HOUSE OF HORRORS
Bodycam video of Turpin children rescue shows squalor inside home & bruises of kids chained to beds as parents arrested
BODYCAM footage lays bare the squalor inside the Turpin home and bruises of the children who were chained to beds.
In a never-before-seen police video, the heartbreaking conditions in what has been dubbed “house of horrors” are exposed to the world.
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Police responded to the Turpin home in Perris, California on January 14, 2018, after Jordan escaped the home via a window in January 2018 and told a police operator "my two little sisters right now are chained up".
She went on to say her parents, David and Louise Turpin, had been violently abusing and starving their 13 children for years.
In a special report on the family, bodycam footage of the moment police first arrived on the scene to find a panic-stricken Jordan standing by the side of the road has been released for the first time.
A sheriff's deputy, who was nearing the end of his shift, is heard greeting Jordan as he steps out of his patrol car, saying: "Hi, Jordan. What's going on?"
"I just ran away from home and I live in a family of 15," the teen, who looks and sounds far younger than 17, is heard telling him. "My two little sisters right now are chained up… they stole mother’s food."
She added: “We live in filth, and sometimes I wake up and I can’t breathe because of how dirty the house is. We never take baths.”
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Officers then knocked on the door of the house for more than two minutes before parents David and Louise Turpin answered.
Louise can be heard saying they were in bed as cops informed her they were there for a welfare check after her daughter called them.
Once inside, officers found mounds of garbage, feces, moldy food.
They also found dirty, pale and extremely skinny kids.
In one filthy bedroom, a cop discovered two frail girls, bruised and caked in dirt.
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“Hi sweetheart. Hi girls. Can I see your wrists?,” the officer can be heard saying. “We’re here to help you.”
Louise can then be heard asking the cops “is that what this is about?” to which the officer replied, “well, that’s part of it, definitely”.
The officers then scrambled to free the children — as they arrested the parents and asked them where to find the key to the chains, the footage showed.
The badly abused siblings, ages two to 29, were taken to a hospital where they were fed and cared for.
However, the shackles were merely the tip of the iceberg in what had been decades of vile abuse and acts of torture inside the Turpin household.
Investigators would later discover that the children were frequently beaten by their twisted parents until they bled, strangle them and permit them to eat just once per day and shower just once a year.
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The evil couple, who would quote the Bible to justify the frequent beatings, left some of the children tied up for months at a time.
The kids lived off bologna and peanut butter sandwiches while their parents gorged themselves on takeaways in front of them.
The children weren’t allowed to exercise, could only speak when spoken to, and were also banned from socializing with each other.
David and Louise tormented the kids by leaving out apple and pumpkin pies that they were forbidden from eating.
They also bought the children toys but refused to let them open them.
When police entered the home, they believed all of the children were under 18 because of how malnourished they appeared and how young they sounded. However, seven of the 13 children were over 18 at the time.
David, then 57, and Louise, 50, were arrested and later sentenced to life in prison for the hideous abuse and imprisonment of their kids.
They pleaded guilty to 14 counts including cruelty to an adult-dependent, child cruelty, torture, and false imprisonment.
All of the Turpin siblings spent weeks in hospital before six of the siblings were split up into two different foster homes.
'I HAD TO DO IT'
Reflecting on her heroics almost four years ago, Jordan said that while she was terrified she knew she had to do something to save her siblings' lives.
"My hands were shaking," she said through tears of the moment she tried to dial 911.
"I was shaking and I was trying to dial 911 but I couldn’t even get my thumb to press the buttons.
"But I was trying to calm down so I could do it, and finally, I pressed it. And when they answered … I’d literally never spoken to someone on the phone. And start saying how we didn’t go to school, we lived in filth, how we starve and all this stuff.
"I had to make sure if we left we wouldn’t go back and that we’d get the help we need. Because if we went back I wouldn’t be sitting here right now."
When asked how she mustered the courage to call the police on her abusive parents, Jordan said: "I think it was us like coming so close to death so many times and I was worried about my siblings.
"When I saw them worried and crying, I just felt like I had to do it."
Jennifer also revealed how she "put music on and danced" to celebrate her freedom after waking up in the hospital the day after her parents' arrests.
She then went to the park with two of her sisters, reveling in the "heavenly" taste of their newfound freedom.
“I was so excited because I could smell the grass,” she said. “I was like, ‘How could heaven be better than this? … Oh my gosh, this is so free, this is life.’”
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“I’m so thankful just to walk… [to] take an hour-long walk with my music,” she said. “These little things I think… are things that people take for granted.”
Escape from a House of Horror - A Diane Sawyer Special Event - airs on ABC 20/20 on November 19.
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Turpin family children who were shackled, starved and tortured reveal shocking 'hell' conditions that saw parents jailed
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