Doomed to Fail - Ep 2 - Part 1: The Terrible Turpin Family

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

Re-release of Episode 2 - part 1! Another terrible story - this time of the Turpin Family - ultra religions in some ways, wild in others. David and Louise Turpin kept their children locked in their house of horrors for years. We're talking absolute filth, starvation, torture -- just all-around awful things. Outwardly, they would dress the children the same and take them on vacations! It's weird! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail]  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

Hi friends, it's Taylor from Dune to Fail. I'm at the airport, so I have a lot of background noise, but today we are re-releasing part one of episode two, where Fars tells us about the terrible Turpin family. It's a real sad story. Lots of kids living in a house of horrors. You might have seen them on the news. They went to Disneyland. It's quite weird. I hope you enjoy. Thanks. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Welcome to Dune to Fail, the podcast where we ignore all the red flags.

I'm Fars, joined by my co-host, Taylor, and every week we'll be bringing you two tales, one historic and one true crime related of relationships that were doomed to. to fail. Taylor, what's our signature drink this week? Thank you Fars. So this week we'll be going back to ancient Rome. So our cocktail is going to be a glass of red wine, but you have to drink it laying down on a couch covered in pillows and you don't hold the glass. Someone else holds the glass and pours it into your mouth. And then they back up and they spill the red wine on the carpet. So you sentence them to death by being eaten by a lion. So that's our cocktail. And then our mock because we know not everyone is a drinker. So our mocktail is one of those mustard yellow Tupperware cups from the 80s. It is stained and it is crusty and it's been on the floor for a few years. And it's also just empty. There's no actual liquid in it. It's just this dirty cup on the floor. And far as I think you'll cover why we have that dirty cup on the floor. I will absolutely be covering why this disgusting cup is on the floor. If you do have a dirty yellow tubberware cup,

from the 80s. Please wash it before you drink anything out of it. But that's it. Today we're going to be covering Emperor Nero of Rome and the Turpin family and try to find the red flags, which are going to be a plenty. So I'm going to dive right in. We're going to start on the true crime side of the equation. And as usual, I'm going to ask you, Taylor, being the true prime officianto that you are, do you know, are you fully with the Turpin family case? I am, and I kind of feel like I want to gag because it's so gross. I am, like, I don't know all the details, luckily, but I guess I'll get to know them now. But yeah, I just, I imagine it's real gross and sad. Very gross. Very gross. Very sad. So to kick things off, do you,

do you remember Harry, who is Jeff Daniels character in Dumb and Dumber? Yes. Okay, picture that guy from now on every time I bring up David Turpin. He looks like he's wearing a mop on his head. And it also looks silky, smooth for some reason. So he apparently cares, he cares enough about his hair to condition and moisturize it, but not enough to actually cut it and modernize it and make it look normal, which is very, very interesting. Okay, great. Got it.

Got it. Okay, perfect. So with that preamble, let's start in on David and Louise Turpin. Right at the top, I'm going to blame religion and power dynamic clip story. Religion tends to play in quite a bit, as we've seen in the last episode as well, into my true crime cases. David and Louise met when he was 23 and she was 16. Obvious power dynamic, right?

Yeah. I get that a seven-year age gap doesn't mean much when you're 40 and she's 33. But by this time, David was a computer engineer. He had an air of a man who had his shit together to a 16-year-old, right? Yeah, totally. It's a huge difference. Huge difference. From what I could gather, they only were together for about a year before getting married

in 1985, and the circumstances under which they got married were also really interesting. They kind of absconded with each other without the parents, with her parents completely disapproving of this, trying to get married to each other. And then somehow they came back home and they squared things away with her parents and were able to get married. But it was, it was kind of like a, he basically was trying to take advantage of a 16-year-old is how I interpreted this. Yeah.

I mean, there's no way to not. Like, you know, there's a thing, like, if you're underage, then like, It's against your will. There's no such thing. You know, you can't consent if you're a child. Exactly. Exactly. So going into a bit of their individual histories, Louise seems to have had a really

rough childhood. According to her sister Teresa, their mother would sell the girls to local pedophiles. Ew. Oh, God. Yeah. Teresa is quoted as saying, this is all a quote. He would slip money into my hand as he molested me. I can still feel his breath on my neck as he whispered, be quiet.

