by John Glatt
Then James lit a single candle, and it took three attempts for the aging Taylor patriarch, who still had a full head of white hair, to blow it out.
* * *
It was in Perris that fifteen-year-old Jordan Turpin decided to finally escape the ruthless tyranny of her parents. She was fed up with the violence and degradation she’d endured all her life and wanted to break free. It would take her two years of careful planning. She knew there would be dire consequences if Mother and Father ever found out.
16
“MAY YOU BE BLESSED WITH MORE CHILDREN”
In the fall of 2015, Monument Park was hit by a plague of mosquitoes after a torrential rainstorm flooded the retention basins surrounding the new development. The mosquito problem became so bad that residents, fearing the West Nile virus that had recently caused three deaths in Riverside County, kept their children indoors.
In early October, more than seventy-five people descended on Perris City Hall to demand action. Angry neighbors told horror stories about the mosquito infestation, comparing it to a Stephen King novel. Josh Tiedeman-Bell, the Monument Park neighborhood watch program president, said that he had come home from vacation to find his walls covered in mosquitoes.
“It’s hell living here,” he said. “We are miserable.”
Perris resident Sheri Fink, sixty-two, who lived just a couple of blocks away from the Turpins, displayed her horribly bitten right leg at the meeting, announcing that she was a “prisoner” in her own home.
Soon after the meeting, a delegation from the neighborhood watch arrived at 160 Muir Wood Road, ordering David Turpin to cut his overgrown grass and weeds in their front yard, declaring it a mosquito magnet. At nine o’clock that night, neighbor Wendy Martinez saw four of the Turpin kids outside their house. They were on their knees digging up weeds and laying new turf, while their mother watched from the door.
“They were just rolling on the grass,” remembered Martinez, who noticed how pale and thin they looked. “Their mother was in the archway, and I said hi. There was no movement … like they were told not to talk to anybody. The mom, no movement at all.”
* * *
Inside, the Turpin house was filthy and stank of human waste. Mother and Father had ordered that all the blinds in the siblings’ bedrooms be closed all the time so neighbors could not see the children chained up inside. They were prohibited from opening the blinds or looking out of the windows.
Jonathan, now twenty-two and five foot eight, was chained up far more often than his other siblings. He would later tell investigators how torturous it was being chained up to the rails of his upper bunk bed for several months at a time, especially during one of the frequent lice outbreaks in the house.
“It was hard for him to sleep,” said lead investigator Thomas Salisbury, “and hard for him to move, roll over, or itch the lice on his head or scratch his back.”
* * *
Mother was becoming increasingly violent with the younger children. Jolinda would tell investigators how Mother would lose her temper and hit Jolinda on the head with her knuckles so hard that her mind went blank.
Once, the frail little girl took some clothing and lip gloss out of Mother’s room and secretly dressed up in it. Later, when Jolinda sneaked backed in to return the items, she was caught and dropped some of the makeup under the bed. Furious, Mother grabbed her by the hair and neck, forcing her underneath the bed to retrieve it and holding her there. There were lots of spiders underneath the bed, and Jolinda was bitten badly, but Mother wouldn’t let her up until she found the makeup.
* * *
That Halloween, Mother and Father brought their thirteen children back to Las Vegas for their third wedding renewal ceremony at A Elvis Chapel to mark their thirtieth anniversary. This time, they brought some guests with them.
Louise had now dyed her hair brown and had a fashionable new cut. She wore a strapless white satin dress with a peaked bodice and carried a bouquet of mixed flowers. David wore his usual tuxedo. Their daughters, who had been allowed to bathe for the first time in many months, wore the exact same purple plaid dresses, with white tights and white shoes. Their scrubbed-up sons wore the same suits with purple ties.
“It was like, ‘The kids are back,’” said Kent Ripley who once again officiated as Elvis. “A fun family. Did the clothes fit? No. They had got a little older and taller maybe. I don’t think they looked any worse. I don’t think they looked any better.”
