Sylvia - XII: Sense from Senselessness

We pay considerably more attention to the problem of child abuse and neglect today than when Sylvia Likens died in 1965. 

The crimes against Sylvia occurred in a time long before AMBER alerts, Megan’s Law, the awareness of stranger danger, and so forth.  Police and social services investigations of abuse in that era were hit or miss as we have seen when school nurse Barbara Sanders failed to follow up on allegations of Sylvia’s mistreatment.  Data collection and interagency information sharing were difficult before the advent of automation.  Young people disappeared and stayed missing with alarming frequency.  The Charley Project, a website devoted to unsolved missing persons cases, too often describes those before the 1980s with the ominous words, “Few details are available in his/her case.”  Technological advances and stronger legislation have helped us make enormous strides in identifying and intervening in instances of suspected child abuse and exploitation.  But better awareness notwithstanding, we too often learn of it after the fact when the damage is already done.   

Occasionally the abuse, or more accurately the neglect, is at the hands of well-meaning caregivers.  Anti-vaxxers are the most visible and vocal example of these, despite the junk science behind their cause.  In a similar, though more sensitive vein are parents who won’t seek medical treatment for their kids on the basis of their religious beliefs.  I’m reminded of the parents of a boy whose cancer came out of remission, refused to subject him to another round of chemo partly as a result of their religious conversion, and fled to Mexico with him to dodge a court order directing their son’s treatment. 

Curiously a figure in the Sylvia Likens case emerged years later to defend these very practices. After Marjorie Wessner left the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office she became counsel for the Christian Science church in Boston.  A child abuse prevention nonprofit’s newsletter from 1986 criticizes a speech by Wessner in which she claimed faith had cured several gravely ill children after doctors had predicted they would die and declared immunization a dangerous and ineffective practice.  But since these beliefs are a suburban, middle class soccer mom fad there are few if any sanctions against any damage they may lead to such as this year’s measles outbreak in Southern California.  By contrast efforts to prevent or mitigate familial abuse often focus disproportionately on the poor.

Child abuse and mental illness now have a higher profile partly thanks to mandated reporter laws which either didn’t exist or weren’t enforced in the 1960s.  The summer before Sylvia died the Indiana legislature enacted the state’s first mandated reporter law.  The law was sporadically enforced until it was revised in 1971 to give it more teeth.  I don’t recall much public discussion about child welfare until the middle of the 1980s.  When I was in elementary and high school there was not the bevy of social workers, counselors, learning disability specialists, child psychologists, and other student support services available to public school students today. 

When I was a social services case manager during a brief detour from academia I was struck by how much things had changed since I was a kid.  I worked in a very small town with fewer than a thousand residents.  Fourteen individuals under the age of eighteen lived on my block.  At one point nine of them were in the system for various reasons, including abuse, parents who were substance abusers, emotional or social adjustment problems at school, run-ins with the law, and so on. 

It seemed to me as if the town’s kids believed it usual to be troubled.  One morning I visited the elementary school to speak with a counselor about a client.  Taking a shortcut through the gym, a little girl who was maybe eight or nine years old noticed my county ID badge hanging from a lanyard around my neck.  She skipped up to me with a bright, expectant smile and asked sweetly, “Are you my social worker?”

I wasn’t, but the encounter made me think.  Morbidity is the new normal.  The nuclear family is the incubator; there is just a little more transparency now than in 1965.  The tendency even today is to preserve the family unless there is a clear danger to the child.  Mom smacked the kid in the grocery store parking lot?  A month of parenting classes will help her cope, at least until the next time she lashes out.  Dad’s meth head buddy who’s been crashing on the living room sofa has been taking liberties with the five year old daughter?  Send the child to counseling, that’ll patch things over.  Just don’t break up the family unit, no matter what.

Before industrialization increased individual mobility, both physical and social, extended families under one roof were the norm.  For although physical punishment of children was common, the presence of grandparents, aunts, and uncles in the household reduced stress on parents by sharing childcare responsibilities as well as discouraging more egregious forms of abuse with the presence of multiple pairs of eyes and ears in the household.  Such checks and balances made severe child abuse and domestic violence much more difficult to get away with.  Place the extended family in a community where neighbors are well acquainted with each other and you can reduce the incidence of child abuse and domestic violence even further. 