We begged her not to take us to him, but she would simply say, I have to clothe and feed you. Louise was abused the worst. He destroyed myself forth as a child, and I know he destroyed hers too. This is Teresa, the sister, talking. Which is crazy. I didn't have an exact age range here where this was going on, but it doesn't matter. I mean, it's still, it's awful. no matter what.

So, I mean, it sounds like she never had a chance. Like, yeah. Yeah, she kind of started off with a bad, bad hand. Using poker terms, which I'm terrible at. And the story was actually corroborated. So they have another sister who's named Elizabeth. She corroborated the sexual abuse story, too. But then she also leveled some pretty stupid accusations against Louise to kind of impute her character

and justify what she did. She wrote a book. The book is called Sisters of Secrets. And so for context, Teresa was of the opinion. I can't believe that my sister would do this. This is insane. Whereas Elizabeth was of the opinion of, of course she could do this. Look at her past.

Look at her history. Look at what she was involved in. They're so stupid. She accused her of drinking, smoking, going to bars, practicing witchcraft, gambling. I love that for her. Yeah. eating steaks and then she made some vague sexual promiscuity claims against her um don't know exactly what those were related to but all this sounds like i mean eating snakes is a little bit

unusual unless you're in louisiana but the rest of the steak i was like that seems fine but snakes i see i get it i get the slithering kind not the delicious cow kind um but all this kind of sounds like just edgy emo shit that anybody would do when they doesn't even sound edgy Yeah, exactly, right? It's fairly standard operating procedure for most kids. Yeah. So Elizabeth sounds like going back to our thing from last week, a bit of a wet noodle. So we're not a huge fan of Elizabeth because she basically tried to find any reason to justify what ended up happening, which we're about to dive straight into.

Totally. But before we dive into it, building back on the characters at hand here, David was kind of the flip side of that equation. He was a bit of a baby straight edge. he was part of the Bible chess and science clubs made really good grades and actually I ended up going back and finding his high school year book picture he had the hair he had the mob hair in high school it was absolutely incredible he looked exactly the same oh my gosh that kind of thing feels like permanent maybe that's it was just permanent like you just can't do anything about it that's so funny yeah I didn't put this in the outline but I wanted to call this out because if any of you look up a picture of these two The one thing also that I found really interesting about this, despite kind of like how they ended up, they were part of a swinger's community. So they had swinger parties too, which, again, nothing wrong with being a swinger. Yeah, good fun. That's fine.

But they are, imagine walking into that house that I'm about to describe and preparing yourself to have a sex party with these people. I think the problem with being a swinger is like not everyone is attractive. some of them look like hairy from dumb and dumber yes but also maybe you like that so you just have to kind of know what you're getting into like don't be surprised if you're like i like that then like great but if you're like i expect it to be something like really beautiful and like sexy and you get there and it's like no but remember and all of a sudden when they go to the sex party Danny divino's eating from the buffet oh yes it's gross that's that's what i'm imagining like a book there's also a buffet well it's not even their appearance i'm addressing here i'm addressing

in the fact that you walk into what I'm about to describe as the house to have sex with these people. And it's like, what could be going through your mind? But let me, I'll get to the house. And then, and then we'll back our way into like, now imagine walking into this to have sex with these people. So going back to this story, in 2011, David files for bankruptcy claiming $240,000 in credit card debt. That's an insane amount of credit card debt. what are you buying with that like a car i don't you know i don't think you can buy a car on a credit car i think you have to actually take out an auto loan or something like it's yeah i mean this number really blew me away because i mean sure everybody everybody has credit card debt it's a thing it is