Louise had ordered the “Hound Dog” package, a slightly more modest affair than the previous one.
As Ripley began singing “Love Me Tender” to start the ceremony, baby Janna could be heard crying. The Elvis impersonator then escorted the smiling bride down the aisle past two young couples sitting at the back, who have never been identified.
“They weren’t family,” said Ripley. “Sometimes people just stroll in, but under the circumstances, I don’t think [David and Louise] would have wanted them to be there, if they didn’t know them.”
At the altar, overcome with emotion, David started weeping. But before he could pull a tissue out of his trouser pocket, Ripley had one waiting.
“Have a happy towel, David,” he quipped.
As David composed himself, Ripley continued. “Today, we celebrate the moment you truly have waited for … thirty years of memories. And if you take today’s date and flip it around to thirteen. Yeah … there they are.”
Ripley pointed toward the thirteen Turpin children in the audience, their new chubby baby, wearing a bright pink chiffon dress, being held by one of her older sisters.
“Your love has grown,” Ripley observed, “and so has your family.”
David and Louise exchanged marital vows once again as their new baby wailed. Then Ripley summoned ring bearer James to the altar with their wedding rings, which they duly exchanged before slow-dancing to “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”
Ripley concluded the ceremony by declaring, “It is Halloween Day, the year 2015, and by the power that’s vested in me by the suit that I wear today … the two of you still will be husband and wife. Together forever, and may you be blessed with more children.”
After David French-kissed Louise to rapturous applause, Ripley invited all the Turpin children to the stage to participate in the finale song, “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck.”
As their parents snapped their fingers in time with the music in front of the stage, their children posed for photographs. Ripley counted them out one by one.
“It’s lucky thirteen,” he joked. “But wait nine more months [and] come back.”
* * *
In December, the Monument Park neighborhood watch held a Christmas decorating contest, with gift cards for the winners. Louise and David decided to enter. Late one night, a couple of the older girls set up a Nativity scene in their front yard, placing a Nativity star in a window and a Santa Claus in a sleigh by the garage.
While they were working, Kimberly Milligan and her son Robert came out of their house across the road to see what their mysterious neighbors were up to.
When she complimented them on their Christmas decorations, the girls went blank.
“They just froze,” remembered Kimberly. “They were scared to death, [and] you could tell they were terrified.”
When Kimberly said she was just being friendly, the girls turned and went back inside.
A few days later, the Turpins took their four eldest children to Monument Park for the official judging of the Christmas decoration contest. Louise seemed unusually friendly, chatting to her neighbor Salynn Simon about growing up in West Virginia and family life in Texas. She also talked about how proud she was to have thirteen children, whose first names all began with the letter J. She introduced Joshua, then twenty-three, and Simon was stunned by how young he looked.
“I told him, ‘You look so young,’” she said. “‘You look fifteen.’”
Joshua merely smiled and nodded. Louise explained how David always took the older children t
o Las Vegas for their twenty-first birthdays, and they were continually asked for ID because they looked so young.
Watch program president Josh Tiedeman-Bell saw the four Turpin children standing in line behind their parents, waiting for hot chocolate and cookies.
“Everybody was super-skinny,” he said. “Not athletic skinny [but] malnourished skinny. Their haircuts were all like their dad’s. They looked like pilgrims.”
* * *
To celebrate Christmas, Mother and Father unchained their children, allowing everyone more time out of their bedrooms. For the next week or two, the children would receive what they called “good treatment.”
“Mother would buy them good and expensive gifts,” said Riverside County deputy Manuel Campos, “[and] try and feed them better. She would spend more time with them and play games with them.”
The “good treatment” could last anywhere between two days to two weeks. Then they would chain up the “suspects” again, and life in the house would continue as usual.
The holidays provided an all-too-brief reprieve from the horrendous living conditions the children endured for the rest of the year.
