Sylvia - IX: The Saving Remnant

Life was not kind to Jenny Fay Likens.

Before she reached adulthood Jenny had been crippled by polio, had weathered numerous moves with her family, had endured the domestic turmoil of her parents’ periodic break-ups and reunions, and had watched helplessly as her sister was slowly tortured to death over a span of weeks.  The remainder of her short life would be lived in the shadow of Sylvia’s memory, sometimes publicly and always in the confines of her mind.

Jenny is an elusive figure.  Although she survived her sister by nearly forty years, we actually know less about Jenny than we do Sylvia.  There’s little to go on concerning her personality or character.  We have her trial testimony, a scattering of statements to news reporters, and not much else.  Half the time the reporters couldn’t even get her name right.  Most often the error was spelling her name with an "ie" instead of a "y."  Her obituary gives her name as “Jennifer.”  And it wasn’t just reporters—during the 1966 trial defense attorney George Rice inexplicably insisted on referring to her as “Virginia.”

We are offered two parallel views of Jenny Likens.  We have Mr. Dean’s portrayal, and we have Ms. Millett’s.  The Jenny depicted in John Dean’s House of Evil is a timorous, somewhat uncouth girl who was kicked around by life until Leroy New and his family rescued her by taking her in after the first trial.  As with his treatment of Sylvia, Dean’s tone toward Jenny is usually benevolent with the occasional offhanded cruelty thrown in.  For example, in one passage he writes of Jenny’s return to school after the trial, “dividing fractions and such, and getting half the problems right, too,” although he concedes she was “not dull.”  Notwithstanding these sporadic digs Dean gives Jenny a reasonably fair characterization.

Kate Millett by contrast is particularly unflattering in her depiction of Jenny.  She writes of Jenny’s “terrible, inarticulate savagery of manners and speech.”  She takes Jenny to task for not speaking up until after Sylvia was dead.  She questions the depth of Jenny’s fear of Gertrude and just how vulnerable Jenny’s handicap actually made her feel pointing out that Jenny had no problem running errands to the store or raking leaves for spending money. 

But it is her “unconsciousness” which Millett most excoriates; that is, Jenny’s supposed obliviousness and emotional detachment from Sylvia’s pain.  Millett insinuates that as Sylvia’s degradation went on Jenny began harboring feelings of contempt and disgust toward her sister and thus became an implicit accomplice of the Baniszewskis in the process.  By Kate Millett’s accounting Jenny Likens is a Betrayer of Women who in an ideal world would be stigmatized and shunned for her lapses.

But Millett goes beyond criticizing Jenny’s inaction; she sees fit to criticize Jenny’s life following the trial as well.  Noting (not quite correctly) that Jenny was chronically unemployed after returning to Indiana from a Job Corps training course in Maine she captiously describes Jenny’s subsequent marriage as a cop out, “the miraculous way out of all female predicament.” 

Here is where Millett tips her hand and betrays her prejudices.  Jenny married because that’s what young women in her socioeconomic stratum did in those days after leaving school.  It is much like when Millett takes swipes at Jenny’s poor grammar and uncultured demeanor, it is a cheap shot.  The Likens family did not possess what today we would call cultural capital, or any other kind of capital for that matter.  It’s easy to step back and slowly shake your head with opprobrium when you have had the advantages of Oxford and Columbia. 

And this is where I find a maddening dichotomy in Millett’s approach to the Likens family.  Sylvia is held apart from her parents and siblings.  Yes, Millett’s construction of Sylvia’s internal monologues is like that of the other semi-fictionalized characters in The Basement, replete with dropped g’s and double negatives and ain’ts, but it’s clear that for the author Sylvia is a rare specimen to behold.  However at one point not even Sylvia herself is spared Millett’s gimlet eye: She catches herself looking at the familiar portrait of Sylvia and for a fleeting moment sees not the innocent teenager but “a face from the poor” that is “sensual, ignorant, a touch vulgar.” 

While Millett states her regret for this display of classism, on the whole she keeps Sylvia on a solid pedestal while treating Sylvia’s kin with poorly concealed disdain.  Millett openly identifies with Sylvia—declares outright that she is Sylvia—but lacks the requisite subjective understanding of the environment that produced her.  Hence the cognitive dissonance she experiences when discussing the rest of the Likens: As with Jenny, Millett faults Dianna, Lester, and Betty as much on their style as their substance.  No, that’s not quite right—Millett conflates their style with their substance.  This approach is seriously flawed because you cannot have Sylvia without her family and social circumstances.  Context is important.

Actually, context is all we really have.  Once more we are brought around to the question of just how much we can ever understand of what I call the Jenny Problem.   Kate Millett refers to Jenny as “an enigma.”  The Sylvia message boards reflect divided opinions concerning Jenny’s inaction.  Many are critical and argue Jenny could have saved her sister by speaking up earlier.  I can understand the frustration.  There is this feeling among those of us who have studied the Likens case that if we could just somehow get into Jenny’s head and figure out what made her tick we can at last arrive at a definitive answer to why Sylvia had to die.

                                                        

Jenny’s witness testimony is interesting reading.  The responsibility of testifying against her sister’s persecutors was a heavy burden to place upon the frail shoulders of a traumatized sixteen year old girl.  It is difficult at times to capture the emotional tenor of her words, though as always Dean’s account lends depth to understanding.  One barrier is that the court reporter cleaned up the language somewhat, breaking contractions into their component words for example, so that the words of the child witnesses in particular seem stilted and false.  Nevertheless, Jenny’s own voice comes through as Marjorie Wessner coaxes her through Sylvia’s and her stay with the Baniszewskis.  The line of questioning, as with the other child witnesses, tended to meander without respect to the actual chronology of events.  And as with some of the other witnesses Jenny’s use of double negatives when one would have sufficed sometimes adds ambiguity to her answers.  Jenny may not have had a way with words, but her roughspun responses are by turns matter of fact and poignant. 

Sometimes Jenny’s answers to counsel reflect a sort of disbelief at what for her were silly questions.  When Miss Wessner asked what Sylvia liked to do, Jenny’s words hint she was almost annoyed by the question: “She liked to dance and skate…I don’t know, just have fun, I guess.”

In a few places Jenny’s replies to questions about some of the worst abuses seem strangely detached as transcribed suggesting a harder edge to her personality than usually described.  When pressed for details about the Pepsi bottle incidents she blandly answered, “It is hard to describe, really,” before Judge Rabb mercifully broke in telling Miss Wessner to move on to the next question.  In another exchange Jenny describes Paula beating up Sylvia.  What happened next, Jenny?  “We just ate supper,” was the nonchalant reply.

