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