The Family Next Door

by John Glatt

  When Elizabeth replied that it sounded more like stealing, Louise slammed down the phone.

  * * *

  In spring 1999, the bank foreclosed on the Roddy Drive house and evicted David, Louise, and their six children. Without any explanation, Jennifer stopped coming to Meadowcreek Elementary. She would never return to public school.

  “One day she just never came back,” said Jessica Bermejo. “I thought that was odd. Later, I tried looking her up, but I never found anything. She had fallen off the grid.”

  None of the other Turpin children would ever see the inside of a classroom, as their father had decided to homeschool them. This would avoid any probing questions from teachers and parents about the Turpin family’s unusual lifestyle. Louise, who had dropped out of high school at sixteen to marry David, would be their teacher.

  Cult expert Rick Ross believed that the next stage of the cult came when David and Louise withdrew their children from the outside world, setting up an alternative caricature of one within their own increasingly unstable home.

  “He used those techniques to manipulate their minds and create unreasonable fears about the outside world,” said Ross. “And instill the kind of dependence, obedience, and submission that [he wanted].”

  Ross said that although David Turpin was clearly the instigator and leader of the cult, Louise willingly went along with it.

  “This is an example of a group that is dominated by a patriarchal figure,” said Ross, “and the mother has some responsibility as well. But David Turpin was like a god in this family. He became an object of worship, and to disobey him was the cardinal sin. And the children had no life, other than what he allowed them to have.”

  * * *

  After the Turpins moved out, the new owners of 3225 Roddy Drive were so appalled at the deplorable state the house had been left in that they took photographs. There was a terrible stench, and all the floors and carpets were caked in grime. There were also large dark stains covering the walls of every room, which appeared to be feces.

  7

  RIO VISTA

  At 10:31 a.m. on July 27, 1999, Louise Turpin gave birth to a seventh child, a healthy baby girl they named Jeanetta Betty. Once again, the baby was born at the Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Southwest Fort Worth in downtown Fort Worth.

  The following week, the Burleson Star duly printed a birth announcement sent in by the proud father on its Look Who’s New in the World of Babies page. Strangely, it listed the Turpins as living in Burleson, Texas, where they only had a post office box.

  “David and Louise (Robinette) Turpin of Burleson announce the birth of their daughter, Jeanetta Betty Turpin on Tuesday, July 27, 1999. She weighed 6 pounds, 3 ounces and measured 18¼ inches long.

  “She is welcomed by her siblings: Jennifer, 11; Joshua, 7; Jessica, 5; Jonathan, 3; Joy, 2; and Julianne, 14 months.”

  It would be the last birth announcement David and Louise would ever send off to a newspaper.

  * * *

  Several days after Jeanetta’s birth, the Turpin family moved into a house at 595 Hill County Road in Rio Vista, Texas. Forty miles south of Fort Worth, the nearest town of Cleburne seven miles away, Rio Vista was well off the beaten track. With a shrinking population of just 744, it was the perfect place to disappear from the world.

  A largely agricultural community, Rio Vista produces cotton, hay, peanuts, and dairy cattle. Neighbors often live miles apart, and everybody minds their own business. In the summer, the hot, muggy temperatures can be almost unbearable, and the winters are cold and windy.

  Although Rio Vista had its own school system, none of the Turpin children were ever enrolled. They were now totally off the radar.

  It was here that David and Louise would brainwash their children into total, unquestioning obedience.

  David and Louise created a bubble around their children, controlling every single aspect of their lives. David reigned like a god, introducing a harsh set of rules they must live by or suffer the terrible consequences. With Louise’s help, he brainwashed them into fearing the world outside so they would never try to escape. They ordered the children to never tell anyone their names or speak about what happened inside the house, as it would contaminate the family.

  “[He had] isolation and control of the environment,” explained Rick Ross. “He created an echo chamber, in which only [his] thoughts and [his] ideas [were] dominant. And then you have all of the family reinforcing everything that you say.”

  Even finding the redbrick house on Hill County Road presented quite a challenge. Route 174 south from Cleburne suddenly turned into a bumpy gravel path, with cows grazing on either side. The new Turpin home was a 2,300-square-foot, single-story ranch house with a double-pitched metal roof and a large barn to the side. The four-bedroom, two-bathroom home fronted a huge thirty-six-acre spread of rural farmland, dotted with mesquite trees. The property featured a producing gas well, for which David Turpin would receive $577.92 a month for mineral rights. It was also a commutable distance to the Lockheed Martin plant in Fort Worth, where David still worked.

  Directly opposite the Turpins on Hill County Road lived Ricky Lee and Shelli Vinyard and their two young daughters. When Shelli first saw her new neighbors moving in, she was excited to see children the same age as hers in such a desolate place.

  “Out here, there’s no one around,” Shelli explained. “[I was] looking for some fun myself and then somebody for the kids to play with.”

  When Shelli walked across the road and knocked on the front door to welcome the Turpins to the neighborhood, there was no answer. She could hear a baby—Jeanetta—crying inside. Eventually, she gave up and went home, wondering what was going on.

