Shelli and her daughter Ashley lived across the street from the Turpin family when they lived in Rio Vista, Texas. Recently, the pair spoke with Dr. Phil about what the family was like – and what they saw inside the Turpins’ abandoned home after they moved.
Ashley, who was just a young girl when the Turpins lived in Texas, said that she was friends with the three oldest Turpin children, Jennifer, Joss, and Jessica. However, Ashley revealed that while the Turpin kids were friendly, they seemed far from normal.
“The only time I ever saw them was in the late afternoons after I got home from school and into the early evening,” she tells Dr. Phil in an exclusive interview airing Monday. “Sometimes, you could hear them outside late at night.”
Shelli recalls what she says happened when she spoke to the kids. “I asked their names, and the older girl, she was, like, ‘Well, we’re not really allowed to tell anyone our names,’” she says.
Shelli added that none of the children knew their birthdays nor basic facts like who the president was.
After the Turpins abruptly moved — as Dr. Phil put it, they “just disappeared” — Shelli and Ashley said they investigated the house and were absolutely shocked by what they found.
“It was so nasty on the inside,” Ashley tells Dr. Phil in an exclusive interview airing Monday. “They had trashed the brick house so bad that they couldn’t live in it. They had pulled carpet out of it. The living room area had newspapers, and animal cages and just filth. The carpet was ripped up. It was plywood that was covered in filth. There was trash everywhere, bedrooms set up like barracks with bunk beds.”
Even more disturbing, the pair said that there were ropes tied to the headboards and footboards of the beds. Shelli revealed that, at the time, she “had no idea” what she was looking at and never would have thought the ropes had been used to restrain the children.
Shelli and Ashley are not the first people to reveal bizarre details about the Turpins’ homes. The current owner of the Rio Vista house said that she found strange air vents in the master bedroom closet when she moved in. Additionally, the people who moved into a home in Fort Worth after the Turpins lost the property to foreclosure said that the carpet was covered in dirt stains and filth and there were scratch marks on the backs of doors.
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