Turpins 2- California Torture House (Graphic content discussed)

[nana sew dear]

I've been away from FJ for awhile trying to save the country on Twitter (as you do) but need to talk about these kids.

I read a couple days ago that the police sent cadaver dogs into the house. I haven't heard anything more but I'm nervous considering the big gap between the two youngest children. The story said they were checking for deceased children who may have been buried on the property,

I am having bariatric surgery this spring and my therapist referred me to a study called the "Minnesota Starvation Study". You can find it by Googling. It was carried out in the 40's as a way to help survivors of the concentration camps. Pretty much all information we have on eating disorders started with this study. It is a good one to look at to understand how carefully these young people will have to be fed and the effects that long term malnutrition will have on them, Interesting stuff.

I just hope that everything turns out to be as normal as it can possibly be for these kiddos. They have a long, long road ahead and the public attention span is oh so short.

[EmCatlyn]

12 hours ago, ViolaSebastian said:

I stand corrected. Still, I maintain that a person that age marrying a sixteen-year-old is unusual and creepy, at best. 

I think that it could be part of "creepy" but I wouldn't automatically say that marrying (or having sex with) or even fathering a child with a 16 year old is, in and of itself "creepy."  A lot of 16-year-olds are physically mature.  And sometimes they are more emotionally mature than some 25 and 26 year old guys.  So, while I would look carefully at such a relationship, I wouldn't automatically think "it is creepy" in all cases.

I know someone who has been happily married for 15 years to a man who was 28 when she was 18.  They got married when she was 21.  If I didn't know otherwise, I would not guess how much older he is. He is sweet and polite and clearly very much in love with her. They obviously relate as "peers."  I know other relationships with big age differences that seem to work out. (And the difference is not always the man being the elder.)

So, I maintain that it depends.    If it comes out that David Turpin abused his daughters consistently, and/or required Louise to dress in "little girl dresses" to turn him on, or something like that, I would see the marriage with a 16-year-old as definitely part of the creepy.  Or if it came out that he insisted on being the "main authority" and the children were taught to defer to him first and their mother second... or any variation of creepiness that would suggest that the marriage was the beginning of a pattern of his abusive perversions.

Right now we don't know that.  We only know that both of them evolved to become torturers and it would seem that both of them had, from the first, some tendency to want to control their kids and others who lived in their house completely.  As I said, it may be that one or the other took the lead, but it also could be that they complemented each other.   He may have been obsessive about one type of control and she may have been obsessive about another type of control and together they cheered each other along as they escalated control into abuse and abuse into torture.   The age difference may or may not have had something to do with it.

12 hours ago, Sideways said:

Unless there was another Turpin we don't know about who older than the 29 year old, Louise would have been 20 when she gave birth to the eldest girl (Jennifer), who was 82 lbs when rescued.

An older child than the 29 year old we know of would seem unlikely since they seem to have had contact with both families during the first five to ten years.  A miscarriage (or abortion) is possible, of course.  The 29-year-old may not have been the first pregnancy.

[libgirl2]

Last Friday, they had a special on about the case. I believe it was on 20/20. They compared this case to the Wolfpack brothers. If you aren't familiar with them, they were kept locked up in an apartment by their father, homeschooled too. Father was bizarre and made them perform rituals etc.  One day, the 15 walked out the door. 

It is similar in the sense that they were confined etc.... but there was no torture and starvation as in this case. Their mother is still around with them too. They are lucky, things could have gotten real bad. 

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wolfpack-brothers-mom-spent-years-locked-nyc-apartment/story?id=52474590

[Black Aliss]

On 1/22/2018 at 1:41 PM, upkacrane said:

And another wall of worlds from yours truly. Sorry folks, I promise I will try and be briefer and leave the personal stuff out of my comments. If you're read so far, I appreaciate it. It's weirdly theraputic to be able to vent like this.

