by John Glatt
“He was just kind of goofy and nerdy,” remembered David Downard, who was also on the team. “He was very quiet and always had this funny grin and [would stand] with his hands tied together behind his back.”
Another member of the chess team, Tony Veneri, still talks about an incident on the drive back to Princeton after a tournament.
“One of the other chess club members, Phillip Wright, was driving and going a little fast,” said Tony’s wife, Becky, who has heard the story numerous times. “And David, who was usually quiet and easygoing, became very anxious and screamed, ‘Oh, Phillip! Slow down! You’re going to kill us!’”
By his senior year, David Turpin had decided he wanted to be an engineer and was an active member in the Princeton High School science club.
The straight-A student won first place in the annual Mercer County Science Fair and joined the prestigious West Virginia Junior Academy of Science. He was also a huge fan of the hit TV show Star Trek, strongly identifying with Mr. Spock, perhaps the inspiration for his new hairstyle.
“[David] and his friends were Star Trek fans, or Trekkies,” said Gilbert, “and they would make jokes about that.”
The 1979 Princeton High School yearbook has a humorous picture of the cocaptain of the chess team—the spitting image of Leonard Nimoy’s character—gazing longingly at a sports sneaker.
“David Turpin surrenders his king to an Adidas,” read the tongue-in-cheek caption.
The teenager also loved cars, which would become a lifelong passion. His father, Jim, helped him to customize his old Honda Civic.
“He and his dad put a big old pair of air horns on it with an air [compression] tank,” recalled Gilbert, “like his little Honda Civic was an eighteen-wheeler or a tractor trailer. He would pull up behind you blowing those air horns and scare you, because it was coming out of such a little vehicle. He loved to blow that horn, and he’d be laughing and scaring people.”
Every Saturday night, David drove his Honda into downtown Princeton, dressed in slacks, a dress shirt, and a bow tie.
“Back in those days, the big thing was cruising,” Gilbert said. “Everybody would go out on a Saturday night and just drive back and forth through town. You would see [David] there cruising and sounding off his air horns.”
Now retired, Mary Hopkins taught both Turpin brothers algebra at Princeton High School. She remembers David being an excellent student.
“He had a sense of humor,” she said. “He would smile and say funny things, and I would see the twinkle in his eye. But he was pretty serious about what he was doing, and he did well.”
Tim Snead, who took biology and Spanish with David, said David never had a girlfriend and didn’t take part in any social activities.
“He really didn’t socialize a lot,” said Snead.”He seemed like a geek, but he was very intelligent.”
David graduated from Princeton High School in the class of 1979, with a grade point average of 95.6585. He had also been awarded a coveted scholarship to study electrical engineering at Virginia Tech.
At his graduation ceremony, David wore a mortarboard and robes and was presented with a “top twenty student” award. The 1979 yearbook explained the accolade.
At every high school there are always groups of students known as the “brains.” They are the ones that actually do all their homework every night … and always have a tremendous stack of books to carry home. Consequently, the top twenty are truly the “tops.”
In his graduation picture, a smiling David Turpin wears a smart fawn-colored suit and a flashy striped tie, with his Mr. Spock haircut. His numerous group affiliations and career ambitions are listed below his photo. In addition to being cocaptain of the chess team, treasurer of the Bible club, and a science club member, he was in the Spanish club and the school’s a cappella choir. His goal for the future was “to take up a career in electrical engineering and invent the light bulb.”
His life motto, he said, was “Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow.”
* * *
It was around the time of his graduation that David was first attracted to ten-year-old Louise Robinette. David’s and Louise’s parents had been close friends for many years; David had actually held Louise when she was a little baby. Both families’ lives revolved around the Princeton Church of God. David’s brother, Randy, worked there as a pastoral minister, and their mother, Betty Jean, taught Sunday school. Louise Robinette was one of her pupils.
After their 1967 wedding, Allen and Phyllis Robinette moved into a small house at 102 B Ray Street. It was there that Louise grew up as a Taylor—in one of Princeton’s most respected families. Her grandfather, John Taylor, was already a wealthy man from his Shell gas station and various property deals. Her uncles Eugene and Glenn Taylor were also successful in their own right; Eugene owned the Clearview Trailer Park, and Glenn was a self-employed brick mason.
Tragedy struck the family in 1974 when Louise’s youngest brother, James, was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident. He was on the way to nearby Athens High School for a date with his girlfriend, Sharon, when his bike skidded off the road.
“James got his leg cut off from the knee down,” said Lois Miller, who was in Sharon’s class. “I wasn’t too crazy about Sharon dating him. I thought he was too wild.”
In 1978, Louise celebrated her tenth birthday, and Allen Robinette shot video of his daughter opening presents in her bedroom. With her long dark hair in a headband and wearing a white ruffled shirt with a Peter Pan collar, the little girl looked like she didn’t have a care in the world.
Later that day, there was a party with a birthday cake, and her grandfather—affectionately known in the family as Papaw—was photographed with Louise and her little eighteen-month-old sister, Elizabeth Jane.
However, the reality of the Robinettes’ household was less than picture-perfect. After her own abusive childhood, Phyllis Robinette showed little interest in being a mother, leaving Louise to bring up her red-haired baby sister.
