Original subtitles

They are the most notorious parents in America today.

Accused of torturing, abusing, and imprisoning 12 of their 13 children.

They began to be tied up.

First with ropes, and then using chains and padlocks.

It's pretty weird, but I guess, I guess evil can be very clever.

These kids were so malnourished,

it makes you wonder how long they had to live.

Early on Sunday, January 14,

police in California are called to

the home of the reclusive Turpin family.

And make a horrific discovery.

13 children, most are starving, some are shackled to beds.

All the victims

were and are severely malnourished.

To give you an example, one of the children at age 12,

is the weight of an average of seven-year-old.

The 29-year-old female victim weighs 82 pounds.

Their parents, David and Louise Turpin, are arrested.

Police escort them from the house.

Their story goes global.

Looks like a typical suburban home.

What was allegedly happening?

Who knew that this was going on?

Who would do this?

Within days, they are charged.

Abuse of a dependant adult.

False imprisonment.

Torture.

Child abuse or neglect.

And lewd act on a child by force or fear.

If convicted of these charges,

these defendants are facing up to 94 years to life imprisonment.

It looks ordinary enough, an estate in Perris,

a town in Southern California.

It's like they were hidden in plain sight.

This home is in the middle of a beautiful neighbourhood.

But there is nothing ordinary about Perris now.

It has become infamous for what allegedly happened in this house.

It's where the Turpins lived,

and where the alleged abuse of their children was conducted.

At the heart of their story, lie dark and terrible secrets.

Louise's sister, Theresa,

has revealed that, as children, they were subjected to sexual abuse.

I can still feel his...

..breath on my neck when he was whispering,

"Be quiet, don't tell nobody", you know?

Later, Louise and David make changes to their private life.

And decide to act out secret sexual fantasies.

Just different partners, I guess,

wanted to experience what it was like with somebody else.

And secret lives, as the Turpins withdraw ever deeper

into an isolated night-time world of their own.

With a nocturnal lifestyle, where you can't...

..see out the windows, you can't connect with the daylight,

you're further isolated from reality.

The Turpins' world would come crashing down

when one teenage daughter,

who posts videos of her own songs on YouTube...

SHE SINGS

..finds the courage to escape and calls police

on a secret mobile phone.

You can imagine a scenario where perhaps the 17-year-old

is the one who's going through puberty,

and just pissed off and angry,

and wanted to make a run for it.

But why and how did this happen?

Why didn't the children try to escape?

After all, the eight eldest are adults.

18 to 29.

It seems their survival strategy was to create their own highly

individual universe.

They may hold and hug each other,

the older children are taking care of the younger children.

So I think in situations where kids have each other,

that that bond becomes very strong,

and that there is a caretaking ability

that's inherent in those relationships.

The Turpin's story begins on the other side of the United States.

In West Virginia, 34 years ago.

Her sister Theresa remembers the young Louise Turpin

as strong-willed, even with their strict parents.

Obedient in front of them, but behind their back, no.

I think that Louise was going to get her way, no matter what.

Before she married David Turpin,

Louise's surname was Robinette.

The family were devout Pentecostal Christians.

They attended the Church of God,

where followers speak in tongues and refuse alcohol.

This is where Louise first met David.

He was in his early 20s, she was barely a teenager.

My dad, I know,

was infuriated about the age difference,

and her dating at that age.

He didn't think it was appropriate for them to be alone without adult

supervision. And my mom loved David and his family because they were

the best Christians, and they were so close to our family.

But, my mom hid that from my dad.

She let Louise see him behind my dad's back.

In 1985, Louise and David married at this church.

Three years later, they had their first child, a girl.

In 1992,

they left West Virginia and moved halfway across America

to Fort Worth in Texas.

The move was significant.

David and Louise began to slip under the radar.

And Theresa believes Louise wanted

to put distance between herself and her family.

And a very dark secret involving a man in the family's inner circle.

He would slip money into my hand,

while he was doing whatever he was doing,

and he thought that that made it OK.

Louise moved away to escape years of continual sexual abuse,

starting in childhood.

But even before, many years earlier,

the perpetrator had targeted their mother.

As far back as I can remember, this person...

