The man who purchased the home where David and Louise Turpin once lived with their several children in Rio Vista, Texas said the previous family ended up moving into a trailer behind the home years after “trashing” it.
Billy Baldwin and his mother bought the home in Rio Vista — about 40 miles south of Fort Worth — in April 2011 after a neighbor who worked with his father informed them that it was for sale, he told ABC News on Friday.
When Baldwin called a realtor to look into buying the property, which included 36 acres of land, it was in such bad shape that he was informed he’d have to sign a waiver before entering the structure that said he wouldn’t sue them if he was injured inside, he said.
ABC News It took about three months and up to $35,000 to restore the Rio Vista, Texas, home where the Turpin family once lived before moving to California.
The Turpins moved to Rio Vista after their home in Fort Worth was foreclosed on, records show. The home in Rio Vista sits on land that has mineral rights, so the family was receiving “nice royalties” off of the gas well on the property while they lived there for more than 10 years, Baldwin said.
After Baldwin bought the home, one of the neighbors told him that the family “up and disappeared” after one of their daughters was seen walking up the street. She allegedly talked to neighbors, asking for a ride and inquiring on how to obtain a driver’s license, Baldwin said.
“You don’t just walk away from a place after you’ve been paying on it 10 or 12 years,” Baldwin said, acknowledging the strange behavior.
ABC News It took about three months and up to $35,000 to restore the Rio Vista, Texas, home where the Turpin family once lived before moving to California.
While the Turpins were living in the home, one of the Baldwin family’s cows got onto their property, and the Turpins “didn’t even answer the door” when Baldwin’s mother went to inform them, he said.
Baldwin had never met the family and had “no idea” what had happened in the home after he bought it, he said. he didn’t notice anything strange inside, besides the filth, but he later found a Polaroid photo of one of the bedrooms, which shows a rope tied to the end of a bed rail, he said.
Jimmy Baldwin Jimmy Baldwin, the current homeowner of the Rio Vista, Texas, home where the Turpin family once lived, found a Polaroid photo that appeared to show a rope tied to the end of a bed after he bought the home.
One photo that Baldwin took after he bought the property shows a drawing on one of the bedroom walls.
Jimmy Baldwin Jimmy Baldwin, the current homeowner of the Rio Vista, Texas, home where the Turpin family once lived, shared photos of the interior of the home after he bought it.
Even though Baldwin, who owns several rental properties, said he is “used to working on houses,” he described the condition of the home as “bad.” The mortgage company had even spent two months cleaning it up to get it “halfway presentable” before they put it on the market, he said.
“It was just nasty,” Baldwin said. There was “all kinds of stuff” all over the walls and carpet, the bathroom floor was “totally rotted out,” the roof was leaking, and there were holes in the walls and ceilings, he said.
Jimmy Baldwin Jimmy Baldwin, the current homeowner of the Rio Vista, Texas, home where the Turpin family once lived, shared photos of the interior of the home after he bought it. Jimmy Baldwin Jimmy Baldwin, the current homeowner of the Rio Vista, Texas, home where the Turpin family once lived, shared photos of the interior of the home after he bought it.
It took about three months and up to $35,000 to restore the home, which Baldwin uses as a rental property, he said.
The 2,300 square foot home with four bedrooms and two bathrooms was so trashed that the family bought a “brand new double-wide” and placed it several hundred yards behind the house in the backyard, Baldwin said. Although the trailer was gone by the time he purchased the property, an above-ground water line that led from the house to the trailer and an electrical meter were still visible, he said.
Hill County Sheriff Rodney Watson described Rio Vista as a tight-knit community where people “take care of each other” and know each other well.
“I never would have dreamed, you know, that somebody out in a lil’ country like this where everybody’s friendly would have something like that going on,” he said.
The Turpins appear to have left Texas for California after moving from their Rio Vista home, moving to Murrieta and then Perris, where they were living when their 17-year-old daughter escaped last weekend and called 911.
Incident reports from Hill County detail an incident in which stray livestock escaped the Turpins’ property in 2003 and another in which the Turpins’ black-and-white border collie bit their then 4-year-old daughter in the face in 2001.
David Allen Turpin/Facebook Louise and David Turpin were arrested in the torture and child endangerment case in Perris, Calif.
Emergency dispatchers were not called to the home until the day after the 4-year-old was bitten, according to the incident report. She was taken to the hospital to receive stitches on her face, and the dog was taken to a veterinarian to be put down, according to the report.
In the 2003 incident, a pig escaped the Turpins’ property and ate a 55-pound bag of a neighbor’s dog food, Watson said. David Turpin retrieved the pig and replaced the dog food, Watson said.
If the responding officers in both incidents had any indication that something was wrong with the children, they would have alerted child protective services, Watson said, adding that he knows several people in Hill County who homeschool their children and “do an excellent job at it.”
David Allen Turpin/ Facebook Louise and David Turpin were arrested in the torture and child endangerment case in Perris, Calif.
The Turpin children — who are ages 2 to 29 — were subjected to repeated beatings, including strangulation, and were only allowed to shower once a year, Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin said a press conference on Thursday. The abuse allegedly intensified when they moved from Texas to California, with the siblings telling authorities that their parents started tying them up many years ago, first with ropes and eventually with chains and padlocks, Hestrin said.
