Tortured by Mum and Dad: The Turpin 13
In January 2018, a 17-year-old girl climbed out of a window in Perris, California, and called 911 with a phone she had taken apart and hidden. What deputies found inside the house came to define the case: thirteen siblings, some of them adults, chained to beds, malnourished, and kept in near-total isolation by their parents, David and Louise Turpin. This documentary reconstructs how a family that neighbors and relatives describe as ordinary, even devout, concealed years of starvation and restraint behind drawn curtains and homeschooling paperwork that kept the children off any official radar. Interviews with journalists, law enforcement, and people who knew the Turpins fill in the timeline from the family's Texas origins through the move to California and the eventual raid. Court footage and photographs from the house supply the physical evidence, while the film sits with the harder question of how a couple functioned in public, attending church and hosting Las Vegas wedding vow renewals, while running a household like this at home.