..he molested my mom all of her life.

Then he turned to the daughters,

Louise and Theresa, and their mother,

desperate for money, would go along with it.

We begged my mom not to take us up there some days,

and she would take us anyway.

He owned all kinds of things and he was very, very wealthy.

And she would tell us she had to feed us.

She would tell us she had to clothe us.

That she didn't know which was going to do.

Even when Louise moved away,

Theresa says she and her sister Elizabeth continued to be abused.

We would be so scared, we would hold each other all night.

Me and Elizabeth would hold hands and pray together.

I mean, there were so many things, I mean...

And we knew, we just knew...

..that it was just the way was, it was the way it was, it was,

it was going to happen because you're not supposed to talk.

You know? You're not supposed to talk.

He destroyed my self-worth...

..as a child, and so I know he destroyed Louise's.

I definitely think Louise going up there scarred her.

That was an open wound that I don't think ever got healed.

Louise may have moved over 1,000 miles,

but was she really able to shake off years of such treatment?

As we know, people who are abusers

tend to be people who have experienced abuse themselves.

It's extremely sad.

If you're raised by an abusive family,

maybe they think that's the only way or right way that they need to be

treated or to treat someone.

Is Louise a victim in this?

I don't know, I mean, I'm really angry with Louise right now.

So it's hard for me to say that.

All I can say is...

..Louise knew right from wrong.

Regardless, Louise knew right from wrong.

Louise knew what she was doing was wrong, or she wouldn't have hid it.

In the early 1990s, it appears the Turpins were doing well.

Their second child, a son, was born.

It seemed Louise had left her childhood abuse behind.

Her sister Theresa believes they were starting to live the good life.

I thought their life was perfect,

just like it was when we went out there.

She always had the nice homes and the nice cars.

They were the most perfect family I ever had seen.

She was funny, like you know, like I could joke with her.

I could joke with David.

And I even said, I said, "Oh Louise is the one who got that fairy tale.

"She's been married to her husband since she was 16,

"they've got all this money."

David Turpin was on a 6-figure salary,

working as an engineer at the aerospace company Lockheed Martin.

Whatever is going on behind closed doors,

to the outside world they appeared a normal, rapidly growing family.

In some ways, these individuals

probably had the strategy to appear one way,

and to have a hidden secret life that they were leading in a very

different way, and in contrast to what were seeing.

Between 1992 and 1996,

David and Louise had four more children, bringing the total to six.

But that fairy tale was about to turn into a nightmare.

Coming up: The Turpin's apparently perfect life was unravelling, and

the authorities say this is when the years of alleged abuse

within the growing family really began.

What started out as neglect became severe,

pervasive, prolonged child abuse.

In 1992, life for David and Louise Turpin,

the American parents charged with torturing their own children,

takes a turn for the worse.

They face money problems and file for bankruptcy.

Honestly, I think it was a pride thing.

I think she was ashamed.

I think that she knew that we knew that she was the only one of us that

had made it in this world.

She was the only one of us who had gotten with

her high school sweetheart and stayed with him this long.

I believe that she was ashamed to tell us anything like that,

anything bad that happened.

And it's in Texas,

according to the District Attorney dealing with their case,

the alleged abuse of their children began.

The neglect and abuse started when

the family lived in the Fort Worth area of Texas.

What started out as neglect

became severe, pervasive,

prolonged child abuse.

The Turpins become more and more reclusive.

More isolated, retreating further into their own dark world.

In hindsight, Louise's sister Theresa

believes what they saw they may all have been a front.

So that makes me wonder,

was the week that we visited you all every year,

was that just a show?

Was that, you know, a show for the family?

Is that a one week out of the year show for the family?

You know, I don't know. I've always thought that they were in love.

Because I've always thought it was a fairy tale romance.

They've known each other all their lives,

but now that I look back, I wonder. I wonder.

By 1999, they have seven children.

And they're about to disappear almost entirely from view.

First, they leave Fort Worth.

The new owners found the place left in a terrible state.

Soiled carpets, filthy walls, and unexplained scratches on the doors.

The people that we knew then,

I mean, is a world away from what we're hearing now.

