by John Glatt
“When my son passed away, they actually came over here and made a condolence call,” said Shelli Vinyard. “I was in bed … and didn’t get to talk to them, [but] my husband and kids, I think, talked to them. They would act a little social, but they wouldn’t get real social.”
10
“SOW THOSE WILD OATS”
On May 24, 2008, Louise Turpin celebrated her fortieth birthday and had a midlife crisis. She and forty-seven-year-old David now decided to start investigating new religions, including snake-handling and witchcraft. They began drinking alcohol in bars and decided to try an open marriage. The mother of twelve suddenly got a makeover, cutting off her long hair and dyeing it red and wearing heavy makeup.
“Louise had never drunk a beer or smoked a cigarette or done a drug … in her whole life,” Teresa told MailOnline reporter Martin Gould. “Then one day, just as she was turning forty, she called and told me she and David were going to have a drink.”
A few hours later, Louise called back.
“She was drunk for the first time in her life,” said Teresa. “She was very giggly. I was in shock.”
Louise also informed her sisters that she and David no longer went to church, as they were “tired” of it.
“They didn’t want to bring their kids up in church,” said Elizabeth. “They don’t trust church people.”
Louise said they were now examining other religions, including Catholicism, Mormonism, and the Mennonites. She added that they were also practicing witchcraft, collecting Satanic books, and contacting spirits with a Ouija board.
Around this time, the couple also started taking twelve hundred–mile gambling trips to Las Vegas.
“She told me that the older children were helping her take care of the younger children,” said Teresa, “so her and David could sow those wild oats that they didn’t sow when [they] were younger.”
Elizabeth was shocked by Louise’s new hedonistic attitude to life.
“She started partying in her forties,” she said, “acting like a teenager [and] doing things that normally in our family we don’t do.”
A few months later, Louise called Teresa to announce that she and David had become swingers and were driving seven hundred miles east to a hotel in Huntsville, Alabama, for a rendezvous with a man they had met on the internet.
“She [said she] was going to sleep with him,” said Teresa, “and that David was okay with that. I told her I thought it was a mistake.”
When they got to the hotel, David dropped off his wife. He waited in the car as she went up to the room and had sex with the stranger. Louise had the man record them making love, using a video camcorder she had brought with her so David could watch it later. She also posed for provocative photographs in the bathtub, wearing sexy lingerie.
Back in Texas, Louise posted some of the photos on her MySpace page.
“My mom got so mad at Louise,” remembered Teresa. “[She] got very, very upset over those pictures. [Louise] said, ‘It’s our life.’”
According to Elizabeth, Louise detailed how she had sex with the man in the Alabama hotel room, and how he he had been rough with her.
Exactly one year to the day after hooking up with the stranger, they drove back to Huntsville, Alabama, checking into the same hotel as before. On the way there, Louise called Teresa to boast about their latest sexual adventure.
“She thought it was funny that David was taking her back to the exact same hotel room,” said Teresa, “so David could sleep with her in the same bed … that she had slept with this man in. [It’s] even worse and even weirder.”
Louise was also becoming obsessed with snakes. She was now attending a snake-handling church, and she started going to the annual rattlesnake roundup festival in Sweetwater, Texas.
“Louise was attracted to that,” said Elizabeth. “Women dancing with rattlesnakes around their necks. Snakes give you power.”
Louise boasted that she loved eating rattlesnakes. She would skin them before cooking and said they were delicious.
* * *
The Turpins were now living the high life, running up thousands of dollars of debt on dozens of credit cards. They spent freely during their gambling trips to Las Vegas and would stay at Caesars Palace. They bought expensive computer games and lavish toys that were never unwrapped. Louise often bragged to her family about their luxurious lifestyle and how David treated himself to a brand-new Mustang every year.
During a two-month period in 2009, Louise and David bought a Ford Econoline van and a Ford Focus, worth almost $30,000, on credit.
“I couldn’t understand,” wrote Elizabeth, “how they could afford to drink, party, go on vacations, visit amusement parks and gamble.”
However, when Elizabeth fell on hard times, Louise was there to protect her younger sister, just as she always had. A year earlier, Elizabeth had caught her own husband, Jonathan Flores, having an affair. He had then walked out of their eleven-year marriage while she was pregnant, moving in with his new girlfriend. Jonathan took their six children, but Elizabeth eventually won custody of them.
Now living in Texas, a desperate Elizabeth called Louise for help before her baby was due. Although it had been months since the sisters had last spoken on the phone, Louise immediately came to her rescue.
“When I had the baby, she came to the hospital,” said Elizabeth. “She went every single day to the NICU to visit the baby.”
Louise would wait until her little niece was off the feeding tube and hold her. After being discharged from the hospital, Elizabeth was homeless, ending up at a Salvation Army shelter with her new baby. Then Louise stepped in.
“[She] was there for me in my separation and bought me a house,” said Elizabeth, “and supported me when my husband wasn’t anywhere there for me.”
For the next few months, Louise paid all her bills, hiring a lawyer to win back custody of her other children. Every weekend, she would visit Elizabeth at her new home.
