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

Sylvia - V: Bystanders

The death of Sylvia Likens was a textbook instance of the “bystander effect.”  Probably the best remembered, most frequently cited example of this phenomenon is the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964.  Social psychologists attribute the failure of people to act when witnessing persons in distress to “diffusion of responsibility.”  Each individual assumes someone else will do something, thereby absolving them for their inaction.  Despite what must have been clear signs to people outside the Baniszewski home that Sylvia was being severely abused, family matters were thought private in the 1960s and it was considered improper to interfere with a parent administering discipline.  Nevertheless, one wonders at the inaction of a number of witnesses which came out in testimony at the 1966 trial.

Neighbor Phyllis Vermillion has been particularly criticized for her failure to act, and rightly so.  She first visited Gertrude in September 1965 after moving to the neighborhood.  She was looking for a sitter to watch her children while she worked the evening shift at the Indianapolis RCA plant.  As she sipped coffee and chatted with Gertrude, Mrs. Vermillion noticed the slovenly, crowded conditions in the Baniszewski home.  She noticed Sylvia.  And her black eye.  She heard Paula brag about giving Sylvia the black eye.  She heard Gertrude shout abuse at Sylvia.  She saw Paula douse Sylvia with hot water, leaving a red mark on Sylvia’s face.  She watched Paula rub “yellow stuff” that seemed like garbage in Sylvia’s face.  She heard Sylvia “squalling” as the girl ran upstairs.  While she sensibly made other arrangements for her kids, Mrs. Vermillion did not say anything to anyone about what she had seen figuring that every family meted out discipline differently. 

Mrs. Vermillion’s second visit in mid-October should have raised even more alarms.  This time she saw Sylvia sitting mutely in a chair, sporting a black eye and a “busted mouth.”  To Mrs. Vermillion, Sylvia “looked like she did not care whether she lived or died.”  That second observation reveals a lot about Sylvia’s mental state by this point.  Sylvia had the “thousand yard stare” of the traumatized.  It shows that she was experiencing depersonalization as a result of her abuse.  No matter.  Phyllis Vermillion continued to keep her counsel.  She could not bring herself to judge the woman she knew as “Mrs. Wright.”

The closest Mrs. Vermillion came to contacting the police was on the night of October 25 / 26.  She and her husband first heard the loud, intermittent scraping of an object on the concrete floor of the Bansizewski basement, followed by a woman shouting.  The scraping noise continued off and on until about 3 a.m.  In the end they did not call.  (Strangely, while she would not bother to notify the authorities of Sylvia’s abuse the Vermillion woman did come forward to help exonerate the neighbor man Gertrude had had arrested for burglary a couple of nights earlier.)

Public health nurse Barbara Sanders paid a visit to the Baniszewski home on October 15^th to follow up on reports of a child with running sores in the neighborhood.  (October 15^th was a busy day at 3850 East New York Street.  If you believe Gertrude’s testimony, it was also one of the days Lester and Betty dropped by.)  Gertrude said her children were perfectly all right and repeated her story of having kicked Sylvia out of the house.   When Mrs. Sanders asked Jenny how she was she merely answered, “Fine” and was otherwise silent before being shooed away by Gertie to do the dishes.

Mrs. Sanders’ visit, which was strictly pro forma, quite possibly represented the last clear chance to rescue Sylvia before the very worst occurred.  Although Gertrude’s (and Paula’s) hateful words about Sylvia, about how she was dirty and promiscuous and “not worthy” of living under the family’s roof, should have raised half a dozen red flags Sanders merely filed a report and did not follow up until after Sylvia died.

Another bystander was the Baniszewski family pastor, Roy Julian, who paid several visits during Sylvia’s stay.  Although Sylvia was not the reason for Rev. Roy’s social calls, he was curious as to why she had stopped coming to church.  Gertrude gave him her standard spiel regarding Sylvia’s wickedness.  When he asked to see Sylvia he was told she was up in her room, but when Jenny walked in Gertie told Julian he could ask her about her sister’s behavior.  Jenny stuck to the party line.  The good reverend’s curiosity was duly satisfied.

Judy Duke, one of the neighborhood kid-mob hanging around the Baniszewski house, had a pang of conscience at one point and told her mom about Sylvia’s mistreatment.  Mrs. Duke chalked the story up to a child’s exaggeration and even if it wasn’t exaggeration she figured Sylvia must have been up to no good to be punished so. 

Grace Sargent, a parishioner at Grace Memorial Baptist, also ignored what should have been clear warning signs Sylvia was in danger.  When Paula came to church with her left hand in a cast, she cheerfully told Mrs. Sargent that she had broken her wrist punching Sylvia in the face.  Paula also volunteered that she would kill Sylvia if “she ever calls my mom a bad name again.”  Mrs. Sargent was “disturbed” by Paula’s tone but did not report the remarks.  She was one of the few bystanders who expressed any regret for her failure to speak up.

Although parents were much more likely to use corporal punishment on their kids back then, the unconcerned attitude of people in the neighborhood not to mention those in positions of trust is the biggest imponderable of the Likens case, second only to the reasons for Gertrude’s animus toward Sylvia.  The apathy goes beyond that seen in the Kitty Genovese murder.  At least with Genovese a few people did call the police.  The tragedy of Sylvia Likens was that until she was dead no one noticed and no one cared.  The rhetorical question of the appropriateness of certain forms of “discipline” is almost beside the point.  Surely even in 1965 beating, burning, and starving a child would have been considered unacceptable.  Even the slow-witted teenager Judy Duke sensed something was wrong.  And yet all the grownups turned a blind eye.

I’m not usually one for repeating bumper sticker quotations, but there is one I find fitting in this case: “I always wondered why somebody didn’t do something about that.  Then I realized I am somebody.”

