Detectives say that through their extensive interviews, they learned that the only person Alissa seemed to have issues with was her stepfather. One of those issues, according to investigators, may have involved allegations of sexual abuse.
In an interview with police, one friend said that Alissa had told him her stepfather had tried sexually abusing her when she was younger. The friend claimed that Alissa told him it happened after school one day, when her father had picked her up early.
"[He] pulled over into an unoccupied area -- somewhere in the desert area, he started fooling around with her, it got aggressive," a friend told police.
Turney has denied the allegation.
Another friend recalled in her interview with police that Alissa told her she once awoke to her father gagging her with a sock.
Turney has denied the allegation.
Detectives later discovered strange parent-child contracts that Turney wrote and had Alissa sign.
When asked about the contracts, Turney told ABC News, "All of my children I did that way. It was an experiment of mine that I learned in some class I took, because I didn't have any raising when I was a child. I learned in a psychology class that you make a contract with your children. That sounded like a good idea to me."
Dr. Steven Pitt, a forensic psychiatrist in Phoenix who consulted on the case for the Phoenix Police Department and viewed one of the documents, said the contracts displayed Turney's need for total parental control.
"Probably the biggest thing that stood out was that Michael Turney had this absolute need for control and dominance of his stepdaughter," he told ABC News. "[The document] was essentially a behavioral contract on steroids that was making myriad tasks on the part of Michael Turney of an adolescent girl that were, in my opinion, wholly -- many of which were wholly inappropriate."
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