Other passages belie the image of timid, mouse-like Jenny.  Forrest Bowman portrays Jenny’s demeanor toward the defense attorneys as occasionally peevish.  (Can’t say that I blame her.)  And while it was widely reported at the time that Jenny had snapped, “I sure do!” at defense attorney William Erbecker when he asked if she hated Gertrude the transcript fleshes out the exchange.   The question had been objected to by Leroy New and sustained by Judge Rabb, but Jenny answered anyway.  A similar exchange occurs a few questions later, when she was asked if she wanted Gertrude punished; even after New’s objection was sustained Jenny interjected, “I think she needs something.”  Reading this I found myself silently cheering her on.  Jenny was brave, Jenny was defiant.  Jenny had the last word—twice.   

As often as not Jenny held her own with the defense lawyers.  There’s her exchange with Ricky Hobbs’ attorney James Nedeff when he opened his cross-examination with a patronizing, “Jenny, would you rather I call you Jenny or Miss Likens?”  At this moment I like to imagine Jenny fixing him in a deadpan stare for just the briefest instant before replying with a laconic, “You can call me Jenny if you want,” throwing her answer at him like a rock. 

But it is her emotionally wrought answers, her on-stand breakdowns reliving Sylvia’s and her ordeal which punctuate the record of Jenny’s testimony.  Jenny sobbing while telling the jury how Sylvia said through torn lips that she knew she was going to die.  Jenny recounting the callousness of Gertrude, et al.: “They said she [Sylvia] didn’t have no feelings but I know better.”  Jenny pleading in exasperation and grief when asked yet again by a defense attorney as to why she did not get help for her sister: “I told you why I didn’t tell!”

On that note, there is one bit of Jenny’s testimony which has been misunderstood courtesy of John Dean and oft-repeated since.  During her browbeating by the defense as to why she didn’t report the abuse Jenny was quoted by Dean as wailing, “That don’t mean I wanted to die!”  Dean included this quote in the Star article he filed on that day’s testimony, and it is in his book as well.  The transcript, on the other hand, records the response as, “That did not mean I did want her [Sylvia] to die, though.”  This is corroborated by other news reports.  Just thought I’d set that straight.  The first account implies cowardice; the second is a denial of indifference toward Sylvia’s fate.

Kate Millett is predictably critical of Jenny’s performance on the stand, while John Dean emphasizes the dramatic highlights.  I think she did well given what she had experienced and that she was in an intimidating, unfamiliar setting.  What Millett derides as digressions and non sequiturs in Jenny’s testimony I read as “kidsplaining.”  On the whole it appears the prosecution’s own questions digressed and jumped around a lot temporally which confuses our understanding of the actual sequence of events.  The trouble with Jenny as a witness, which the defense worked assiduously to exploit, is that Jenny did not directly witness all of Sylvia’s abuse.  Judge Rabb showed remarkable forbearance when it came to hearsay testimony. 

The transcripts from Gertrude’s 1971 retrial have been lost.  We know from news articles that Jenny (or according to the convention of the time, Mrs. Robert Ford, 21) was the last prosecution witness.  It was reported Jenny was “foggy” on some details after five years.  Quotations and news photos suggest she was as emotional the second time around as the first.  Again, the question as to why Jenny didn’t tell anyone Sylvia was being abused.  And again, a characteristically heartbreaking answer: “I’m sorry.  I was scared.  I think I was under a spell.” 

Over the ensuing years Jenny would reappear momentarily in the public eye as interest in Sylvia caught its attention for a while, then she would recede into the shadows as it waned.  What happened with her in between is not well known but it’s not hard to guess at either.  Details can be gleaned here and there from news accounts of the second trial and Gertrude’s 1985 parole hearings. 

But it’s the photographs which tell the story most effectively.  Of the dozen or so available photos of Jenny, four of them stand out.  They all appear to have been taken in the months following the 1966 trial, and they are the only photos I’ve seen which suggest Jenny may have had enjoyed something approaching a normal existence. 

The most singular of these is a candid shot by an Indianapolis Star newsman.  Jenny is pretty, her blonde hair falling softly about her shoulders, her chin resting lightly on her fingers.  She is relaxed and smiling naturally, gazing at the camera with an almost flirtatious sidelong glance.  (Perhaps she fancied the photographer.)  There is a color studio portrait, possibly arranged by the News for Lester and Betty, and a school yearbook picture in which Jenny is again relaxed and smiling.  Finally, there is Jenny waving cheerfully as Leroy New helps her board a plane. 

That’s it.  Even in those few other pictures where Jenny smiles, such as the Easter photo from before Sylvia’s and her ordeal, there is a strained quality to it, a grimace that is more a ritual baring of teeth for the camera than it is an expression of happiness or pleasure.  The rest of the images are connected to the trials, Gertrude’s parole, or memorial gatherings for Sylvia, each a reopening of wounds.  Before and during the 1966 trial, Jenny is either shown weeping or wearing an expression I can only describe as stricken.  A couple of shots, taken at a distance, depict Jenny sitting forlornly and looking a bit threadbare with her hands folded in her lap, clutching a handkerchief or tissue, the clumsy leg brace visible below her skirt hem.  There is Jenny again five years later on the witness stand, her head bowed, hand to face brushing away the tears.  Then there is Jenny at Gertrude’s parole hearing.  Even with Dianna there for moral support, Jenny’s face is a mask of anxiety. 

Once Jenny returned to Indianapolis from the Job Corps in 1967 she worked with computers for a time at the American Fletcher National Bank.  (Jenny may have worked in banking for several years; an acquaintance recalls her cashing a check for him at a bank in the Indianapolis suburb of Beech Grove in the early 1970s.)  She married sometime toward the end of the 1960s, having lived with Betty for a while following Betty’s divorce from Lester.  How long the marriage lasted isn’t known but it seems to have ended by the late 1970s.  The union produced a son and daughter.  There could have been any number of reasons for its failure.  Maybe it was just the garden variety “irreconcilable differences.” 

But I wonder.  Was Jenny overwhelmed by the duties of marriage and motherhood as her mental condition deteriorated?  Perhaps her husband was not equal to caring for Jenny.  Whatever happened, it is known that the children were raised by their father and his family in an era when the mother received custody practically by default.  Jenny was reportedly estranged from them at the time of her death.  (Obituaries mention a “grandchild” without reference to gender leaving the reader to wonder whether Jenny herself even knew though she surely must have.)