Greater accountability would have averted the Sylvia Likens tragedy.  Gertrude Baniszewski should never have been trusted with a houseplant, let alone a houseful of children.  This seemed to occur to no one.  It’s dumbfounding when you remind yourself yet again that so many people encountered the Likens sisters in the fall of 1965 and suspected nothing, nothing amiss.  There was so much at stake and seemingly no one saw.  No accountability, no consequences.  Once Sylvia was dead, the question of preventing that death was moot.  Moot, that is, except for her surviving family.

Consider the aftermath of Sylvia Likens’ death among her sisters and brothers.  Mental health problems seem to have dogged that generation of the Likens family.  Had Sylvia lived would she have dodged that bullet, particularly if she hadn’t crossed Gertrude’s path?  Her passivity in the face of Gertrude’s physical and emotional abuse is alarming.  Would she have stood up to or left an abusive boyfriend or husband?  Such stresses would adversely affect the health of an average individual let alone one who may have had a somatic propensity toward mental health disorders.

There is nothing to suggest that Lester ever experienced mental health problems, though Betty told a reporter in 1985 that since Sylvia’s death she had had difficulty holding down a job.  Sylvia’s elder brother Danny, who is believed to still be alive, is reported to have been chronically homeless throughout much of his life which is often correlated with mental illness and substance abuse.  No one, not even his relatives, seems to know his whereabouts.

Younger brother Benny is said to have been schizophrenic.  According to his grave marker Benny served in Vietnam though in what capacity we don’t know.  If he had been drafted rather than volunteered it might have been as part of Project 100,000, the Pentagon’s initiative to fill the ranks during the war under the guise of helping the underprivileged.  If he had experienced combat it could have aggravated whatever somatic propensity toward mental disorder he might have had.  Like Danny he was periodically homeless and was out of touch with his family when he passed away in 1999.  His father learned of Benny’s death when the post office returned a letter to him marked “deceased.”

I’ve written elsewhere of Jenny’s suffering though I believe it would have been much less severe or possibly nonexistent had she and Sylvia not been left with the Baniszewskis.  Among the siblings only Dianna seems to have been unscathed, in spite of having endured more tragedy in one lifetime than any individual should be expected to bear.  I think she is a remarkable lady.

Greater awareness has not precluded the possibility of more Sylvias.  Nearly two decades after the Likens case a California woman named Theresa Knorr tortured and killed two of her own teenaged daughters in 1984 and 1985.  Her first victim was elder daughter Suesan, whom she shot in a fit of anger and then kept tied up in the bathtub until she recovered.  Another argument led to Suesan being stabbed with a pair of scissors.  As with the gunshot Suesan was not afforded medical attention.  Fed up with the abuse Suesan told her mother she wanted to leave home.  Theresa agreed but only after the bullet lodged in Suesan was removed.  Suesan agreed but contracted blood poisoning following Theresa’s removal of the bullet with a hobby knife.  After her condition became worse Suesan was taken by her mother and brother to a remote mountain location about 100 miles from home, and left by the roadside after being set afire while still alive.   Law enforcement was initially unable to identify the body.

Suesan & Sheila

Less than a year later Theresa murdered her younger daughter, Sheila Sanders, after she became convinced Sheila, who had been forced into prostitution by Theresa, was pregnant and had contracted an STD which Theresa claimed she had gotten from a shared toilet seat.  Sheila died of dehydration after being tied up and confined to a closet until she confessed to what Theresa had accused her of.  Even after Sheila “confessed,” she was kept locked up a few more days until her mother finally discovered her dead.  When the odor of decomposition became noticeable, Sheila’s body was placed in a cardboard box, driven to a location near where her sister had been dumped, and set on fire.  As with Suesan, law enforcement was not at first able to make an identification.