The Robinette home was a battleground with Phyllis and Allen’s constant arguments. Some of Elizabeth’s earliest memories are of Louise trying to shield her from their parents’ raging fights.
“There was fighting between my parents and yelling and screaming,” said Elizabeth. “I remember Louise covering my ears and planting my face in her chest … so I wouldn’t have to hear or watch it. She was very, very protective.”
Beginning when Louise was a tiny child, Phyllis would regularly drive her over to her father’s house. For years, John Taylor, now in his midforties, had allegedly been molesting his daughter. Now he turned his attention to his pretty young granddaughter, and Phyllis allowed it—in return for money.
“He was the family leader,” said Elizabeth. “He had money, so when my mom needed money, she ran to [him].”
It was always the same. At some point during the visit, Papaw would whisper to Louise that they were going into the other room for “a tight hug.”
Years later, female family members would reveal what had really happened in their grandfather’s house.
“He molested my mom all her life,” said Louise’s youngest sister, Teresa. “We begged my mom not to take us there some days, and she would take us anyway. He was very, very wealthy.”
Their grandfather’s alleged abuse was a closely guarded family secret, and the girls were told never to talk about it.
“That’s how we’re programmed,” Elizabeth explained. “We know how to mask very well [and] not show what we’re feeling.”
* * *
Like David, Louise also attended Glenwood Junior High School and then Princeton High School.
“She was kind of quiet and kept to herself,” remembers Richard Ford, who was in Louise’s class at Princeton High School. “She didn’t have many friends, and she was picked on a little bit. It was kind of strange. She isolated herself from everybody else. I don’t remember ever seeing her out. Most of the students would go to the mall on the weekends or the ball gam
es.”
The sole mention of her in the 1984 yearbook is as vice president of the Bible club. Her yearbook photograph shows Louise dressed in an all-American crewneck, her long, dark, curly hair cut into bangs.
Elizabeth remembers her older sister being very unpopular and constantly ridiculed by her schoolmates.
“She didn’t have any friends,” said Elizabeth. “She was made fun of a lot. She never had any control in her life growing up.”
Allen Robinette, who worked as a draftsman doing blueprints for the Joy Manufacturing Company, would often drive his daughter home from school. He appeared to have had no idea of Louise’s struggle to fit in.
On Friday, March 25, 1983, he photographed her holding schoolbooks, writing underneath, LOUISE “DADDY’S GIRL” COMING FROM SCHOOL.
* * *
In 1982, Mary Louise Taylor caught her fifty-eight-year-old husband raping their fourteen-year-old granddaughter, Louise, on their living room couch. Furious, she picked up a frying pan and chased him out of the house. Within days, she had filed for divorce, and Taylor moved into a new house at Bailey Hollow Road, right behind his Shell station.
To avoid scandal, the horrific incident was never reported to the police.
“It was a very small town, and everybody knew him,” explained Elizabeth. “We had to keep our family name [and] be uppity-up for the town of Princeton. So we can’t go to the authorities.”
Elizabeth’s younger sister, Teresa, who was a year old at the time, would only learn the real reason for her grandparents’ divorce after she had become another victim of Taylor’s sexual abuse.
“There was never any justice,” said Teresa. “The family told us girls … to keep quiet. We didn’t want to ruin the family name, and he had all the money.”
* * *
A year later, Louise started secretly dating twenty-two-year-old David. Phyllis was aware of the relationship but was too scared to tell her husband, as the evangelical preacher would never have approved of his young daughter dating an older man.
“My mom was like, ‘Oh, it’s David Turpin, the Turpin boy,’” said Elizabeth. “‘He’s a good boy.’”
Louise confided to Elizabeth that she was going to marry David as soon as possible and have twelve children. He was going to be a rich engineer, she told her sister, earning $100,000 a year and giving her everything she had ever dreamed of.
* * *
Child trauma specialist and therapist Allison Davis Maxon, nationally recognized as an expert in children’s mental health, said that child incest victims may, as adults, feel powerless or worthless, and can “attract” partners who abuse them or their children.
“When a young girl has grown up being constantly victimized and perpetrated on,” explained Maxon, “it’s not uncommon, unfortunately, for her to grow up to marry a perpetrator and/or a pedophile, because that’s the relationship dance she knows. It’s really about attachment. When a child has learned that connection means pain, trauma, and abuse, he or she learns the dance of victimhood.
“The child typically internalizes a belief system that they are unworthy, dirty, ‘less than,’ ‘bad,’ and/or deserve to be punished. So it’s not uncommon for children who have suffered intense abuse and trauma to grow up and find a partner that will treat them according to what their belief system dictates: ‘I’m worthless, bad, and deserve to be punished.’”
* * *
Now in his first year at Virginia Tech, David was majoring in electrical engineering and was an excellent student. He was also a member of Eta Kappa Nu, an elite international electrical and computer engineering honor society. Past members include Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Google, and Yahoo! founder Sabeer Bhatia.
Most weekends, David would drive home from the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, to visit his girlfriend, Louise, but they always had to sneak around so her father wouldn’t find out that they had become more than friends.