News reports from 1985 describe Jenny as a housewife.  Extrapolating from that it seems her second marriage was successful and long-lived considering she was still married when she died nearly twenty years later.  Jenny and her second husband lived in various places for some years before returning to Indiana to settle in Beech Grove. 

News coverage from the time offered a little insight into Jenny’s condition when Gertrude was released from prison.  While we don’t know how or if she reacted when the other defendants were released, Jenny had an almost palpable fear of Gertrude.  A brief soundbite from a news broadcast shows Jenny reading a statement to the Indiana Parole Board.  She is hunched over, her words spilling out in a husky, rushed monotone.  She speaks with an accent which owes as much to Appalachia as to Indiana.  If Gertrude went free, said Jenny, “You might as well put me in prison because I would be in prison in my own home.  I would be afraid to go anywhere alone again.”

At face value this statement greatly exaggerates the threat posed to Jenny by Gertrude, if there was a threat at all.  (If I was to be afraid of any of the defendants once they got out, it would have been Coy.  Or Paula.)  But clearly Jenny was frightened of something, and we cannot discount that.  She withheld her married name from the media to make it difficult to be found.  There are reports of Jenny going into hiding or spending each night in a different place for a time.  We are told she slept with the light on.  It is said the very mention of Gertrude’s name made her distraught.

Jenny and her supporters were frank about her poor psychological state.  She had suffered two (or three, depending on the source) breakdowns and was being treated for paranoia.  It’s no stretch to surmise she had PTSD and experienced depression as well.  A fund was set up to offset Jenny’s mounting medical bills though what became of it isn’t known; Dianna reportedly learned about it only years later and said Jenny never saw a dime.  We do not know if Jenny’s health improved.  Hints about her behavior in the ensuing years indicate she remained easily frightened to the point where even a sharp knock at the door could send her into a panic.   Jenny died of a heart attack at 54.  If she was treated with antipsychotics, long term use can have cardiovascular side effects.  Trading one evil for another, I suppose.  Then again, it is hardly unusual for women in their fifties to pass away in this manner.

Looking over the fragmented accounts of Jenny’s life, one gets the impression of a profoundly isolated individual.  This may not have been solely from the trauma of witnessing her sister’s death.  A poster on a Sylvia message board mentions meeting a woman who attended elementary school with Jenny for a brief period.  The acquaintance related how Jenny was bullied because of her handicap and her poverty.  Running into Jenny a year or two before her passing, Jenny remembered her classmate after all those years as one of the few kids who were nice to her.  If true, this story further underscores the fundamental pathos of Jenny’s existence.

I’m sure Jenny had her share of good days and happy memories.  But thoughts of Sylvia could never have been far away.  How could they not?  Toward the end of her life Jenny appears to have become reclusive.  She shunned people who sought to dredge up that which she would have preferred to forget.  When contacted by people wanting to discuss her sister’s murder Jenny would cut them off and refer them to Dianna.  An exception was Star reporter Linda Graham Caleca, who periodically wrote stories related to the Likens case from the mid-1980s until the early 2000s.  Many of the pieces, which ran the gamut from a story about the so-called “Suitcase of Sorrow” found among Betty’s possessions to one about an ultimately abortive attempt by a nonprofit to convert 3850 East New York Street into a battered women’s shelter, included comments from Jenny.  For whatever reason, Ms. Caleca had earned the confidence of a deeply mistrustful woman.

Jenny’s sporadic statements to reporters reveal a rich vein of bitterness over Gertrude having gotten off so lightly.  She insisted to the end of her life that Gertrude should have “gotten the electric chair or 99 years.”  After Gertrude died Jenny sent a clipping of the obituary to Betty with a note: “Some good news.  Damn old Gertrude died.  Ha-ha-ha.  I am happy about that.”  I imagine some of her anger and resentment was turned inward in the form of guilt.  I cannot conceive of what her interior life must have been like in her later years.  Some things are simply best left alone.

Jenny Likens Wade died on June 23, 2004, after what must have been an unusually painful life. 

Gertrude Baniszewski killed Jenny just as surely as she killed Sylvia.  It just took Jenny longer to die.

©2015 The Unassuming Scholar

Sylvia - VIII: Done Because We Are Too Many

The economics of poverty in a first world country like the United States can be tricky.  In 1965, the year Sylvia Likens died, poverty was at the top of the domestic policy agenda.  President Lyndon Johnson had declared a War on Poverty, but its benefits never made their way to the Baniszewski household.

And yet references to artifacts of the postwar consumer culture abound in the testimony given by the witnesses at the 1966 trial.  Coke, Pepsi, White Castle hamburgers, Trend detergent, Pampers, Shell filling stations.  You can see its detritus as well in the crime scene photos.  Dove soap, Double Cola, Miracle Whip, Nabisco saltines. 

In Kate Millett’s The Basement the thoughts of the semi-fictionalized characters often turn to the just out of reach bounty of American consumerism.  In one passage Sylvia muses idly on the qualities of various brands of soda and how happy drinking a cold bottle of Coke made her feel on a warm summer’s day at the fair.  In another Gertrude fusses to herself how she, a grown woman, didn’t even have the price of a Coca-Cola on her person.  When Gertie spots the phantom smear of mustard at the corner of Sylvia’s mouth, she thinks resentfully how nice it would be to have dinner out with someone else doing the cooking for her. 

Food was certainly a preoccupation in the Baniszewski house.  Gertrude claimed that while food would be scarce a day or two before the next support check arrived there was usually enough to eat.  Jenny’s testimony indicated otherwise.  Aside from occasionally robust suppers of hot dogs or lunches with cold cut sandwiches the family diet consisted mainly of toast and canned soup.  There were nine children in the home, most of them still growing and one who was pregnant.  As the baby little Denny had first claim to any milk in the house.  Stephanie (and Sylvia for a few weeks until she was forced to drop out) earned a hot lunch each school day working in the cafeteria which eased the hunger pangs a bit.  The rest subsisted on a few hundred calories a day.  Had the situation continued, the wellbeing of each of the kids would have been negatively affected perhaps with lifelong health implications.

The Baniszewski home reflected the paradoxes of poverty in a consumer culture.  The family didn’t have a stove to cook on, and their main eating utensil at the end was a single shared spoon.  The kids shared beds.  They lived on a sparse diet.  But they had a TV and a hi-fi.  They had a puppy which was later joined by a police dog.  Baby Denny was clad in expensive disposable diapers.  And Gertrude was a heavy smoker. 