Enough said.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

Sylvia - IV: Consequences

Tall, urbane Leroy K. New presented opening arguments for the State of Indiana on April 27, 1966, commencing the trial of Sylvia Likens’ accused murderers in the courtroom of Judge Saul Isaac Rabb.   

                                    The Trial of Sylvia Likens, by Kate Millett

The Indianapolis media gave the trial a sensational build up.  Hints of what was to come were evident in the December 1965 grand jury hearings in which Gertrude Baniszewski gave testimony.  The grand jury indicted Gertrude, Paula, Stephanie, Johnny, Coy Hubbard, and Ricky Hobbs for first-degree murder.  Leroy New announced he would seek the death penalty against them all.

John Hammond, the Baniszewski family lawyer, could not represent Gertrude and her children since their individual defenses would pit each against the rest.  Hammond stayed on as Stephanie’s counsel and referred the others.  William C. Erbecker would represent Gertrude.  Forrest Bowman, Jr., would represent Johnny as well as Coy Hubbard.  George Rice accepted Paula’s case.  Each of the three attorneys tried their cases pro bono.  Judge Rabb assigned Ricky Hobbs a paid public defender, James Nedeff.

All of the defendants except for Stephanie went on trial in April 1966.  Stephanie’s trial was postponed until after she testified for the prosecution.  Although the prosecutors and Stephanie each emphatically denied there was a quid pro quo for her taking the stand, the Marion County grand jury revisited the evidence against her in June and dropped the charges.  Those initially charged with injury to person were not prosecuted and several of them testified against the defendants. 

The others had been held without bail since their arrest, even the children.  The heinousness of the crime and the shiftless nature of the Baniszewskis certainly had a lot to do with this.  However, Leroy New had little compunction about keeping juveniles charged with murder locked up pending trial.  In 1964 New objected to bail for a twelve year old who killed his older brother with a shotgun after an argument over money to buy ice cream.  The judge set bail for the boy only after his father suffered a heart attack in the courtroom during the hearing.

It is a testament to the collective stupidity of Sylvia’s killers that almost all of them were frank about what they did in their statements to the police though they stopped short of admitting to murder.  Once their cover story fell apart—that Sylvia had run off and then suddenly reappeared a few hours before her death half-naked and clutching a note conveniently explaining everything—it seems they were plumb out of ideas.  Gertrude was willing to waive her rights and answer police questions without a lawyer present because she believed she had done nothing wrong.  Paula’s police statement is blunt and unapologetic, as is Coy Hubbard’s.  Ricky Hobbs gave a rather chilling interview to Bob Hoover of radio station WIBC admitting his role, including the fact he had done most of the branding on Sylvia’s abdomen, but his demeanor clearly implied he should be off the hook because Gertie told him to. 

By today’s standards I am not sure that the statements taken from the suspects in the hours following their arrest could have been admitted in court.  Stephanie, the only Baniszewski with two brain cells to rub together, urged her mother to call her lawyer once they got to the police station but Gertrude evidently didn’t do so until after she had spoken with the investigating officers.  Certainly the defense attorneys tried mightily to suppress the statements.  Reading the transcript the ignorance of the police officers of their suspects’ Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights is appalling.  The first trial occurred after Escobedo v. Illinois and Gideon v. Wainwright had been decided but before Miranda v. Arizona.  (The U.S. Supreme Court had heard oral arguments in Miranda but would not hand down its opinion until two weeks after the trial had concluded.) 

Forrest Bowman and the other defense lawyers tried to get as much mileage out of Escobedo as they could, but Judge Rabb put his foot down saying it wasn’t practical for a policeman to have a lawyer “in his back pocket” at all times.  A subsequent Supreme Court precedent, Bruton v. U.S., which was decided in 1968, limited the evidentiary value of a confession by one defendant implicating another in a joint trial if the other defendant did not testify.  The Bruton rule would have tied the prosecution’s hands had it been in place at the time.  If State v. Baniszewski had been tried today the defendants would have been undoubtedly acquitted. 

Standards were different then, though that did not register with any of the accused.  The younger defendants were certainly clueless as to the seriousness of their predicament.  This is evident in their behavior before and during the trial.  There was the Hobbs boy’s on-air confession to Bob Hoover, of course.  Forrest Bowman reprimanded Johnny several times during the trial for fidgeting and other distracting behavior.  George Rice had to tell Paula to quit working crossword puzzles and pay attention.  By contrast Stephanie, before she got her separate trial, used her time efficiently doing homework for her classes at the Juvenile Center.  But even Stephanie displayed her own peculiar brand of obliviousness.  Like her victim, Stephanie had a talent for sketching.  At times she idly drew pictures of Jesus Christ and Judge Rabb as the proceedings went on around her.

The defendants had all done things before the trial which made any hope of acquittal remote.  Gertrude had inexplicably testified before both the grand jury in late 1965 and in her own defense at trial.  Leroy New had little difficulty catching her in a raft of inconsistences between her trial testimony and her statements to the grand jury.  She claimed the inconsistencies arose from fear for her children.  Every witness was lying except Gertrude.  She would have done better to keep mum.

Gertrude wasn’t helped much either by eleven year old Marie, who was there to testify on her mother’s behalf.  Marie’s performed well enough during the first day of her testimony.  No, Mom couldn’t have done what she’s accused of.  She took good care of the Likens sisters; what happened to Sylvia was the work of the other kids.  The little girl didn’t stand a chance against Leroy New, however.  Throughout the trial New had left the questioning of most of the child witnesses to co-counsel Marjorie Wessner, who as New himself conceded had a gentler touch.  The often overbearing New reserved Marie’s cross-examination for him alone.