So either some really bad things happened

that changed who they were as people, or

they're just very, very good actors.

And I think they're just very, very good actors.

With their seven children,

the Turpins then cut themselves off from the family, almost entirely.

The very last time I physically saw them and they came to us in 1998.

She came in with the oldest four,

and she came to West Virginia,

and she told a very close family member of mine that

that was the last time she would be in.

That that was the last the family would see of her.

I think that she was so hurt.

They appeared to be shutting out the rest of the world.

Isolating the kids is another strategy

on the parents' part to manipulate them, control them,

and make sure they have as little access to reality as possible.

Their new home was a remote 36-acre plot, deep in rural Texas.

Neighbours know neighbours here, but respect privacy.

It wasn't long before the family living next door to the Turpins

sensed it was all getting strange.

Whenever we would come up close to the house,

they would turn and start going back towards their property.

They didn't want to come past our house.

They stayed where they, I guess, where no-one could really see them.

One time, I caught them out on the road,

and I started asking them, like,

"Hey, I'm your neighbour across the street.

"I'm Ashley's mom Shelli and my husband's name is Ricki.

"What's ya'll's names?"

And it got weird, you know,

the older girl was like,

"Well, if you pay attention to what we say,

"maybe you could figure out what our names are."

And one of the younger girls turns around and goes, "No, don't, don't."

And she looks scared, like they're going to get in trouble.

The Vinyards noticed other things.

Though their full significance would not become apparent

for another 15 years.

I started looking at them and I noticed how white their hands were.

And I hadn't noticed that before, and it wasn't gloves,

it was the fact that the rest of them was dirty.

That, to the wrist down, was the only clean part of them.

And they started telling me how it was that if you went past the wrist,

it was wasting water.

And that's when it got kind of scary and I kind of pulled back.

It all became horribly clear after

David and Louise Turpin were arrested,

and the District Attorney spelled out what was happening.

None of the victims were allowed to shower more than once a year.

If the children were found to wash their hands above the wrist area

they were accused of playing in the water.

And they would be chained up.

Things were weird and suspicious and I wish I had done more.

I really do wish I had done more, you know?

This was when the behaviour of the Turpin family became truly bizarre.

They got to where they wouldn't be out during the day, only after dark.

And it seemed like they were keeping night hours,

and completely a ghost town over there during the day.

At night it was like every light in the house was on,

but all the curtains were drawn shut.

But the house would be lit up all night long.

If the kids were outside, you could hear them, but otherwise silence.

That house was silent all day long.

With a nocturnal lifestyle, where you can't

see out the windows, you can't connect with the daylight,

you're further isolated from reality,

and it feels like this was to completely deprive them

of a normal sensory experience in the world.

They had bicycles for like ten kids over there, brand-new,

and they just sat and rotted.

No-one ever played with them even when they came out at night to play,

a no-one ever played, even when

you'd see them out every rare occasion,

they'd never touch the bicycles.

It tends to be related to wanting to have

this secretive, kind of isolated life.

It's part of, "our rules are different,

"we do things differently in this house."

And the parents, again,

are setting yet another rule or another condition

to their existence.

It's pretty weird, but I guess evil can be very clever.

They probably were looking for someplace like this,

where they could fly under the radar.

The authorities said this is when the starving began.

The children were, when they were not chained up,

locked in different rooms.

And fed very little, on a schedule.

There's people that live near them that said

they saw the two oldest boys digging in trash cans,

so how did you not question that?

I'm sorry, if I saw a teenage boy going into a trash can,

I'm going to go ask him,

"Is everything is OK? Like, what are you doing?"

And see what response I got.

In Texas, in 2010, one of the girls makes a break for it.

She flags down a passing pick-up truck

and tries to call the emergency services.

A lady picked her up in a pick-up truck and from what I was told,

the lady had talked to her,

and she didn't seem to know who the president was, her age,

or a lot of things that she should've known.

And that she was asking how to get a job, an apartment, and a car.

But the woman takes the girl back to her parents.

The chance to save the children from

another eight years of alleged abuse was lost.

That could have been it, that could've the moment,

that could've been their escape.

I really wish that maybe someone had listened to her a little bit more.