Concerning that last item, it’s an odd thing how decades after mainstream culture rejected smoking that it remains so prevalent among the poor.  It reminds me of my time with social services when clients would come in to sign up for assistance, telling their caseworker how they couldn’t afford food or diapers for the baby.  As soon as they were out the front door they’d light up.  At which point we would all look at each other knowingly and then one of us would say, “But they always have money for cigarettes.”

I suppose it’s the grinding monotony of life for the very poor that makes them seek anything that makes them feel good for a moment or two.  George Orwell wrote as much eight decades ago in The Road to Wigan Pier.  I know it from my own experience.  I remember how good a candy bar or a Coke would make me feel when I was a kid, especially when things were particularly lousy, even though more wholesome foods would have been better for me.  But the economics of poverty aren’t rational for the people experiencing it.  I would unfailingly choose my children’s welfare over an unnecessary luxury for myself but I now have the good fortune of being a bystander to poverty rather than being immersed in it as I was when young.

Sylvia herself had few possessions beyond the clothes in her closet.  According to Jenny, Sylvia owned a pocketbook, a bible, and a jewelry box containing a couple of pins.  Sylvia’s housemates coveted even these meager belongings.  Her wardrobe was diminished significantly over the weeks as Gertrude or the kids would literally rip the clothes from her back.  When Sylvia would be called away while reading her bible she would hide it fearing it would be stolen.  However, she was generous just the same.  During her first days in the Baniszewski home Sylvia would share items of clothing with Stephanie and even with Gertrude.  Being poor herself Sylvia would have understood the Baniszewskis’ lifestyle and would have wanted to lend a hand where and when she could.

Gertrude did have things in common with the Likens in terms of economic circumstances.  All engaged in short-term, transient labor.  Like Lester and Betty, Gertrude sometimes worked as a concessionaire at special events, in Gertrude’s case vending refreshments at the Speedway during the Indianapolis 500.  Like Sylvia, Gertrude babysat and did piecework ironing laundry to earn money.  Both the Likens and Baniszewskis moved around frequently, the adequacy of their accommodations fluctuating with the state of their finances.  Though living close to the margins economically prudent management of scarce resources in such a situation can mitigate its effects.  Regrettably for those who depended on her, prudent management was a bit beyond Gertie’s capabilities.

Gertrude Baniszewski was poorly educated, yes, but more significantly she was emotionally immature.  She seemed more comfortable in the company of younger people and was not very competent in the adult world.  She wasn’t equipped to make responsible decisions for herself let alone for her family.  Perhaps more importantly she lacked a strong social support network to help her manage and to check her darker impulses, particularly in the face of want.  (Or chill penury, if you will.)

Gertrude and Paula may have been among the very few people ever who actually benefitted from going to prison.  Paula told her attorney George Rice the bed in her cell was the most comfortable she had ever slept on.  Gertrude both at her 1971 retrial and at her 1985 parole hearing looked far healthier and better fed than she did when arrested in 1965.   There may have been more than material benefits for the Baniszewskis among the consequences of having murdered Sylvia.  Kate Millett observed that the media attention given the 1966 trial provided Gertie and her brood with a form of validation, that the world, having ignored them for so long, finally noticed they existed. 

Strange, isn’t it, that it took a particularly heinous act for the world to notice the Baniszewskis?  Sylvia and Jenny Likens had been left among people whose conduct resembled that of a pack of feral dogs.  Poverty, not only financial poverty but spiritual, undoubtedly contributed to the behavior of those inhabiting the Baniszewski house.  Paula’s attorney George Rice certainly painted it that way.  Perhaps he even had a valid point. 

However, we should also mark well the words of Leroy New in his closing statement at the trial.  Untold, nameless numbers of poor people throughout history have never descended to the depravity of Gertrude Baniszewski and her children.  Poverty is structural but there are means of coping with it.  More importantly, bad behavior is never mandatory.  There is always a choice.  If only the people within the four walls of 3850 East New York Street had possessed the moral sense to understand this.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar 

Sylvia - VII: Virtue and Vice

“Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.”

Victor Hugo

There are two general theories as to why Gertrude Baniszewski and the denizens of 3850 East New York Street killed Sylvia Likens.  While they aren’t mutually exclusive commentators on the Likens case often favor one or the other.

The first theory, argued by Paula Baniszewski’s lawyer George Rice and strongly implied in John Dean’s writings was that the poverty stricken family was resentful of its condition and unleashed their suppressed rage on Sylvia.  The second is that Sylvia’s torture was sexually motivated.

Kate Millett developed the sex-as-motive theme in The Basement, characterizing Sylvia’s brutalization as a “dry fuck” and “sexuality without the sex.”  In a similar vein crime writer Denise Noe has described it as a “sexless sex crime.”  At trial defense psychologist Jerome Relkin said he thought that there was “probably a sexual involvement in the murder and these children were involved in sexual activity,” though in his opinion Gertrude herself was sexually repressed.

Millet’s theory is the most commonly cited and thus deserves consideration.  The shifting narratives in The Basement are permeated with Gertrude’s vindictiveness, the emotional contagion it created among the children in the house, and Sylvia’s bewilderment and despair over their hatred and aggression towards her.  As the horror she instigated escalates Millett’s semi-fictionalized Gertrude becomes sexually aroused by her own violence.  At the same time Sylvia herself begins to ask herself if she isn’t to blame for her own pain; in one passage she wonders if God is punishing her for having had impure thoughts.  In another passage, where Sylvia is once more left alone with her own thoughts, Sylvia considers her social role as a woman to be.  She decides she would refuse to become a woman if that meant turning out like Gertrude.

Gertrude was clearly preoccupied with Sylvia as a sex object from the moment Sylvia entered her life.  In Gertrude’s telling, she had first heard of Sylvia several days before she actually met her.  Darlene McGuire, who had befriended the Likens sisters when they lived on East New York Street, came to Gertrude’s door with a woman in tow.  The woman said she was looking for a Sylvia Likens, whom she accused with going around with her husband.   Paula brought Sylvia and Jenny home a couple of days later.  From Gertrude’s perspective Sylvia was tainted from the very start.

At times Gertrude’s hatred of Sylvia was reminiscent of a desire to purge a nebulously evil presence among her family.  The killing of pubescent girls because they were thought to harbor demons was not uncommon during medieval and early modern history.  Persistent folk beliefs of this sort may have played a role in the murder of a ten year old Québécois girl named Aurore Gagnon by her stepmother in 1920.  In a similar vein a mentally ill young woman named Anneliese Michel died in Germany in 1976 following severe physical abuse suffered as part of an exorcism.

