This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

A mother and father have been charged with torture after their 13 malnourished children were rescued from a California house, where some were found shackled to beds.

Police made the discovery after a 17-year-old girl escaped from the house in Perris, 70 miles (115km) east of Los Angeles, on Sunday and used a mobile phone she had found in the home to raise the alarm at 6am, the Riverside county sheriff’s office said. She was so underfed that officers thought she was only 10, and they mistook her seven adult siblings for children.

When police entered the single-storey suburban residence in Perris, they found “dark and foul-smelling surroundings” and discovered her pale siblings begging for food and water.

“The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty,” police said in a statement. Their skin was so pale they looked like vampires, officers told reporters.

The children, aged two to 29, were recovering in a hospital, where staff were reportedly “heartbroken” by their condition.

The parents, David Turpin, 57, who is listed as a school principal, and Louise Turpin, 49, were arrested and have been charged with torture and child endangerment.

The case, which came to light on Monday, has shocked the United States and prompted questions about how such alleged abuse could unfold in a suburb 70 miles east of Los Angeles without neighbours or authorities noticing something wrong.

David Turpin’s parents, James and Betty Turpin, who live in West Virginia, told ABC News they were “surprised and shocked” at the allegations.

They described the family as extremely religious and said the parents had so many children because they believed “God called on them” to do so. They added that the children were expected to memorise long Bible passages as part of “very strict homeschooling”.

David and Louise Turpin’s Facebook posts portrayed a happy, if unconventional, family who have made at least three visits to Las Vegas in 2011, 2013 and 2015, where the Turpins renewed their wedding vows at a chapel presided over by an Elvis Presley impersonator. Footage of one ceremony posted online showed the children smiling, dancing and clicking their fingers behind their parents.

Betty Turpin told CNN that on excursions to Disneyland the parents made the children dress alike for safety and lined them up according to age, with the mother and father taking the lead and rear. “They were very protective of the kids. This is a highly respectable family,” she said.

One image shows the children wearing Dr Seuss-style shirts, with each child’s top emblazoned with “Thing 1” to “Thing 13”.

The parents were being held on $9m (£6.5m) bail and were due in court on Thursday.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A family photo posted on Facebook. Photograph: Facebook

The group were found in a suburb of new houses, where neighbours said the children were rarely seen. Andrew Santillan said: “I had no idea this was going on. I didn’t know there were kids in the house.”

Robert Perkins said he and his mother saw family members constructing a nativity scene in their front garden a few years ago. “They didn’t say a word,” he said, even after he complimented them on their work.

The Turpins filed for bankruptcy in 2011, stating in court documents they owed between $100,000 and $500,000, the New York Times reported. At that time, Turpin earned $140,000 as an engineer at the global security company Northrop Grumman, and his wife was a homemaker, records showed.

Their bankruptcy lawyer, Ivan Trahan, told the Times he never met the children but the couple spoke highly of them. “We remember them as a very nice couple,” Trahan said, adding that Louise Turpin told him the family visited Disneyland often.



The discovery is the latest in a series of cases of slavery and abduction to have gained worldwide attention. In 2006, Natascha Kampusch escaped from a windowless cell in Strasshof, Austria, eight years after being abducted on her way to school, aged 10.



Two years later, Josef Fritzl admitted imprisoning and sexually abusing his daughter in a windowless cellar in Amstetten, Austria, for 24 years, during which time he fathered her seven children.

California was shocked in 1970 by the case of Genie, the name given to a 13-year-old girl whom authorities initially assumed was aged around seven. Her deranged father had strapped her into a handmade straitjacket and tied her to a chair since she was a toddler.