“We would go out to eat,” Elizabeth recalled. “She would take me shopping for clothes. It was amazing.”
On one visit, Louise wanted to bring in her Ouija board, which she kept in the trunk of her car. When Elizabeth refused, saying it was dangerous and evil, her sister laughed. She said that she and David only did it when they were staying in hotels and never in front of their children. She also claimed she had asked the Ouija board if she was going to have a thirteenth baby, and it had said yes.
A couple of times, Louise brought two children along with her, but Elizabeth said she never saw anything to make her suspect any “child endangerment issues,” or that they had abandoned their other children alone in the trailer.
After counseling, Elizabeth and Jonathan reunited after a two-and-a-half-year separation, and they are now bringing up their seven children in Tennessee.
* * *
In early 2010, David Turpin lost his job at Lockheed Martin. Once again, they were deep in debt, but that didn’t stop David from treating himself to a $22,000 Ford Mustang on credit. But their creditors were catching up with them, and it became a common sight to see repo men knocking on the door of the Turpin trailer.
“The repo guys started coming up,” remembered Ricky Vinyard. “They put a bounty on them because they bought a van and a Mustang and quit paying for them. They basically stole them because they knew they were already in trouble. They were preparing to skin out.”
On April 5, Johnson County Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the Hill County Road property, officially serving the Turpins with civil papers. Wells Fargo had foreclosed on the property for nonpayment of mortgage.
A month later, David and Louise Turpin returned to 595 Hill County Road for the first time in years. They loaded their twelve children into the van, taking as many personal possessions as they could. They left all their pet dogs in the house, along with their pigs, goats, and chickens. Then they drove off into the night and never came back.
* * *
Because the Turpins were so reclus
ive, it was some time before their Hill County Road neighbors noticed they were no longer living there.
“One day, they just vanished,” said Ashley Vinyard. “We didn’t realize it for several weeks, until bill collectors were knocking on our door asking about the Turpins. They had brand-new cars that were being repossessed, and debt collectors were looking for them because they were foreclosing on the property.”
One day, Ashley, her father, and a neighbor decided to go into the trailer to see just how their mysterious neighbors had been living for the last ten years.
“We went up there and knocked on the door,” said Ricky, “and we could hear the dogs indoors barking. So it was like, ‘Man, we’ve got to let these dogs out.’”
When they opened the door, the Turpins’ two pet Chihuahuas ran out and hid under the house.
“They wouldn’t come out,” said Ricky. “So we went in. The smell was rancid.”
All the carpeting had been ripped out, and the floors were covered in feces and urine. The dogs had apparently survived by eating dirty diapers and drinking from the toilets, which were now empty.
As they entered the bedroom, the stench became overpowering. It had been set up like a barracks, with six bunk beds stacked in a row. None of the beds had mattresses, but Ricky noticed ropes tied to some of the headboards.
“At the time,” said Ricky, “I didn’t think nothing of it.”
They ventured into the filthy living room. It looked like it had been used as a makeshift schoolroom, with eight small desks and educational posters tacked on the walls. There was a broken chalkboard. Scattered around the floor were an array of religious pamphlets and books.
“It looked like a cult house,” Ashley remembered. “It was kind of scary. Like preparing for Armageddon … because the devil [controls] the government. Social media is evil. It’s all corrupt.”
As they walked through the trailer, they noticed that all the doors, closets, toy chests, and even the refrigerator shared a disturbing feature.
“Everything was padlocked,” said Ricky. “When [we saw this] we’re like, ‘Oh my god. What were they doing?’”
The trio left the stinking trailer to take a look at the house where the Turpins had lived for the first five years. They walked past an abandoned old Ford pickup, which had been used as a dumpster and was overflowing with wiener sausage cans, potted meat, and diapers.
“It had been there so long the bags had withered,” said Ricky, “and the trash was actually falling out and the critters were getting in there and eating.”
Ashley heard a baby kitten crying inside, which they pulled out and took home with them.
“The dumpster smelled of death,” said Ashley. “Who knows what was buried in it.”
The back porch door of the redbrick ranch house was wide open, so they walked in. The pungent smell was overwhelming.
“It’s knee deep in filth,” Ricky recalled. “Dirty diapers piled waist high. There’s computers, toys, and trash. The toys are still in the boxes. They’ve never been opened. They had Mattel toys for the baby and Pirates of the Caribbean stuff, as well as a TV in the mulch. You could see the rats jumping in and out of the stuff.”
In the kitchen, they found a dead cat on the stove and a dead dog on the floor, as well as several other animal corpses lying around.
“And once we saw those corpses,” said Ricky, “it’s like, ‘Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.’”
* * *
It took the mortgage company three months to clean up the Turpin property and make it halfway presentable. The trailer was then repossessed by Vanderbilt Mortgage and Finance and eventually removed from the backyard.
When the Hill County Road property was finally put on the market, the real estate agent made prospective buyers sign a “hold harmless agreement” before they could view it, to indemnify the bank if they became sick.