One factor in her hostility may have arisen from Gertrude’s preoccupation with youth.  She was 37 years old and looked older, though she told Sylvia and Jenny she was 32.  She liked the company of younger men, boys really.  Her relationship with Dennis Wright, who was fourteen years Gertrude’s junior, as well as her fondness for the social company of the neighborhood boys are evidence of this.  At trial, James Nedeff created an impression his client Ricky Hobbs had had a relationship with Gertrude though his questioning yielded no specifics.  On cross, prosecutor Leroy New charged into the breach and asked Ricky outright if he had had sex with Gertrude.  Ricky unequivocally denied it. 

Was there an untoward relationship between Gertrude and Ricky?  John Dean has written that while it was probably platonic Gertrude had a different relationship with Ricky than she had with, say, Coy Hubbard.  Maybe so. Gertie’s hoochie-coochie dancing in the living room appears to have been for Ricky’s benefit as much as it was for the other kids.  But it’s also plausible that Ricky, whose mother was dying of cancer, needed a sympathetic adult and Gertrude was there for him. 

Paula had her own reasons for hating Sylvia, sexual and otherwise.  They were closest in age among the girls in the house so there were bound to be unspoken comparisons by those who knew the Baniszewskis.  Sylvia was working to complete high school and get her start in life; Paula had to attend night classes while working during the day to help support the family.  Sylvia was cute and lithe; Paula was dumpy and unattractive.  Sylvia was kind; Paula had a mean streak.  Sylvia was a good girl; Paula, despite her mother’s denials, was pregnant by a married man after running away with him to Kentucky. 

Sylvia was what Paula could never be.  To Gertrude she represented the lost glory of youth.  It wasn’t Sylvia’s overt sexuality which triggered Gertrude and Paula’s animosity it was merely its latent potential.  By contrast Jenny likely escaped that sort of attention because she was physically disabled, timid, and perhaps a bit immature for her age; because of this Gertrude and Paula were less apt to look upon Jenny as a sexual being.  She was nonthreatening and thus left alone for the most part.  And so Sylvia became the focal point of the escalating perversity of the Baniszewskis’ punishment.

Millett posits that Gertie and Paula might not have been the only been the only ones in the Baniszewski household who sensed potential competition from their attractive young boarder.  Stephanie’s relationship with Sylvia can be best described as ambiguous.  She was perhaps the closest thing Sylvia had to a friend in the Baniszewski house, though that isn’t saying much.   In one scene in The Basement Millett has Stephanie watching her boyfriend Coy “flip” and beat Sylvia; this confirmed his loyalty to Stephanie because each flip and blow was an implicit rejection of Sylvia and the temptation she represented.  As with so much of Millett’s speculation this theory is thought provoking.  I find it plausible, but not wholly convincing.

Was there anything in Sylvia’s behavior which indicated misconduct of any sort while staying with the Baniszewskis?  Was there even the faintest bit of truth in Gertrude’s claims of Sylvia’s bad behavior?  As prosecutor Marjorie Wessner aptly pointed out at the first trial, none of Sylvia’s alleged misdeeds could be independently corroborated.  She was literally the victim of rumors and innuendo concocted by the Baniszewskis.  Even so, how and when did Gertrude’s preoccupation with Sylvia’s sex life arise?  Was it something that she had been harboring within her ever since her pretty young boarder arrived in her home or did she seize upon it suddenly during Sylvia’s stay?

Stephanie Baniszewski testified that it was Gertrude who first broached the topic of sex with Sylvia sometime in August.  Sylvia mentioned that she missed her boyfriend from when she lived in California.  When Gertrude asked Sylvia if she “did anything” with the boys she went with in California, Sylvia said yes.  Perhaps it was teenage bravado, or maybe she misunderstood the question.  Either way, Gertrude pounced upon the admission.  She fixated in particular upon a party the Likens kids had in California one weekend while Lester and Betty were on a jaunt to Las Vegas.  Sylvia said she had gotten under the covers with a boy named Mike, an admission which later found its way into the second note Gertrude made Sylvia write to her parents shortly before she died.

Jenny’s testimony concerning the party shows she was hesitant at first to give details; John Dean reported in the Star that she “evaded” questions about the sex part.  Perhaps she was not comfortable with this line of questioning from the defense attorneys trying to acquit her sister's killers.  Here is what probably happened at the California house party.  The kids hung out and played records and danced.  If Sylvia did anything with her boyfriend it’s unlikely it went any further than necking and cuddling. 

Consider: Danny and Benny were at the party, and I don’t think they would have permitted anyone to take liberties with their sister while they were around.  Also, Sylvia was raised in a very strict fundamentalist church which taught that there were fire and brimstone consequences for one’s sins and I don’t think these were ever far from her mind.  In other words, I seriously doubt Sylvia would have allowed any boy to round the bases even if the opportunity presented itself.

When Lester told Gertrude to “straighten out” Sylvia and Jenny, that they were “getting hard to handle,” it is quite likely he had the house party in mind if he in fact knew about it.  (Jenny indicated he did in her trial testimony.)  Lester may have looked upon it as a breach of trust and wanted to ensure the girls walked the straight and narrow while at the Baniszewski’s.  It seems like a tempest in a teapot from this remove.  I did far worse things at sixteen than Sylvia could ever have imagined doing and I still turned out okay.  Nevertheless I believe that it was the intersection of Lester’s admonition with the revelation of the house party which gave Gertrude license to persecute Sylvia for her supposedly loose morals.    

Soon after the house party conversation, Gertrude began to drop hints Sylvia was pregnant.  She would tease Sylvia that she was getting big in the belly.  Sylvia laughed it off at first, kidding back that maybe she should go on a diet.  (Stephanie claimed she thought it was a joke, too, and said she offered to join Sylvia by dieting herself.)  But Gertrude wouldn’t let it go.  When neighbor Phyllis Vermillion first visited the Baniszewski home weeks later Gertrude told her Sylvia was three months pregnant, a strange thing to tell a new acquaintance about a third person.  (In her testimony, Gertrude fabricated a visit by Lester and Betty in mid-October during which she told them she thought both Sylvia and Jenny were pregnant.  Gertrude claimed Betty said if there was a pregnancy the best thing would be to “get rid of the baby.”  Whether this meant procuring then-illegal abortions for the girls or giving the babies up for adoption wasn’t made clear.)