what it is but this amount of it is pretty remarkable to me especially when you factor in that he had a really good salary he made about a hundred and forty thousand dollars a year as an engineer. You know, I don't know if this detail is particularly significant, the debt that they were in, but I can see why that level of debt could increase stress levels and kind of improve some rational thinking. Yeah. But I mean, what ended up happening kind of goes a little bit, not a little bit. It goes a lot beyond just stress related to some debt. But I don't know, what do you think, Taylor? Well, I also think, like, I know you're going to talk about it, but part of it is like they have a shit ton of children so like i don't know maybe think about your financial situation

before you have 47 kids like stuff like that that i think maybe also ties to the religion factor as well maybe they like didn't take precautions to not have kids but like at some point you have to be like i'm way over my head with this debt i should stop incurring more expenses yeah aka having like 7000 kids yeah whenever i whenever i consider the debt piece of it and then look at what ended up happening I was like, well, could this have been a response to, like, we just don't have the money for these children, and this is the only option we have? I mean, obviously, that's not an excuse, but I'm just trying to make, I'm trying to create logic in an incredibly a logical situation. Totally, but if you like, like, you have a, you have a dog. If you're like, I can't afford to take care of my dog, you wouldn't stop feeding your dog.

You would give it to someone else. Yeah, exactly, exactly. You'd rehome it. Yeah. So going back to the story, they lived in Fort Worth, which is just outside of Dallas, Texas, until 1999. And then they moved to another town in Texas called Rio Vista. In 2007, they moved 10 of their children into a trailer on that property in Rio Vista. There was two other kids, so there was 12 in total, and the two youngest stayed in the house with their parents.

The other 10 were brought groceries on a weekly basis, but apparently it wasn't enough food. for all of them. This trailer eventually looked exactly like what you would expect when the family left it. The way it was described by neighbors, it was basically like an episode of quarters. It was just feces everywhere, dead animals everywhere, food.

It was filthy. It was absolutely, absolutely filthy. Oh, my God. And the thing is, I mean, how big of a trailer could it have possibly been? I didn't see it. I didn't get dimensions on it. But 10 people is just...

Yeah. You'd have to be sleeping on the floor. assume, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah, well, the family relocated to Paris, California in 2014. People thought they were odd, but nothing super out of the ordinary. They would occasionally do nice family things. If you Google the Turpins, one of the first pictures you'll pull up is of them at Disneyland, and they're all wearing, you know, thing T-shirts, you know, thing one, two, three, four, they're wearing all of those. And they look normal, minus, you know, David's haircut. Like, they actually did some stuff

occasionally together. It's also so funny because that's so expensive. Like, I don't want to go to Disneyland with my four-person family because I don't feel like spending $4,000, you know, like Yeah, so I don't have kids, so I don't know what this would equate to, but could you rack up $240,000 in credit card debt by taking your kids to Disneyland? No, but you could rack up like 15. Wow. Okay. Yeah. If you went there for like a week and like stayed in a hotel and had tickets and bought food and like whatever and made those thing t-shirts you could be a lot going back to like the pictures these folks say there was another picture that came up which is of them getting uh renewing their vows with all their children in tow you've seen that right it's so eerie it's like they're so pleased

with one another there's something about it that just like shook me they definitely look like oh we're so happy and we're so in love and like renewing our bows and there's like an elvist And they just look so super happy. And you're like, what? I don't be pleased with yourself. You're doing a terrible job. Yeah. Yeah.

So look up these people and see these pictures because it's a little haunting after you realize what those kids were going through while all this was happening. So they were both Pentecostal. They believed that they were called to have this many children by God. So, you know, kudos to you, Taylor. You kind of guessed why this ended up. happening the way that it ended up happening. I researched Pentecostalism and realized that these are the people that speak in tongues.

Do you know, are you feeling with this? I think, well, I think so. Like, I was going to ask you, like, tell me a little bit more about being Pentecostal. So, um, yeah, tell me just on speaking in tongues. It sounds hilarious. I went down a rabbit hole with this because I was just blown away at like the belief system here. So these are, these are the folks that think that the Holy Spirit inhibits their body.

