Turpin Family: What to Know About the 'House of Horrors' and Where the Siblings Are Now
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"I'm sorry for everything I've done to hurt my children. I love my children so much. ... I only want the best for them," she said. Colace gave the credit to Jordan, telling her he was glad she took that photo of her sisters in chains. Both Jordan and Jennifer declined to discuss their other siblings, wanting to protect their privacy and making it clear they were only sharing their own experiences. In another bedroom, police found a boy with thick chains on his wrists and ankles, tied to a bed railing.
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"But at the end, when I saw all my younger siblings, I knew that's what I had to do." Some of the children were bound to their beds and furniture by chains and padlocks and many of them told police they were "starving," according to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department. An 11-year-old child was so malnourished that her arm circumference was the equivalent of a 4-and-a-half month old baby, investigators said.
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Judge Bernard Schwartz called the couple's actions "selfish, cruel, and inhumane." Turpin read the final portion of the statement himself, saying he hoped his children succeeded in school and later, in their chosen professions. One asked in a statement for a lighter sentence because "they believed everything they did was to protect us." She also said she wanted to have contact with them again, and asked that they be incarcerated nearby. Some of the children, who were not filmed, described still struggling with moving on from the plight, but expressed joy at being able to live new lives and attend school.
Repeated abuse
The family’s oldest child was once forced to watch her cat be mauled to death by feral dogs after she was caught taking food out of the pantry without permission. The family’s home was described as a “House of Horrors” by authorities and the public. The children were often chained up after “playing with water” (washing their hands higher than their wrists) and were often left in their own waste for hours. Reports later revealed that the Turpin parents restricted the food their children could eat, left several of them in a home alone to fend for themselves, and imprisoned, beat, and strangled their kids. When the children were discovered, many of them were unable to communicate sufficiently and were not sure who the police were.
ABC News
ABC News was there the first time Jordan reunited with that first "stranger" she ever met -- Deputy Anthony Colace -- who responded the day of her escape. She showed him the photos of her dirty, shackled sisters, explaining that the chains were punishment for taking food. "If we went to Oklahoma, there was a big chance that some of us would have died," Jordan said of her severely malnourished and frail siblings. After that incident, Jordan secretly talked to a couple of her sisters about trying to come up with a plan to escape. "We [weren’t] even allowed to stand up. We were supposed to be sitting down all the time," added Jennifer, now 33.
Watch the Diane Sawyer special event, "Escape From A House Of Horror," on Hulu.
As more children were born, Jennifer said neglect from their parents turned into physical abuse, and they would use parts of the Bible to explain their behavior. Beecham, who worked closely with the siblings and saw them twice a month when he was preparing a case against their parents, says at least five of the kids knew about the early-morning escape plan — and it wasn't their first plot to flee. In the early morning hours of Jan. 14, 2018, two Turpin siblings decided to flee their suburban house in Perris, Calif. Before she left, she faked a lump in her bed to make it look like she was still sleeping there. Her sister left two minutes later, from the same window, while two of her shackled siblings looked on.
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Within a year she had caught up to high school junior level — and at 18, she entered a school building for the first time. "Well I am not -- I don't have the information you're looking for," Spiegel told ABC News. "We're still in investigation stages, so I don't have anything to share with you." "We take our work very seriously, including the extensive vetting of resource parents which is subject to state law," said Brett Lewis, the ChildNet spokesperson. In a statement to ABC News, a ChildNet spokesperson said the company was limited in what it could say because of confidentiality laws, but they stood by their work.
Escape From a House of Horror: A Diane Sawyer Special Event
Jordan Turpin, then 17, escaped from her parents' abusive home and called 911. The Turpins filed documents saying they were homeschooling their children but Jennifer and Jordan Turpin said that wasn’t the case. Instead, they said their mother would coach each of the children to remember what grade they were supposed to be in, based on their ages, and they secretly tried to teach each other what they could. Louise Turpin seemed to rack up huge credit card debts, according to bankruptcy documents. Jennifer and Jordan Turpin said their mother would buy children’s clothes, games and toys, but hoard them. There she attempted to find an apartment and a job, but with her limited education, she said she struggled to fill out an application.
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Her siblings were distressed by their mother’s behavior, which prompted Jordan to make her call earlier than she planned. "The night I left was not expected. I was pushed to that point. I literally thought we were gonna die," Jordan recalled to PEOPLE. Before her escape, Turpin was able to acquire a disabled cell phone, which could only be used to call 911, so she snuck out a window and called for help. It's not clear if any children will attend Friday's sentencing, but they will be offered a chance to speak or can offer written statements to be read in court. Deputies testified that the children said they were only allowed to shower once a year. They were mainly kept in their rooms except for meals, which had been reduced to one per day, a combination of lunch and dinner.
When ABC News attempted to meet up with her last week, she avoided cameras. The next morning, a county spokeswoman said Espinoza had not worked there since Aug. 21, declining to say anything more because of both personnel-confidentiality rules and the court's order of secrecy in the Turpin cases. "You rarely hear folks like you speaking out publicly about your work. This is the exception," ABC News correspondent David Scott told Donaldson as she explained what the last four years have been like for the Turpin children. But advocates and several of the Turpins themselves have come forward to share troubling tales of their plight. Melissa Donaldson, the Director of Victim Services in Riverside County, said some of the children told her they "felt betrayed" by the county. "That is unimaginable to me -- that we could have the very worst case of child abuse that I've ever seen," Hestrin said, "and then that we would then not be able to get it together to give them basic needs."
For years, the Turpin children were rarely allowed to leave their home - first in Texas, and then in California. Jordan's plan to contact authorities was more than two years in the making and culminated as the family was planning a move from California to Oklahoma. “My plan was, okay, while we're on the trip and in a crowd, I’m going to sneak out and call 911," Jordan told PEOPLE. From the abuse they endured in the "House of Horrors" to their lives today, here's everything to know about the Turpin family. Colace noted that Turpin did not seem to know common words like "bruise" to describe the way she and her siblings were being treated.
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