The Forest for the Trees

Diane Arbus

The story of the brave escape of the 13 Turpin children of Perris, California on January 14, 2018 after nearly 30 years altogether of oppressive confinement, starvation, abusive neglect and deprivation on the part of their parents was packaged up for us recently by Diane Sawyer on ABC's 20/20.  The Turpin children at the time of their escape ranged in age from two to 29 years, although all except the youngest were physically stunted from malnutrition and even the six adult children reportedly all looked younger than 18.  On their rescue, the 29 year old weighed 82 pounds (37 kg).  

After originally pleading not guilty to all charges, in February 2019 the parents, David and Louise, pleaded guilty "to one count of torture, three counts of willful child cruelty, four counts of false imprisonment, and six counts of cruelty to an adult dependent."  Asked by Sawyer to conjecture about an explanation for the Turpin case, Mark Hestrin, Riverside County DA said of the Turpin parents' motivation that sane people do bad things sometimes.  An investigator for the DA's office likewise suggested that from his vantage of expertise, there was "no why" that he could fathom for this case.   The children themselves naturally had the opposite problem: for them there were too many whys to ponder.    

In retrospect, of course members of the Riverside County DA's office did not see a reason for the abuse.  Through prosecutorial eyes, everything that can be prosecuted looks like criminal behavior chosen by legally sane people for no reason.

I'm no psychologist, but it looks to me based on the little that is known about the elder Turpins that part of the "why" has to do with a combination of childhood trauma of their own (Louise had been sexually abused as a girl by a family member), an incredible immaturity on the part of both who married very young, and a worldview-- they had been adherents of the Quiverfull movement-- that encouraged the regular popping out of children in spite of an absence of tools or motivation to deal with parenthood.  (Their beliefs did not prohibit them apparently from experimenting with extramarital "swinging.") Having no imagination and a singular goal of selfishness, no parenting skills beyond brutal control and confinement of the brood they could only continue to increase,  and a pass from a culture that prefers to give some of its members the benefit of the doubt in how they see to the welfare of their young behind closed doors, they succeeded in stunting the development of all thirteen of their children. 

The parents each received 25 years for their convictions, but as an official from the DA's office tearfully alleged, for some of the children at least, abuse and neglect continued.  The ABC report concluded with  an investigative crew aggressively confronting county social services officials in a cliched display of getting to the bottom of the allegations of the county's bureaucratic revictimization of  many of the Turpin children following their parents' arrest.  At least one child was reportedly placed into a home where abuse was subsequently discovered to have been perpetrated on several foster children including allegedly one of the Turpins.  The hundreds of thousands of dollars contributed by concerned strangers across the country and held in trust were reportedly being withheld for the most part from the children despite several requests including for tuition and transportation.  Jordan, the then 17 year old who had escaped the house and called for police that January morning when she learned that an inactivated smart phone she found in the house could be used to make emergency calls, reported that after months of basic neglect in a group home, she was suddenly released with no address, no job, no means of support or any training on how to manage day to day living as an adult.

It's a formula for compelling TV, no doubt, but thanks very much to years of public policy deprivations promoted by the Riverside County DA’s political party and  overlooked when not outright championed and rationalized away by the media of which 20/20 is very much representative, it should surprise no one that our tattered safety net is incapable of supplying any measure of what these children had been deprived of from their parents.  But it's a bit conveniently advantageous for ABC to grandstand when the story is such an egregious outlier.  Where are the cameras for the estimated 13 million American children living with food insecurity every day?  While on the decline from its all time high of 1000 inmates per 100,000 Americans, the per capita prison rate of the US at 639 per 100,000 remains the highest in the world and is more than 13% higher than the second in rank, El Salvador.  Are Americans especially criminal, or is America, like David and Louise Turpin just especially punitive?  What does it take to get ABC News to show up for you?  The answer of course, can be summed up in one word: sensation.  It is not news that too many are imprisoned or that children are starving everyday.  You either have to be murdered on video by excessive force in the false suspicion of a crime or be the children of Caucasian freaks to get some attention in this town.  Go through the right kind of hell and you just might hit the jackpot with a prime time special devoted to your plight. Meanwhile who is advocating for the rescue of the rest of us?

Poverty by circumstance was not a factor in the Turpin case.  On the contrary, David Turpin was a successful engineer for Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grummond.  Rather, the poverty was inflicted on the children by parents who preferred to lavish their household income on themselves.  There is an undeniable extra fascination in learning that the Turpin parents, who both came from the humblest roots in West Virginia were in many respects exponents of the American dream, a fantasy never more cloyingly idealized and romanticized than in the films and theme parks of Walt Disney.  ABC, a child company of Disney made no mention in their blockbuster exclusive report of the fanaticism of both Turpin parents for all things Disney, as exclaimed on their vanity license plates which read "DLand" and "DL4EVER".  It's more than just interesting trivia that in all those years of forcible sequestering of their children from sight, the exception that the Turpins made for allowing their children in public in a semblance of all-American swellness was Disneyland. 

For 30 years, from the outside, everything looked normal.  On the inside, in some respects, it was.