And they'll start just speaking in gibberish under the auspices that that is the Holy Spirit in their body trying to express itself. There was, I can't remember his name now. There was a huge megachurch guy in Dallas who would do this all the time. You'd get on TV. I remember I used to watch this. I grew up in Dallas. And I would watch this guy on late night TV just like doing gibberish talking to the camera, trying to get people to send him money. And then he ended up being found as a total scam artist and got sued by the government and everything else.

But it's crazy. Like, they fall on the ground, they roll around. It's like basically the shittiest improv skit of all time. And then people just buy into it for some reason. But they don't know, like, do they try to, like, translate what they're saying? No, it's just, it's nonsense. It's absolute nonsense. But they don't try to be like, this nonsense means give me money and.

Or they're just like, it's just nonsense. Watch me do it. So you're kind of on to something on that last point. So the theology is also tied to the prosperity theology, which, are you familiar with that? No. Okay. So this means that having material in the financial wealth is a sign that God thinks you're great, basically. So, yeah.

So if you're poor, you're poor because God hates you. If you're rich, you're rich because God loves you. Yeah. So it basically means that your faith in God is what brings you these things. And I find it interesting when factored in with the, bankruptcy because you kind of have to think to yourself, you know, were they thinking to themselves? I guess I was wondering how psychologically, if you believe this stuff, how would you feel if you were also this destitute as they, as they ended up being? Maybe you ignore the debt

and you like think, well, I'm rich because I can buy all these things, even though you're not, and you're like not thinking about like, oh, but I don't have that money, I have to pay it back. I was actually thinking in terms of, did they think that if they neglect their kids and spend as little as possible to keep them alive. It would help them with God because they'd had money left over. Right. You know? Like, it's not good.

It's not good. So the kids. So there are 10 daughters, three sons, all born between 1988 and 2015. So towards the end of this saga, which we haven't got to the house yet. But I'm going to skip forward to how this ended up happening because what ended up happening, they discovered. the house is critical here. So as this saga is coming to an end and they're about to be discovered, apparently there's a bunch of talks of the family all moving to Oklahoma.

I don't know exactly the details of what happened here. But in 2018, one of the kids, her name's Jordan, she was 17 at the time, fled through the window and ran a distance from the house before calling 911 on a cell phone she had on her. Apparently, there were some internal discussions amongst the kids who were all, you know, destitute together that moving to Oklahoma for whatever reason would be basically the end of them. There would be their death. I don't know exactly what happened because it was already awful. It was already awful for the same years. And what was the reason for this?

The other thing I don't understand is how these kids had cell phones. There's actually multiple examples of this. I'm going to go into a little bit later. but the kids apparently had cell phones on them. And for some reason, they were still running out of the house to make a phone call. Did they go to school? No, no. What's actually amazing and really funny is David listed himself on some tax filing or something

as a principal of Sandcastle Day School. That is like how operated from his house. Yeah, exactly. And he actually got another conviction for falsifying records for, to, to on an official form because of this principal thing yeah yeah um i don't know i feel like i know you can get a cell phone you know if you are financially in need of a cell phone because you know you do need one to like get a job and like things like that you know so you can get one via assistance but i don't know how they would have like applied for that assistance i also know that you can

dial 911 on phones that don't work so if you have a phone that isn't connected to like a plan um you can still dial 911 on it So that's actually really good advice for anybody, like, if you actually need to do it. But I will say it, and you'll see later on, that these phones had service. I'll explain that bit in a moment, which, again, I have no idea. Yeah, yeah, I don't know how they got cell phones. I don't know why they didn't use them earlier. I don't know why they had to leave the house to use them, so on and so forth.

It's all a little bit of a mystery. But Jordan ended up doing this, and the police showed up, and Jordan showed them pictures that she'd taken on that cell phone of the house. And Jordan told the police, quote, My two little sisters right now are chained up. They're chained up because they stole mother's food. Yeah. Imagine being a cop who heard that.

