In January 2018, Jordan Turpin managed to escape from her parents' home and managed to alert the authorities to the atrocities that she and her 12 siblings had suffered at the hands of their parents.
In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Jordan and Jennifer Turpin spoke for the first time about their life at their home in Perris, California, which has become known as "the house of horror."
"I knew I would die if they found me out,"
said Jordan Turpin, who is now 21 years old.
"I think it was being so close to death so many times. If something happened to me, at least I would have died trying to escape," he said.
Host Diane Sawyer (R) with two of the Turpin sisters.Christina Ng / ABC News via NBC
Jordan Turpin managed to alert the authorities that his brothers were being forcibly held inside the house by their own parents and told them that
some of them were in chains.
When the police arrived and found her, they believed that she was a small girl because of how thin she was, not a 17-year-old girl.
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David and Louis Turpin abused their children for more than a decade.
After pleading guilty to multiple charges that included torture and false imprisonment, they were sentenced in 2019 to 25 years in prison, with the possibility of remaining there for life.
The start of the nightmare
Jennifer Turpin, the oldest of the sisters, was less than 3 years old when she lived with her parents in a nice neighborhood in Forth Worth, Texas.
His father worked as an engineer and his mother at home.
But eventually his house deteriorated and his mother began to have very violent mood swings.
They stopped bathing her to go to school and her entire home was littered with garbage.
In 1999 they moved into a house in a remote neighborhood in Rio Vista, Texas.
As they had more children, their parents began to become violent against them, justifying themselves with passages from the Bible.
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"They loved to say that they had the right to do things to us because Deuteronomy said so ... that they even had the right to kill us if we weren't paying attention to them," Jennifer Turpin recounted.
The family moved to California in 2010, by then the children were eating only once a day, things like French fries, peanut butter sandwiches or frozen burritos, while their parents ate three full meals a day.
The escape
When their parents left, the children secretly watched movies, listened to music.
In 2015, Jordan Turpin got hold of an old smartphone his parents had forgotten and discovered the music of Justin Bieber.
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That's when he began to realize that there was a different world out there: "I don't know where we would be if we hadn't seen Justin Bieber," he said.
I don't know where we would be if we hadn't seen Justin Bieber "
She started posting her own videos on social media thanks to that phone she had found.
And one day someone started leaving comments on his posts, asking him questions about his life, why was he always inside his house and not going to school.
It was this person who suggested that Jordan Turpin call the police when she told him how their parents punished them,
chaining them to their beds for months
, and the things they fed them.
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For two years he was planning their escape
, gathering evidence of the abuse they suffered since this was something he had learned from the television shows he watched.
Until one day their mother told them in a fit of rage that the next day they would move to Oklahoma.
Then he realized that this would be his last chance to escape.
He managed to get out of a window and immediately ran into the street and called 911. His parents were arrested two hours later.
The brothers spent time in the hospital.
All but the youngest
were severely malnourished and had not seen a doctor in over five years
, some had never seen a dentist.
"I'm so grateful just to be able to go for an hour walk while listening to my music. These little things that I think people take for granted," Jennifer Turpin told the quoted outlet.