The house was eventually purchased by Nellie Baldwin and her son Billy as rental property. Nellie, seventy-eight, was a neighbor of the Turpins and knew them by sight. She had always wondered what had happened to them.
“The house was in really bad shape,” said Billy. “It was just nasty. The flooring in the bathroom was rotted out. There was feces on the floor and a lot of diapers around. We spent about $30,000 on it to get it livable.”
His mother, who had been buying rental properties for decades, was shocked when she went in to try to clean it up.
“They had smeared feces on walls,” she said. “The living room and every room just had a terrible odor.”
After a busy day of cleaning the house, Nellie would pour a couple of gallons of bleach on the floors to make the stench more bearable the next day.
Soon after taking possession, the Baldwins noticed some unusual vents in the master bedroom closet, where some of the Turpin children might have been imprisoned. Billy also found some old Polaroid photographs taken before the Turpins left. One showed a rope tied to the end of a metal bed rail in the children’s bedroom. Another captured some children’s drawings on a bedroom wall of what appeared to be a pregnant woman.
11
MURRIETA
On June 4, 2010, David and Louise Turpin moved their twelve children to Southern California. Thirteen-year-old Joy Turpin memorialized the event in her journal, writing that they had “crossed into California.” One week later, the Turpin family moved into a beautiful new house in Murrieta, sixty-five miles north of San Diego.
Built in 2002, 39550 Saint Honore Drive was a spacious 2,470-square-foot, five-bedroom family home with three bathrooms and a loft. There were two large living rooms downstairs, and Louise and David took the master bedroom upstairs, while their twelve children occupied the other four rooms, none of which faced the street. There was also a beautiful fitted kitchen, strictly off-limits to the children.
Their new house, which they were renting, lay in a trendy Vintage Reserve neighborhood of stucco and tile-roofed homes in Murrieta, Riverside County—midway between San Diego and Los Angeles.
Louise told her family that they were moving to Southern California for David’s work in the aerospace industry—but in reality, he had been unemployed for the last few months. Their sole income was the monthly royalties—$577.92—that David still received for the mineral rights to the well on his now-foreclosed Rio Vista property. The payments would continue until March 2011, when the royalty company realized he no longer owned the well.
Although they survived on credit, Louise painted a totally different picture of their life in sunny California to her family. She boasted about their new annual pass to Disneyland for the whole family and personalized car plates reading DSLAND.
“They were the most perfect family I had ever seen,” said Teresa. “She always had nice homes and nice cars. I even said, ‘Oh, Louise got the fairy tale. She’s been married to her husband since she was sixteen. They’ve got all this money.’”
Over the next several years, Teresa and Billy made plans to visit Louise in California and get to know their nieces and nephews, many of whom they had never met, but the trips were always canceled at the last minute.
“[Louise] would always come up with an excuse,” explained Teresa. “That she had had a bad dream about the flight [or] one of the kids got sick.”
Once, she invented an elaborate story about how one of their daughters had gotten into trouble, and she and David were too “aggravated” to host a family visit.
Over the next few months, Louise started distancing the children even further from her family, now only allowing her siblings to speak to their nieces and nephews one at a time. Teresa worried that the children’s homeschooling did not allow them to go out and meet new friends and learn social mores. They always seemed uncomfortable and difficult to talk to on Skype.
“I was always concerned that they weren’t going to be socially developed,” she said.
Louise began making excuses as to why she and the kids could no longer Skype weekly. She would explain how busy she was
caring for so many children. Finally, she broke off all contact.
* * *
In fact, homeschooling was virtually nonexistent. Louise would teach the children using phonics books for a few days before losing interest. Years would pass between lessons. To ensure that the Riverside County authorities never questioned why none of the Turpin children attended school, David Turpin officially opened the City Day School, designating himself as principal. On October 1, 2010, he filed the California Department of Education’s Private School Affidavit, under penalty of perjury. He wrote that his City Day School at 39550 Saint Honore Drive, Murrieta, had eight students—from the second to the eleventh grade. Under the religious column, he wrote that it would not be affiliated with any denomination.
“This is a private full-time school,” read the signed affidavit, “that offers instruction in several branches of study required to be taught in public schools of the state that offers this instruction in English and that keeps attendance records.”
From then on, Mother and Father were officially homeschooling their children, with no legal obligation to send them to state school. Because the City Day School had more than six students, it was subject to an annual inspection by the local fire marshal to check that it was up to safety and fire standards.
But for the next seven years that David Turpin ran his private school, there would never be one inspection.
* * *
After the move to Murrieta, Louise and David’s abuse of their children escalated. Instead of being a fresh start, the Murrieta house became their new prison. Mother and Father confined their children to different rooms and began tying them to furniture with ropes as punishment. But David and Louise treated the older siblings far better than the younger ones, perhaps trying to breed resentment and jealousy among the children; Joshua got a camera, and Jennifer was even allowed to have a smartphone. Mother and Father felt confident that their cultlike control was strong enough that the siblings would never try to use these limited luxuries to escape.