Polyester clothing magnate Peter Nygard used his massive wealth to sex traffic and blackmail young women at his Bahamas 4.2 acre paradise called Nygard Cay. Tonight’s episode of Dateline interviews some of his victims and explores the story of the strange and hellish fantasyland.
Donna Anderson felt she was fooled by her husband. Just a couple of years after her blissful wedding, her life disintegrated because James was looking to take all of her money.
When the Turpin children were finally freed from their hellish conditions with their parents Louise and David Turpin they were living in a house in Perris, California. Before that, however, the children had been abandoned alone together for years in a trailer in rural Texas.
In 2004 Deborah Jones was living in Skowhegan, Maine and working in the mental health field, which she really liked. She had been married and divorced before, but she was now single so she decided to try out online dating, which is how she connected with Gerard Pepin. They had a lot in common and he checked a lot of boxes for Deborah, so she was excited to talk to him and meet him. He worked with at-risk teens, which was close to Deborah’s profession. They soon got married, but she soon found out that her new husband was not who she thought he was.
In 2010 15-year-old Loren Leslie felt out of place in her local community and spent more and more hours in front of the computer. She thought she had found the connections he craved on a website called Nexopia, but it was a deadly illusion.
What happened to the 13 Turpin children is unimaginable. The children grew up starving, were constantly in filth, were chained up for punishment, and were denied education. Even after they reached legal age, they were unable to leave the horrible captivity at the hands of their parents, Louise and David Turpin. Although their family was large, the father David was a computer engineer who always had a good job, but it wasn’t enough to sustain shopping and gambling addictions. Financial strain from poor personal decisions and compulsions is woven deep into the horrible Turpin family story.
At 5:49 AM on January 14, 2018 17-year-old Jordan Turpin took a chance that saved the lives of herself and her 12 siblings. She had never really seen the outside world, but she knew she had to try in order to save everyone from the horrific misery they were enduring at the hands of their parents. Jordan grabbed her brother’s old cellphone and snuck out a window of their house. Once she felt she’d made a safe enough distance, she struggled to call 911 with shaking hands.
73-year-old Philip Snider’s wife Roberta had been missing for several months when he met Missy at a Burger King in March 2018. Philip was part of a group of mostly men that would meet up at small-town Hartville, OH’s fast-food restaurants in the mornings to drink coffee and gossip. Missy, who was attractive and 20 years younger than Philip, raised eyebrows in the community when she set her sights on the retired carpenter.
In 2017, 13 siblings were trapped in obscene living conditions at the hands of parents David and Louise Turpin in Perris, California. Two weeks into 2018 that all changed when 17-year-old Jordan Turpin escaped and sought help for the rest of the family.
Jeanne Trantel thought she had the perfect life, but looking back she wished she had questioned it more. She thinks there was also a part of her “that just didn’t want to know what was happening.” Her husband Stephen Trantel was a hard worker but he had a criminal secret.
On October 13, 1997, 10-year-old Joel Kirkpatrick was murdered and his mother Julie Rea was sentenced to 65 years in prison for his death. Julie had woken up the night of Joel’s murder to his screams and found an intruder in his room.
Chad Daybell was a former gravedigger who found a new life in writing apocalyptic novels based around LDS (Mormon) theology. He even started his own publishing company. As his writing grew more popular, Chad claims that the content of his books had come from prophetic visions. Once he met Lori, he considered her to be a goddess on a special mission on Earth. The couple threw themselves into their grandiose delusions on a dangerous path to murder and mayhem.