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  For Audrey and Mavis Hirschberg

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The unspeakable crimes that David and Louise Turpin stand accused of committing against their own thirteen children are unparalleled. When Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin first briefed reporters about the depths of depravity the couple had sunk to, he elicited gasps from even the most hardened reporters.

  The Turpin parents, who had their children affectionately call them “Mother” and “Father,” apparently lacked any conscience about the lasting mental and physical injury they were inflicting. According to the evidence, Louise would physically beat her children, and chain them to beds for months at a time. While they starved she and David dined out at good restaurants.

  Although brought up in the Pentecostal Church of God, it remains a mystery how they could twist the church’s teaching into madness. Chillingly, they flew under the radar, living in good, respectable neighborhoods with neighbors on either side. But no one ever reported anything untoward in the house. David Turpin officially filed papers with the California Department of Education to run his own homeschool. But none of the relevant authorities ever checked up on whether its self-appointed principal was actually teaching them.

  Ten years ago, I wrote Secrets in the Cellar, the horrific story of how Austrian monster Josef Fritzl imprisoned his own daughter, Elizabeth, for more than twenty years, siring her seven children. In 2010, my book Lost and Found recounted how Phillip Garrido and his wife Nancy abducted eleven-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard, holding her hostage for eighteen years in Antioch, California—just four hundred and twenty-five miles from the Turpins’ own house of horrors.

  Then in 2013 The Lost Girls chronicled the so-called Cleveland Abductions, where Ariel Castro snatched three young girls off the street and turned them into his sexual slaves for more than a decade. Like Jordan Turpin five years later, Amanda Berry bravely risked her life to escape and summon help to save the others.

  As Cult Education Institute founder Rick Ross told me: “Who knows how many there are around the United States. This is not uncommon but we only find out about it when something horrible happens.”

  This book is the result of many months of research into David and Louise Turpin’s lives. I started my journey in Princeton, West Virginia, tracing their roots from the beginning. Then I followed them west to Fort Worth and Rio Vista, Texas, where they had almost all their children, before finishing up in Perris, California.

  There are so many people who made this book possible with invaluable help along the way. First and foremost I would like to thank forensic psychiatrist Dr. Michael Stone of Columbia University for adding his own expert analysis of this often baffling case. Child trauma expert Allison Davis Maxon provided invaluable help in understanding the full depth of damage the children suffered and the specialized treatment they will need. Renowned cult expert Rick Ross, who has been following the Turpin case from Day one, explained how super-narcissist David Turpin had first recruited Louise to form a self-styled family cult to worship him.

  I would also like to thank: Jessica Barmejo, Gilbert Bolling, Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld, Jared Dana, David Downard, Janie Farmer, Dr. David Fenner, Richard Ford, Mike Gilbert, Todd Gray, Dr. Ray Hurt, Mary Hopkins, Greg Jordan, Donald Kick, Tyler Kyle, Erica Llaca, Brian McCabe, David Macher, Assemblyman Jose Medina, Lois Miller, Jeff Moore, Verlin Moye, Aaron Pankratz, Brent Rivas, Kent Ripley, Brian Rokos, Ricardo Ross, Lindsay Gatlin, Tim Snead, Bobby Spiegel, Mayor Michael Vargas, Becky Veneri, Ricky Vinyard, and Pamela Winfrey.

  I would also like to thank Dolly’s Diner in Princeton, West Virginia, Annie’s Café in Lake Elsinore, California, and Jenny’s Family Restaurant in Perris, California, for their hospitality and help, as well as Bobbie Herrera, Felipa Guerra, and the staff at Cleburne Public Library.

  As always I am deeply indebted to Charles Spicer and Sarah Grill of St. Martin’s Press for all their help and good advice throughout. Much gratitude too to my super-agent Jane Dystel and Miriam Goderich of Dystel, Goderich and Bourret Literary Management, my pillars who are always there with unstinting encouragement and support.

  I’d also like to thank my wife, Gail, Emily Freund, Debbie, Douglas, and Taylor Baldwin, Pamela Martin, Chris Vlasak, Lenny Millen, Bernie Freund, Annette Witheridge, Ian and Helen Kimmet, Jo Greenspan, Galli Curci, Chris Frost, Roger Hitts, Danny, Cari and Allie Tractenberg, and Gurcher.

  PROLOGUE

  Around 5:30 a.m. on a chilly Sunday morning, seventeen-year-old Jordan Turpin and her thirteen-year-old sister, Jolinda, squeezed through their first-floor bedroom window and leaped out. It was still dark as they tiptoed through the backyard onto Muir Woods Road in Perris, California.

  Fearing for their lives, the two waifish girls crept past neighbors’ houses, turning right onto Presidio Lane. Suddenly, Jolinda became too scared to go through with it. She fled home and climbed back into her bedroom. Jordan was on her own.

  Since moving to Perris three and a half years earlier, Jordan had rarely been outside and did not know her surroundings. She and her twelve siblings had been prisoners their entire lives. Their jailers were their own parents, who ruled with violence and torture.

