It was a story that shocked the world, as 13 malnourished children were rescued from their squalid home amid allegations they’d been mistreated by their own parents for years.
David Turpin, 57, and his wife, Louise, 49, were previously charged with imprisoning and torturing their children, after their 17-year-old daughter escaped and called police, telling them her siblings – who are aged between two and 29 – were being held captive in their home.
Now, speaking on Channel 9’s 60 Minutes on Sunday night, Louise’s brother and sister, Billy Lambert and Teresa Robinette, have spoken out about their shock at the state their nieces and nephews were found in – and the family secret they believe could have influenced Louise’s alleged crimes.
“You hear people say sometimes the abused can become the abuser. I think that she’s just one of those that it did happen that way,” Teresa said of her sister Louise, as she broke down on camera.
Taking viewers back to Louise’s own childhood, Teresa claimed that both of them were repeatedly sexually abused by their grandfather.
“My mum would take us to him daily. She was pretty much selling us for money to live on, that’s how it is. I don’t like saying it like that and it breaks my heart but it is what it is,” she said on the show.
“Louise went through the same thing we went through with my grandfather which was probably the darkest, hardest thing for any of us girls to deal with.”
Teresa now believes the cycle of abuse could have made Louise think it was somehow acceptable, and told the show it may have influenced her future actions.
“All the abuse together that she went through, I think made her mind whatever her mind was. I think it destroyed her self-worth and made her think that that was OK,” she added.
Desperate to escape, Louise moved to Texas at 16 years old with her older boyfriend David and they immediately began expanding their family in just a few years. To the outside world, and Louise’s siblings, they looked happy.
“We thought she had the perfect life, she had the perfect husband. We thought she was happy,” Billy admitted on the show.
“Any time they wanted something they did it. Because we always saw pictures of them going to Disneyland or going to Las Vegas, we’re like, well you kind of have to have money to keep going to Las Vegas. Face to face I thought they were just a normal, happy family.”
While Louise remembered commenting on how “little” the kids were when she saw them years ago, she said her sister would simply make excuses for it and clothe them well to hide how malnourished they had become.
Meanwhile, the show also met the Turpins’ neighbours Ricky and Shelly Vinyard, who insisted they had no idea how bad things had got. All the same, Billy hit out at the pair for not acting on their smaller suspicions sooner.
“I’m disappointed at the neighbours,” he said on camera. “They said that they were marching in a circle at night time upstairs and they saw them in the window. To me that seems a little strange right there. I would at least go knock on the door and be like, is everything OK?”
He added: “There was another neighbour that came forward that said that two of the older boys were digging in the trash cans at night. How is that not a red flag?”
David and Louise Turpin made a brief appearance in a California court on Saturday morning for an arraignment into their case.
The couple are facing 88 charges between them, including torture, child abuse and false imprisonment. David also faces one charge of lewd acts on a child. One charge against the father was later dropped after a judge ruled the youngest of the children, aged two, did not appear severely malnourished.
They have both previously pleaded not guilty to all charges. If convicted, they could reportedly face life in prison.