'House of Horrors' Parents Punished Daughter by Throwing Her Pet Cat to Wild Dogs

The children of David and Louise Turpin suffered years of torture, abuse and malnutrition at the hands of their parents. The abuse began when the family lived in Texas and continued until January 2018, when one of the 13 Turpin siblings escaped from their Perris, Calif. home and called police.

Riverside County Deputy District Attorney Kevin Beecham, who worked the case that led to the parents’ imprisonment, says the children endured daily “psychological torment” from their parents, which included the oldest Turpin sibling having to watch as her cat was mauled by feral dogs outside their rural Texas home.

“She was caught stealing or taking some food from the fridge or pantry, and her mom told her to bring her cat and so Mom put the cat outside, and made her daughter watch as these dogs literally ate the cat in front of her, tore apart the cat and killed it,” Beecham tells PEOPLE.

Beecham says the oldest sibling was around nine years old when she witnessed the attack.

Prosecutors said the parents beat, strangled and starved their kids — who ranged in age from 2 to 29 at the time of their rescue — in an intensifying cycle of abuse dating back to at least 2010, when the family lived in the Fort Worth area of Texas.

RELATED: Evil Next Door: Siblings Allegedly Suffered Heinous Abuse — Until Teen’s Escape Put Parents in Jail

While at their Perris home, the children were forbidden to socialize with each other, and when they were caught trying to take food, they were chained to their filthy beds. They were also banned from exercising.

“They were supposed to sit down or lay down in their room,” says Beecham. “They weren’t even supposed to stand.”

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Among other disturbing behavior, David and Louise never changed the smoke detector batteries in the Perris home when they were low or out. “There’s that annoying beep, that loud beep,” says Beecham. “That’s what you heard all throughout the house. The psychiatrist explained that’s one mechanism that torturers would institute to try to keep control by using sounds.”

RELATED: ‘I Still Have Nightmares’: House of Horrors Siblings Confront Abusive Parents at Sentencing

Beecham says Louise initially didn’t seem to understand that what she did was wrong.

“She wrote an apology letter basically saying, ‘Sorry I chained you up. It won’t happen again. I’ll be a better mother.’ She was just very naïve to the whole thing,” he says. “She was just thinking that she needed parenting classes and that would be the end of it. David, not so much. I think he knew the writing was on the wall early on.”

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In 2019, David and Louise Turpin pleaded guilty to multiple felony counts including torture and false imprisonment and are now serving a 25 years-to-life sentence.

If you suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to http://www.childhelp.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.