Marie, though tearful, held up under cross at first until New teased out the inconsistencies in her story.  After that she became progressively confused until, in a Perry Mason-like moment, Marie broke down at last and cried “Oh God help me!”  When she calmed down, Marie admitted her testimony to that point had been untruthful and her subsequent answers more or less corroborated what had been testified to by other witnesses.  Forrest Bowman further impeached Marie’s credibility when he asked her if she had been untruthful on the stand, which she started to deny until she realized what she was saying with a startled “Oops!” that elicited much laughter in the courtroom.  This was probably the only moment of levity in an otherwise grim proceeding.

The personal conflicts among the lawyers at the trial have become apparent with last year’s publication of Bowman’s memoir Sylvia: The Likens Trial.  Bowman alleges Leroy New was driven by an overweening desire for publicity and accuses New of grandstanding when cross-examining defense witnesses.  Bowman, a careful legal scholar with a strong respect for procedure, found New’s courtroom style irksome.  He describes his dislike of New ripening into contempt when he chose to call Shirley to the stand to testify against Gertrude.  Bowman relates that during a lunch break New stopped him on the street and suggested he put Johnny on the stand to testify against his mother as well despite the fact this would endanger Johnny’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.  During this encounter New vowed “to put Gertie’s ass in the electric chair.”  Bowman criticizes New for seeking first-degree murder convictions and the death penalty against all six defendants, even the juveniles, as the “ultimate ego trip” for New, a gamble he did not win in Bowman’s eyes.

I think both New and Bowman had a deep capacity for righteous indignation.  While Bowman conducted himself professionally, the actions of the other defense lawyers raise eyebrows.  Gertrude’s lawyer Erbecker was determined to portray his client as insane at the time of the crime and so he asked nearly every witness he examined and cross-examined whether they thought Gertrude actually was.  Ricky’s public defender Nedeff was of questionable competence.  At one point Bowman, fearing Nedeff was jeopardizing Nedeff’s own client’s life, barged into Judge Rabb’s chambers during a courtroom break to protest Nedeff’s assignment to a capital case.  (After the jury convicted Ricky on the lesser charge of manslaughter, Rabb remarked to Bowman in passing, “That Nedeff is some lawyer.”) 

But it was the conduct of George Rice, Paula’s attorney, whose conduct raises my hackles most.  A speech professor with a Ph.D. in psychology who practiced law on the side, he had a reputation for eccentricity and button-pushing.  (He once mockingly clicked his heels like a German soldier in front of Rabb, who was Jewish.)  Rice’s questions during his cross-examination of Jenny Likens reflect his quirkiness.  He led off by asking her if her legal name was in fact Virginia; while this was not the case Jenny inexplicably answered in the affirmative twice.  (When Rice later questioned Nurse Sanders on the stand he referred to Jenny as “Virginia Likens,” understandably confusing her.)

Rice’s lines of questioning reek of attempted character assassination, zealous advocacy notwithstanding.  He asked Jenny about Sylvia’s grades; she said she thought Sylvia was an average student.  What about Jenny’s grades?  C’s and D’s, mostly.  Was Sylvia involved in any sports or extracurricular activities at school?  No.  Any awards or scholarships?  No.

Then Rice’s questioning took an ugly turn.  Did Sylvia have dates, boyfriends?  Yes.  How many dates a week?  Leroy New objects here unless the time was fixed; Rabb sustained him.  All right, then, how many dates did Sylvia have in the spring of 1965?  She had a boyfriend when they lived on New York Street; sometimes she would visit his house.  Was she there often? 

At this point Jenny makes one of those inexplicable stray, offhand, potentially damaging comments which are scattered throughout her testimony.  “Well, there were the twins…”  When Rice pounces on this and asks if Sylvia saw them often Jenny realizes her misstep and quickly adds that Sylvia was good friends with the twins’ sister too. 

The ugly implication of these questions is quite clear.  Because Sylvia wasn’t a straight-A student, wasn’t class president, wasn’t captain of the volleyball team her life was somehow less worthy.  Justice was for well-scrubbed, well-heeled suburban girls, not for those from Eastside.  Add to that the insinuation Sylvia had had a number of boyfriends, well…

But Rice wasn’t the only defense attorney who tried to cast aspersions upon Sylvia’s honor.  Or Jenny’s.  Before Rice began his cross Gertie’s lawyer Erbecker had clumsily tried to elicit an admission from Jenny that perhaps she herself was faster than she wanted to admit.  After bizarre exchanges over whether her disability gave her discomfort and whether she smoked while living with Gertrude—occasionally at first; later, no—Erbecker asked about Jenny’s boyfriends and dating history.  She answered she had had boyfriends but had never been on a date. 

In other words Erbecker hoped to establish that she went around with men while Jenny clearly meant your typical middle school, I-like-you-do-you-like-me, passing notes in class sort of thing.  (John Dean writes that Jenny was embarrassed by this line of questioning, hanging her head in humiliation.)  After a further round of scattershot questions, including a few concerning the Long Beach house party, Erbecker wound up his cross by asking Jenny if she believed Gertrude was insane.  After the inevitable flurry of objections and rephrased questions, she replied she didn’t know.

The term “slut shaming” didn’t exist in 1966, but the practice did.  The onus of virtue was on the young woman; she was either a “good girl” or she wasn’t.  Portraying Sylvia as a “bad girl” was the only hook the defense had as mitigation since the evidence was so strongly against them.  Today I hope we are enlightened enough to where a jury would ignore that sort of argument even without instruction from the bench.  But back then even the hint of promiscuity could be damning.  With Sylvia not around to defend herself, it became a matter of the Likens family’s word against that of the Baniszewskis. 

