They looked like the perfect couple. A graduate of Virgin Tech, David Turpin was a well-paid computer engineer who’d worked for large outfits like Lockheed-Martin and Northrop-Grumman.

Wife Louise was born in West Virginia and married David when he was 23 and she was 16. They were to move first to the Fort Worth, Texas, area, then Perris in Riverside County, California, well-dressed, well-mannered. They were conservative. They home-schooled the kids. They loved Disneyland. They renewed their vows with all the children present. Both were Pentecostal Christians — “born again” and “saved.” As such, they told friends they had been called by God to have twenty-five children and reached the number thirteen before trouble set in.

That trouble came when one of their ten daughters, a 17-year-old named Jordan, escaped from their house and was able to use someone’s old cell phone to make a call to 911.

Incredibly, the girl was walking in the street; she knew nothing much about sidewalks or much of anything in the outside world. She wasn’t even sure what “medication” and “police” were. Malnourished, she looked more like she was ten than the late teen she was. Somehow, however, she knew which numbers to call on a phone she got her hands on, and when the sheriff’s department rolled up, what they told them — buttressed by photos on the barely charged phone — was beyond disturbing.

For years — since they were very young children, she explained — she and her brothers and sisters had been trapped in the house. At times, they were all but starved. All were forced to spend their entire days sitting down. At times they were chained or tied with rope to their soiled beds.

Instead of walking, the kids skipped oddly. Several of them were adults, imprisoned like their younger siblings in a “house of horrors” filled with decaying garbage, dead cats, rodents, feces, clothes they were not allowed to wear and toys they could not play with (kept out of reach for psychological torture). They were beaten, sometimes strangled. The smell in the house was so bad they could barely breathe. They were allowed a shower — once a year. As for nourishment, they were given a single meal a day, often so insufficient that they took to eating ketchup, mustard, and ice cubes while their parents ate like royalty.

Yet family and neighbors, while thinking them a bit odd, and in at least one case spotting the kids scrounging through garbage, and at a rare time when a window was open glimpsing the kids walking around and around in circles, did not report anything. One of them, a 29-year-old in captivity (by now completely brainwashed by the parents) who weighed a mere 82 pounds. Another, eleven years old, had the arm circumference of an infant.

As they say, you can’t make this stuff up. By outward appearances, all seemed normal. Photos such as the Disneyland and wedding-renewal shots you see here, which were posed and posted, of course, on Facebook (famous for those who present themselves as a bit happier and more together than they actually are).

Cut to the chase: after Jordan bravely escaped (terrified because she heard her parents planning to move to Oklahoma, where they would be all the more isolated), cops entered the premises, were shocked by what they encountered, and in fairly quick order the Turpins were charged with twelve counts of torture, a dozen counts of false imprisonment, seven counts of abusing a dependent adult, six counts of child abuse, and one count (against David) for a lewd act on a child under 14. The trial ended in 2019 and was an open and shut case: life sentences, making them eligible for parole after twenty-five years, though many don’t expect they’ll ever see daylight, due to the horrific situation.

The case was detailed (and here one has to give credit where credit is due) by Diane Sawyer in a special edition of the ABC show “20/20” last autumn (and also the Australian version of “Sixty Minutes”).

One can go on with this case, but it didn’t add up; it didn’t make sense. Why? How could parents treat their own flesh and blood this way? How? What was the motive?

Nowhere in these reports, at least nowhere of great prominence, was what may have been the driving factor, for one comes to learn with a modicum of research that these “Pentecostal Christians” apparently had “backslid,” left the faith, and become involved with “swinging” and — more to the point — the occult.

In a book called Sisters of Secrets and an interview with the New York Daily News, one of Louise’s siblings, Elizabeth Flores said that Louise had told her “she was messing around with witchcraft.”

“It just really freaked me out,” said Flores, who spoke to the newspaper from Tennessee and had no idea what was transpiring in her sister’s house. Turpin’s obsession with Satanic rituals, spells, and her Ouija board, said the newspaper, had been worrisome when Flores moved to Texas from 2008 to 2010, according to the sister.

During that time, Turpin claimed the parlor board game told her she would have another child.

“She brought the Ouija board to my home and I wouldn’t let her bring it in my door,” Flores said. “I do know witchcraft is very serious and demonic. If she did get deep into that, I do think it could have led her to do what she did because you’re basically selling your soul to the devil.”

She added that Louise had an obsession with snakes. There was a statue of one, those who entered later noted, at the front door of the home.

No doubt, there’s more to this; more will come out. As is so often the case, a spiritual dimension. An occult connection.

That explains a lot. So does the fact that as it turns out, Louise and Elizabeth grew up in a home where as children they also had been abused.

As for the children: incredibly enough, five of them ended up in a foster home where abuse was occurring (one of them suffering attack here also) and this week they made news again by filing a lawsuit against the county for negligence.

And we’re left with one more spiritual aspect: how evil attracts even similar evil, how dabbling with the occult can totally twist a person’s thinking, and how sin flows like sludge through families and sometimes generations until it is purged. Pray for all involved [scroll for video reports]