The Turpin case involved the maltreatment of children and dependent adults by their parents, David and Louise Turpin of Perris, California, U.S. The ages of the 13 victims ranged from 2 years old to 29. On January 14, 2018, one of the children, 17-year-old Jordan Turpin, escaped from the family home and called local police, who then raided the residence and discovered disturbing evidence. Given the number of dependents involved, the degree of abuse, and the protracted nature occurring over decades, the story garnered significant national and international news. Experts in family abuse considered the case to be extraordinary for many reasons.
In February 2019, both Turpin parents pleaded guilty on 14 felony counts, including cruelty to a dependent adult, child cruelty, torture, and false imprisonment. In April, they were sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole after 25 years.
Background
David Allen Turpin (born October 17, 1961) was formerly a computer engineer who graduated from Virginia Tech and had worked for Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. He met his wife, Louise Ann Turpin ( Robinette, born May 24, 1968), at Princeton High School in Princeton, West Virginia. The couple married in Pearisburg, Virginia, in 1985, when David was 23 years old and Louise was 16 years old.
The Turpins are Pentecostal Christians, and as part of their beliefs, the couple had numerous children because "God called on them" to do so. They produced ten daughters and three sons between 1988 and 2015. The couple later experimented in swinging.
The Turpin family lived in Fort Worth, Texas until 1999, when they moved to Rio Vista, TX. In 2007, the Turpin parents moved 10 of their children into an isolated trailer on their property. David and Louise took the two youngest and left the rest of the children to fend for themselves, bringing groceries on a weekly basis but not enough to feed everybody. One of their daughters, Jordan Turpin, aged six years at the time, stated there was "a lot of starving", and she had resorted to eating "ketchup or mustard or ice". After the family left the Rio Vista property in 2010, neighbors found feces and beds with ropes tied to them, along with dead cats and piles of garbage.
In 2014, the Turpins moved to Perris, California. Neighbors reported that the children were silent unless spoken to, "like children whose only defense was to be invisible"; would skip rather than walk; and appeared malnourished and pale.
One of Louise's sisters later said that David and Louise refused to let her see the children, and another sister said she had been concerned about the children's weight, but Louise's aunt said the family pictures posted on Facebook had made her think that "they were one big happy family."
The children did not spend all of their time in captivity. Photos emerged of the parents and all 13 children visiting Disneyland in nearby Anaheim. The boys and girls were dressed in matching Disney T-shirts. David and Louise had an affinity for Disney and for the park. The vanity plates on the couple's two cars were "DLand" and "DL4ever".
David and Louise had been planning to move the family to Oklahoma at the time of their arrest. Jordan Turpin overheard her parents speaking about the move and decided it was time to call the police.
Escape and rescue
By 2018, the Turpin children had been planning to escape their parents for more than two years. On January 14, 2018, two of the girls left the house through a window. The younger girl (age 13) became frightened and turned back, but Jordan, then 17, got some distance away and called 911 on a deactivated cell phone she had brought with her; she told the dispatcher that she and her siblings were being abused by their parents and that the smell in the house was so bad sometimes she could barely breathe. She also stated that two of her sisters and one of her brothers were currently chained to their beds. When the first police officer arrived, Jordan showed him photos of conditions inside the house.