Theresa, fearing detection, took her remaining children and went on the run after attempting to burn down their apartment to destroy any physical evidence.  Terry, the youngest of Theresa’s daughters, fearing with good reason she would be the next to die, ran away from home using Sheila’s ID to pass as an adult.  Terry attempted to report the murders to police in Salt Lake City after several years had passed but was not believed.  A therapist Terry was seeing also thought she was making it up.  (Strangely, Theresa lived nearby at the time though neither mother nor daughter was aware of this.)  Frustrated with the official inaction at home Terry contacted the authorities where her sisters were dumped.  Her story’s details matched those of their Jane Does. 

Theresa was charged with and convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.  For their involvement, one of her sons was sentenced to probation and counseling while the other received three years imprisonment.  The question of why hangs in the air, as it always does in such cases.  Terry believed her mother saw her adolescent daughters as sexual competition, an eerie parallel with the Likens murder.  Psychologists and criminal profilers familiar with Theresa Knorr tend to offer this explanation as well.

 

Theresa Knorr

Terry Knorr Walker remained in Utah for a time, later residing in Missouri until her death in 2011 at the age of 41.  Her mother is still alive and well.

The murder of the Knorr girls resonates with me for different reasons than Sylvia’s.   It is a matter of proximity both in time and in place.  The case occurred in a city near where I grew up.  Suesan and Sheila were both left a few minutes’ drive from my present home.  More importantly, Suesan and I were the same age.  This was a girl I could have gone to high school with.  Likewise with Sheila.  Terry was a few years younger than I, but she was close enough in age to where I could still relate to her personally.  (My thoughts on Terry are much like mine on Jenny Likens.  I see them both as hapless figures whom the world should have treated more compassionately.)  Much like Gertrude Baniszewski, Theresa Knorr is to me a somewhat more malevolent version of my own mother whom I believe would have been capable of the same animalistic behavior under the right circumstances.   I cannot dwell much on the Knorr murders.  Too close to home in so many ways.

I try to reassure myself that improvements in awareness and detection have greatly lessened the possibility of another Sylvia Likens tragedy.  Child Protective Services may be overloaded with cases and follow through may suffer at times, but they nevertheless represent a line of defense.  But I also know that kids fall through the net sometimes, as in the 2009 death of sixteen year old Jeannette Marie Maples in Oregon.  Jeanette had spent much of her early childhood in the foster care system due to her mother’s drug use before being returned to her mother at age seven. 

Jeannette Maples

Jeannette was a good student but found it hard to fit in because her mother would send her to school in worn and dirty clothing.  Jeannette’s teachers had noticed she had lost a considerable amount of weight a year earlier and made a report to CPS.  The girl’s mother, Angela McAnulty, assured the investigators everything was fine and accused her daughter of lying about being starved.  Angela thereafter opted to “homeschool” her daughter.  Subsequent calls to CPS by Jeannette’s grandmother were not looked into.  

Angela and her husband, Richard, ramped up their campaign of abuse until Jeannette could bear no more.  Paramedics found her lying in the living room, topless and with wet hair.  Resuscitated, she later died at the hospital.  The coroner noted Jeannette was badly bruised and her body was covered with scars and open sores.  One wound had exposed her femur.  Her front teeth were broken out.  She was also severely dehydrated.  Angela claimed Jeannette had fallen earlier but had seemed fine at first until she suddenly stopped breathing.  Officials said the girl had died from intentional malnutrition and torture. 

Police investigation of the house turned up blood spatter in Jeannette’s bedroom.  Family members admitted Angela tried to clean the mess before calling for help.  Caught in a chain of lies Angela finally admitted to detectives she abused her daughter, remarking that she should have taken up smoking instead of taking her frustrations out on Jeannette.  At trial witness testimony revealed Jeannette would drink from the toilet or the dog’s water bowl to cope with her thirst, that she was forced to sleep on the floor on a sheet of cardboard so her blood would not stain the carpet, that she was often tied up at night, that Angela and Richard would beat her face with shoes, and that the family would feed Jeannette dog feces.  Richard McAnulty received a life sentence without the possibility of parole.  Angela McAnulty was sentenced to death.  She is currently the only woman on Oregon’s death row and only the second in the state’s history to draw a death sentence.