  “They were extremely mysterious,” said her husband, Ricky, who works as a tree cutter. “We tried to talk to them, but they wouldn’t answer the door, even though we lived straight across the road.”

  Eventually, their two daughters—Ashley, then aged ten, and her younger sister, Barbara—saw Jennifer, Joshua, and Jessica outside and tried to talk to them.

  “[They] were walking up and down the street,” Ashley remembered. “Joshua had a stick in his hand and was poking at rocks on the ground. We live in the country out here, so I was excited to have a group of kids to play with.”

  The three Turpin kids refused to give their names, cryptically saying the girls would have to pay attention and work it out themselves.

  “We had to guess them, basically,” said Barbara, “and the kids didn’t like that either.”

  Nonetheless, over the next few weeks, they all became friends, playing together in the Turpins’ backyard and around their property. The three Turpin siblings all stayed unusually close to each other.

  “We played in the creek that runs by their house,” said Ashley, “catching frogs and minnows and throwing rocks—normal kids’ stuff. Running around, just being crazy and having fun.”

  But whenever Ashley asked about their parents or where they went to school, the kids went blank.

  “They really didn’t talk about their parents or family,” said Ashley. “Every time I innocently asked them about their parents, they would sort of shut down.”

  During the ten years they lived across the road, Ashley rarely saw Louise or David Turpin.

  “The mother always dressed modestly,” she recalled. “The father had an intimidating presence, but quiet. He never said anything.”

  Ricky Vinyard was also curious about his new neighbors but not at all surprised they were distant and unfriendly.

  “Out here, everybody pretty much keeps to themselves,” he observed. “My best friend, that neighbor up there, I didn’t know him for the first four years.”

  Every morning, he’d see David leave for work in his Mustang, and later Louise would head out with some of the kids, driving a large minibus to town and back.

  “They’d come in from work,” recalled Vinyard. “They’d go get their groceries [but otherwise] they never left the house. Nev
er outdoors.”

  Ashley only went inside the Turpin house twice, each time entering through the back door.

  “There were animal cages and newspapers strewn about on the floor in piles with feces on it,” Ashley remembered. “They had dogs, cats, and goats [and] even though the house smelled of poop … I really didn’t think anything about it. We lived out in the country, [so] it was no big deal to have animals in your house.”

  But she was never allowed past the kitchen and dining room area, into the children’s bedrooms. And although the Turpin kids were “really friendly,” if they ever saw her mother outside, they went silent. They also appeared to be under strict instructions never to walk past the Vinyard house.

  “Whenever we would come close to [our] house,” said Ashley, “they would turn and start going back toward their property. [They] didn’t want to come past our house. We would pretty much just [play] in their yard all the time.”

  If they ever needed to go past the Vinyards’ house, the Turpin kids would take a long, circuitous route to avoid it. They would walk up a hill at the edge of their property before coming down again farther along Hill County Road.

  One day, Shelli Vinyard spotted Jennifer and Jessica walking down the road. She came over and introduced herself as Ashley’s and Barbara’s mom. Then she asked their names.

  “And it got weird,” Shelli recalled. “The older girl was like, ‘Well, if you pay attention to what we say, maybe you can figure out what our names are.’ And the younger girl turned around and goes, ‘No! Don’t! Don’t!’ She looked scared, like they were going to get in trouble.”

  The next time Ashley went over to play, Louise answered the door. Apparently, she had found out that Shelli had been asking questions and said the children could no longer come out and play. Then she shut the door.

  “I’m just like, ‘Wow, I can’t play with my friends anymore,’” remembered Ashley. “We live so far out in the country, and they’re the only kids on the whole street that I had to play with. And now I couldn’t.”

  The next day, Ashley came back and knocked on the front door, hoping one of the Turpin children would answer and explain what was going on.

  “And I knocked and I knocked and I knocked,” she said, “and nobody ever answered.”

  She peeked through a window and saw baby Jeanetta lying in her playpen, crying.

  “Nobody else was there,” said Ashley. “She’d be there for hours, all day, all night, unsupervised.”

  * * *

  Now living off the grid, Mother and Father’s abuse of their seven children escalated. What had started as neglect in Fort Worth turned increasingly violent over the next decade in Rio Vista.

  “It started with slapping, hitting, [and] throwing around the room,” reported Riverside County deputy district attorney Kevin Beecham. “And it aggravated to belts.”

  At first, Mother and Father whipped the children with the leather end of David’s belt, using the metal buckle if they still didn’t behave. Then they began using a wooden paddle or an oar. The offending child would have to drop his or her pants and lie down on the bed. They would then be beaten with the oar on their lower back, buttocks, and the backs of their upper legs.

  Years later, their oldest son, Joshua, would describe being beaten with the oar as “the worst of the worst.”

  If this still didn’t work, Mother and Father would use what Joshua called “the switch”—a metal tent stick with fiberglass wrapped around it and metal tips on the end. Both parents carried out the beatings, but Joshua prayed Mother would do it, as she didn’t have Father’s strength. These savage beatings often injured the children, who would cry out in pain.

  But there was no one to hear them.