  Practically starved, they were only allowed one bath a year and wore the same putrid clothing for months at a time. Although officially homeschooled, many of the siblings, aged two to twenty-nine, barely had a first-grade education and lacked basic life skills.

  Jordan’s escape had been more than two years in the making. Several months earlier, their father’s engineering job had been relocated to Oklahoma. By January 2018, the family was all packed up and ready to move; it was now or never. And Jordan finally had the means for escape: an old, deactivated cell phone her brother had given her. The teenager prayed it could still access emergency services, as she had been told.

  At 5:51 a.m., her hands shaking with fear, Jordan punched in 911 and broke through to the outside world.

  * * *

  Seventy miles southeast of Los Angeles, Perris prides itself on being a family-oriented community with good schools, safe streets, and many children’s activities. Muir Woods Road is a smart street of manicured lawns and garden gnomes where people take pride in their homes.

  Outwardly, there was nothing to suggest that the house at 160 Muir Woods Road was any different. When David and Louise Turpin and their twelve children first arrived in May 2014, it had been a model home in the fashionable new Monument Park district. They were among the first families to move in.

  For the next four years, the Turpins rarely went out, except to pick up their mail at the communal mailbox, and kept to themselves.

  “Nobody here knew they had twelve kids,” said Lindsay Gatlin, who lives a few doors away. “I thought there was just one or two.”

  But fifty-seven-year-old David Turpin did stand out, with his dyed-blond Captain Kangaroo haircut. Neighbors knew h
e worked as an aerospace engineer for Northrop Grumman, making a six-figure salary. The gleaming fleet of three cars and a fifteen-seater van in his driveway attested to that.

  But behind closed doors, things were very different. David and his forty-nine-year-old wife, Louise, had turned their home into a filthy, stinking dungeon, holding their children captive. They insisted on being called Mother and Father, like in biblical times.

  Confined four to a room, their severely malnourished children were frequently beaten and chained up to furniture for months at a time. Punishable offenses included washing above the wrists—“playing in the water”—stealing food, playing with toys, or even looking through the blinds.

  They lived in a twilight world, sleeping during the day and awake at night. Their one meal a day was always the same: peanut butter or baloney sandwiches and burritos. The oldest, Jennifer, less than six months away from her thirtieth birthday, weighed just eighty pounds.

  At Christmas, twenty-five-year-old Joshua had received a new cell phone, giving his sister Jordan his old, deactivated one. A friend online had told her it could still connect to 911.

  To prove the atrocities in the house, Jordan had secretly taken two cell phone photographs of her two little sisters, shackled to bunk beds in their own filth. She had also taken a scrap of an envelope with her home address on it, as she did not know it.

  * * *

  “911, what’s your emergency?” answered 911 dispatcher Kelly Eckley.

  “Okay,” Jordan replied breathlessly, “I live in a family of fifteen people, and my parents are abusive. They abuse us, and my two little sisters right now are chained up. They chain us up if we do things we’re not supposed to.”

  In the high-pitched voice of a young child, Jordan told the dispatcher she could no longer stand hearing her two little sisters crying all night in pain because their parents had chained them so tightly to their beds.

  “They will wake up at night and start crying and they wanted me to call somebody,” she said. “I wanted to call y’all and help my sisters.”

  The stunned operator, assuming it was a small child on the line, asked her name.

  “T-U-R-P-E-N,” recited Jordan, misspelling it.

  When asked for her address, Jordan read out numbers from the envelope she had taken, 925707774: the ZIP plus the four number code for her home.

  Eckley then asked if she was near her house.

  “Yeah, I think,” she replied. “I’ve never been out. I don’t go out much, so I don’t know anything about the streets or anything.”

  Over the next twenty minutes, Jordan calmly described the inhuman cruelty that their parents inflicted on them.

  “I think that my father has guns,” she said at one point, adding that although she hadn’t seen them, “they’ve talked about it.”

  When the dispatcher asked if the children went to school, Jordan replied no.

  “Our mother tells people we’re private schooled,” she explained, “but we don’t really go to school. I haven’t finished first grade, and I’m seventeen.”

  Eckley asked if there was any medication in the house. Jordan said she did not know what medication meant.

  Astonished at what she was hearing, Eckley asked where her mother was, and Jordan responded that she didn’t know much about her.

  “She doesn’t like us,” Jordan said in a quivering voice. “She doesn’t spend time with us, ever. I take care of myself and my mother finds food for us, but we never talk.”

  She listed the ages of all her siblings, saying that the only one “Mother takes care of right” was the two-year-old.

  The house was so filthy, she said, that she would wake up unable to breathe because of the stench. Gasping for air, she would open a window for relief, risking a beating if she were caught.

  “We don’t take baths,” Jordan said matter-of-factly. “I don’t know if we need to go to the doctor.”

  Asked when she had last taken a bath, Jordan seemed uncertain. “Uh, I don’t know,” she replied. “Almost a year ago. Sometimes I feel so dirty, I wash my face and I wash my hair in the sink.”

