On the 26th of October 1965, police arrived at 3850 East New York Street and were quickly led to an upstairs bedroom.
Lying on the bed was the battered and emaciated body of Sylvia Likens.
Her caregiver, Gertrude Baniszewski, claimed the girl had initially run away with a group of boys, only returning after they had assaulted her. She even handed the officers a letter written by Sylvia explaining everything.
Sylvia Likens' Early Life
On 3rd January 1945, Sylvia Likens was born to travelling parents Lester Cecil Likens and Elizabeth Francis in Indianapolis, Indiana. She was the middle child to two older twin siblings Daniel and Diana, and two younger twin siblings Benny and Jenny.
Lester and Elizabeth would make ends meet by selling beer and candy at carnival stands throughout Indiana however, this type of lifestyle brought severe financial strain and caused a fractured marriage.
Their two sons would travel with them to help with the business, but Sylvia and Jenny were not allowed to do the same. This was possibly due to safety, and their education, and in particular Jenny, as she suffered from Polio as a child which caused her to have one weakened leg that required a brace.
Sylvia and Jenny would mostly stay at friends' houses or their Grandmothers.
Sylvia was described as a friendly, caring girl who always protected her younger sister Jenny, and loved music, particularly The Beatles.
Sylvia earned her own money by babysitting and ironing for friends and neighbors, while always giving some of her earnings to her Grandmother.
However, this would soon change.
On 3rd July 1965, Elizabeth Likens was arrested and incarcerated for shoplifting, making the strain for money and work even more tense.
Now, the full burden of caring for their children and working fell onto Lester. To ease this strain Lester arranged for Sylvia and Jenny to stay with a lady by the name of Gertrude Baniszewski who reassured him that she would care for the two girls as if they were her own.
Gertrude had two children Paula and Stephanie, who were good friends with Syliva and Jenny having met through Arseanal Technical Highschool.
The arrangement was decided that the girls would stay with the Baniszewski's and Lester would send Gertrude $20 a week for board and keep, on the promise that he would return to collect the girls in November.
Gertrude BaniszewskiL The Making of a Monster
Gertrude Baniszewski (originally Van Fossan) was born on 19th September 1928 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Not much is known of her childhood but at the age of 11, Gertrude witnessed her father pass away from a sudden heart attack at the age of 50.
In her later years, she dropped out of school at age 16 and married an 18-year-old up-and-coming police officer, John Baniszewski.
The couple had four children together, and although things seemed okay on the outside, John was said to have had serious anger and aggression issues and would regularly beat Gertrude.
Due to being a product of her time, it wouldn’t have been easy for Gertrude to ‘abandon’ her marriage, as it would have been seen that way. She would have received little help or understanding from the community, as domestic abuse was not classified as a crime at the time.
Eventually though, after 10 years of marriage, Gertrude divorced John.
Eventually, Gertrude married again, to Edward Guthrie, but this marriage only lasted 3 months before the pair divorced. Gertrude then remarried her first husband John Baniszewski and had two more children before divorcing for a second time in 1963.
Meer weeks after this third divorce, Gertrude entered into a relationship with Dennis Lee Wright, a 20-year-old welder who was also physically violent and abusive to her. The pair had one child, but Wright abandoned Gertrude shortly after the birth of their son.
By the time she was 36, Gertrude lived alone with seven children: Paula (17), Stephanie (15), John (12), Marie (11), Shirley (10), James (eight), and Dennis Jr (1), and was described as a “haggard, underweight, asthmatic”.
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Gertrude Baniszewski, 1986
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The Horrors Begin
Shortly after 4th July 1965, Sylvia and Jenny moved in with Gertrude after she accepted Lester's offer of twenty dollars a week to care for the girls.
At first, everything seemed fine—Syliva helped with housework, she was known to sing pop songs with Stephanie and even went to Sunday School with the family, but the dynamic began to change when Lester's cheques began to run late.
The checks would usually arrive on time, but occasionally the money would end up arriving a few days late, probably due to the type of work he was doing. This frustrated Gertrude and in turn, she began taking her frustration out on Sylvia.
Gertrude would do this by whipping the girls' bare backsides with a wooden panel, but this wasn’t the only time. In August of 1965, Sylvia and Jenny were beaten with the paddle for simply eating “too much” food at a church event.
There is speculation that Paula, Gertrude's oldest child, was incredibly jealous of Sylvia—but so was Gertrude. Sylvia was youthful, and beautiful and had her whole life and opportunities ahead of her. So she bore the brunt of Gertrude's abuse which, within the space of three months, ramped up to an inhumane level.
