THE FAMILY NEXT DOOR

Horrific account of a headline-making case of criminal abuse that shook a California community.

The cliché screams out at the beginning: They seemed to be such normal people, and, as a neighbor said, “nobody here knew they had twelve kids….I thought there was just one or two.” The 13 children in the Turpin household in an otherwise ordinary Southern California suburb, though, were anything but normal. They were held captive in their home for years, beaten, chained to furniture, sexually abused, forbidden to wash, fed a diet of frozen burritos and peanut butter or bologna sandwiches meal after meal. Infractions that merited corporal punishment included playing with toys or looking out the window. The children had never been to a dentist. The parents/perpetrators had themselves experienced abuse and trauma, a family history that Glatt (The Lost Girls: The True Story of the Cleveland Abductions and the Incredible Rescue of Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Gina DeJesus, 2015, etc.) traces over generations. There were exceedingly odd twists. The parents bought their children 10 brand-new, expensive bicycles and then "lined them up under the carport with the price tags on the handlebars and stickers on the wheels for all the neighbors to see”—but forbade the children from leaving the house to play with them. The story is creepy, with a few twists—e.g., after they were freed, it developed that the children were musically adept, singing being one of the few things they could do in captivity. Train-wreck attention-getter that it is, the book is longer than the story warrants, and it calls out for comparative treatment—for case studies of similar crimes, that is, and any conclusions that can be drawn about the perpetrators other than that they’re monstrous, which seems abundantly clear from the first page.

It’s hard to imagine wanting to read such a story, but devotees of true crime will be drawn to this narrative.