“My mom hid that from my dad … and let Louise see him behind [his] back,” explained Teresa. “He didn’t think that it was appropriate for them to be alone without adult supervision.”
Phyllis encouraged the relationship, admiring the Turpin family’s devout Christian values. But her husband, now working in the Mercer County Assessor’s Office, would never have approved. His daughter was only fifteen and below the age of consent; any sexual contact between the couple would have been statutory rape.
* * *
In 1984, David Turpin graduated Virginia Tech with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. In both his junior and senior years, he was awarded the prestigious Marshall Hahn Engineering Scholarship. In the yearbook, he’s pictured with a tuxedo, a bow tie, and a big grin. He projects the look of a confident young man who is really going places.
As David began sending off his résumé to blue-chip companies, Louise started tenth grade at Princeton High School.
“She was a tiny little girl and looked like she was about ten,” recalled her shorthand teacher, Pamela Winfrey, who had been in Louise’s father’s graduating class. “I guess she was fifteen or sixteen, but she was a really quiet girl.”
But younger sister Teresa said Louise was highly manipulative, and Teresa would later realize that acting shy and dutiful was part of Louise’s act.
“Obedient in front of them,” explained Teresa, “but behind their back, no. Louise was going to get her way no matter what.”
Elizabeth said her sister was headstrong and always got what she wanted.
“It was her way or no way,” Elizabeth explained, “and if she had to sneak around to do it, she would.”
David soon found an engineering job with the U.S. defense contractor General Dynamics in Fort Worth, Texas. He asked Louise to elope with him, promising to buy her whatever she wanted.
Louise immediately agreed, and they began secretly planning their new life together.
Elizabeth now believes that Louise was also desperate to escape her grandfather’s sexual abuse, which had worsened since his divorce. Phyllis was bringing her three daughters over to his new home regularly, allowing her father to abuse them and then taking his money.
But whenever Papaw asked Elizabeth for a “tight hug,” Louise would insist on taking her place.
“She would always push me out of the way and say, ‘I’ll go,’” remembered Elizabeth. “She was very protective.”
When their grandmother discovered Phyllis was still allowing her daughters to be molested, she demanded Phyllis stop taking them over.
“And my mom would just say, ‘That’s my father,’” said Elizabeth.
4
THE RUNAWAYS
That Christmas, Louise gave little sign of her imminent departure. On Christmas Day, she was photographed with her grandmother, sitting on a checkered couch in the living room beside a fully trimmed Christmas tree with presents underneath.
But by mid-January, David Turpin had devised an elaborate scheme to whisk the sixteen-year-old off to Fort Worth, Texas, so they could marry. It was a big secret. Louise told only Elizabeth and a friend in her shorthand class at Princeton High School, swearing them to secrecy.
The night before leaving, Louise called Elizabeth into her bedroom, saying she had something important to tell her. She came in to find her older sister packing a duffel bag. Then Louise asked how Elizabeth would feel if she married a rich man and had a baby.
“You could come over and hold it,” said Louise, adding that they would all live together in a big house, with a nice car and lots of money to spend.
“Wouldn’t that be fun,” she said, “and I could buy you what you want.”
Then she made Elizabeth promise not to tell anybody.
Early the next morning, Louise said good-bye to her parents and went off on the school bus as usual. David’s plan called for him to masquerade as her father so he could sign her out of school.
That morning in shorthand class, Louise seemed nervous, waiting for her b
oyfriend to arrive. She repeatedly asked her teacher, Pamela Winfrey, for permission to go to the restroom so she could check if he was there yet.
“She said, ‘Can I be excused?’” recalled Winfrey.”And she left and then came back to class. Then just a few minutes later, she said, ‘Can I be excused again?’” and then she left. She asked two or three times to be excused. And then she left and I never saw her again.”
When Louise didn’t return to class, Winfrey asked the other pupils if Louise was sick.
“Then one of the girls told me, ‘Well, she’s planning on running off and getting married to David Turpin.’ I was totally amazed. But by then, it was too late to stop her.”
David Turpin had disguised himself to look older, donning a fake mustache and a cowboy hat. He had then parked outside the front entrance of Princeton High School and marched into the office, announcing he was Allen Robinette and Louise had to leave with him immediately. Nobody questioned him further, and he officially signed her out of school.
A few minutes later, David Turpin and his underage girlfriend were heading west out of Princeton for their eleven hundred–mile journey to Fort Worth.
* * *
When Elizabeth arrived home alone that afternoon, her mother presumed Louise had missed the school bus, so she drove to Princeton High School to collect her and was informed that her husband had checked her out hours earlier.
So Phyllis called Allen Robinette to find out what was happening, and he “flipped out,” saying he had not signed out their daughter. He then called the school, who told him that a tall man with a mustache and hat had left with Louise hours earlier.
“Daddy was frantic,” said Elizabeth. “Mommy was frantic, so they went to the police station and reported Louise missing.”
* * *
Over the next several days, there was no word from Louise. Her parents blamed each other for her running away. Allen was furious with his wife for encouraging the relationship with David, saying it was all her fault.