The trial did not want for dramatic or poignant moments.  Few witnesses provided as many such moments as the deputy county coroner who first examined Sylvia’s body at the Baniszewski house, Arthur Kebel.  When asked by New the extent of her injuries Kebel paused a moment before answering, “One would hardly know where to begin” which naturally brought loud objections from the defense.  Too often Kebel’s desire to explain the full extent of the harm done resulted in him being admonished by Judge Rabb to confine his answers to a simple “yes” or “no.”  At one point, frustrated at having his testimony circumscribed in such a manner, Kebel asked the judge if he could answer in his own way.  Rabb came back with a sardonic, “You try, doctor.”  (The testimony of the pathologist who performed the autopsy, Charles Ellis, proceeded somewhat more smoothly.)

But perhaps the one most affecting statements from a witness during the trial, aside from those of the Likens family, was when Dr. Kebel was asked his reaction upon first seeing Sylvia’s lifeless body.  Leroy New recalled in an interview years later Kebel said he and his wife were unable to have children and he could not understand why anyone would destroy a young child.  Unfortunately this remains the great imponderable of Sylvia’s murder.

It wasn’t just the witnesses who supplied the drama during the trial.  The spectators, enticed by months of sensationalistic, even prurient news coverage, crowded the courtroom, their periodic murmurs and exclamations testing Judge Rabb’s patience to the point where he barred standing spectators.  This led to competition for spectator seats; at one point two women physically struggled over possession of the last remaining seat.   (One was injured and taken to the hospital.)  Another woman walked into Rabb’s chambers during a recess to complain that people at the rear of the courtroom couldn’t hear what was being said.  Baniszewski family lawyer John Hammond, who represented Stephanie, caused a minor furor after it became known he had urged Forrest Bowman to get a severance for Johnny and Coy during an elevator ride in the presence of a juror.

William Erbecker predictably provided his share of awkward moments, particularly when his quest to have Gertrude found insane ultimately backfired in the most embarrassing fashion.  One of his witnesses, psychologist Jerome Relkin, an odd mannered gentleman who passed the time waiting to testify soundly sleeping in an armchair in the antechamber, gave interesting testimony.  Relkin said he had given Gertrude several personality tests, among them one where Gertrude was asked to draw herself with Relkin interpreting the way she drew her hands.  Despite Erbecker’s best efforts Relkin stopped short of saying Gertie was not responsible for her actions.  Recalled to the stand by the prosecution, Leroy New quickly demolished Relkin by establishing that not only had Relkin trained at the LaRue Carter State Hospital but that he had also been a patient there.  (It later came out that Erbecker, who was bipolar, had first met Relkin at LaRue Carter as a fellow patient.  Erbecker denied this.)

There were affronts to the integrity of testimony: Witness Judy Duke’s mother was reprimanded and told to leave the courtroom for answering questions from the audience during Judy’s testimony.   There were the eccentric moments: One Jay Tuck, an Antioch College student who was observing the trial on behalf of the American Humanist Association, expressed his outrage over the neighbors’ apathy toward Sylvia’s plight to the Star as well as the barbarity of the state seeking the death penalty for the juvenile defendants.  (Tuck would go on to become a prominent radio announcer in Europe.)  And there was a surfeit of pathos: Jenny Likens, who was present in court throughout the trial, frequently broke down crying, and there were occasions where her sobbing became so loud she had to be escorted from the courtroom by her minder Officer Norman Collins.

The closing statements varied in tenor and tone.  Marjorie Wessner closed for the prosecution, comparing Sylvia’s conditions to those in a German death camp.  The emotion of describing Sylvia’s suffering caused Miss Wessner’s voice to nearly break a couple of times.  George Rice spoke of the “chill penury” of the Baniszewski household and of Sylvia as the unfortunate target of their frustration after years of poverty.  Gertrude’s lawyer Erbecker gave a predictably strange closing, brandishing the photo of Sylvia’s mutilated body at the jurors.  Yes, Gertrude was responsible for the death of Sylvia Likens.  Yes, she was deserving of the electric chair.  But the jury couldn’t send Gertrude to her death because she was insane. 

Coy and Johnny’s lawyer Bowman lambasted Prosecutor New’s aggressive cross-examination of the child witnesses, as did Ricky’s lawyer Nedeff.   Bowman argued it was “just an accident” that it wasn’t Sylvia on trial for killing Johnny, that the climate of frustration in the Baniszewski home was such that the victim really could have been any of the children.  (The latter statement is plausible; Stephanie once said if it hadn’t been Sylvia she herself might well have been the victim.  I refuse to believe the former on general principle.)  Nedeff reminded the jury of all the adults in the community who were either aware of Sylvia’s abuse or should have suspected it and yet did not come to her aid.   

But it was Leroy New’s rebuttal to the defense which stole the show.  John Dean has likened New’s 35-minute speech to that of a revival preacher.  New told the jury Sylvia Likens did not run away from the Baniszewski home or report her persecutors because she “trusted in man” and could not believe that the people she had been entrusted to would actually continue to hurt her.  By the time she realized the seriousness of her predicament it was too late.  Addressing the defense’s plea of poverty, New retorted that poverty did not excuse bestiality and that he had lived in poverty himself.  (This last statement was gilding the lily a bit if one is familiar with New’s biography.)  Finally, dismissing all the defense attorneys’ rationalizations, New declared, “I can’t hear a word these people are saying because the voice of Sylvia Likens cries out to both God and man.” 

