town 50 miles away. Ricky Vinyard, a tree cutter who was their neighbour at the time, told the Los Angeles Times that from the moment they moved in “they were really mysterious people. They didn’t talk to us or socialise.”
They kept their blinds drawn and rarely came outside. Vinyard’s daughters played with the Turpin children a few times in a nearby creek, but they wouldn’t tell them their names. His daughters later overheard one Turpin sibling telling another: “We can’t talk to them any more, remember?”
That house was foreclosed too and when the family left in 2010 repossession agents came to collect their two cars. Vinyard recalled walking through the large trailer that the Turpins left behind. It had eight small desks, a blackboard and other trappings of the children’s home schooling. There were mattresses on the floor, but no beds. The trailer was also “waist-deep in filth” with “dead dogs and cats in there” and locks on everything from the toy chest to the refrigerator. In the house itself the next owners found a handful of Polaroid photographs taken after the Turpins had gone. One showed a bed with a rope tied to it.
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The family decamped to Murrieta in California in 2010 when David Turpin took a job with Northrop Grumman, an aeronautics and defence company. In 2014 they moved 20 miles north to Perris, where the abuse appears to have escalated. “Sometimes in this business you are faced with human depravity and that’s what we have here,” Hestrin said.
The daughter who raised the alarm — she called 911 on a mobile phone she had found inside the house — was 17, but she was so small that police officers initially thought that she was a ten-year-old. Another child went with her, but turned back out of fear. The escape had been planned for more than two years. Neighbours think that the children must have climbed out of the property’s front window, the only one not blocked by a fence. A neat section of the mosquito screen, big enough for a child to crawl through, is missing just above the window sill.
When police entered the “dark and foul-smelling” house, where three of the siblings were chained to their beds, they mistook all seven of the adult offspring for children. The oldest, at 29, weighed less than six stone. The parents, their two Maltese-mix dogs and the two-year-old were well fed, but the rest of the siblings were severely malnourished. None of the siblings had ever seen a dentist and they had not visited a doctor in four years. They were all “very dirty”.
“Conditions were horrific,” Captain Greg Fellows, the chief of police for Perris, said.
The siblings, many of whom did not know what a police officer was, said that they were starving. They were given food and drink, then taken to separate medical centres in the region — one for the children and one for the adults.
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Doctors and nurses at the two facilities have found the experience emotionally draining. “It becomes very personal to you. And it hurts to see what another human being can do to another human being,” Mark Uffer, the chief executive of Corona Regional Medical Center, told ABC News. “I don’t think there’s any of us that are involved or have spoken to them or interacted with them that slept much in the last week because you wake up in the middle of the night worrying about them.”
Some of them may never fully recover physically and intellectually from the impact of malnourishment on their development, experts say. They are likely to have permanent emotional problems and a complicated relationship with food.
There have been several high-profile cases of adults holding children captive for years. Ariel Castro, a former school bus driver in Cleveland, Ohio, kidnapped three women, aged 21, 16 and 14, between 2002 and 2004. They were rescued by neighbours in May 2013, with a six-year-old girl that Castro had fathered by one of the women. He killed himself in prison after being sentenced to life plus 1,000 years in jail.
Phillip Garrido and his wife, Nancy, kidnapped Jaycee Dugard, an 11-year-old schoolgirl, in South Lake Tahoe, California, in 1991 and held her captive for 18 years before they were caught.
However, the Turpin case is extraordinarily rare because it involves two parents apparently holding their own children prisoner. Psychologists say that the Turpins may have been driven by a delusion that only they knew how to care properly for their children and that chaining them up was the best way to keep them safe. They may have derived feelings of prestige from dominating and controlling their children that compensated for their lack of authority in normal life. Or they may simply have taken pleasure from cruelty. The journals that the Turpins allowed their children to keep could provide critical evidence for investigators as they seek to establish a motive for the alleged crimes.
The Turpins’ neighbours were still struggling to process what had taken place in their midst last weekend. Simon, a special-event co-ordinator, had taped a homemade “Help Start the Healing” poster to her house; on the pavement facing the Turpins’ home she had set up a table laden with free cookies and doughnuts for anyone who wanted them. Her eldest daughter, Delilah, seven, was pouring cups of lemonade, hot chocolate and Mexican cocoa. A jar for donations to support the Turpins’ children was filling up with $20 notes. Adult neighbours and their children milled around and played in the street.
Sharon Ontiveros, 63, who lives just around the corner, had loaded her car up with teddy bears and other toys that neighbourhood children wanted her to pass to the Turpin siblings. “There’s no room in my car to spit,” she said, opening the door. “My granddaughter, who is three, kept saying, “I want to give them more.’ ”
Joshua Tiedeman-Bell, 31, a project manager, passed by with his two toddlers in a small cart. “It makes you treasure your kids a lot more,” he said. “And it makes you think twice when you are angry or frustrated about how you are going to react.”
He said that he had been so wrung out that he could only laugh when he sat down in front of the television on Friday night and saw that “our neighbourhood was splattered all over” the ABC news programme 20/20. “We’re the place with the House of Horrors. So they’re doing the aerial views with a drone shot and I’m, like, ‘That’s my house! And there’s dark scary music playing! That’s nuts!’ ”
He said that it was “almost impossible to comprehend” what had happened. People living in the community had done everything possible to be good neighbours, from staging an annual “meet, eat and greet” with food trucks to an active neighbourhood-watch scheme for which he knocked on “every frickin’ door” in the street. “But you can’t make people come out of their house and participate,” he said. “It’s their right to be introverts.”
Wendy Martinez, 41, can see the Turpins’ backyard from her house. “To be a neighbour, to be so close and not to know anything, it’s just heartbreaking,” she said. “Since Sunday I have not been right.”
Tears began to stream down her face. “Everybody’s bashing us: the neighbours this, the neighbours that. But do you think if we saw something we would not have said something?”
The massed ranks of the international media have departed. People are no longer streaming in from outside the community just to grab a photograph of the “House of Horrors” to post on social media.
But the neighbourhood will never be quite the same, Martinez said. “We drive by this house every day. We are not going to forget. Not ten years from now, if I’m still living here. It’s never going to go away.”