The pregnancy accusation took a strange turn on one occasion.  When one of the gaggle of neighbor kids who joined in the torment, a pudgy girl named Anna Siscoe, kicked Sylvia on one occasion Sylvia cried out, “Oh, my baby!”  Was this just a plea for this latest round of hurt to stop?  Or had Gertrude somehow convinced Sylvia she really was pregnant?  This is just one of many questions pertaining to the Likens case to which we will never know the answer.  In any event, one fact is clear: Sylvia’s autopsy revealed she was not pregnant when she died.

It is just as well.  Despite later claims she was sick and sedated while much of the abuse was going on, Gertrude was well enough to punctuate her morality lectures by kicking Sylvia hard in the groin.  A pregnant woman would surely be at risk of miscarriage given that sort of mistreatment.  The same goes for being repeatedly pushed down the basement steps, or being judo flipped onto the floor over and over.  I am inclined to think Gertrude would have engaged in this behavior even if she knew Sylvia in fact to be pregnant.

There was a didactic aspect to some of the abuse, at least in Gertrude’s mind.  The Pepsi bottle episodes were for the edification of her children and the neighbor kids, yes, but Jenny was the target audience.  The first time, Gertrude taunted Sylvia saying, “Prove to Jenny what kind of girl you are.”  I think Gertrude was working to drive a wedge between the sisters, to distance Jenny from Sylvia.  In a similar vein Gertrude tried to implicate Jenny by telling her to go with Johnny to “lose” Sylvia in nearby Jimmy’s Forest as well as encouraging Ricky to involve her in the branding.  Jenny feared Gertrude, but aside from slapping Sylvia only after Gertie repeatedly slapped her if she wouldn’t, Jenny successfully avoided complicity in her sister’s torture.

As the weeks wore on, Gertrude magnified Sylvia’s supposed misdeeds.  Sylvia went around with older, married men.  She stole money from Gertrude.  She stole from her high school classmates.  She shoplifted.  She filched Cokes from vending machines.  She spread rumors around school maligning Paula’s and Stephanie’s virtue.  (The last may or may not have been true depending on the credence you give Stephanie’s courtroom testimony.)  Gertrude could be persuasive with casual acquaintances, and most people who knew her at the time felt sorry for her and found her tales of woe convincing.  Even though the Likens family had once lived in the neighborhood and there were people who surely had known Sylvia from before, Gertie’s tale telling stuck.

Sylvia’s abuse took on a figurative dimension.  Gertrude took great pains to portray Sylvia as slatternly and herself as virtuous.  But it was not just a reputation for sexual license that Gertrude tried to hang upon Sylvia; she believed Sylvia was literally unclean and made it so by not permitting Sylvia to wash or use the toilet.  Sylvia’s circumstances became symbolic of Gertrude’s own social condition; she was the funhouse mirror upon which Gertrude reflected back society’s perception of its impoverished.  

There is an imputed uncleanness to the poor.  Throughout most of history this dirtiness was literal, as Aldous Huxley reminds us in his essay “Hyperion to a Satyr.”  Only the well-off could afford to bathe and launder their clothing regularly.  With the advent of indoor plumbing personal hygiene became democratized.  But the stigma, albeit metaphorical, abides nonetheless.  For society’s “nice” people there’s something unsavory and disheveled lurking just beneath the surface of folks on the poor side of town regardless of how upright many of them undoubtedly are.

The circus atmosphere of the 1966 trial was a result of “nice” people’s mingled fascination and disgust with their morally suspect counterparts across the tracks.  This was long before daytime TV talk shows and tell-all confessionals.  We’re blasé about this kind of stuff now but in a culture on the cusp of a tectonic shift it was rare to drag a family’s secrets into the open.  While the Baniszewskis appear to have drawn validation from all the attention, it surely compounded the suffering of the Likens family.  One facet of public reaction to the players in the drama recounted each day in Saul Rabb’s courtroom was summed up by the unnamed Indianapolis doctor overheard by John Dean who expressed his distaste for all the publicity being given to “those trash.” 

Although such judgments were unfair, at least in the case of the Likens, we have not become more enlightened in our opinion of the poor.  In a culture which worships the wealthy we have a countervailing contempt for the economically unsuccessful.  We watch daytime talk TV not to commiserate but to look down our noses at the afflicted.  (Tabloid programs such as Jerry Springer’s show have recast the petty dramas of poor whites into a particularly repulsive form of minstrelsy.)  Notwithstanding pleas to not judge the truth is that we take pleasure from the feelings of superiority that come with rendering judgment upon others.  It’s part and parcel of our Puritan heritage that is so hard to shake off.

Gertrude Baniszewski took refuge in moral superiority in the face of her own moral failures, failures which were laid bare to the world once her judgments had led to an innocent girl’s death.  In the final accounting one thing is clear. 

Sylvia Likens died for the Baniszewskis’ sins.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

Sylvia - VI: Frames

In media studies, it’s common to speak of how news stories are primed and framed for the public.  A story is brought to public attention as a consequence of editorial agenda setting in such a way as to elicit a certain reaction.  As the story progresses the message is framed, or interpreted.  The public is told a story through the phrasing of print and online articles and radio news segments.  With TV news and streaming media we are presented with video clips, soundbites, captions, the demeanor of anchors and reporters assembled in such a way as to shape our opinion about the story.

Although it was a much earlier time and the mass media were not as sophisticated as today one can readily recognize how public perceptions of the Sylvia Likens story were shaped over the months after her death through its telling.  Early coverage was especially sensational.  Reading the local news coverage at the time, most of it in the Indianapolis Star and its afternoon edition sister the Indianapolis News, one has the impression that the good people of Indiana’s capital looked upon the Likens murder as just the sort of tawdry business one expected to happen on the poor side of town.  One early news report didn’t even identify Sylvia by name, describing her simply as “a 16 year old high school dropout.” 

Headlines of various stories the last week of October 1965 refer to Sylvia tersely as “Slain Girl.”  Another item published that week identified Lester and Betty Likens as “roadshow performers.”  (Interestingly, an article published following Betty’s death mentioned that she was once a singer on the fair circuit.)  Lester and Betty were depicted as “nearly hysterical” when they returned home to claim Sylvia’s body.  Readers were unsurprised to learn that the police were frequent visitors to 3850 East New York Street.

As coverage of the case went on, the key figures in the drama became so familiar to newspaper readers in Indianapolis that first names alone sufficed—“Sylvia,” “Gertrude,” “Paula,” etc.  Still, not everyone was kindly disposed toward the people involved.  In the Star, John Dean quoted a doctor unconnected with the case as saying, “I think it’s terrible to give all that publicity to those trash.”  It’s unclear whether the good doctor was referring to the Likens, the Baniszewskis, or both.  Dean seemed to think it was the former since he writes of Sylvia in the next sentence, “But she was a human being.”