I feel like it would be, I would just, I feel like, what, what? They stole mom's food. Crazy. Well, I don't say mom and say mother. They called her mother like Mike Pence calls his wife mother. Like, that's not great. When you hear that, you're like, that's bad. I also feel like there's some, there's,

I mean, there's so many people who dedicate their lives to helping children who are in these terrible situations. But there's also a place where they, like, don't know what is normal, you know? So, like, maybe a lot of it, they're like, yeah, this is our life. Like, I've never seen a life that isn't like this. But also, like, I must feel terrible. So I'm going to go into that, too, because I thought a lot about that as well. And it ties into the cell phones and everything else here in a moment. Um, so the police responded for a welfare check to the house and just found it in

complete this right, obviously. It was also what you would picture of a hoarder's house. He said, the detail that gets me is that you, they keep finding dead pets in the house. Ew. Like, they don't bury or cremate them. They just, like, live with them decomposing on their living room floor. I don't know what pets it was. It was just, it just said pets.

It doesn't matter. Yeah. No, that's so gross. Whenever I see that in hoarders, they'll be like, oh, yeah, there's a cat skeleton in the corner. You're like, how did we get here? Like, that's just, that's so much farther than, like, not taking out your trash. That's horrible. Yeah, yeah.

That detail, you're right. When I watch Waters, I also have that reaction is that's the one detail. It's like of everything else. That's the one I most understand. I also just love watching Quarters. I keep waiting for a new season. I've watched all of it. I want more.

Yes. We have the exact same TV addiction. So police witness, one of the kids was shackled to a bed. And apparently, I don't know how they know this, but apparently he'd been shackled there for weeks. I can only presume it was based on the reaction to the shackles on his skin that they would be able to deduce how long he'd been up there. The details of what these kids endured is kind of beyond comprehension. They were obviously incredibly malnourish and extremely dirty. They were regularly beaten.

they were only allowed to be the once per year. Oh, my God. Go back to the 10 kids in the RV or the trailer, right? Once a year living in those conditions. They were also regularly shackled as police have already observed, and they had very little understanding of the outside world. Apparently they were fed only once a day, and they also weren't allowed to use the indoor bathroom.

So I can only imagine there was like a ship bucket sitting somewhere, They're inside the room that these kids were in. Oh, my God. Yeah, unbelievable. So I'm going to go back to what you'd mention, which is their understanding of the outside world and also tied it into the cell phones. One detail as I was reading about this story and researching it was in 2014, Jordan, the girl who, the daughter who ran out called the police. Yeah. She saw a Justin Bieber video on her brother's cell phone.

huh yeah and she'd also been watching hannah montana in high school musical on this cell phone so that points like hey the cell phones work the cell phones had service so like right totally don't understand how that wasn't being used but can you imagine that can you imagine being that isolated and then seeing stuff like that like i get phomo if i just stay on a rainy saturday i can't imagine what it must feel you're covered in dirt wearing tattered clothes starving walking around and shit and you see essentially the polar opposite. Like, I mean, I've never watched Hannah Montana, but I would assume that

it is the polar opposite, right? It is. Yes. I always have watched it. But it is. You remember how our friend Jeff was in Hannah Montana? Was he really? Yeah, he was in like an episode where they were like playing volleyball over some reason and he like, he like won against her or something.

I need, oh, you know what? That does bring a bell. It does. It actually does bring a ball. I don't you go find that. Yeah. What do you think it was? Yeah. This part of it just blows me away of like you watch this stuff. You know that there's a world like that out there and you live in this situation.

I just say it's incredible. Yeah, but just like how much have you been brainwashed to think that that is the life that you should live, right? Yeah. But also doesn't living like that mean God hates you? I'm not expecting any rational answers from this, but I'm just saying that like, if you're living in poverty, God hates you, right? But here's the thing. I mean, given how they treated these kids,

I don't think that, you know, religious teachings were being imposed on them. It doesn't seem like they, it seems like the Louise and David were having their own wives being run in parallel to like these separate lives of these kids were living. Right, because he went to work. Yeah, he went to work.

He had a great job. That's crazy. He was doing his thing, yeah. Yeah. So the parents were obviously arrested, and they were charged with torture, false imprisonment, abuse of a dependent adult since several of the children were 18 or older in child abuse. The dad was additionally charged with lewd acts on a child. Oh, no. Yeah.