The beatings continued and Gertrude even started to starve Sylvia, forcing her to eat spoiled food, or food that had been discarded in the trash.
An escalation occurs one day when Sylvia confesses that she had a boyfriend when she resided in California, and Gertrude questions her on what she had “done” with the boy.
Sylvia, too innocent and naive to understand, said she did once lay under a duvet with him, and for this, Gertrude kicked her in the groin.
Gertrude exclaimed that if you do anything with a boy, you will end up pregnant—which was shocking considering Paula was three months pregnant at the time.
Paula herself also attacked Sylvia numerous times, including knocking her off a chair and pushing her downstairs on several occasions.
The abuse, however, was only not limited to the Baniszewski family.
One day, Sylvia was eating dinner with Gertrude, Paula, and a neighbor Randy—the three smothered a hotdog in several condiments before force-feeding it to Sylvia, which caused her to throw up. The threesome then forced Sylvia to eat her own vomit.
As an act of retaliation, Sylvia allegedly spread a rumor around the school claiming that Paula and Stephanie were both prostitutes. Stephanie confronted Sylvia after a boy approached her, claiming Sylvia was behind the rumor.
When Sylvia admitted to it, Stephanie responded by punching her. But Sylvia faced even greater consequences.
Stephanie's boyfriend, Coy Hubbard, 15, learned about the rumor and brutally attacked Sylvia, slapping, punching, and even slamming her head against a wall.
Gertrude also found out about the incident and beat Sylvia with a paddle, and Paula joined in. Paula attacked Sylvia so violently she broke one of her wrists. When it was plastered in a cast, she used this to further attack Sylvia.
Gertrude even forced Jenny, Sylvia's sister, to strike her under the threat of being beaten herself.
A Sadistic Cheerleader
By this stage, Gertrude was openly and actively encouraging the abuse and violence towards Sylvia, not just from her own children, but also the neighborhood children.
Coy Hubbard, Stephanie’s boyfriend, and other kids routinely went to the Baniszewski's house specifically to abuse Sylvia. She was beaten, lacerated, burned with cigarettes, and used as a rag doll during violent Judo sessions, all whilst Gertrude watched and cheered them on.
They even inflicted serious injuries onto Sylvia's genitals. In one act of barbaric abuse, Gertrude forced Sylvia to strip naked and to penetrate herself with a glass bottle as everyone watched, to prove to Jenny “what type of girl” she was.
Eventually, Gertrude stopped Sylvia from attending school, mostly because of the injuries that were apparent on Sylvia’s body, but also because Sylvia confessed to stealing an item of clothing.
For this, Gertrude whipped her with a three-foot leather police belt. She then lectured her on the “evils of premarital sex” before kicking her in the genitals and burning her fingertips with matches.
The level of abuse that was now happening on a daily occurrence, and with huge increases in violence, was enough to render Sylvia and Jenny terrified to confide in their school teachers or family members.
But disgustingly, Jenny was said to have endured ridicule from the people in her neighborhood as they knew Sylvia was being the victim of beatings.
Where Was The Help?
In September, Sylvia and Jenny ran into their estranged older sister Diana at a local park, and both explained the horrors they are enduring daily, particularly what Sylvia was enduring. But heartbreakingly, Diana presumed the girls were exaggerating.
Although Diane did not pay much heed at the time, it seems it may have played on her mind as she did eventually visit the Baniszewski family home on October 1st, 1969.
At this visit, Gertrude told her that Sylvia’s parents gave her specific instructions to not let Diana near the girls, and with that, Diana left.
The encounter in the park wasn’t the first—a few weeks prior, Sylvia and Jenny, along with Marie Baniszewksi, encountered Diana in the same park.
Sylvia mentioned she was hungry, prompting her sister to give her a sandwich and when they returned home Marie told Gertrude. In response to this Gertrude accused Slyvia of “gluttony” and with her daughter Paula, the pair choked and beat Sylvia.
The pair then forced Sylvia to a bath in scalding water, to “absolve her sin”. When the intense heat and shock caused Sylvia to pass out, Gertrude grabbed her hair and slammed her head against the bath to rouse her.
A few days later on October 5th, Lester and Elizabeth visited their daughters at 3850 East New York Street, but claimed to have seen no evidence or reason to believe abuse of any kind was happening.
As further psychological abuse, Gertrude was always in the room with the girls and their parents, making it almost impossible for them to speak out.
If this wasn’t horrendous enough, once their parents left Gertrude turned to Sylvia and said “What are you going to do now Sylvia, now they’ve gone?”