Because she did seem to have worked so hard

to have gotten out of there,

and she had gotten so far out,

and then somebody seemed to have talked her into going right back.

And she wasn't able to put up much of a fight.

Between 1999 and 2005, David and Louise Turpin

have another six children, bringing the total to 12.

A large family by any standards.

In fact, Louise has five children in just five years.

She appears deeply attracted to the early stages of motherhood.

Could this be the key to explain what is happening?

I did wonder whether this was a woman who liked the infancy stage,

which is a stage where you're needed the most,

because the child can't do anything for him or herself.

And then as soon as that stage was passed,

she would start thinking about being pregnant again.

It seemed she and David didn't want their children to grow up.

Louise had a need for babies.

Could it be that she wanted her children

to always remain as infants?

It appears that they never wanted their kids to grow up.

They wanted to live in Neverland.

Forever. It just seems like their fascination with Disneyland,

their children almost purposefully being, you know,

malnourished to stunt their growth...

..to keep them small.

In 2010, the Turpins' family fortunes dwindled further.

David lost his job at Lockheed Martin,

and once again, they're in debt.

Unable to pay their mortgage, the Turpins left Texas in a hurry.

One night they seemed to kind of just disappear

in the middle of the night.

When the house goes up for sale, their neighbours, the Vinyards,

take a sneak look inside.

What they see appals them.

We opened the door and the dogs came flying out.

They had been living off the trash and dirty diapers

that they had left in the house, to eat.

The living room was set up like a makeshift school with a broken

chalkboard set up against it and there wasn't, like, crayons.

There was no colouring books.

There wasn't toys.

It was just filth and trash.

The carpet had been ripped up, and plywood had been laid down,

and you could still see that even the plywood was stained and gross.

The bedrooms where the kids were clearly living was set up like,

I guess like bunks. Just like a barracks.

Just one bunk bed right after the other,

right after the other, and in the other room it was the same way.

One thing Shelley saw confused her.

But later, haunted her.

Ropes tied to the children's beds.

Just tied to the headboard or footboard at the end by the doors.

I just thought the kids had done it, I didn't know.

I was just like, "Wow, why in the world are there ropes on there?"

I wouldn't let my kids play with ropes.

The victims report that as a punishment,

starting many years ago, they began to be tied up.

First with ropes,

one victim at one point was tied up and hogtied.

And then when that victim was able to escape the ropes,

these defendants eventually began using chains

and padlocks to chain up the victims to their beds.

And then you think back, "Oh, my gosh,

"the ropes on the bed, the secrecy."

You know, it was a lot more serious than we realised.

This is not a common type of trauma,

in the sense of the magnitude of the trauma.

We know trauma is everywhere, unfortunately,

but the depth and breadth of this trauma was enormous.

Coming up... Louise and David Turpin's lifestyle

enters new and dark territory,

when their sexual fantasies are unleashed.

And she said, "Well, it's time for us to sew those wild oats."

This January, David and Louise Turpin

became the most notorious parents in America,

when they were charged with starving and torturing

12 of their 13 children.

But ten years ago, according to her sister Theresa,

Louise and David Turpin's lifestyle took

a darker and dangerously voyeuristic turn.

She'd never taken a drink of alcohol.

She had never smoked a cigarette.

She had never done a drug.

She'd never partied. She'd never done any of that.

And she said, "Well, it's time for us to sew those wild oats."

I knew that she was experimenting,

which to me was a little abnormal for her age.

She was getting to that hill that she just was like, "Oh,

"wait, I never did this."

So, like, she wanted to climb back down to experience it.

Just different partners, I guess.

Wanted to experience what it was like with somebody else.

David took her to meet this man

that they had never met before in their life.

She slept with him in the room,

and David sat out in the car and waited on her.

They recorded it for David, so he could watch it.

A year later, on the anniversary of the date she did it,

at exactly a year to the date,

David took her to the same hotel,

and slept with her in the same bed that that man slept with her in.

My mom got so mad at Louise over some pictures

that Louise had posted on MySpace.

It blew our minds.

Because she had on a one piece lingerie.

And this guy was taking picture of her in this lingerie,

and she had pictures of herself in the bathtub,

and I know my mom got very, very upset over those pictures.