* * *
On Thursday, February 18, 2016, Phyllis Robinette died at Princeton Community Hospital at the age of sixty-six. A few days earlier, she had been rushed into hospital with a viral infection and put on life support. Her two youngest daughters, Elizabeth and Teresa, and son Billy all drove from Tennessee to be with her. Over the last few years, Elizabeth had finally forgiven her mother for allowing Papaw to molest her as a little child.
“I always felt like Mommy did her best,” wrote Elizabeth. “Even when she let Papaw molest us for money. She needed money to feed us, pay the bills.”
On her deathbed, Phyllis asked to Skype Louise so she could say goodbye to her thirteen grandchildren.
“My mom’s last request on her deathbed,” said Elizabeth, “was to talk to the kids and see them on Skype. [Louise] wouldn’t even answer the phone.”
“I think she harbored a lot of resentment toward Mommy,” said Teresa. “I think she resented the whole family because they kept the secret [of abuse].”
A few hours after their mother was taken off life support, Louise finally called, launching into a vitriolic attack on her siblings.
“She was saying strange stuff,” said Elizabeth, “like, ‘Mommy didn’t love you like she did us. She [doesn’t] want you at the funeral.’”
Louise refused to attend her mother’s funeral the following Monday, saying that she had a prearranged trip to Las Vegas. But her grandfather John Taylor did attend after agreeing to pay for the service as none of the other family members could afford it.
Just shy of his ninety-second birthday, Papaw walked into the Cravens-Shires Funeral Home in Bluefield, where Phyllis’s body lay in an open casket. He went straight over to his granddaughter Elizabeth, assuring her everything was taken care of.
“And he wanted to know,” said Elizabeth, “if I’d come over later and give him a tight hug.”
17
THINGS 1 TO 13
In early 2016, Jennifer Turpin secretly lent Jordan her cell phone so she could go online and surf the internet. The fifteen-year-old was watching Justin Bieber music videos when Joshua caught her. He reported her to Mother, who flew into a rage.
“Do you want to die?” Mother yelled, grabbing Jordan by the throat and starting to choke her.
When Jordan said she didn’t, Mother screamed, “Yes, you do! Yes, you do! You want to die and go to hell!”
When Louise finally released Jordan, her neck was sore for the next two days.
After the choking incident, the teenager considered calling Child Protective Services, which she had somehow found out about. She sneaked out of the house for the first time by herself to summon help. But when she saw Mother’s car approaching, she rushed back inside and up to her room.
* * *
That April, David and Louise posted a carefully staged photograph of the family outside near the Skydive Perris headquarters. All their children are wearing jeans and red Dr. Seuss T-shirts, numbered Thing 1 to Thing 13, in order of their ages. Their parents also have Dr. Seuss T-shirts, but no visible numbers. Although gamely smiling, all the siblings look emaciated, except baby Janna.
Nine months earlier, the hit TV reality show 19 Kids and Counting had been canceled after seven years. The TLC cable show followed the lives of devout Baptists Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, from Tontitown, Arkansas, and their nineteen children—nine girls and ten boys. Like the Turpins, every one of them had a Christian name starting with the letter J and were homeschooled.
Louise Turpin was a big fan of the show, which had averaged 2.3 million viewers a week. Now Louise and David saw a void in the reality show market and perhaps thought they could take advantage of it with their thirteen children, telling relatives they were trying for more kids.
On May 12, they updated their Facebook cover photo to a shot of their recent Halloween wedding renewal and posted several others of their smiling children at the ceremony. They also posted a photograph of baby Janna visiting Santa Claus, and of their front yard Christmas decorations, which had been finally removed in late February.
Four days later, Allen Robinette died at the age of sixty-seven at his daughter Elizabeth’s home in Cleveland, Tennessee. It was just three months after his ex-wife, Phyllis, had passed away.