Powerful stuff, that.  But perhaps not as effective as Leroy New had hoped.  From the distance of fifty years it’s difficult to follow what the jury’s logic may have been arriving at its judgments of guilt and punishment.  Perhaps it was the youth of most of the defendants.  Maybe the defense’s insinuations about Sylvia implanted small seeds of doubt in some of the jurors.  The State of Indiana had asked for first-degree murder convictions and death by electrocution for each of them.  Gertrude was convicted of first-degree murder.  Paula was convicted of second-degree murder.  Each drew a life sentence.  The others—Coy, Ricky, and Johnny—were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to two to 21 years imprisonment.  Johnny at the time was the youngest inmate ever at the Indiana State Penitentiary.  All three served the minimum sentence.

Gertrude and Paula successfully appealed their convictions and were granted retrials with a change of venue.  While awaiting trial, Paula briefly escaped and was soon caught.  The prosecution offered Paula a plea deal; she pled guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to two to 21 years.  Astoundingly, she escaped a second time, was caught, and was still paroled two years into her new sentence.

Gertrude’s 1971 trial in Peru, Indiana was shorter than her first but resulted in the same outcome.  At the time under Indiana law, the only sentencing choices a jury had for first-degree murder were death or life imprisonment.  At the time of Gertrude’s conviction Indiana’s governor had imposed a moratorium on executions pending a decision from the state legislature, the state having last carried out an execution in 1961.  By the early 1970s death sentences were increasingly rare.  After 1972, with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Furman v. Georgia, all existing death sentences were overturned and no new ones upheld until states changed their capital punishment laws to meet the Furman standard.  Even if Gertrude had drawn a death sentence both in 1966 and again in 1971 it is highly unlikely she would ever have been executed, and the sentence would have been commuted to life by Furman anyway.

And so Gertrude was once again sentenced to life.  Indiana’s legislature did not adopt life without parole as a possible sentence until 1993, which meant Gertrude would become eligible for parole at some point.  With the help of her prison chaplain, Rev. Rubin Fields, Gertrude applied for release in 1985.  She had been a model prisoner and a mentor to the younger inmates.  She had trained as a cosmetologist and as a secretary.  She received a favorable report from the warden.

When the news of Gertrude’s impending parole became known it was clear people in Indianapolis had not forgotten Sylvia Likens.  An activist group helped Jenny Likens file a lawsuit to block Gertrude’s release.  A petition circulated, and more than 40,000 signatures were collected. 

Initially, they were successful.  However the parole board reversed itself a second time and Gertrude went free in December.  Going by her middle and maiden names to put Gertrude’s past behind her, Nadine Van Fossan moved away to Iowa and obscurity.  She died of lung cancer in June 1990.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

Sylvia - III: Crime and Punishment

The sequence of events started rather abruptly.

Sylvia and Jenny were living in Indianapolis with mother Betty in the early summer of 1965.  They had taken an apartment after Betty and father Lester separated following a few months living in Long Beach, California.  Lester remained with his mother in Lebanon, together with sons Danny and Benny.   (Eldest daughter Dianna was already married and living on her own.)

Lester and Betty Likens had had a turbulent marriage with frequent separations and reunions.  The family moved around a lot; by the time she died Sylvia had lived at fourteen different addresses.  Lester was hard working but was never prosperous.  After his discharge from the Navy in 1946 he had worked at a number of jobs including running a restaurant, which he lost when it was discovered that the man who had leased it to him didn’t actually own the place, laundry route driver, proprietor of a dry cleaners, and factory worker.  At times he and Betty worked as carnival concessionaires, travelling the Midwestern summer fair circuit.

Over 4^th of July weekend Betty was arrested for shoplifting leaving the sisters at loose ends for a couple of days.  While hanging out with a friend from their old neighborhood on East New York Street, they met Paula Baniszewski.  Paula brought the girls home with her where they met Gertrude.  The visit led to an invitation to supper.  (Gertrude actually invited Jenny to the table; she declined unless a place was set for Sylvia.  A first hint of things to come…)

Jenny and Sylvia stopped by again the next day and that visit became a sleepover.  Lester and Danny arrived later that night looking for the girls, having been directed to the Baniszewski house by their old neighbor friend Darlene McGuire.  Sylvia and Jenny told Lester of Betty’s arrest.  Allowed to sleep in the living room overnight, Lester told Gertrude the next day that he had a job offer on the fair circuit and hoped Betty would join him.  Jenny was still in elementary school and Sylvia wanted to return to high school after dropping out the previous year.  Both needed to stay in Indianapolis.  Gertrude offered to board the girls for $20 a week until he and Betty returned.  Lester agreed and advised Gertrude to “straighten out” Sylvia and Jenny if they got out of line.

This is where a lot of people encountering this story for the first time indignantly shake their heads.  Leave my daughters with a total stranger?  Never!  The ever blunt Forrest Bowman, a defense attorney at the 1966 trial who recently published a memoir of the case, describes Lester as a “study in human inadequacy” and wonders whether he was “dumb or indifferent” to his daughters’ wellbeing to have left them with Gertrude.  This is the general consensus of many observers.  But it’s easy to second guess people’s decisions after a tragedy.

While I am not defending Lester’s decision I think we should contemplate the circumstances.  I have two points for you to consider.  The first one is—and I know it’s a cliché—but it was a simpler time.  The other is to put ourselves in Lester’s shoes.  The pressures he was experiencing may have been self-imposed but they were nevertheless real and immediate for him.  He’s been searching for work since giving up his aircraft factory job in California.  He sees a chance to salvage his marriage by going on the fair circuit with Betty.  The daughters need to go to school, and grandma up in Lebanon has her hands full with the boys.  Dianna is married and has her own life.  He has very little time to pull everything together, and Gertie’s offer must have seemed a godsend.

And so a deal was reached.  Betty was already out of jail so she and Lester could hit the road.  It’s true they were remiss not learning more about the household in which they were leaving their daughters, despite making several visits over the ensuing weeks.  The Baniszewski family environment was full of risk factors and short on protective factors.  Gertrude was 37 years old but looked much older.  She had six children with her first husband, ex-police officer John Baniszewski: Paula (17), Stephanie (15), Johnny (12), Marie (10), Shirley (9), and Jimmy (6). 