Angela McAnulty

In another egregious case of protracted abuse leading to death, an Australian girl named Louise O’Brien died in October 2008 under circumstances unnervingly similar to those of Sylvia Likens.  Louise was fifteen when her mother Kathy McDonald sent her to stay with Patricia Goddard, a family friend, in 2005.  Kathy planned to move to the same town as Goddard and wanting to avoid having Louise change schools midyear sent her on ahead.  Kathy made routine payments to Goddard for Louise’s maintenance.

Louise O'Brien

Kathy made frequent visits to Goddard and Louise, as had Lester and Betty Likens with their daughters during their stay at the Baniszewskis.   Nothing struck Kathy amiss during any of these visits.  They continued until one day when a strangely hostile Patricia Goddard told Kathy that Louise no longer wanted to see her mother.  Louise appeared suddenly, however, sporting a black eye.  Goddard angrily shooed Louise away and shut the door in Kathy’s face.  Kathy never saw her daughter alive again.

Kathy complained to the authorities, who told her there was nothing to be done since Louise was old enough to make her own decisions.  Kathy’s pleas to Goddard were ignored.  Finally, she was told Louise had run off to Melbourne with a boyfriend.   Louise’s whereabouts were unknown until March 2011when police found her remains in a wheelie bin buried in Goddard’s backyard.

During the investigation police learned that Louise had been a virtual slave in the Goddard household, cooking for Goddard and her daughter and keeping house.  Louise was subjected to frequent beatings to keep her in line.  Like Sylvia, Louise’s food intake was severely restricted.  Like Sylvia, Louise was sometimes forced to eat disgusting things such as the scabs from her wounds.  On one occasion reminiscent of the hot dog episode at the Baniszewski’s house Goddard put so much hot sauce on Louise’s food it made her vomit.  Goddard would also burn Louise as punishment.  On her infrequent sorties into the neighborhood people noticed the sores and bruises visible on Louise.  Sometimes she would go from house to house begging for food.  No one is known to have contacted the police or social services about her, though.

Louise died in a similar manner as Sylvia.  Louise had aroused Goddard’s anger in some way.  Depending on which theory you prefer Goddard either threw a claw hammer at Louise accidentally striking her in the head or she deliberately bludgeoned Louise to death with it.  Either way Louise O’Brien died from the same cause as Sylvia Likens, a subdural hematoma.  Sylvia died slowly in a basement.  Louise died slowly, shut up in a trailer behind the Goddard house.

Unlike Gertrude Baniszewski, Patricia Goddard did not panic at the death of her charge.  Consulting her daughter Tracey, who was travelling with a carnival, Goddard decided to stuff Louise’s body in a plastic trash bin and bury it in the back yard.  Enlisting the help of an 18-year-old neighbor boy, she was able to conceal the evidence without anyone the wiser until the police were finally tipped three years later.

Patricia Goddard got off even more lightly than Gertrude, at least legally, though being much older than Gertrude at the time of her conviction she never drew a free breath again.  Goddard pled guilty to manslaughter and died behind bars a year or so later.

Patricia Goddard

There were many similarities between Sylvia and Louise.  Both were sweet natured and unassertive in the face of adult authority.  People in the neighborhood suspected abuse in each case but did nothing.  Both Gertrude and Patricia Goddard were able to cover up the seeming absence of their young housemates with stories no one bothered to verify.  The ensuing trials of both women were media circuses.  And once justice, so called, was done little more was.  Public attention moved on to the next spectacle.

Something dark lurks in the depths of the human soul.   Pushed in the right (wrong?) direction any of us are capable of anything.  We all have destructive impulses.  We’re left to ponder why relatively few of us act upon them and are shocked when we recognize those who do.  We can rarely discern what compels them.  Gertrude Baniszewski’s actions beggar comprehension.  It is all anyone can do to find even a scintilla of sense in them. 

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar