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