Don't be sorry, please. Anyone who doesn't want to/is uncomfortable reading this can scroll on by. For the rest of us it may be therapeutic to read for a variety of reasons. But it's enough that it helps you to be able to say what happened.

[EmCatlyn]

5 hours ago, Italiangirl said:

ok after reading pretty much all the 2 thread (i just skip a part of the first cause i cant read it, it was too much i have to take a break) i have a question, is all the younger kids born at home? or was L in a hospital and somehow able to made the kid disappear? i mean from what i understand nobody knows there were 13 kids right?  i just can put my head around this people, it seems that somehow the abuse was discontinuous?

i have to say i don't really know the US reality, so I don't know how they were able to hide the kids even from authorities. Did I understand right that there wasn't any certificate or legal paperwork of this children? or I'm mixing up things? anyway  more i read about this case and more i'm horrified

 

I read in a couple of accounts that all the children were born in the hospital.  I think also there was reference to fertility treatments to get pregnant between the next-to-youngest and the youngest child.  It would seem to me that the family definitely did not hide the existence of the children from the law.  The children probably all have birth certificates and I wouldn't be surprised if they all (or all except the oldest two and the very youngest) have social security numbers.

Children born in U.S. hospitals get the initial paper work for the birth certificate done by the hospital and because since around 1990 children over the age of 2 have to have social security numbers for their parents to list them on their taxes. (And I would guess the family wanted every one of the tax exemptions for the kids.)

The children were not really "kept from the authorities."  That is, the "authorities" had documentation that the children existed and were supposedly being home-schooled.  However, the "authorities" don't intervene in what parents do (or fail to do) unless they are alerted to a problem (and sometimes not even then).  Because the children did not go to school or interact much with others, the few people who suspected something was wrong did not feel they should "intervene."

(Note that this happened over two different states, both of them bigger than many European countries.)

 

[Dandruff]

Wonder if any of those kids will ever want to visit Disneyland again.  I can understand why they wouldn't, and it makes me sad.

[Anonymousguest]

I saw this, not sure if it has been posted here. The oldest son attended 6 semesters at the local community college and maintained a 3.9 gpa. I couldn't find anything saying when he attended. It again makes one think things escalated recently. If he was nourished enough to attend college and do well just a few years ago I hope that means his outlook for a recovery, at least physically is good. 

http://abc11.com/perris-torture-case-eldest-son-maintained-393-gpa/2980407/?sf180016412=1

[justoneoftwo]

The thing I don't understand is, if it escalated recently, and the oldest boy did well in community college, how are they so small and delayed?  Wouldn't you need years of abuse to be delayed?  wouldn't it take years of starvation to appear 14 when your 29?  and wouldn't that have had to happen when you were young?  Maybe I don't understand how the body works or something, but it seems it would take time to do all that damage.

Further, how could you go to community college and not know what medication was?  Or the police?  It just doesn't make sense.

[Black Aliss]

1 minute ago, justoneoftwo said:

Further, how could you go to community college and not know what medication was?  Or the police?  It just doesn't make sense.

It was the 17 YO girl who didn't know what those words meant. And she may have been in a state of shock where she wasn't able to process language very well just then.

[justoneoftwo]

7 minutes ago, Black Aliss said:

It was the 17 YO girl who didn't know what those words meant. And she may have been in a state of shock where she wasn't able to process language very well just then.

I guess my question is, if it wasn't just the shock (and it could have been) how long would the abuse have to have been happening for this to be the case?  I get that it may have gotten much worse lately, I just don't see how things could have been much better before to have these results.  (Mostly the physical and mental limitations, that would have taken time, right?)

[Anonymousguest]

14 minutes ago, justoneoftwo said:

The thing I don't understand is, if it escalated recently, and the oldest boy did well in community college, how are they so small and delayed?  Wouldn't you need years of abuse to be delayed?  wouldn't it take years of starvation to appear 14 when your 29?  and wouldn't that have had to happen when you were young?  Maybe I don't understand how the body works or something, but it seems it would take time to do all that damage.

Further, how could you go to community college and not know what medication was?  Or the police?  It just doesn't make sense.

They did say that "some" of the children didn't know what medication or the police was, obviously the 17yr old knew to call 911, so she must have known something.

I don't know about the starvation. I can only guess that some of the kids were more effected than others, so we are applying the total sum conditions to all the kids. The mom is obviously very short, and in some photos the girls are taller than her, so maybe some of the kids would have genetically just been very small but are extremely small do to starvation. I have very small children, teens and adults and even being at healthy weights the girls weigh under 100lbs, and people think they are younger than they are because they are cute and small. 

There is a picture of them at Disney that it's labeled as 2010/2012 ( I've seen it listed as both) and if you look at the youngest son he looks like just a little boy, maybe 8-10, but he has been identified as one of the adults, I think listed as being 22. He would have been a teenager in the Disney photo. Maybe their degree of stunted growth and cognitive impairment has to do with when they were starved? I don't know, all speculation. I'm hoping that maybe they were suffering cognitive impairment when found because they were shocked and currently dehydrated, and they'll recover more fully than initial reports indicated.

[feministxtian]

Some kids just don't "look" mature at an adult age. My youngest son is 27. No shit he looks maybe 16 on a good day (pictures provided if asked), especially if his hair is longer. He really doesn't need to shave, he has maybe 10 hairs on his chin. 

So...a 20-something guy looking younger than his age is not really unusual, at least based on my experience w/my son and his friends. 

[bird]

19 minutes ago, justoneoftwo said:

I guess my question is, if it wasn't just the shock (and it could have been) how long would the abuse have to have been happening for this to be the case?  I get that it may have gotten much worse lately, I just don't see how things could have been much better before to have these results.  (Mostly the physical and mental limitations, that would have taken time, right?)

From my limited understanding of girls... a young girl only needs to be a little under healthy weight to stop having periods. When this happens the body stops laying down bone (It's to do with female hormones and calcium). You only have a set time in your life for making bones and when the time is up it's up. So basically if they were even a little underweight for all of their teens it would have been enough to stunt bone growth. I don't know about the cognitive impairment. I don't feel 100% comfortable speculating on these poor children as we really don't know but I do know how little weight loss it takes to make children very unwell. 

[ladyicantxplain]

56 minutes ago, justoneoftwo said:

The thing I don't understand is, if it escalated recently, and the oldest boy did well in community college, how are they so small and delayed?  Wouldn't you need years of abuse to be delayed?  wouldn't it take years of starvation to appear 14 when your 29?  and wouldn't that have had to happen when you were young?  Maybe I don't understand how the body works or something, but it seems it would take time to do all that damage.

Further, how could you go to community college and not know what medication was?  Or the police?  It just doesn't make sense.

It makes sense to me that it escalated recently, (though it is clear from the Texas stories that it was going on for years) only because of my experience with how quickly the body "wastes" when non-ambulatory.  A person very close to me spent 39 days in an ICU, and the weight loss and muscle waste was IMMEDIATE and severe.  This all could've happened within the last two years or so, and those photos from 2015 kind of make my thoughts lean in that direction.  I also do a lot of work with special needs children, and one slight illness with just a couple of days of less than the usual nourishment (due to vomiting or something) is profoundly impactful on these children.  It was mentioned that LT literally stood outside of the community college door waiting for this young man to finish classes.  I doubt he had any social interaction at all while attending.  It is so unfortunate that these children were paralyzed by fear.

[Emilycharlotte]

In some families, parents will choose one child to abuse while treating the others normally. Obviously all of these kids were abused, but it's possible some were targeted to receive the worst of it while others were treated slightly better. Just a little extra food or a tiny bit more freedom could make a difference, I would think. 