Not that that's surprising, but oh, no. I know, I know. They ultimately pled guilty. So originally they pled not guilty, and then they changed their plea to guilty. and they were thankfully sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, I think after 22 years. But apparently the general prevailing theory is that given the nature of the crimes, that there's no chance it would ever re-release into the public.

And they're separated, right? Obviously, because she's in a men's a women's prison and he's in a men's prison. Totally. That's awesome. That's great. So I'm happy they're not together. Yeah, they don't do much good together. Yeah.

So there's a bit of an aftermath. So a bit of an aftermath as far as these kids are concerned, that's really depressing. So we're going to continue on that theme. It's kind of hard to imagine, but some of these kids suffered even more after this event. What? Obviously, the kids were taken away, right? Like, they were taken away and the state had to, well, the county had to figure out what resources to kind of apply to bring these kids back up to be able to live reasonable lives.

The kids were obviously super fucked up psychologically and also had to help. health ailments because of the lack of nutrition they ultimately spent two months in the hospital it's crazy it's a long time um this is where it gets bad taylor so five of the kids were adopted by family and these people were utter pieces of shit i don't know i'm hiding out of the screen because i'm so upset yeah i don't know how you find people like this and not appropriately vet them, but apparently Riverside County didn't. The kind of abuse they suffered, I'm going to read the laundry list of it here. They were hit in the face.

They had their hair pulled. They were hit with belts. They were forced to eat excessive amounts of food. And then when they vomited, they were forced to eat their vomit. Oh. And, you know, it's a given, but we'll just tack it on anyways. The foster father was also accused of fondling and kissing them on the mouth. you know why

all those kids Jesus Christ I don't oh my God it's like how much can one how much can someone take right I mean I can't like there who are like I love five kids to abuse please

yeah and they just like waiting for that and like what I've been in the past and like oh God yeah yeah it's it's really really bad so the foster parents were obviously arrested as well in the mix in the middle of all this

but yeah so this story has some parallels with cults so i'm going to do a little bit of a sidebar here i'm mostly thinking about hardcore insular poly um polymarriage whatever it's called and i'm also thinking of the children of god who are now known as the family international so when i read stories about people who have left these groups you're sure by the fact that they can't take care of themselves. Everything's done for you. You're part of a community, a bad one, but you're part of the community that everything's done for you. They don't know how to do the basic adult stuff, how to open a bank account, rent an apartment, buy furniture, work and normal jobs, so on and so forth. That was all going on here as well. Because usually it's because

everything was done for you and then teaching basic life skills wasn't really good for whoever the leader was, whether it's children. I want to keep you there. these people. Yeah. The harder you make it to leave, the less likely someone is to do so. Totally. And that's the impression I get of what's going on here. These kids, as they age out of the foster program, are kind of just dropped into the real world with no understanding of how to do normal things. And like, I don't blame them. I don't know if you remember what you were like when you were 18, but when I was 18, I mean, I didn't have my shit together until I was like 32. Like, you know what I mean? And you knew and you knew about the world also, you know. How old are

you now, are you like, 33? What, in terms of maturity? Probably 33. No, in terms of you saying that you guys should do it in there, you were 32. I'm just asking how long you think it was. It's been six years. I've been a solid six years since I had my chest together. Okay.

But no, I mean, look, if you drop me into the real world, even without the exposure of abuse that these kids suffered at 18, I probably would have just died in the gutter. Like, there's no way I would have figured my shit out, right? Like, nobody would. I don't think. I don't think so. I mean, you know, what are you going to, how are you even going to,

know how to get a job you know or like that's and then if you don't have anything how do you get anything you know like getting an apartment you have to have money to even start you know like there's not like it's so hard the story gets worse now that you mentioned so some of these kids ended up being homeless um obviously riverside county was the county that had jurisdiction over the kids the child services and were responsible basically their well-being um they were sued by some of the kids for placing them in that shithead foster family's house. And also, because this part, I don't recall from when the news broke on this case, but apparently the public donated around $2 million for the care of the loving of these kids. Yeah. And so it never was

distributed. There was a guardian ad litem who never distributed the funds. The kids would ask sport it would it would they would never get it um and yeah that's why the kids end up homeless in a lot of cases is because they age out of the foster program and they had no resources to fall back on and no life skills and this guardian ad litem for whatever reason abdicated her responsibilities and just did not distribute the resources to these kids they needed to survive so basically everybody everybody failed these kids yeah yeah like i wouldn't i wouldn't say you should give them two million dollars because they don't know what to do with it and they might just buy a house and like don't not take care of it because they don't know how you know

