On January 14, 2018, seventeen-year-old Jordan Turpin slipped out of a window in Perris, California. She carried a deactivated smartphone capable only of dialing emergency dispatch. Her hands shook as she placed the call. She informed the operator that she and her 12 siblings lived in squalor, suffered regular beatings, and faced literal imprisonment at the hands of their parents.
When deputies arrived at the residence on Muir Woods Road, they discovered an environment that defied belief. Three children were chained to bed frames in rooms smelling of human waste. The 13 captive children, aged 2 to 29, were so profoundly malnourished that deputies initially mistook adults for young adolescents. Jordan herself was seventeen but possessed the physical stature of a ten-year-old child.
Lifetime took these baseline realities and condensed them for television. House of Chains focuses on parents Laura and Tye Hayes, who command absolute authority over their offspring. The movie translates the physical mechanisms of the Perris home into a narrative study of domestic isolation, capturing the padlocks, the rationed meals, and the complete disconnection from outside human contact.
