Father David Allen Turpin, was found guilty of abusing and holding 13 children captive (Image: Getty Images)
Siblings who were starved and subjected to horrific abuse by their parents in a “house of horrors” have spoken out about the harrowing details of their childhood.
The 13 children were brutally mistreated by their parents in California, yet three of the older siblings have since bravely said they will always “have each other” as they press forward on their road to recovery.
Julissa, Jolinda and James Turpin were rescued from their birth parents, who had tortured them for years. Jordan Turpin – then aged 17 – escaped the home through a window in 2018 and remarkably managed to alert authorities to the abuse they had endured.
Jordan had been living in appalling conditions alongside her siblings, aged between two and 29. They spent virtually their entire lives confined within a home where they were routinely subjected to beatings and starvation.
Jordan contacted emergency services on a mobile phone she had secretly smuggled out of the house of horrors, describing the dreadful conditions she and her siblings were enduring – informing officers that they had been abused by their parents and that her brother and sister were currently chained to a bed, reports the Daily Star.
Julissa, Jolinda and James Turpin spoke out in their first interview since being rescued from the “house of horrors,” where they were abused by their birth parents for years.The siblings are three of the 13 Turpin children who suffered abuse at the hands of their parents in California. They were also among the six Turpin children who were later abused by their foster parents. (Image: ABC)
On arrival, police discovered one of the children shackled to a bed, where they had remained for weeks, while an overwhelming stench of human waste and rotting food filled the property.
David and Louise were reportedly bewildered by the visit, but it soon emerged the children were all so severely malnourished from years of starvation that detectives initially believed them all to be under 18. Jennifer, who was 29, weighed just 5stone 11lbs after being permitted to eat only once a day, while one 12-year-old child had the arm circumference of a four-month-old baby.
The youngsters, who had kept detailed diaries documenting their harrowing life, were forbidden from showering more than once a year and had never received medical or dental care. They were banned from playing with toys and, in addition to being shackled to their beds, were locked in cages whenever they broke the rules.
Their parents, David and Louise Turpin, were convicted on multiple felony charges, including cruelty to an adult dependent, child cruelty, torture and false imprisonment, and were handed sentences of 25 years to life in prison.
Remarkably, several of the children have forgiven their parents for the years of abuse they endured. In a powerful victim impact statement, read out to the court during the sentencing in 2019, one child said: “Sometimes I still have nightmares of things that had happened such as my siblings being chained up or getting beaten. That is the past and this is now. I love my parents and have forgiven them for a lot of the things they did to us.”
The children lived in abject squalor (Image: AFP/Getty Images)
Another said: “My parents took my whole life from me, but now I’m taking my life back. I’m a fighter, I’m strong and I’m shooting through life like a rocket. I saw my dad change my mom. They almost changed me, but I realised what was happening.”
Following their rescue, the six youngest Turpin siblings were placed in the care of foster parents Marcelino and Rosa Olguin, together with their adult daughter Lennys Olguin.
Tragically, these Turpin children endured further abuse while living with the Olguins. In 2024, Marcelino Olguin was handed a seven-year state prison sentence, while his wife Rosa and daughter Lennys each received four years of probation.
Despite this, escaped sisters Julissa and Jolinda have managed to build healthy lives for themselves. The pair remain inseparable and revealed they now share matching tattoos bearing lyrics from a Harry Styles album track “we’ll be fine, we’ll be alright.”
The siblings opened up about their lives and ongoing recovery in “The Turpins: A New House of Horror – A Diane Sawyer Special Event”.
Julissa, 19, said: “To me, it feels like, ‘Why do people get to have a family, and we don’t?’ And like we have each other, and that’s the world, you know, but we still want a mom. Something good needs to come from this. It has to. And I can’t accept it not.”
All three said therapy had been a vital component of their healing journeys as they continue to process the trauma they have experienced.
Jolinda, 20, said: “I’ve been, like, literally discovering all these things about my brain that helps me have clarity of who I am, my identity, and who I want to be, what I can work on, what I can fix, and also realising, too, that it’s not my fault is a big thing, too,”. James, 24, revealed he had always longed for stable parents, explaining how he had learnt to depend on alternative support networks.
The California couple were jailed for at least 25 years (Image: AFP/Getty Images)
He said: “I’ve always wished I had normal parents or just someone I could like go to and, you know, rely on or ask questions or whatever, but I have the internet, so it’s okay.”
Jolinda disclosed that the sisters now share matching tattoos bearing lyrics from the title track of Harry Styles’ 2019 album Fine Line: “we’ll be fine, we’ll be alright.”
She said: “To me that song just means that like we’re gonna be okay, we’re always gonna get through everything and at the end of the day we’re always gonna have each other.”
The younger siblings, who suffered abuse on two separate occasions, received a settlement from the organisation responsible for arranging their placement with their abusive foster carers, although the agency declined to accept any liability.