How Sylvia and Jenny were failed by those around them was astonishing.
On one occasion a neighbor, Michael Monroe, phoned the Arsenal High School and reported seeing a girl with open sores residing at Gertrude's home. Naturally, they sent a nurse to assess the situation.
Gertrude informed the nurse that Sylvia had actually run away and that the sores on her body were due to her “lack of hygiene”, and believe it or not, the school made no further investigations.
Other neighbors Raymond and Phyllis, described Gertrude as an “ideal caregiver” despite the fact they witnessed Paula physically attack Syliva in their presence.
Paula was even said to have bragged to the couple about the abuse she and her family bestowed on Syliva. Raymond and Phyllis also visited the house on a second occasion and described Sylvia as “meek” and “zombie-like”.
Despite witnessing abuse, hearing about it from Paula and seeing Sylvia in a terrible mental state, they did nothing.
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Richard D. Hobbs and Gertrude Baniszewski, appearing before Judge Harry Zaklan. November 1, 1965. Published in The Indianapolis News November 2, 1965. Photographer Joe Young.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
She Knew Her Fate Was Sealed
By this point, Gertrude was acclimating to the level of abuse she was using on Sylvia and needed to escalate it even further by dehumanizing her to a shocking level.
One instance consisted of Gertrude brandishing a knife and challenging Sylvia to a fight, to which Sylvia replied “I don’t know how to fight”. Gertrude then slashed Syvlia’s leg.
She even went as far as to charge the neighborhood kids five cents a turn, to come and view the injuries on Sylvia’s tortured body.
The frequency and severity of abuse, which on another occasion had Gertrude and her 12-year-old son smear feces and urine from her toddler's diaper into Sylvia’s mouth, had by this point rendered her incredibly unwell. She was malnourished, beaten, broken, wounded, and incontinent due to the gross injuries and abuse concentrated on her genitals.
On the 6th of October 1965, as punishment for wetting herself, Sylvia was stripped naked and thrown in the basement, where she was then tied up to a railing where her feet could just touch the ground.
In the basement, she endured scalding hot baths, was given no food or water, and had literal salt rubbed into open sores and wounds that scar her beaten, disheveled body.
On the night of 22nd October, Gertrude granted Sylvia permission to sleep upstairs on the promise of not wetting herself. But due to her lack of food and water, she asked Jenny for a glass of water and subsequently woke the next morning having wet the bed.
As punishment for this, Gertrude forces=d her to insert another glass pop bottle into her vagina as other family members watched.
As an extra act of punishment, she dragged Sylvia upstairs and into the kitchen before declaring she was going to brand her as a prostitute, just as Sylvia has branded her daughters. And with a hot needle, she carved the words “I’m a prostitute and proud of it” on Sylvia’s torso.
One of the neighborhood kids, Richard Hobbs (14) and Shirley (10) took Slyvia back into the basement and attempted to brand an “S” on her left breast with a heated anchor bolt. Sylvia was then forced to show this “brand” to neighborhood children as Gertrude explained she received the brand at a “sex party”.
At this point, Sylvia was aware of her fate and confided to her younger sister Jenny, “I know you don’t want me to die, but I'm going to die. I can tell it”.
Gertrude, realizing just how bad of a state Sylvia was in forced Sylvia to write a letter to her parents claiming that she ran off with a group of local boys, and once she agreed to have sex with them, they attacked and assaulted her.
On the 25th of October, with what little strength Sylvia had left, she attempted to escape after overhearing Gertrude instructing Jenny and John to blindfold Sylvia, dump her in the woodland, and leave her to die.
Despite the incredibly weak and broken state Sylvia was in, she attempted to run to the front door but was quickly apprehended by Gertrude who then tried to force-feed Sylvia dry crackers.
But because she was so incredibly dehydrated, she could not swallow them. This angered Gertrude and she grabbed a curtain pole and beat Sylvia with such force, that the rail is said to have bent at right angles
John also joined in and delivered a skull-crushing blow to Sylvia, rendering her unconscious.
When Sylvia regained consciousness, she found herself back in the basement. Summoning all her strength, she screamed for help and banged a shovel against the stone walls, desperate to attract attention.
Unfortunately, once again, she was let down by everyone. A neighbor reportedly heard the “racket” coming from the basement, but when it abruptly stopped at three in the morning, they chose not to report it to the police.
On the morning of 26th October, Sylvia was unable to move, to speak and this began to worry Gertrude.
In a panic, she tried to feed her milk and doughnuts, but Sylvia couldn’t even eat or drink anymore.