  Their parents also laid down strict rules for the children to follow, allegedly following the tenets of the Pentecostal religion in which David and Louise had been raised. But there was nothing in any religion that forbade washing and taking showers to keep clean.

  “None of the victims were allowed to shower more than once a year,” said Riverside County district attorney Mike Hestrin. “One of the reasons for the punishments [was] if the children were found to [have] wash[ed] their hands above the wrist area, they were accused of ‘playing in the water’ and they would be chained up.”

  Cult expert Rick Ross said these unnatural punishments were all about David Turpin’s need to control his children.

  “The father had a kind of philosophy,” said Ross, “but it wasn’t really about religion at all. The Pentecostal religion had little, if any, meaningful relevance to what he was doing.”

  Shelli Vinyard recalls noticing how the Turpin siblings’ hands were pale white, compared to their thin arms.

  “The rest of them were dirty,” she said. “[From] the wrist down was the only clean part of them.”

  Soon after they moved in, David converted the living room into a makeshift schoolroom, with a row of eight school desks. His parents, James and Betty Turpin, who visited Hill County Road several times, said their grandchildren had “very strict homeschooling,” learning long scriptures from the Bible by rote. Some of the older ones even memorized the entire book.

  The prosecutor said that some of the Turpin children could barely read and write and learned from educational posters with letters of the alphabet and numbers. They also had phonics books, and religious posters with selected teachings were pinned to the wall.

  Jennifer, age 29, who only had a third-grade public school education, taught her younger siblings as much as she could, but years later, some of them hadn’t got past the first half of the alphabet, according to prosecutors.

  The children were so badly fed that their growth became stunted, and they would suffer permanent physical and cognitive damage. There were also questions of whether David and Louise were making them fast.

  Sixteen years later, David’s brother, Randy, by then the president of Valor Christian College in Columbus, Ohio, would self-publish a book called 21 Days of Prayer and Fasting.

  “Fasting and prayer go hand in hand,” Randy wrote. “Fasting is a good way to open our hearts for the Holy Spirit to reveal areas of pride. Recognizing and eliminating pride is a key to entering God’s best for your life.”

  Randy claimed that after three days of fasting, people are no longer hungry and have a heightened awareness of God.

  He defined fasting as “voluntarily depriving oneself of physical nourishment in order to accomplish a spiritual purpose … putting to death fleshly desires.” He also warned how “bodily appetites” lead us away from God.

  His book also provided a road map for the three-week fast, along with a journal to be filled in each day.

  “Learn how to deal with cravings for food,” he advised. “Keep a notepad on hand for this purpose. By making a list of meals and food items you are craving, it is a way to postpone the thought or desire. When you write it down you are telling yourself, ‘I can think about this another time.’”

  It was around this time that David and Louise started providing journals for their children, encouraging them to keep daily records of their lives, according to the D.A. However, there is no direct evidence that the children’s near-starvation diets were in any way connected with this Pentecostal religious practice or influenced by their uncle.

  * * *

  In November 2000, Louise gave birth to her eighth child, Jordan.

  David began dabbling in farming. He bought some cows, chickens, goats, and three enormous pigs, but since the pigs were never fed enough, they terrorized the neighborhood in search of food.

  “The pigs were huge—three-hundred pounders,” recalled Ricky Vinyard. “And they kept escaping because he refused to feed them.”

  On numerous occasions after the pigs escaped, Vinyard would cross the road to warn David.

  “And I’d beat and beat and beat on the door,” he said. “I never could get hold of anybody. These people didn’t want any human contact.”

  One day, a large dum
pster appeared in the Turpin front yard, into which they started throwing their trash. Over the next few years, their concerned neighbors watched the rubbish pile higher and higher until it was an overflowing health hazard.

  While all their neighbors took care of their properties, 595 Hill County Road was an eyesore.

  “They had a pretty good spread out there,” said Ricky, “but they didn’t do anything with it. They never mowed the lawn. They didn’t do anything but huddle up in the house.”

  Vinyard would often see his neighbor shooting off his gun outside. One day he watched, aghast, as Turpin placed a can in his driveway by the road, walked back to his house, and began firing at it.

  “I caught him standing in his driveway with a pistol shooting toward the road,” said Vinyard. “It kind of spooked me out.”

  After Mother ordered her children not to play with Ashley and Barbara, the family went into virtual lockdown. The siblings started sleeping during the day and were only allowed to leave their rooms to use the bathroom and go into the kitchen one at a time to eat. The children were apparently allowed to clean their teeth, although none of them had ever seen a dentist.

  “At night … every light in the house was on,” remembered Ashley, “but all the curtains were drawn shut. That house was silent all day long.”

  Every night, she could hear the Turpin children playing out back where they couldn’t be seen, but over time, they came out less and less.

  “They were keeping night hours,” said Shelli. “It was completely a ghost town during the day. I was getting concerned at that point. Something’s going on over there. Something’s not right.”

  The Vinyards often considered contacting the authorities for suspected abuse, but Ricky always had reservations.

  “We discussed it,” said Ricky, “and we didn’t want to have the repercussions with them. Also, I knew he had a pistol.”