She also had an infant son, Denny, from a short-lived relationship with 23 year old Dennis Wright, who at this juncture was either with the army in Germany or in prison depending on Gertrude’s telling.  (Gertrude passed herself off as “Mrs. Wright” during the time of the Likens girls’ stay.)  Support payments were often late.  Gertrude’s poor health limited the amount of laundry and ironing work she could take in.  The house was sparsely furnished.  The children shared beds.  There was no stove in the kitchen, only a hot plate.  Kitchen utensils consisted of a few forks and by the end a single spoon.  Meals often consisted of toast for breakfast with soup and crackers for dinner.  There usually wasn’t any lunch.

Complementing the menagerie at 3850 East New York was a collection of neighborhood children who came and went throughout the day.  Coy Hubbard, a 15 year old judo enthusiast who would initiate the practice of “flipping” Sylvia, was Stephanie Baniszewski’s boyfriend.   Ricky Hobbs, also 15, lived a couple of doors down.  Randy Lepper, a 12 year old boy with offputting mannerisms, was another frequent habitué, as were Judy Duke (12), Anna Siscoe (13), Mike Monroe (12), and the aforementioned Darlene McGuire.

At first there were halcyon days, if such a thing can be said to have existed under Gertrude’s roof.  The kids would spend their days at the local parks, Brookside, Ellenberger, and Christian.  Sure, it was because Gertie was fed up with having so many kids around the place but it was still summertime with all its pleasures.  The outings must have made up for the increasingly disturbing developments back at the house.

According to Jenny, conditions began to deteriorate around the end of the second week of her and Sylvia’s stay when things became “pretty rough.”  For Sylvia they continued to get rougher.  Viewed in their entirety Sylvia’s abuse and death fit neatly into long-recognized patterns of bullying and domestic violence.  Over the weeks of her stay Sylvia was systematically scapegoated and dehumanized in a textbook case of mobbing, culminating in her branding and being fed human waste before the head beatings which caused her fatal brain hemorrhage.  As the abuse progressed Gertrude and the kids believed they were justified in their actions because they had gradually convinced themselves Sylvia was somehow a lesser being. 

Evidence suggests that the Baniszewski home was a violent place well before Sylvia and Jenny crossed its threshold.  These were not people who used their words.  John, Sr. was a harsh disciplinarian with his kids and may well have been abusive with Gertrude during their relationship.  He had a violent side; a 1968 news photo shows him roughing up a newspaper photographer.  Paula, Stephanie, and Johnny were known to throw hands on slight provocation.  Dennis Wright would beat Gertrude from time to time before he made himself scarce.  A psychiatrist who testified at the trial said Gertrude was a passive individual; this may have affected her ability to leave abusive relationships exacerbating the brutal atmosphere within the household. 

Accustomed to harsh treatment throughout her own life, Gertrude’s brand of discipline was indiscriminate and ruthless.  Sylvia and Jenny are caught collecting discarded soda bottles to return for the deposit money; Gertie beats them.  Sylvia and Jenny find a castoff tennis shoe that fit Jenny’s good foot; Gertie beats them.  Sylvia, not having money to buy a gym suit for school, finds an unwanted gym suit lying about and brings it home; Gertrude beats her.  And so forth.  Sometimes Sylvia was beaten for misconstrued acts: Little Jimmy, who was said to have had kidney trouble, once playfully jumped on Sylvia’s back.  Sylvia, startled, threw him off with Jimmy landing hard on his own back.  He was unhurt, but Sylvia was punished nonetheless.

Throughout the witness testimony a pattern is evident.  Someone, Gertrude or one of the kids would hurt Sylvia in some form or fashion.  Sylvia would cry.  Later she would cry less, then not at all.

A good deal of the abuse, when it wasn’t occasioned by Sylvia’s alleged badmouthing of others, seemed to center around two issues—food and hygiene.  The withholding of food was likely an outgrowth of the scarcity of just about everything in the Baniszewski house.  I mentioned that family meals weren’t exactly bounteous.  When Lester and Betty would visit both daughters complained of being hungry.  By early September, Sylvia was being denied meals by Gertrude though Jenny continued to get as much food as the other residents of the house.  Even before this Sylvia and Jenny got “the board” for eating too much at a church supper. 

While she attended school Sylvia worked in the cafeteria which entitled her to a much needed free lunch, but this ended in October when Gertrude forbade her from further attendance.  Even before this withholding food had become a prime component of Sylvia’s physical and psychological torture.  On one occasion when Jenny came back from a school festival with a lollipop, Gertrude taunted Sylvia about how Sylvia must wish she had one too.  The discovery of a sandwich eaten a couple of weeks previously, the bounty of a chance encounter with sister Dianna at the park, resulted in a thrashing.   A supposed smear of mustard around Sylvia’s mouth which no one but Gertie could see and the odor of hamburger on her breath which only Gertie could smell brought the same. 

One evening, the Baniszewskis had hot dogs for dinner.  Sylvia was excluded from the repast until Gertrude and the kids bullied her into eating a portion of a hot dog so loaded with condiments it made her vomit.  Soon Gertie and the kids would feed her other things, but the lack of food took its toll.  Coroner Charles Ellis noted at Sylvia’s autopsy that her body had begun storing fat in her liver, a clinical sign of malnutrition.  As her stay with Gertrude went on there were reports from the neighbors Sylvia was scavenging food from garbage cans.