Then in 2010, another big move.

The Turpins leave their Texas home in total squalor.

These photographs were taken by the incoming owners.

The Turpins move halfway across the country to California.

Here, according to the prosecuting authorities,

the alleged abuse got more extreme.

The abuse and severe neglect intensified over time,

and intensified as they moved to California.

It's also when they became even more reclusive.

More secretive and isolated.

The Turpins launched their own home-school,

the benignly named Sandcastle Day School.

But their only pupils were the Turpin children.

And it seems there was not much teaching.

The children lacked even, they lack a basic knowledge of life.

Many of the children didn't know what a police officer was.

The 17-year-old, when asked if there was medication or pills in the home,

didn't know what medication or pills were.

These individuals managed to isolate and confine themselves in such a way

that there's no external accountability in the world.

This is reinforced by Billy Lambert, Louise Turpin's half-brother.

He remembers the children being painfully shy, not easy to talk to.

The oldest, she just seemed like she didn't want to hold a conversation

with you. She didn't really want to make eye contact.

They just didn't seem like they wanted to go out there and play.

In 2014, the Turpins make one final move.

Muir Woods Road in the town of Perris,

is the very model of suburban California.

The house at the centre of the current torture allegations.

It appears quite normal.

But what allegedly happened behind this front door

was far from normal.

As the Turpins' contact with the outside world is all but curtailed.

The children were, when they were not chained up,

locked in different rooms.

And fed very little on a schedule.

These kids were not being given, but maybe one meal a day.

What hurt me as a parent, covering the story,

was hearing that they would put pies out on the counter,

the kids could see those pies, but they weren't allowed to eat them.

Parents could eat them, but not the kids.

And that's just torturous.

Physically, starvation is devastating on every organ system.

And starvation is uniquely cruel,

because it weakens the person's ability to think properly.

Our ability to cope, and to process, and to fight,

and to think clearly is dependent on adequate nourishment.

Stories emerge of just how hungry the children were.

Especially the few times they were allowed out.

Like when the eldest son took a class at a community college.

We talked to a classmate at the college,

and she said that the boy,

whenever they brought food in, free food or anything like that,

he would stand at the table and eat pizza slice after pizza slice.

He was constantly eating, because it was there.

He was eating like he was starving.

Like he hadn't eaten in a long time.

Food was not the only thing they were deprived of.

They were not allowed to have toys.

Although there were many toys found in the house,

that were in their original packaging and had never been opened.

This is on a different level.

You almost get the feeling that these kids

were living in a prison camp

inside their own home.

Neighbours definitely got the sense the Turpins wanted to be left alone.

I thought they were isolated, no friends came over,

no family came over.

Standoffish.

Not in a mean way, just,

"Don't bother me, I'm in my lane, just don't...

"I'm not going to pay attention to you,

"you're not going to pay attention to me."

Despite what's allegedly going on,

there are rare times when all the Turpins ventured out,

and appeared to be one big happy family.

Like here, at Disneyland.

Then, in 2015, the Turpin's 13th and final child arrives.

It's also when they go to Las Vegas

with all their children as witnesses,

to renew their wedding vows.

I promise. I promise.

To love you tender. To love you tender.

I will never. I will never.

Leave you. Leave you.

As heartbreak hotel. At heartbreak hotel.

It was to be one of the last times

the entire Turpin family was seen in public.

I think this desire to present the family as happy and healthy

might be a motivation for them,

in order to feel like they really aren't doing anything wrong.

The photograph is a snapshot

and a smile can hide extreme pain.

And so when someone says, "Say cheese",

they might say cheese because they've been trained to.

While they presented a wholesome face in public,

Theresa remains haunted

by what, in private, might have been happening at home.

To go from just amazing and wealthy,

and all these Christian values, and

to go completely to the other side, that's like...

You're off your map, like, you're on somebody else's map.

In 2016, personal grief for Louise Turpin and sister Theresa.

Their mother dies, aged 66.

But reclusive Louise in California refused to attend the funeral.

She found it hard to forgive her mother

for the years of abuse,

and she seemed to have been the one who suffered the most.

