And is it possible those journals are honest or were they expected to write about their lovely life?
I will be happy and super surprised if the parents did not censor the journals. Fingers crossed.
I don’t think the prosecutors would have mentioned them unless they’ve at least skimmed a few…
I think the mom was so delusional that she didn’t think there was anything wrong with the way she was treating her “children”. I can believe that the kids were encouraged to write about their “discipline” and to reflect on the behavior that caused it. Also I can believe that the kids were told to write daily but I can’t see the parents keeping up with reading 10+ journals every day.
20/20 did a segment tonight.
A neighbor who worked the night shift saw the kids walking past a window from 3-5 a.m.
It seems that they were marching.
Guessing for exercise.
The show also highlighted the (?) boys who were held captive in an apartment by their
father for years.
Another article focusing on Louise’s family http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5289527/David-Louise-Turpin-eloped-16.html
I’ve read and watched a lot about the case–too much–and the saddest thing to me is that a long time ago, one of the kids made a break for it. She was walking down a road and a neighbor saw her and picked her up. She asked the neighbor questions–most important one seemed to be “How do I get a driver’s license?” Neighbor decided she was a teenage runaway and drove her back to her parents! This is probably the oldest kid who is now 29 and weighs 82 pounds.
Guy who bought the Texas property said–before prosecutor gave his statement–that after the main house got too filthy, the Turpins bought a mobile home and lived in it. There were six sets of bunk beds and some of the beds had ropes tied to the ends. Owner seemed a bit defensive, but totally credible. He said he bought the property in foreclosure and never had any contact with the Turpin family.
There is a young woman who played with the children for a while. Then one day she was abruptly told the kids couldn’t see her anymore. All the kids had names that started with J.
Like the Duggars…
^^^I watched a documentary on the “Wolfpack” boys not too long ago. Yes, another very strange family, but at least they were fed and weren’t tied up (at least that wasn’t mentioned in the documentary). They were locked into their apartment - I think in NYC, and were only allowed to go outside a couple of times/year. They spent their time watching thousands of movies and reenacting their favorites with homemade costumes and props. One day the oldest boy (there were several boys and one disabled daughter) decided that he was going to break free from his father’s restrictions and just walked out. The others followed and a filmmaker observed them all walking around NYC (they all had long dark hair worn in ponytails) and did the documentary on them. Amazingly, they are doing very well now, and most of them have jobs in creative fields.
@patsmom @jonri My kids all have names starting with J as do my DS and myself. We home school until 9th grade. I also dressed the kids in coordinating Gymboree clothing for special events when they were young. Are you suggesting that I starved and tortured my children? Worse yet we moved to Texas (heaven forbid!) to homeschool our children after the local school district in MA told us we weren’t “allowed” to teach our children Latin because it didn’t align with their elementary school curriculum and refused to approve our home school curriculum.
What those parents did to those kids was sick but it wasn’t because they were homeschooled, it wasn’t because they lived in Texas and it certainly didn’t have anything to do with naming their kids with J names!
^thanks. The dad had the only key so how did the 15 yr old walk out that Saturday morning?
Details missing like this drive me nuts.
No one is suggesting that A implies B. Some of these things are certainly not what most people are doing , however. Most people these days don’t have 13 children. They don’t name their children with names starting with the same letter, or not if there are a lot of them (my children have names starting with C, but there are only 2 of them). Most people don’t homeschool.
As for dressing them the same, we don’t know if that was what they normally did, given that these were obviously infrequent events at which they were photographed. Maybe it cut down on clothing costs. None of these things in themselves are wrong or weird, but they help give insight into the whole bizarre picture.
What is most beyond me is how they escaped the notice of public authorities all these years.
From what I read she went out a window.
@gouf78 I think @oregon101 was referring to the “Wolfpack Brothers” not the CA family. Sorry I derailed the thread and confused things. I’ll stop after this comment.
@oregon101 This segment from a New Yorker article on the boys explains how he left:
“Five years ago, when he was fifteen, Mukunda walked out of the apartment while Oscar was buying groceries. There was no elaborate system of locks to break or alarms to dismantle. He just opened the door and went. In case his father should see him on the street, he wore a Michael Myers mask, that paper-white mold that covers the face of the killer in the “Halloween” movies. You have to applaud his strategy, though roaming around disguised as a slasher didn’t exactly endear him to the denizens of the Lower East Side. Someone called the police, and Mukunda was taken to a mental ward, where he spent two weeks before being released back into his family’s care.
Still, the spell had been broken, as spells are made to be. The boys began venturing out together; in the face of their united front, Oscar retreated.”
Why they didn’t try it before then? From what I read, the father was very controlling - the boys said the mother suffered the most, so I’m assuming they were just too afraid to leave before then. They’d only been out into the world a few times, so that might have made them fearful also.
Ok thanks. On 20/20 last night they showed the Wolfpack dad locking a deadbolt and he had the only key.
They did show the 15 year old just open and walk out of the door. So I have that information but still not
why he could open the door that particular day. Not important.
As far as the same clothes worn on outings in the California case it makes total sense to me. I put bright orange
shirts on mine at Disney Land. I needed to be able to keep track of them. The only odd think is the choice of the
clothes and the age of the oldest wearing the same clothes a 2 yr old had to wear.
“What is most beyond me is how they (Wolfpack) escaped the notice of public authorities all these years.”
What is there to bring them to notice?
They were home schooled–no crime. They didn’t draw attention to themselves in any way. Nobody was starving or created a commotion.
And they did draw attention–one went out with a halloween mask and spent a week in a hospital. And then returned home.
Neighbors didn’t even know they existed for the most part. (Guess nobody wanted to get involved).
Yeah, my sister and I have J names, but J names for 13 kids is a bit extreme! 
Those poor kids. Their recovery, and I would figure that the degree to which they CAN recover will be varied, will take a long, long time.
The one who went out the window must have a strong spirit.
I know this thread is about the CA kids but I always have the type of questions that are being asked here.
What makes someone follow orders no matter the abuse?
What makes one victim rebel when another won’t?
What makes up a survivor mentality?
And in these cases after prolonged abuse since childhood–when do you realize that this “isn’t right” and there is another life outside yours?
I went to school with a kid from a family with 12 or 13 kids. The all had T names-Tracy, Todd, Tommy, Timmy… We used to have Todd speed recite the names as entertainment. They were a normal, happy family who happened to be Roman Catholic and got stuck on T.
They have been led to believe that escape is difficult or impossible, that attempts to escape will result in greater abuse, and that living independently of the abuser is impossible, whether or not these things are true or not.
Compare to slaves and people living in countries with repressive governments.
My FIL was one of 15 (no multiple births) it wasn’t unusual for that part of the country at the time.
I’m just saying that people are judging on a lot of extraneous things: large families, dressing kids alike, same first initial, homeschool, none of this caused this tragic abuse nor are they symptoms of the abuse.
Many people witnessed “odd” behavior from this family and yet no one followed up. Watching kids march in circles in the middle of the night? seeing kids go through trash bins for food? and yet no one thought to get involved? I’ll bet the person that picked up the kid that escaped years ago and just returned her home feels pretty bad now.
I was referring to the California batch, in particular. I don’t know anything about the wolf kids.