Sylvia Likens

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sylvia Marie Likens (January 3, 1949 - October 26, 1965) was tortured to death by Gertrude Baniszewski (née Van Fossan), her children, and other children from their neighborhood. Her parents, carnival workers, had left Sylvia and her sister Jenny in the care of the Baniszewski family three months before her death in exchange for twenty dollars a month. Her torture and murder were described by the prosecutor in Baniszewski's trial as "the most terrible crime ever committed in the state of Indiana." [1]

1 Background
2 Abuse and death of Sylvia Likens
3 Trial
4 In popular culture
5 External links

[edit] Background

Sylvia Likens was born the third child of carnival workers Betty and Lester Likens. Her birth came between two sets of fraternal twins, Diana and Daniel (two years older), and Jenny and Benny (two years younger). The Likens family moved many different times during Sylvia's childhood, and Sylvia was often boarded out or forced to live with relatives while her parents were working; Lester and Betty's marriage was also often unstable. [2]

In 1965, Sylvia and her sister Jenny, who was disabled because of polio, were living with their mother in Indianapolis when Betty was arrested and jailed for shoplifting. Lester, who had recently separated from Betty, arranged for his daughters to board with Gertrude Baniszewski, the mother of Paula, a girl with whom Sylvia and Jenny had become acquainted. Although the Baniszewski family was poor -- with seven children, three spoons, and no stove -- Lester Likens, as he reported in the trial, "didn't pry" into their condition of the house, and encouraged Baniszewski to "straighten his daughters out". [3] [4] He agreed to pay her twenty dollars a month.

[edit] Abuse and death of Sylvia Likens

Baniszewski, described by the Indianapolis Star as a "haggard, underweight asthmatic" suffering from depression and the stress of several failed marriages, began taking her anger out on the Likens girls, beating them with paddles after their parents' payments failed to come on time.

Sylvia in particular became a target of abuse. Baniszewski accused her of stealing from a grocery store and humiliated her when she admitted that she had once had a boyfriend; she kicked Sylvia in the crotch and accused her of being pregnant. Paula Baniszewski, who was in fact pregnant at the time, became enraged and knocked Sylvia onto the floor. Sylvia seems to have believed that she was pregnant, although medical examination proved that she was not and was likely a virgin. [5]

Sylvia retaliated by spreading rumors at their high school that Paula and her sister Stephanie were prostitutes, which prompted Stephanie's boyfriend, Coy Hubbard, to attack Sylvia physically. This seemed to have been welcomed by Mrs. Baniszewski, who encouraged neighborhood children to torment Sylvia, including, among other things, by putting cigarettes out on her skin and forcing her to remove her clothes and inserting a Coke bottle into her vagina.

After she admitted stealing a gym suit, without which she was unable to attend gym class, Baniszewski pulled Sylvia out of school and did not allow her to leave the house. When she wet her bed from nerves, she was locked in the cellar and forbidden from using the toilet; later, she was forced to consume her own excrement and urine. Baniszewski and a neighbor boy, Richard Hobbs, carved the words "I'm a prostitute and proud of it!" into Sylvia's stomach with a heated needle and attempted to burn an S into her chest (apparently for either "Sylvia" or "slave"). [6]

Sylvia attempted to escape a few days before her death. As punishment, she was tied in the basement and given only crackers to eat. On October 26, 1965, after multiple beatings, she died of brain hemorrhage, shock, and malnutrition.

[edit] Trial

Baniszewski commanded Richard Hobbs to call the police from a nearby payphone. When they arrived, she handed them a letter she had forced Sylvia to write a few days previously, addressed to her parents. This letter stated that she had agreed to have sex with a group of boys in exchange for money; they dragged her away in their car, beat her up, burned her multiple times, and carved the inscription into her skin. Before the police left, however, Jenny Likens approached them, saying: "Get me out of here and I'll tell you everything." [7]

During the highly-publicized trial, Baniszewski denied responsibility for Sylvia's death, pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. She claimed that she was too distracted by her ill health and depression to control her children; the attorneys for the children on trial (Paula and John Baniszewski; Richard Hobbs; and Coy Hubbard) claimed that they had been pressured by Baniszewski. When Marie Baniszewski, Gertrude's eleven-year-old daughter, was called to the stand as a witness for the defense, she broke down and admitted that she had been forced to heat the needle with which her mother carved Sylvia Likens' skin; and that she had seen her mother beating and forcing Sylvia into the basement. In his closing statement, Baniszewski's lawyer said: "I condemn her for being a murderess... but I say she's not responsible because she's not all here!" and tapped his head. [8]

On May 19, 1966, Gertrude Baniszewski was convicted of first-degree murder, but spared the death penalty and sentenced to life in prison. Her daughter Paula, who had given birth to a daughter named Gertrude during the trial, was convicted of second-degree murder and also given a life term. Richard Hobbs, Coy Hubbard, and John Baniszewski were convicted of second-degree manslaughter and sentenced to two-to-21-year terms. [9]

The boys would spend two years in prison. In 1971, Paula and Gertrude Baniszewski were granted another trial. Paula pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was released two years later. [10] Gertrude, however, was again convicted of first-degree murder. She came up for parole in 1985, and despite a public outcry and petitions against her release, the parole board took her good behavior into account, and she was set free.

Gertrude Baniszewski, now known as Nadine van Fossan, died of lung cancer in 1990. When Jenny Likens, who was then married and living in Beech Grove, Indiana, saw her obituary in the newspaper, she clipped it out and mailed it to her mother with the note: "Some good news. Damn old Gertrude died. Ha ha ha! I am happy about that." [11] Jenny Likens Wade died on June 23, 2004 at the age of 54.

After the Jonesboro school massacre, John Baniszewski, now known as John Blake, gave a statement claiming that young criminals were not beyond help and describing how he had managed to turn his life around.

[edit] In popular culture

Feminist Kate Millett wrote a semi-fictional book relating to the incident, The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice. Millett stated in an interview that the murder of Sylvia Likens "is the story of the suppression of women. Gertrude seems to have wanted to administer some terrible truthful justice to this girl: that this was what it was to be a woman." [12]
Author Natty Bumppo (aka John Dean) wrote an account of the murder, The Indiana Torture Slaying.
Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door (Novel) is a fictional story based on the murder set in the 1950s.
Patte Wheat's By Sanction of the Victim is a fictional story based on the incident, set in the 1970s.
An unpublished play called Hey, Rube was written by Janet McReynolds, though was never produced.
The true-crime encyclopedia Bloodletters and Badmen by Jay Robert Nash contains an entry on Baniszewski and the case, though some details are inaccurate.
The film An American Crime starring Catherine Keener as Baniszewski and Ellen Page as Likens premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007.