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‘Horror house’ dad was a nerdy chess player in high school

“Horror house” dad David Turpin was a dweeb in high school who headed up the chess club and had a thing for bow ties, according to a new report.

“For lack of a better word, he was kind of nerdy,” former classmate Mike Gilbert, 56, told the Princeton Register-Herald.

“He was always kind of a quiet guy and very intelligent. He always did real well in school, had real good grades. We went to Glenwood Junior High together and on from there to Princeton High School. He dressed nice and he wore bow ties on occasion.”

Gilbert describes Turpin as a bookish “homebody” who “wasn’t rowdy or nothing like that as far as I knew,” but said he wasn’t particularly close with Turpin.

Turpin’s motto, according to a 1979 yearbook: “Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow.”





The book credits Turpin as co-captain of the chess club and a member of the Bible club, science club and a capella choir. He wrote in a yearbook bio that he hoped “take up a career in electrical engineering and invent the light bulb,” the Register-Herald reported.

He won first place in his 9th-grade science fair, according to a 1976 newspaper clipping, and was named on Princeton High School’s “B or better” honor roll the following year.

He obtained a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Virginia Tech in 1984, according to the school, which declined to reveal his grades or extracurriculars.

Tuprin, who was arrested along with his wife Louise for keeping their 13 kids ages 2-29 malnourished and imprisoned in their suburban California house, homeschooled the brood, according to state records.





It does not appear the depraved dad was passing the kids based on merit — his 17-year-old daughter, who fled the house to alert authorities Sunday appears to have a “mental capacity below her age,” NBC reported, citing law-enforcement sources.

Annual records Turpin filed with the state show a student around her age was in 11th grade at Turpin’s Sandcastle Day School and on track to graduate. She had never been held back, records show.

Louise eloped with David at the age of 16, and was listed as a homemaker on 2011 bankruptcy filings.





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