The nature of the murder guaranteed coverage outside Indiana from serious news publications and pulps alike.  Time magazine related the story in a sober, restrained write-up titled “Addenda to de Sade.”  On the other end of the scale the Police Gazette, a pulp magazine which ceased publication many years ago, printed an error-riddled story after the trial called “The Teen-Age Torture Murder that Shocked Indianapolis.”  Probably the most amusing liberty with the truth taken by the Police Gazette was its description of Paula Baniszewski as a “sexy looking dish, with a cheaply pretty face, suggestive curves—and no heart.”  While I wholly agree with the last assertion the rest of it tickled my funny bone, very possibly the only thing I’ve read concerning the Sylvia Likens case that has.                                                                                                                                           

Of course news reports are the “first draft” of history.  Once the dust has settled on a long-running news story it is up to longform writers to reassess the events and interpret them.

The two most-cited books on the Likens case, John Dean’s House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying and Kate Millett’s The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice, offer very different perspectives.  Neither tome is a historical account, strictly speaking.  When an item in the Indianapolis Star announced after the first trial that their reporter was writing a book Dean said that it would be a “nonfiction novel,” a là Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (which was then on the bestseller list).  Published just months after the trial, House of Evil is a well-written potboiler that pulls together much of Dean’s newswriting on the case into a succinct narrative.  Leroy New provided the introduction to the first edition.  Warning ominously that the Sylvia Likens murder was a harbinger of societal breakdown if we did not check the growing trend of permissiveness, the introduction showcases the prosecutor’s penchant for platitudes. 

House of Evil is the gold standard for understanding the events of the Likens case.  Even Kate Millett acknowledged her debt to Dean’s book, although she did primary source research of the trial transcripts as well.  Its main drawback is that its source material for some of the events he describes is not stated, leaving the reader to wonder if they were conjecture.  There is also the reliability of his sources; Dean wrote in the foreword he was unsure of the veracity of some of the events described.

Dean himself is a hard guy to figure out.  He’s certainly eccentric.  In the mid-1970s he switched careers and became a lawyer.  This was just after the Watergate scandal and Dean did not want to be associated with the convicted Nixon aide with the same name.  His solution?  He legally changed his name to Natty Bumppo.  (Not sure that would have been my first choice.  If you’re going to take the name of a literary character, why not Huck Finn?  Or Ichabod Crane, for that matter?)  It takes all kinds, I guess.

Dean’s reportage during the trial and in his book went a long way to evoke empathy for Sylvia and her family while bluntly exposing the misdeeds of the Baniszewskis.  However, it’s the little stylistic tics and the flip, offhanded remarks then and now which raise eyebrows.  For instance, there’s the passage in House of Evil in which he mentions Gertrude’s first cigarette burning of Sylvia as the start of Sylvia’s “career as a human ashtray.”  On a recent TV documentary show on the murder, he compares Sylvia’s sufferings to those of Christ.  But in an online exchange with true crime writer Denise Noe a few years ago where they speculated on the sort of life Sylvia would have lived had she survived, Dean opined she would be a sideshow stripper with her dad as barker.  He defended the remark as gallows humor.   

I wrote in my first post that I had learned about the Likens case through Kate Millett’s book.  This is a bit unusual since many of the folks who post about Sylvia’s murder mention the Dean book as their first encounter.  However, in 1999 House of Evil had been out of print for nearly thirty years and it would be several more before it was reissued.  Also the first editions of Dean’s book were published by the long defunct Bee Line Books, which mainly turned out soft core pornography and was thus unlikely to sell books to public libraries.  Hence, Millett was my introduction to Sylvia’s story.  To this day, despite its flaws, and despite having only read it twice many years apart, Millett’s account is the one which most colors my thinking on the crime.

The Basement is a curious amalgam of legal procedural, philosophical musings on violence towards women in a patriarchal culture, and the psychodynamics of torturer and victim through the alternating stream of consciousness perspectives of Gertrude, Paula, Jenny, Sylvia, and others.  For Millett, Sylvia’s suffering represents what happens to women or at least what can happen to them in the worst case.  By abusing her Gertrude was attempting to teach Sylvia what it meant to be a woman, the torture symbolic of the violence visited upon women by men. 

The principal weakness of The Basement is its meandering, elliptical digressions as Millett ponders such evils as torture in prerevolutionary Iran and female genital mutilation in Africa.  She also tends, like so many writers who attempt to tell this story, to get names and dates wrong.  While I find her framing of the crime as sexually motivated plausible, Millett’s narrative grates on me in parts because of her poorly concealed snobbery toward the Likens family.  I’m also uncomfortable with Sylvia’s suffering portrayed as collateral damage in what Millett considers the larger War of All Men on All Women.  Ms. Millett and I reside in differing precincts of the political Left.  She engages in the identity politics of the smug and comfortable, and I am more concerned with socioeconomic inequality.  But on a positive note it goes to show that once again Sylvia’s story can be seen from so many diverse perspectives.

A recently published contribution to the literature is the somewhat misleadingly titled Sylvia: The Likens Trial by Forrest Bowman, who represented Coy Hubbard and Johnny Baniszewski at the trial.  Although much of the book paraphrases and excerpts the trial transcripts, Bowman does provide valuable insight into the procedural maneuverings in the case.  He also describes his dealings with prosecutor Leroy New, with whom he had significant personal and professional differences.

There is also a memoir from a woman who was in prison with Gertrude and Paula, Justice from Within as told to Gisele Veilleux.  I haven’t read it but the reviews I’ve seen are mixed at best.  It might be worth considering but I find myself uninterested in what happened to any of Sylvia’s tormentors following their conviction.

There are also the fictionalized and dramatic retellings of Sylvia’s story.  Some of them are obscure and nearly impossible to find, such as the unpublished 1976 Janet McReynolds play Hey, Rube.  The play was reportedly performed once and not again since.  (McReynolds’ own life had a second act of sorts as a suspect with her husband in the JonBenét Ramsey case.)   Patte Wheat published a novel around the same time titled By Sanction of the Victim.  I could find little information on this work, though while it’s said to be quite graphic its plot apparently does not closely follow the factual events of the crime.

A novel published in the last year or two, The Punishment Game by Lavinia Jewel, is a flawed telling from the opening sentence.  Having read a number of negative reviews I chose to save my money and read the preview on Amazon.  It does not look promising.  It is partly a repetition of dialogue from the movie An American Crime and partly a stilted packaging of commonly known facts such as Jenny’s polio and Sylvia’s love of The Beatles into verbal exchanges between the characters.  Exposition is necessary but it shouldn’t be obvious. 