Once again, Louise shunned her dying father, refusing to respond to a stream of urgent texts, voice mails, and private Facebook messages from Elizabeth, who’d cared for him in his final days.
“She wouldn’t answer me,” said Elizabeth. “She knew Daddy wanted to talk to the kids on Skype, and she didn’t want to have to tell him no.”
Louise also refused to attend her father’s funeral, saying it was too short notice. It led to a huge fight with Elizabeth, during which Louise demanded some of her father’s personal items.
Furious, Louise sent her in-laws, Betty and Jim Turpin, who did come to the funeral, to confront Elizabeth at the hotel where they were all staying.
“I told them exactly how I felt,” wrote Elizabeth. “She wouldn’t get anything after the way she treated my parents.”
Mercer County clerk Verlin Moye, who was a pallbearer at Allen’s funeral, was surprised that neither Louise nor her children attended.
“They were not there,” he said. “There were a couple of daughters that lived in Tennessee and their children, but none of his California family.”
In their absence, Elizabeth made sure that the recent photograph of his thirteen grandkids wearing their Dr. Seuss T-shirts was placed in Allen’s casket.
* * *
A few weeks later, David and Louise brought Joshua and several of his older siblings to Mt. San Jacinto College to watch a guitar ensemble perform. The Turpins occupied almost half a row of seats near the stage, dressed identically in blue shirts and tan pants.
“They all seemed well behaved,” Mt. San Jacinto student Joe Chermak told the Associated Press. “They were all in uniforms, so at first I thought it was a group of kids coming from another school.”
Then, during the performance, the Turpins suddenly all stood up and walked out of the auditorium.
“They left abruptly in the middle of the show,” said Chermak. “You could tell from their [arms] they were really skinny and pale.”
Joshua, now twenty-four, puzzled his younger classmates. They wondered why his mother still escorted him to class, waiting outside to take him home.
Now in his sixth semester at Mt. San Jacinto College, Joshua was an A student, constantly on the president’s honor roll. In his last report for spring 2016, Joshua maintained a 3.93 grade point average, although he never earned a degree.
“[He] talked to himself,” said Seraphim Faith (not her real name), who took an a cappella class with him. “He was mentally disturbed. During class, he would get up and just go stand in the hall.”
Seraphim later told Radar Online t
hat Joshua smelled and his hair looked like he had just gotten out of bed. She once confronted Louise Turpin after he complained to her about not knowing anyone and asked if they could be friends.
One night after class, Seraphim accompanied Joshua out into the parking lot, where his mother was waiting by their van.
“He asked her,” said Seraphim. “‘Mom, I met this girl, and she doesn’t have any friends either. Can we be friends?’”
Louise looked the girl up and down and asked her name.
“I told her my name, and she told him, ‘Sure, sure, whatever,’” said Seraphim. “They got in a large van and left. Never showed up again.”
That was the last time Joshua ever set foot in Mt. San Jacinto College.
* * *
In late 2016, the Reverend Randy Turpin self-published 21 Days of Prayer and Fasting. The book, which provides a guide to the spiritual enrichment of fasting, credited Jim and Betty Turpin as his “personal mentors in prayer.”
In his book, David’s brother said that fasting and prayer go hand in hand.
“With prayer we lay hold of the heavenly,” he wrote. “With fasting we cast aside the earthly. When we are fasting, we are not fasting for ourselves. We are totally removing ourselves from the picture. Fasting is not me-centered.”
Though there was still no proof of a correlation between the Pentecostal principle and the Turpin children’s near starvation, the idea was chilling. Leaving their children at home hungry, Mother and Father would often eat out at one of their favorite Perris restaurants.
“Louise was in here every other day,” said Matthew Padilla, who worked at Leonardi’s Pizza inside the WinCo supermarket. “Sometimes with her husband. She would order a slice of pepperoni, or a chicken club sandwich with no tomato. We … would chat. She was normal, if maybe a bit reserved.”