Gertrude’s preoccupation with Sylvia’s cleanliness may have been a facet of her conjectured sexual fixation with her.  Those who knew her said Sylvia was neat and clean in her habits and practiced good personal hygiene.  Gertrude thought otherwise and was determined to prove it.  Gertrude would rip Sylvia’s clothes off her back and prevent her from bathing.  Then she would accuse Sylvia of being dirty and subject her to scalding baths, binding Sylvia hand and foot so she could not get away.  She was assigned her own bowl and spoon because of her dirtiness and was forbidden from taking meals with the family. 

Sylvia’s exile to the basement was also part of Gertrude’s warped logic.  When Sylvia became incontinent from the constant physical punishment, she was tied to the bed and forbidden use of the bathroom.  The inevitable bedwetting would lead to equally inevitable beatings.   The final indignity took place hours before she died.  Sylvia was hosed down with cold water and detergent powder on the basement floor after soiling herself.

It’s difficult to account for the frequency and intensity of the violence inflicted on Sylvia.  Simply cataloguing what was done only heightens my own disbelief.  There are hints, however, of Sylvia being the catalyst which surfaced something already brewing within Gertrude and the Baniszewski family.  Stephanie testified Gertrude did not resort to corporal punishment often.  When asked by her mother’s attorney on cross whether there were discipline problems among the children, Stephanie said Paula and Johnny were responsible for most of the trouble in the Baniszewski household but that Gertrude tended to scapegoat Stephanie.  In an article published just after the trial, Stephanie described her goodbyes with her mother as almost a role reversal with Stephanie as the adult figure.  Stephanie was also quoted as saying that if it hadn’t been for Sylvia she herself might easily have become the target of her mother’s rage.  She thought Sylvia may have resembled someone from Gertrude’s past.  Who knows?  It’s as good an explanation as any for the unexplainable.

Then there is the question raised by every commenter on the Likens case: Why didn’t Sylvia fight back?  Or try to get away?  Why didn’t either sister tell anyone?  Paula claimed she warned Sylvia to leave the house for her own good.  On another occasion Gertrude told Jenny that Johnny had taken Sylvia for a walk at night to “lose” her, but that Sylvia had come back on her own.  If the story is true the reason for Sylvia’s return is self-evident.  She didn’t have anywhere else to go.  Sylvia had run into Dianna a couple of times but didn’t know where she lived.  A grandmother lived a mile or so away, but adults were more apt to believe adults over kids in those days and Sylvia might have feared she wouldn’t be believed leaving her in the end with an even more vindictive Gertrude.

A casual meta-analysis of books and articles suggests a consensus which holds that the Likens children were already used to harsh corporal punishment.  John Dean mentions that Lester once thrashed Danny and Sylvia for staying out all night and that Sylvia and Jenny were spanked on another occasion for dawdling on an errand to the market.  Gertrude’s slaps and paddling probably didn’t seem unusual in the beginning.  Much like frogs in a pan of water brought to boil Sylvia and Jenny did not realize they were in trouble until it was too late.

It’s useful to remind ourselves that childrearing practices were different then.  Corporal punishment was usual and accepted and family matters were considered private.  I was a child in the 1970s.  My father had fashioned a paddle from a slab of inch-thick pine; it hung on a hook on the kitchen wall.  My sisters and I were frequently spanked with the paddle as well as with belts, a wooden spoon when we were smaller, and with an open hand.  I do find it unusual that the Likens kids were being punished this way well into their teens, but it seems to have been acceptable in that time and place.  

The nature of the spankings show how easily accepting physical punishment as normal can escalate into worse mistreatment.  The methods employed in the Baniszewski home varied.  Sometimes it was with a fraternity-style wooden paddle.  Sometimes it was with a police belt given to Gertrude by John, Sr.  At first it was Gertrude administering the thrashing; when she felt under the weather she would give the job to Paula.  Later, Stephanie was enlisted.  By October, the abuse of Sylvia had turned into a free-for-all involving everyone in the house but Jenny.  (Even Jenny got dragged into it one time.  Gertrude once slapped Jenny until Jenny would slap Sylvia.  Jenny used her left hand to lessen the blow.)  

One element of the punishment is disturbing.  Jenny testified as to how she and Sylvia were told to partially undress before being paddled, adding sexual humiliation to the harm.  Of course, as the abuse against Sylvia escalated to the withholding of food and water, punches, burnings, crotch kicks, judo flips, having random objects thrown at her, strippings, tumbles down the basement steps, scalding, salted wounds, chokings, bindings, branding, shearing, coerced self-violations with a soda bottle, and head blows, perhaps humiliation became moot.

So, again, the question arises as to why the sisters did not ask for help.  I’ve already mentioned one possible answer, reporting the abuse would pit the word of a child against that of a grownup.  But why Sylvia’s growing lassitude?  Sylvia surely became passive for the same reason as her tormentors ramped up their abuse.  The Just World Hypothesis looms large in our cultural worldview.  Gertrude believed Sylvia was somehow getting what she deserved; perhaps as time passed Sylvia began to believe it herself.  I also think there is merit to the theory that Sylvia was taking the abuse for both herself and Jenny.  By all accounts Sylvia was gentle natured and deferential to adult authority, and this undoubtedly inhibited her volition to resist.  As the weeks wore on and her sense of self eroded I think Sylvia, like many victims of domestic violence, fell into the trap of learned helplessness.  When she did try to make a break for it after Gertrude floated her plan to dump Sylvia in the woods, she was too weakened to get past the front door.  The ensuing beating to her head sealed her fate.