One issue I have with this book in addition to the common complaints—and remember I’ve only read the opening chapters—is with its anachronisms.  For instance, Darlene McGuire invites the Likens sisters to hang out at the mall where they are having a sale on clothes.  Hanging out at the mall was more a thing with my generation, and indoor regional malls really didn’t become ubiquitous until the 1970s.  (Also, considering Betty had been arrested for shoplifting a pair of pants the day before the events in Chapter One it’s unlikely the girls could do more than window shop.)  The characters’ speech and idioms owe more to that of today’s young people than to those of 1965.  And so on.  Give this one a pass.

There are other works which are inspired by but are not necessarily about Sylvia’s murder.  Jack Ketchum’s 1989 novel The Girl Next Door alters the setting and circumstances of the story somewhat along with the time period.  The Likens murder is also said to have inspired Mendal Johnson’s 1974 psychological horror novel Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ in which a group of kids hold their babysitter prisoner while their parents are vacationing abroad, enlisting their neighborhood friends in torturing and ultimately killing her.  I’ve never read it and don’t plan to, but I am told it is very disquieting.

There is an e-book sequel to Johnson’s novel, Six Hours at the Adams’ by Peter Francis, which came out several years ago but I have no information concerning its content or plot.

And finally there is Leroy New's self-published memoir, Solid Foundations: Autobiography of an Attorney.  I don't know how much of the book if any is devoted to the Sylvia Likens case since there are only two copies held by libraries anywhere.  They may be the only two copies for all I know.  One copy, with a 2000 publication date, is with the Carmel Clay Public Library in Carmel, Indiana.  The other, with a 2006 copyright, is in the collection of the Indiana Historical Society Library in Indianapolis.  (This copy was provided a year after Mr. New passed away.  It also contains 36 more pages than the first.)

The cinematic renderings of Sylvia’s story are subject to the narrative limitations of that art form.   The Girl Next Door was made into a movie a number of years ago.  I remember finding it over the top in its depiction of the violence against the girl-victim, verging on the pornographic.  Having watched part of it again recently on YouTube, my opinion has not changed. 

 An American Crime, a 2007 TV movie first aired on Showtime, is a fact-based account of the Likens murder itself.  It’s gotten some criticism on the Sylvia message boards for having taken liberties with the story, but it is between difficult and impossible to tell any complex story in vignettes within two hours or less.  Just remind yourself it’s a movie, not the literal truth. 

With that in mind, I do find fault with how some of the figures in An American Crime were characterized.  Paula, for instance, is drawn as almost sympathetic and even as a friend of sorts to Sylvia.  Ricky Hobbs is portrayed as being motivated by an unrequited crush on Sylvia when there is no evidence indicating this.  The names of some of the characters were inexplicably changed, even those of the deceased such as Gertie’s young boyfriend Dennis Wright (who is an active character in the plot even though the real Dennis was out of the picture by the time the Likens sisters stayed with Gertie).  The scene where Gertrude explains to Sylvia that her torture was necessary for Gertrude to save her family after which Sylvia forgives Gertrude makes for good drama but it’s not very believable. 

Other alterations, such as Sylvia and Jenny first meeting the Baniszewski girls on the church bus or a dream sequence in which a dying Sylvia imagines she has escaped the basement and is reunited  with her parents seem like a harmless condensing of the storyline in the first case and artistic license in the second.  I can even accept Sylvia’s apparition appearing in Gertrude’s prison cell.   But I can’t resign myself to any sympathetic portrayal of any of the Baniszewskis.

Overall, I though the story was well-told though flawed.  The casting of characters with whom you’re vicariously acquainted is always bound to invite criticism.  Ellen Page is a convincing Sylvia, though Catherine Keener’s rendition of Gertrude makes the viewer empathize with her more than he should.  Bradley Whitford is a fine actor, but he was an underwhelming Leroy New.  And James Franco as the Dennis stand-in character strikes me as a self-conscious stroke of stunt casting.

My sentiments about An American Crime are also tempered by a comment from Sylvia’s sister Dianna in a news article about the movie in which Dianna noted that no one in the Likens family was ever consulted by director Tommy O’Haver about the production.  I don’t think the producers intended to exploit Sylvia’s death or add to the Likens’ pain but I can certainly see why Dianna and other family members would feel slighted.  The lurid nature of the murder tends to draw excessive attention to the violence exerted on the victim while ignoring the pain endured by Sylvia’s survivors.

Lastly, there are depictions of Sylvia in two- and three-dimensional art.  Kate Millett created a sculpture installation, The Trial of Sylvia Likens, which was shown at the Noho Gallery in New York in 1978.  (The installation was reassembled and shown again at Duke University in 2010.)  One particularly controversial depiction is part of Marlene McCarty’s series of drawings from the 1990s, Murder Girls.  All the other drawings in the series are of young women who had committed murder.  They are drawn as partially nude with their sexual parts showing, suggesting a connection between their crimes and their emerging sexuality.  The drawing of Sylvia is the only one of the series depicting a murder victim as its main subject, though another murdered Indiana teenager, Shanda Sharer, is shown in the hands of her killers in one more.  There are no depictions of Gertrude or Paula or Stephanie.  Sylvia is represented as nude from the midriff down, standing nonchalantly with her hands on her hips, the “I’m a prostitute” stomach tattoo prominently displayed. 

I know I’m not alone when I say I found all of McCarty’s drawings disturbing and the one of Sylvia particularly distasteful.  Don’t misunderstand me.  I’m not a prude, and depictions of nudity or sexuality by themselves don’t normally bother me if they are in the proper context.  I also believe that for art to be effective it must challenge the observer even at the risk of causing offense.  But considering the nature of the crime against Sylvia, I find McCarty’s transgressive take on it very hard to accept.  Millett’s installation by comparison, with its stark depiction of the killers in the dock and their victim prostrate on the floor with headlines from the case lining the walls, is much more effectual at conveying the horror of Sylvia’s ordeal and its circus-like aftermath.

I noted in a previous posting that because of the lacunae in our knowledge of Sylvia Likens we are forced to make inferential leaps to fill the gaps.  This is evident in so many of the retellings of her life.  Anything going beyond a bare factual narrative requires not only speculation but also introduces the risk, perhaps unavoidable, of interpolating one’s subjective experience.  And thus Sylvia’s story will continue to be framed and reframed for each successive generation which encounters her.  It is one of the ways she lives on.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar