The Turpins - This is What Homeschooling to Hide Abuse Looks Like
Combining abuse with the Bible is a uniquely cruel thing.
Photo from Facebook. This is a piece that was originally posted at Patheos No Longer Quivering. It has been updated since the original publishing date in January 2018.
On a cold January morning in 2018 we all woke up to a story in the news of a California family that had been abusing their children. One of the Turpin children, 17 year old Jordan, managed to get away and called local law enforcement. When the police arrived what they found were some of the other 12 children in the family shackled to their beds in a dark foul-smelling home.
The children were all emaciated, malnourished to the point where the 7 adult children appeared to be no older than teens and preteens. The police officers involved made sure to get all of them fed immediately, saying the victims said they were starving. All were removed from the family home and taken to local hospitals for evaluation and treatment.
I’ve been watching and waiting on the reveals of this terrible story, thinking that there was a high possibility that David and Louise Turpin, the parents, had to be some sort of Quiverfull family with that many children. Photos shot overhead of the home showed the requisite white fifteen passenger van parked in the driveway and the first news reports said that the address had been registered as the Sandcastle Day School with David Turpin as principal. Suspicious indeed!
But it wasn’t until I started seeing the first articles coming off the Australian media confirming that the family is some sort of Evangelical Fundamentalist Christians who were homeschooling the children. I started realizing that just like the Nauglers and too many others we’ve seen written about here that this is another case of homeschooling to control and hide abuse. A sadly common problem in many of these religious communities involving non-denomination, high-demand, Evangelical families.
The neighbors said that the family was very secretive, that the children were very rarely ever seen outside. It seems like there were only small glimpses of the children marching around the home in the middle of the night. No one was even aware that the seven oldest ranged from 29 years old to 18 because all of the children were tiny for their age as a result of what looks like serious food deprivation.
Much of the emerging news looks like the family was Quiverfull": homeschooling, total control of the children, money troubles leading to two bankruptcies. David and Louise Turpin’s joint Facebook account since deactivated (which I will not be screencapping here because of all the photos of minor children) is filled with some of the creepiest photos of a Quiverfull family seen in a long time. Girls dressed identically in he same dresses, and the three males in matching suits and Prince Valiant bowl haircuts just like Daddy has that were last fashionable in 1972. Many of the photos show repeated wedding vow renewals over the years with the children showing not much growth at that Las Vegas chapel with the same Elvis impersonator each time. The girls are even wearing the same dresses in each renewal photos. There were at least three wedding vow renewal ceremonies on their Facebook page and on Youtube.
David and Louise Turpin are being held on a nine million dollar bail on each of them. Very unlikely they were unable to raise this bail. HSLDA (Home School Legal Defense Association) did not do as they usually do when a homeschooling family is in the legal cross hairs - swoop in and makes that particular family their pet cause. Suspect they were too dirty for HSLDA to even consider defending. Eventually both parents pled guilty for a multitude of charges. Both were sentenced to life behind bars without the possibility of parole until they’d served 22 years.
Some of the tales emerged around the trial about the depths of the abuse suffered by the children. They told of parents that deliberately starved them, in the cruelest ways by doing things such as putting pies out on the countertop and warning the children not to touch the pies. Once a year they were allowed showers. The home was filled with feces and urine. The worst of neglect and abuse.
So what does all of this hold for the future of the children? It’s likely that the children will never fully recover from the years of food deprivation according to studies like World War 2’s Minnesota Starvation Experiment. They’re more likely to have a lifetime of ill health and psychological problems.
Sadly the Turpin kids didn’t fair well in foster care. A number of the children experienced more about at the hands of foster parents and 6 of them are currently suing former foster parents, Riverside County, ChildNet Youth and Family Services and the Foster Family Network.
The children are all still close. It’s not surprising they are because sometimes the strongest bonds are forged in the hardest times. According to a People magazine article earlier in 2024 all 13 siblings had the opportunity to attend a Justin Bieber concert together. During their time in captivity the kids loved to watch Bieber videos.
None of the major media outlets has put it together yet that the Turpin family is almost certainly Quiverfull, or hiding child abuse and neglect by homeschooling. But they never picked up on Andrea Yates being Quiverfull either. This is a subculture that isn’t entirely known, even while people like the Duggars play like it’s completely normal way to live without once mentioning the name of what they believe.
This is Quiverfull.
This is Patriarchal Control
This is Religious Abuse and Neglect
THIS case is one of many reasons why there must be government oversight of homeschooling. There are plenty of homeschool families doing it right with no neglect or child abuse, but there are enough of these horrendous cases where parents are using the idea of homeschooling as a smoke screen to keep others out of their toxic and dangerous family structures.
Please, if you live next door to a homeschooling family with a 15 seater van, you very rarely see the many children and when you do something feels ‘off’, like the Turpins neighbors have said, call CPS or local law enforcement to express your suspicions. Ask for a well check on the family. Sometimes this is the only time that law enforcement gets tipped off to the abuse and neglect before something tragic happens. The government will not stand up to the homeschool lobby. That lobby loves nothing more than covering up the abuse, so it’s up to those in the community to realize there’s likely abuse going on and to report it.