[ladyicantxplain]

8 hours ago, FecundFundieFundus said:

Kinky sex is in no way related to abuse, torture, or molestation. I do find it interesting that DT was playing around with submission, though. It just seems so odd.

I respectfully disagree that kinky sex is in no way related to abuse, torture, or molestation.  It's all perversion.  I was abused by an adult man who was heavily affected by a prior porn addiction.  I'm talking he started with garden variety porn, and by the time he quit, he was invested in extremely violent BDSM porn, so violent it would make you vomit.   In any event, he craved verbalizing his desires that he gleaned from these atrocious scenes on the porn.  I wouldn't engage.  He kept desiring to act out the torture scenes - inflicting real pain.  Sometimes he tried and I made him stop.  In any event, his mind was extremely perverse at one point, and he definitely was looking for any human who would engage is satisfying his perverse desires borne of this twisted porn.  Eventually before he became self-aware of this horrible problem he had, he had become deeply entrenched in reading about torture of women, abuse of women, and all manner of molestation of women.  It's all tied neatly together - perverse.  Extreme "submission" in marriage is also a part of the perversion, in my opinion.  Power.  It's all about power and control.   I truly believe when DT and LT started their kinky sex adventures, it got worse for the children precisely because they couldn't perform all that they wanted to perform on each other.  

[FundieFarmer]

Some risky or kinky sexual behaviors can be tied to abuse, but correlation does not equate causation. You will find plenty of people in the BDSM community who did not experience abuse and believe firmly in the motto of “safe, sane, and consensual”. What you are describing is none of those things, and as one survivor to another, I am deeply sorry for what you went through. But please remember that nothing is absolute, especially when it comes to sex.

 

 

[princessjo1988]

This has hit close to home. The oldest girl (1988) is my age . I've been married (now divorced), travelled overseas, LIVED! And my heart breaks for her because she has known none of that, just year after year of cruelty and abuse. Heartbreaking. 

I'm following developments - thanks for the links on Webslueths... 

 

And as for the judgements on kinky sex. The kink community is big into the concept of Safe, Sane & Consensual, and there's quite a lot of literature out there about the postive impact that it does have in some people's lives. 

I'm sorry that those things happened to you, ladyicantxplain. What you experienced was abuse. Not kink. My father used religion. I understand the urge to blame it on those those things, but that was a tool - something they used to shift blame onto. 

[Chocolatedefrauded]

I also find it significant that the monster waited outside her adult son's college class & drove him home immediately. I wonder if the prof thought he was much younger than he actually is so the mother waiting was not so odd.

If he attended for 6 semesters, then he was probably only taking 1 or 2 classes at a time. Going full time, most people finish community college in 4 semesters. Unless it was a school with a trimester schedule - 3 sessions of classes = a year so you get a associates degree in 6 semesters.

i also wonder if they wanted to prepare the son to leave the house & that's why he was allowed to take classes. They may have realized that he needs skills to get a job. Or they wanted him to prepare for a job to help support the whole family.

Maybe the classes were something he negotiated or they allowed for some financial reasons, like deducting him on their taxes as a college student.

either way, I hope he and all the kids can now pursue any educational or employment goals they have!

[HarryPotterFan]

I forget who posted it, but one of the links to an interview with the former DA or someone talked about how D and L took the kids to places that are very large, crowded, and anonymous. Disney and Vegas are huge places where you go to have fun, you aren’t paying attention to the people around you. And he theorized that some of the older children might have been conditioned to abuse the younger children, because there are so damn many of them that it would be hard for two people to control/“raise” them all. He was basically speculating off of his years of experience dealing with abuse cases. I really hope that isn’t true. There’s more than enough horror and trauma without adding another layer of complexity.

6 hours ago, IntrinsicallyDisordered said:

My sister once went to school with our father's handprint taking up half her face, her teacher (4th grade) asked her what happened and my sister told her she fell down the stairs and landed on a baseball glove.  At the time my sister was relieved she got away with the clever lie and wouldn't get in more trouble, as an adult she has a great deal of bitterness towards her formerly favorite teacher.  

