Escape from the House of Horrors - Louise and David Turpin Sentencing FULL AUDIO

xperts in family abuse considered this case to be "extraordinary" for a number of reasons.

In February 2019, both parents pleaded guilty on 14 felony counts, including cruelty to a dependent adult, child cruelty, torture and false imprisonment. In April of that same year, they were sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole after 25 years.

Background-
David Allen Turpin (born October 17, 1961) and Louise Anna Turpin (born May 24, 1968) met when David was 17 and Louise was 10, and eloped in 1985 in Pearisburg, Virginia, which angered Louise's father, who was a pastor.

According to David's parents, he was a computer engineer who graduated from Virginia Tech and had worked for Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. In 1979, he graduated from Princeton High School in West Virginia, which Louise also attended until 1985.

From 1988 to 2015 they had ten daughters and three sons. All their children’s names begin with the letter “J”.

According to Louise's sister, she (the sister), Louise and a female cousin were sexually abused as children by their maternal grandfather. Another sister claimed that their mother accepted cash in return for allowing their grandfather to sexually abuse them. The sisters have said that Louise became obsessed with witchcraft, Satanic rituals, and Ouija boards, and had tried to persuade one of them to join a snake handling festival, and that Louise and David engaged in "swinging".

In 1999 the Turpins left Fort Worth, Texas for Rio Vista, then left the area in 2010.

After the family left, neighbors found feces and beds with ropes tied to them in the house, along with dead cats and piles of garbage around the property.

At the Turpins' Perris, California house, neighbors reported that the children were silent unless spoken to, "like children whose only defense was to be invisible"; would skip rather than walk; and appeared malnourished and pale. One of Louise's sisters later said that David and Louise refused to let her see the children, and another sister said she had been concerned about the children's weight; but Louise's aunt said the family pictures posted on Facebook had made her think that "they were one big happy family."

The children did not spend all of their time in captivity. Photos emerged of the parents and all 13 children visiting Disneyland in nearby Anaheim. The boys and girls were dressed in matching Disney T-shirts. David and Louise had an affinity for Disney and for the park. The vanity plates on the couple's two cars were "DLand" and "DL4ever."

David and Louise had been planning to move the family to Oklahoma at the time of their arrest.

Escape and rescue-
By 2018 the Turpin children had been planning to escape their parents for more than two years. On January 14, 2018, two of the girls left the house through a window. The younger girl (13 years old) became frightened and turned back but the 17-year-old got some distance away and called 9-1-1 on a cell phone she had brought with her. When police officers met her she showed them photos of conditions inside the house.

Deputies of the Riverside County Sheriff's Department raided the house, inside which they found the other twelve children; one was shackled to a bed and it appeared that two others had been shackled until just before officers arrived. The children were so malnourished that deputies thought they were all under 18 years old, when in fact seven were over 18. The sheriff's department said that Louise was "perplexed as to why we were at that residence." The house contained hundreds of journals written by the children about their lives.

All the children spent several weeks in hospitals, after which the six minors were put into two foster homes. In early 2020 the Riverside County Deputy District Attorney said that "Some of [the children] are living independently, living in their own apartment, and have jobs and are going to school. Some volunteer in the community. They go to church." One had graduated from college.

Nature of the crimes-
For years the parents had imprisoned, beaten and strangled their children, allowing them to eat just once per day and shower just once per year. The older children appeared much younger because of malnourishment; the 29-year-old weighed just 82 pounds (37 kg). Some appeared to lack basic knowledge of the world, for example being unfamiliar with what medicine and police were.

The case is considered "extraordinary for numerous reasons", including that abuse was inflicted on multiple children by both parents, and the calculated and systematic nature of the abuse and torture.