  Jordan told the dispatcher that she and her siblings were being kept prisoners in the house by Mother and Father.

  “[They] don’t let us move out,” she said. “Some of us have asked for jobs, and they said that would never happen.”

  * * *

  After Jordan’s 911 call, deputies from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department rushed to her location, where they were met by officers from the Perris Police Department.

  When they first saw Jordan, they thought she was ten. The experienced officers were shocked by how badly she smelled and the black dirt that caked her skin. When she showed them the cell phone photographs of her two little sisters chained up, they went straight over to 160 Muir Woods Road to carry out a welfare check.

  * * *

  As soon as she heard loud knocking on the front door and saw the flashing police car lights, Louise Turpin immediately ordered the two girls to be unchained. An older sister ran into their bedroom, unlocking the padlocks and throwing the chains into a closet.

  Eleven-year-old Julissa, who had been chained up, later told investigators that when she heard the knocking and saw the flashing lights, she knew Jordan had made it and they would soon be free.

  When the front door was eventually opened, officers rushed inside. Although the smell was overpowering, nothing had prepared them for the unspeakable horrors inside. One of the officers was wearing a body cam with the camera rolling to record it.

  Inside one bedroom, they found Jonathan Turpin still chained up. As they freed him, he acted as if it were normal. His two younger sisters, who had just been released, had white stripes on their dirty skin where the chains had been.

  The other nine children were scattered all over the house in cramped bedrooms, reeking of human waste. They were all filthy, stinking, and emaciated.

  “It was very dirty,” said Riverside County Sheriff’s Department captain Greg Fellows, “and the conditions were horrific.”

  * * *

  All the commotion had woken up Araceli Olozagaste, who lived across the street. She peeked through her curtains to see deputies leading David and Louise Turpin out of the house in handcuffs. David was crying uncontrollably, but Louise was expressionless.

  “She was just coughing,” recalled Olozagaste, “acting a little weird as the police officer was talking to her. She just kept smirking at him. Then she spat twice down on the floor.”

  PART ONE

  THE SEEDS OF EVIL

  1

  KING TURPIN

  According to family lore, David Turpin first had “feelings” for Louise Robinette when she was ten years old and he was seventeen. The gangly six-footer showered the shy girl with attention. Their courtship consisted of secretly holding hands during fiery Pentecostal services at the Church of God in Princeton, West Virginia, which both their families attended.

  Two years later, the tiny seventh grader told her grandmother that one day she would marry David and they would have twelve children.

  Almost half a century earlier, David’s grandfather, the Reverend King Turpin Jr., had also fallen for a sixteen-year-old girl, nearly half his age. Just two months after Nellie, the dutiful mother of his eight children, died giving birth to twins, Turpin married his children’s nurse, Bertha Lee Church.

  The day after Christmas 1932, the charismatic Pentecostal preacher made a deal with her father: to swap Bertha for his flashy Studebaker Big Six car.

  “My dad traded me for the car,” she would admit many years later. “King said that if he hadn’t given my dad the car, he wouldn’t have got me.”

  Over the next eighteen years, Bertha would bear him eleven more children, for a total of nineteen, though five died in infancy.

  Although physically small, the Reverend King Turpin Jr. is a larger-than-life icon in the Turpin family. David’s elder brother, the Reverend J. Randolph “Randy” Turpin, is the fam
ily genealogist, and in 2010, he wrote and self-published their grandfather’s biography: A Man Called King. It was intended as an inspiration to all future generations of Turpins.

  Born in 1903 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the “Little King,” as he was fondly known, grew up in dire poverty in an often-violent home. His mercurial father, King Turpin Sr., was a strict disciplinarian, losing his temper at the slightest provocation. He would chase the mischievous little boy and his younger sister, Minnie, around the house, brandishing a white-hot poker or throwing rocks at them. When he caught them, they would receive a brutal whipping.

  On one occasion, he took away their only pairs of shoes as a punishment, making them walk barefoot through the rough rural countryside. On Sundays, he gave them back for church so the neighbors wouldn’t talk. But as soon as they got home, he confiscated them again for another week, saying they could wear shoes when they learned to behave.

  King Turpin Sr. often left his two young children home alone for weeks at a time while he roamed the Tennessee countryside doing odd jobs to scratch out a meager living.

  “We were living by ourselves,” Minnie remembered many years later. “We pulled ourselves up … we had a pretty hard life.”

  After one particular savage beating, the Little King and Minnie ran away to escape their violent father. A family friend took them in and then called King Sr., who came to collect them.

  In 1915, when the Little King was twelve, the Tennessee welfare authorities intervened. The state’s early version of Child Protective Services found the two Turpin children had been seriously neglected and placed them in separate Chattanooga orphanages. The Little King was soon released into the care of an uncle, but Minnie wasn’t so lucky. She spent two years at the orphanage before she was placed in the custody of another close family member, becoming pregnant when she was thirteen.