But you could, like, give them money for an apartment, you know, and like, right? Wouldn't that be that guardian's job? So that's the responsibility of the guardian ad litem. The guardian ad litem is, is that, their guardian. Yeah. It's in lieu of parents. This is the person who is supposed to tell you, here's how you go get health care. Here's how you go shopping for food.

Here's how you create a bank account. I could do that for them. I could do that. Side hustle is become a guardian. guardian ad litem. And it also, as part of all of that, is distribute resources as needed. Like, you have to make a case for it, right? Yeah. The guardian ad line of isn't just going to say, here's $2,000. Good luck. Go, go at it.

Which I think is the right decision. Yeah. But she should do something. She didn't do anything. Exactly. So that's where we are right now. The parents are in jail, presumably for the rest of their lives, thankfully. The kids are, unfortunately, like, not doing that great, it sounds like. Um, you know, all this is fairly recent. So every now and then, there's new stories that come up. I think the most recent one was December of, um, 2021 about what the update is on the kids. So there's going to be more and more updates on this. We'll update this, um, uh, podcast as we hear more about what's going on with the kids. Apparently one of them did graduate from high school. So that's good. But, you know, like you're dealt, when you're dealt a hand this bad, it's kind of tough to recover. Yeah. Um, absolutely. So that's, My story about the Turpins, and when I think about the, yeah, when I think about the concept of this being doomed to fail, I really fall back on the conclusion of the control dynamic between David and Louise.

I don't think Louise is a good person, but I also think that, A, she was horribly, emotionally, and psychologically, and physically damaged in her childhood. And so she hoax up with a guy when she's still a child who's seven years or elder, and David. And I don't, I don't know for sure, but I would imagine that David kind of ruled their decision making. Whatever David did and said would probably work. And she doesn't have any understanding of what a normal childhood should look like. Like you learn from what your parents teach you. And she never learned the right way to do that. And so. Yeah. I think the cycle of abuse is, is what, you know, dooms this couple and this family to fail because there's no, like you said, there's nothing like

good to look back on and know like what it felt like to be like loved and taken care of and you know all those things i think it's just like and who knows if he abused her or she like what that might have been like because she seems super happy but like she also is definitely in a weird situation you know like the the power dynamic of the 16 year old marrying a 20 whatever year old like i hate that yeah yeah not not good none of it's good hopefully kids recover um and that is are true crime story of the week. I think a good takeaway is to look into your neighbor's windows and make sure I'm not doing anything weird.

If you go to a Swinger's house, there's dead cats and dogs in the living room, tell somebody. Yes, tell someone. Like, I think that's, you know, if you think someone's in trouble, please tell someone. I know that, like, we're not like, the cops are the best. The foster system obviously is not the best, but you should definitely tell someone and try to do something. Absolutely. See something, say something.

Yeah. See something. Say something. All right. That was part one of episode two on the Turpin family. Hope you're all okay. Next week we will be releasing part two where I go into the story of Emperor Nero and his wife, Pompea, and all of the absolute chaos that Nero caused in Rome. Later in our podcast episodes, I also talk about how the city of Pompei,

was destroyed by Mount Vesuvius, and that's kind of a similar time period. Nero did travel to Pompeii, to sing, obviously, and then also to do a little bit of governing, see some races. He stopped a riot, kind of, so all sorts of stuff. It all connects. You can check out my history timeline if you look at our linked traits on our Instagram, and you can kind of see where it all fits together. So, yeah, do you want us for next week for that?

then also follow us everywhere that you listen to podcasts. Please tell your friends and we're at Doom to Fail Pod. Thank you.