I think she held a lot of resentment toward Mommy.

I think Louise has kind of worked the same.

When she first left, I think that

she was mad and resented Mommy a lot.

I think she resented the whole family because they kept the secret.

Refusing to attend the funeral

caused deep resentment in the family.

She told me that she felt bad, you know,

she didn't make it to the funeral.

She did feel bad about that,

she felt like she kind of let Mom down on that end.

We did call her, try to get her come to the hospital because we told her

"It's down south, this isn't coming back. You've got to get here."

And she just didn't do it.

And the sense of isolation from her family grew even deeper.

By 2016, six of the Turpin children were adults.

Despite what they have allegedly been through,

the question is simply why didn't they escape, make a break for it?

Why weren't they able to get out?

Why weren't they able to move on?

And see that this was a bad situation?

Yet they stayed, and that makes you think, "Wow, why?"

The children's mind-set, say experts, was complex.

Could they have felt safe

in their own small universe with its own rules?

So the kids form, like, a band,

and they bond together very strongly,

and I think that that's part of their survival strategy.

If you have a band of siblings who are going through the same thing,

and you're starved, and you can't think straight,

and you're not developing properly,

socially, emotionally, and you're disconnected from the world,

you may not know that that is unusual.

While the children felt a deep bond with each other,

they may also have felt a similar bond with their alleged torturers.

Their parents.

I think one of the most difficult things to understand

is the control that the parents have over the children.

They're so dependent on the people who are abusing them,

but at the same time, "taking care of them".

This is a phenomenon known as Stockholm Syndrome.

When hostages side with their captors.

And could go some way to explain what

the Turpin children were experiencing.

Stockholm Syndrome is a phenomenon where, under extreme traumatic

circumstances, a person will start to adhere to,

and even believe in the mind-set of their captor.

"I will go along with what my parents are doing,

"because I don't know anything else."

Coming up... The moment the world discovered the Turpin 13.

Fearing for her life, one of the girls, just 17, makes a dawn escape,

clutching a mobile phone.

And 20 years of alleged abuse, were exposed.

To me, she's a hero.

Because if it weren't for her,

these kids were so malnourished,

it makes you wonder how long they had to live.

The Turpin children have allegedly been kept prisoners by their own

parents for over 20 years.

But one child, a 17-year-old daughter,

seems more independently minded than the rest.

It's a song called You Told Me. Yeah.

Certainly, by the end of 2017,

she had found a way to post her own original songs on YouTube.

Using the name, Lacey Swan.

SHE SINGS

In hindsight, the titles of the songs seem shockingly revealing.

Where Is The Key?

# Oh, where is the key?

# Where is the key? #

You Blame Me.

# You blame me for everything. #

And So Weak.

# So weak, so weak. #

She made at least eight videos,

the last posted just days before she made her escape.

Eventually, she reaches tipping point.

You can imagine a scenario where perhaps

the 17-year-old is the one who's going through puberty,

and just pissed off and angry, and wanted to make a run for it.

On Sunday January 14, at six in the morning,

she finally summoned up the courage to escape.

For 12 of the 13 Turpin children,

years and years of alleged abuse,

starvation, and torture are finally over.

For this child,

it's hard to know the ingredients

that come into play where she develops a sense of mastery,

like, "I can do this and I'm going to forge out".

The girl, who planned her get away for two years,

told police she was terrified

her parents would kill her if she was caught.

The motivation may have been not so much to take care of herself,

but to take care of her siblings,

or to just get this situation to stop once and for all.

Whatever the reason,

the teenager's courage breaks a cycle of abuse

that allegedly went on for years.

To me she's a hero because if it weren't for her,

these kids were so malnourished,

it makes you wonder how long they had to live.

Even the girl who escaped was in such a poor state physically,

police thought she looked more like a ten-year-old.

Family and neighbours were stunned by the news.

When the story first broke,

the first thing I saw was their mugshots,

and I looked at her and I was like "Oh, my God."

These two pictures, that in itself shocked me.

Yeah, and she was perplexed as to why they were there.

Yeah, that pissed me off.

Why would you be surprised that an officer is at your door,

but you don't know why they're there?