All of the siblings, except for the 2-year-old, are severely malnourished, Hestrin said. They are all being treated at local hospitals.
Gina Ferazzi/Reuters/Pool David Turpin and Louise Turpin appear in court for their arraignment in Riverside, California, Jan. 18, 2018.
David and Louise Turpin were arrested on charges of torture and child endangerment. During their arraignment on Thursday, they both pleaded not guilty and are being held on $12 million bonds each.
The Supreme Court said Friday that it will decide whether President Trump’s responsibility to protect the nation grants him authority to ban travelers from specific countries and that it will rule by June in the case, a major examination of the president’s powers.
The court will consider the third iteration of Trump’s travel ban, issued last fall, which bars various travelers from eight countries, six of them with Muslim majorities.
Lower courts have struck down each version, but the conservative-leaning Supreme Court has given the administration hope that Trump may be able to carry out one of the most significant and divisive initiatives of his presidency.
What the president has said is a necessary step to protect the country from terrorism has been characterized by his opponents as an illegal and unconstitutional fulfillment of campaign promises to ban Muslim immigrants.
His first order, issued a week after his inauguration, created chaos at airports and prompted protests in the United States and abroad. Trump’s comments and tweets about immigration and terrorism have ensured that the issue remains at the front of the national debate.
In a short order accepting the case for argument in April, the justices said they will consider the statutory justification for Trump’s actions as well as charges from opponents that it is an unconstitutional restriction based on religious discrimination.
The order would also seem to further ensure a blockbuster conclusion to the court’s term in June — the Supreme Court already is considering potentially landmark cases on partisan gerrymandering, privacy, unions and a clash between religious rights and gay rights.
In requesting the court provide a final answer on the travel ban, Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco said the high court must reestablish the vast authority the president wields when the nation’s security is at stake.
“The courts below have overridden the President’s judgments on sensitive matters of national security and foreign relations, and severely restricted the ability of this and future Presidents to protect the nation,” Francisco wrote in his petition to the court.
Challengers to the ban — in this case, the state of Hawaii and others — say Trump has exceeded his legal authority.
“No prior president has attempted to implement a policy that so baldly exceeds the statutory limits on the President’s power to exclude, or so nakedly violates Congress’s bar on nationality-based discrimination in the issuance of immigrant visas,” said Hawaii’s brief asking the court to let lower-court decisions stand.
But there are indications that the Supreme Court will be more sympathetic to the administration’s claim than the lower courts that have rejected it.
Last month, in an unsigned opinion, the justices said the restrictions in Trump’s latest version of the ban could go into effect as envisioned while legal challenges to the merits of the decision continued.
That decision, which included noted dissents only from liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, in effect discarded a compromise the justices fashioned regarding the second version of the plan. That compromise said the ban would not affect those who could prove significant connections to the United States.
The current version of the plan imposes various restrictions on travelers from Syria, Libya, Iran, Yemen, Chad, Somalia, North Korea and Venezuela. The first six of those countries have Muslim-majority populations, and the restrictions on travelers from North Korea and Venezuela are not part of the challenge.
The court will review a unanimous ruling from a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco. That panel said the third version of the travel ban suffered from the deficiencies of the first two — that Trump had again exceeded his lawful authority and that he had not made a legally sufficient finding that entry of those blocked would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
Another challenge to the ban is still resting with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond. That full court is considering a ruling by a Maryland judge that the ban violates the Constitution because it is effectively a ban on Muslims. Judge Theodore D. Chuang considered Trump’s statements and tweets in reaching his decision.
Despite a nudge from the Supreme Court last month to work quickly, the 4th Circuit has yet to rule. The case could be added, but the Supreme Court told the administration and Hawaii to also argue that constitutional question.
Trump’s moves on the issue have been controversial from the start. After the first version was rejected by the courts, the administration replaced it with a second one. It barred entry by nationals of six overwhelmingly Muslim countries for 90 days, excluded all refugees for 120 days and capped annual refugee admissions at 50,000.
Courts put that order on hold as well. That is when the Supreme Court fashioned the compromise that permitted the ban to go into effect but granted entry to those with a significant connection to the United States, such as family members, a waiting job or an academic opportunity.
The justices were scheduled to decide the merits of that ban last fall. But the order expired before oral arguments, and the administration replaced it with the third order.
Whatever the shortcomings of the first two orders, Francisco told the court, the third followed a painstaking review process to determine which countries did not have procedures in place to screen out those who might intend to harm the United States.
The eight countries named in the current ban “do not share adequate information with the United States to assess the risks their nationals pose, or they present other heightened risk factors,” Francisco wrote. “Whereas prior orders of the President were designed to facilitate the review, the [current] Proclamation directly responds to the completed review and its specific findings of deficiencies in particular countries.”
Hawaii argued that the current ban is worse than the previous ones, because it is permanent unless the administration takes some action to amend it.
“The President has issued a proclamation, without precedent in this Nation’s history, that purports to ban over 150 million aliens from this country based on nationality alone,” said Hawaii’s brief to the court, written by Washington lawyer Neal K. Katyal. “The immigration laws do not grant the President this power: Congress has delegated him only a measure of its authority to exclude harmful aliens or respond to exigencies, and it has expressly prohibited discrimination based on nationality.”