@wild little fox that was my thought as well.

 

I’d be bitter too. I don’t get how the teacher believed that lie. A glove isn’t the same shape as a hand, nor is it as hard as bone. I think sometimes people in positions of authority or who are mandated reporters just want to believe everything is fine. Maybe they don’t want to admit something horrible happened to a vulnerable child, maybe they’re lazy, maybe they’re idiotic assholes who don’t know what they’re doing...

1 hour ago, feministxtian said:

Some kids just don't "look" mature at an adult age. My youngest son is 27. No shit he looks maybe 16 on a good day (pictures provided if asked), especially if his hair is longer. He really doesn't need to shave, he has maybe 10 hairs on his chin. 

So...a 20-something guy looking younger than his age is not really unusual, at least based on my experience w/my son and his friends. 

I can speak to this. I’m 27, and yesterday an elderly man told me I’m not allowed to have whiskey because I’m too young. I didn’t bother to correct him. Then someone else asked what I wanted to do (essentially asking what I wanted to be when I grow up, I still don’t know). I just told him the organization I work for.

As for the effects of starvation, it can and often does cause cognitive impairment - it depends on the age of starvation, length of time, degree of starvation, as well as individual factors - some kids might have more resiliency or some other underlying protective factor. It can vary, even amongst siblings. And I believe starvation would have the most devastating effects on a very young, developing brain.

[EmCatlyn]

2 hours ago, Anonymousguest said:

I saw this, not sure if it has been posted here. The oldest son attended 6 semesters at the local community college and maintained a 3.9 gpa. I couldn't find anything saying when he attended. It again makes one think things escalated recently. If he was nourished enough to attend college and do well just a few years ago I hope that means his outlook for a recovery, at least physically is good. 

http://abc11.com/perris-torture-case-eldest-son-maintained-393-gpa/2980407/?sf180016412=1

There is also this interview with a former classmate.  If the classmate is not misremembering, the son was allowed to attend a class potluck where he couldn’t stop eating,

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Former-Classmate-Describes-Turpin-Son-After-Sharing-Music-Class-With-Him-470086943.html

On the subject of the 3.99 gpa, my reaction is that I hope they didn’t beat him up too badly for getting that one B that kept him from getting a 4.00.  

 

[AlwaysDiscerning]

To add to the madness, this guy is saying Louise was clearly the leader of the family and therefore its implied that the abuse was all her doing. 

https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2018/01/23/shes-the-boss-child-torture-edition/

[sockiemom]

Very tragic. It looks like the older kids got the least food. 

The parents put them in groups - 3 oldest girls (all wear high heels), 3 little girls, 3 middle girls, 3 boys and 1 baby. The dresses and haircuts to infantilize them... 

I bet the annual jaunts to disney and vegas coincided with the annual shower.

Horrifying to imagine...

[Rachel333]

11 minutes ago, AlwaysDiscerning said:

To add to the madness, this guy is saying Louise was clearly the leader of the family and therefore its implied that the abuse was all her doing. 

https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2018/01/23/shes-the-boss-child-torture-edition/

Ah yes, I'm not surprised to see some random anti-feminist blogger claim it's all the woman's fault.

[Crazy Enough to Join]

2 hours ago, ladyicantxplain said:

I respectfully disagree that kinky sex is in no way related to abuse, torture, or molestation.  It's all perversion.  I was abused by an adult man who was heavily affected by a prior porn addiction.  

I'm so sorry you went through this. Elizabeth Smart also shared how her captor used porn as part of the abuse. I recently read an article that said that ISIS used porn in their abuse of captive Yezidi women. There's a website, Fight the New Drug, that argues that porn is incompatible with women's lib/feminism. https://fightthenewdrug.org/