Billy Lambert was angry when he saw the relatives he thought he knew.

I feel betrayed as far as a brother, you know, by my sister.

That Louise, I feel like she betrayed me.

My mom sent me the link.

As soon as I opened and I saw their faces,

it was just like...

Questions that I had been asking myself for years were answered.

I just want them to know that if they ever felt

like we forgot about them,

if they ever felt like we didn't care, we did care.

We knew you were there, we knew you were there.

We didn't know what to do.

When police searched the Turpins' home,

they make a valuable discovery.

Hundreds of journals, handwritten by the children.

They are immediately seized by police,

to provide key evidence for their parents' trial.

Once they go through those journals,

they're going to see the first-hand accounts of what each one of these

kids that wrote a journal, what they went through.

Apparently that was their only entertainment...

was talking to each other and writing in these journals.

I think that's a positive thing for kids, because it's expressive,

it's an expressive activity that they can do.

But I also do wonder about the parents

and their interest in the kids documenting things.

And their encouragement of the children to write things down.

These individuals sleep all day and are up all night.

The...all 13 of the victims,

including the defendants,

typically go to sleep around four or five in the morning.

Sleep all day and then be up all through the night.

It'll take many years for the children to adjust

to living in the real world.

You can heal from a nutritional standpoint,

you can heal from a sensory reintroduction standpoint,

much of what they were deprived of is sensory,

in terms of living in the world in daylight,

and with other human beings.

But I don't think you can really ever recover emotionally

from the trauma that you experience like that.

On March 19, nine weeks after they're taken into care,

the seven oldest Turpin children, aged 18 to 29,

are moved from a medical centre to a secret rural location

where they are under constant supervision.

According to the lawyer, they have enjoyed ice cream Sundays,

topped with hot fudge.

They have been shopping, to restaurants,

they have their own bedrooms, wardrobes, and bathrooms.

And for the first time in their lives,

they also have the freedom to go outside.

You talk to the health professionals

that worked directly with these kids,

and they will tell you that they all had great attitudes.

You hear now the success stories, these kids are so receptive,

they're wonderful, good people and you can see the potential in them,

and now hopefully, the world will.

The younger children are being cared for by two foster families.

But in the long term, their relatives hope

somehow to bring them home.

I want to adopt two of them.

The adults will, more than likely,

not be able to be adopted out,

because the adults are in a nice home,

that has been converted into kind of like apartments for them

which is probably very cool for them.

And that they are learning how to be adults,

learning how to be taking care of themselves, and be independent.

I want to adopt,

I'm interested in adopting at least three of the kids if I could.

I would love to take in three.

I feel like I could do that financially fine.

So, I feel like if I could get three of the kids,

I would love to and try to help in any way I can.

Their parents, Louise and David,

face a lifetime behind bars if convicted of the charges.

The only way they can contact the children now

is through their lawyers.

We are not planning to and will not try our case in the media out here.

Our case, whatever it may be,

is going to be tried and heard in the courtroom.

Both David and Louise Turpin have pleaded not guilty

to all the charges against them,

including 12 kinds of torture,

12 counts of false imprisonment,

nine counts of child abuse and endangerment,

seven counts of cruelty to an adult dependent.

David Turpin is separately charged with

one count of a lewd act on a child under the age of 14.

Louise Turpin is separately charged with

one count of assault with force,

likely to produce great bodily injury.

What we would like to have the public know is that our clients are

presumed to be innocent.

They are presumed to be not guilty.

We are going to provide a vigorous defence.

No trial date has yet been set.

Louise Turpin's sister Theresa is torn between

what her sibling was and what she may have turned into.

I hate who she's become.

And I absolutely hate her ways in every way.

I hate her beliefs, I hate who she's become.

I love the sister that left home when I was three.

As for the children, Theresa believes

life will be an emotional roller-coaster,

but in the end, they will survive.

I think they'll be happy.

They'll have fun times and they'll have

times that they're emotional and upset over, you know,

things that come back to that memory.

I think they'll be OK.

I think they'll be OK. I think with the right people, the right love,

I think they'll be OK. I don't think that they'll ever get back

time that they should've had, but they'll OK. They're loved.

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