Worried that her appearance could be explained away as “poor hygiene”, Gertrude instructed one of the neighbors to spray her with a hosepipe. They even gave her a rotten pear, but Sylvia could only point to her teeth and mumble that they felt too loose to eat.
Sylvia did attempt one last escape, but she barely made it to the stairs of the basement before she collapsed, and while she lay on the floor, Gertrude stamped on her head.
That night at 5:30 p.m., Richard Hobbs found Stephanie crying while holding Sylvia’s lifeless body. Together, they decided to give her a warm bath and dress her in clean clothes.
In Sylvia’s final moments, she expressed to Stephanie her wish that her father was there with them and asked Stephanie to take her home.
When Stephanie realized that Sylvia had stopped breathing, she attempted to resuscitate her, while Gertrude stood in the room, screaming at her and claiming that Sylvia was “faking it.”
Sylvia Likens had finally succumbed to the barbaric and heinous abuse she had endured for three months under the care of Gertrude Baniszewski and her children.
She was only 16 years old.
A Fate Worse Than Death
When Stephanie failed to resuscitate Sylvia, Gertrude panicked and told Richard to phone the police from a payphone.
At 6:30 pm, the police arrived at the house and Gertrude quickly escorted them upstairs to Sylvia’s bludgeoned body, which lay on a soiled mattress.
She told the police that Sylvia had previously run away, but returned, claiming she was assaulted by a group of boys. Gertrude then handed the officers the letter she had forced Sylvia to write, claiming the same.
Jenny Likens, Sylvia’s younger sister recited the same story to the police, before stealing her chance to whisper to the officers, away from the evil eye of Gertrude, “You get me out of here and I’ll tell you everything”.
An autopsy performed by Dr. Charles Ellis revealed Sylvia had over 150 separate injuries to her body, all in varying degrees of severity and healing, they included: over 100 cigarette burns, lacerations, nerve and muscle damage, all her fingernails were snapped backward, and her vaginal canal was practically swollen shut.
The skin across her face and chest had receded, or pealed, due to boiling water. Dr. Charles Ellis, a veteran of over 250 autopsies cringed at the thought of the intense pain Sylvia must have endured before her death.
Sylvia’s official cause of death was deemed a homicide by “a combination of subdural hematoma and shock, complicated by severe malnutrition”.
The Trial and Sentencing
During the next several days, police took the Baniszewski family into custody, along with eight neighborhood children.
Michael Monroe and Randy Lepper, along with Anna Cisco and Judy Duke were charged on the grounds of “injury to a person” and Gertrude's younger children, Marie, Shirley, James, and John Jr were all placed in foster homes.
In December of 1965, Gertrude Baniszewski pleads not guilty due to insanity. She claimed to have not known about the injuries on Sylvia’s body as her depression caused her to be unaware of what was happening in her home.
In May 1966, after eight hours of deliberation, a grand jury found Gertrude guilty of first-degree murder, along with her daughters Paula (17), and Stephanie (15) and her boyfriend Coy Hubbard (15), and her son John Jr (12), and Richard Hobbs (15).
Gertrude was sentenced to life imprisonment but after an appeal in 1970, a new trial was set at a different venue. However, the retrial found her once again guilty of first-degree murder. Fifteen years later in 1985, she was granted parole.
Gertrude Baniszewski died of lung cancer in June 1990 at the age of 60.
Paula Baniszewski was sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty of second-degree murder, and in 1970 was granted a new trial on appeal where she pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter.
Paula had a retrial in 1971 and was sentenced to two to 21 years in prison. Whilst in prison, she managed to escape twice, and two years later was granted parole.
Coy Hubbard was convicted of manslaughter and was also sentenced to two to 21 years, but was released on parole in 1967. Hubbard died of a heart attack on June 23, 2007.
Richard Hobbs was also convicted of manslaughter and was sentenced to two to 21 years, and was also released on parole in 1967. He died of lung cancer at the age of 21.
John Jr. was convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to two to 21 years, but granted parole in 1967.
After his release, John Jr. lived under the alias “John Blake” became a lay minister, and counseled children of divorced parents. On May 19th, 2005, he died of diabetes at the age of 52.
Stephanie Baniszewski voluntarily testified for the state and was granted a separate trial. She was found not guilty and released.
Jenny Likens died in 2004 at the age of 54.
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7Voa_oL0o4
https://sylviascac.org/sylvias-story/
https://time.com/archive/6629479/trials-avenging-sylvia/
https://people.com/sylvia-likens-abuse-caretaker-orchestrated-8752827
Featured photo: Wikimedia Commons; Additional photos: Wikimedia Commons
