Apparently they felt that
God had called upon them to have so many children. Still not sure why they chained them up...
James and Betty Turpin, who live in West Virginia, said David and Louise had so many children because "God called on them."
They were given "very strict homeschooling," and would memorize long passages in the Bible, the grandparents said. Some children tried to memorize it in its entirety.
While David and Louise were in the Pentecostal faith, they did not have a church in the area and David's parents knew of no friends that the couple had.
The last time the grandparents visited California about four or five years ago, they thought the children seemed thin but they appeared to be a "happy family," they said.
Meanwhile the "I didn't want to get involved" neighbor award goes to this lady:
"They were very pale-skinned, almost like they'd never seen the sun," said one woman who lives in the neighborhood. "It was mostly girls. Kind of small-framed, kind of tiny. Almost looked a little malnutritioned."
She said the couple mostly kept to themselves and she never tried to pry.
"I respected their privacy," she said. "But now it just breaks my heart. It makes me want to cry."
Also I cannot stress just how badly malnourished they must have been:
The youngest child was 2. At first deputies assumed from their frail and malnourished appearance that all in the group were minors, but they later determined that seven of them were adults ages 18 to 29, the sheriff’s statement said.
Turpin's former
bankruptcy lawyer had this to say:
“To me and my wife, Nancy, who was with me during the interviews, we always thought of them as very nice people who spoke highly of their children,” the attorney said. “They seemed like very normal people who fell into financial problems.”
Trahan said that David Turpin, who worked as an engineer at Northrop Grumman, an aeronautics and defense technology company, had a “relatively high” income, but had trouble keeping up with his expenses because he had so many children.
Bankruptcy documents show David Turpin earned more than $140,000 in 2011, when the records were filed, but that the family’s expenses exceeded his take-home pay by more than $1,000 a month.
The Turpins are being held on a 6 million dollar bond. The children are being eval'd by CPS and APS and are in hospital last I had heard.