For Jenny it was fear of Gertrude and though her critics believe otherwise, fear for Sylvia.  Remember that Jenny wasn’t wholly exempt from the abuse.  Jenny once slipped and mentioned to a church friend that Sylvia was still at home rather than in juvenile hall as instructed.  Gertrude reminded Jenny to stay on script by giving her a black eye.  It did not seem to Jenny that there were any adults in her immediate circle or beyond whom she could trust without landing her or Sylvia in worse trouble.  Her blurted offer to police Sgt. Kaiser to tell all if he would only get her away from Gertrude was a desperate gambit.  Just minutes before Paula was reading the Bible to Jenny and promising to treat her like a sister if she would stay with the Baniszewskis.   Even Jenny’s dry account of this exchange in the trial transcript evokes a sense of dread. 

As with Sylvia, there is no reason to trust Jenny would have been believed if she had spoken up.  I think Jenny was used to being treated condescendingly by adults.  The poor little crippled girl, you know.  Dianna was skeptical when she and Sylvia first mentioned Gertrude was perhaps a little heavy handed.  Lester and Betty suspected nothing during their periodic visits.  When Dianna herself sensed something amiss and went to the house Gertrude ran her off saying Lester and Betty had said not to allow her to see her sisters.  The Baniszewski home was a closed book to adults and an open secret to the neighborhood kids.

I often wonder whether anyone in the house knew the seriousness of what they were doing, or the consequences until the moment they discovered Sylvia had stopped breathing.  During her final hours downstairs, as Sylvia struggled to remain conscious by trying to recite the alphabet and by trying to identify aloud the various people who passed in and out of the basement, the Baniszewski kids went about their day and Gertrude sat in front of the television crocheting. 

We know from the coroner’s testimony that Sylvia died hours before the time her death was reported to the police.  The bathing of the body, dressing it in fresh clothes, laying it half on, half off the dingy mattress, the call to the police from the payphone at the Shell station across the street all hint at a frantic attempt to cover their backs.  After this failed, the statements to the police reflect a curious absence of guilt despite the frankness of the confessions.  Certainly the trial, which took place the following spring, shed little light. 

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

Sylvia - II: Constructing a Symbol

The semiology of Sylvia Likens would make an interesting field of study for those so inclined.  When an individual’s life becomes a preoccupation for many people for whatever reason the meaning of that individual and her life can take on many different facets depending upon the beholder’s perspective and disposition.  Kate Millett devotes The Basement partly to the meaning of Sylvia’s ordeal within feminist discourse, but I have not encountered any in-depth discussion of Sylvia-as-symbol elsewhere.  For many of us touched by her story she represents victims of child abuse and neglect, though this is a crowded field.  For others, considerations of her suffering are an exercise in theodicy. 

There’s an element of mystery to Sylvia.  She is elusive.  We know much more about how Sylvia died than how she lived.  There are a few photographs, small tidbits from news articles, and the testimony of her parents and sister at the first trial.  There is little more to go on.

This lack points up how technology has transformed social relations over the past couple of decades.  People nowadays obsessively document their daily lives with even the most trivial events captured on camera phones and uploaded to social media.  Spontaneously recording anything and everything wasn’t practical with film cameras or even camcorders, and these technologies could be costly.  Similarly, very little personal information was readily available to the public pre-internet.  Piecing together the life story of someone who died long ago, aside from vital statistics or interviews with surviving friends and relatives, often means a reliance on artifacts.

In Sylvia’s case there are few artifacts in the public domain.  After her mother Betty died in 1998, found among her effects was a suitcase filled with letters, photos, and other keepsakes including childhood pictures of Sylvia.  A news article at the time dubbed it the “Suitcase of Sorrow.”   The suitcase presumably is still with the Likens family.  They have been understandably reticent to publicly discuss Sylvia or otherwise revisit her murder so we are unlikely to learn more about her. 

Here is what we know:

Sylvia Marie Likens was born on January 3, 1949, in Lebanon, Indiana, to Lester and Elizabeth (Grimes) Likens.  She died in Indianapolis on October 26, 1965, slightly more than two months shy of her 17^th birthday.

She was the middle child of five.  Her older sister and brother, Dianna and Danny, were twins and were three years older than Sylvia.  Her younger sister and brother, Jenny and Benny, were also twins and a year younger.

Sylvia stood 5’ 4” and was of slender to average build.  She had either dark blonde or light brown hair.  Black and white photos (there are none in color) show she had dark eyes.  She was missing a front tooth from a childhood accident, so when she smiled it was with a closed mouth.

Her nickname was Cookie.

Sylvia enjoyed roller skating and dancing and singing and had a knack for drawing.  She liked The Beatles and Shirley Bassey.  She babysat and ironed laundry for pocket money and she would share her earnings with her mother.  She was an average student who probably wasn’t into academics but nevertheless understood the value of an education and had resolved to complete high school.

Her father and mother described Sylvia as quiet and dutiful.  She attended church and Sunday school regularly.  A prized possession was her bible, which she read often.

Perhaps the most striking thing, however, is that aside from Gertrude Baniszewski’s tales and the insinuations of defense attorneys at the first trial, nearly everyone who knew Sylvia had nothing but good to say about her.  Even the younger Baniszewski children said Sylvia was nice and helpful.   Sylvia undoubtedly had her faults, but the overall impression is that of a good, decent, and kind person. 

In the summer of 1965, Sylvia Likens was a happy and healthy teenager with much to look forward to.  You can get a sense of her essence from pictures taken at the time.  There is the iconic photograph of Sylvia with her upward gaze and wistful smile.  There is Sylvia posing with her mother; Betty’s expression is impassive while Sylvia’s exudes an ineffable sweetness that reaches out to the viewer across the years.  There’s a shot which appears to have been taken in a photo booth, with Sylvia in a plaid work shirt glancing sidelong at the camera.  Then there is the photograph taken in California on Easter Sunday 1965 in which Sylvia and Jenny are standing with three church friends after the service.  Sylvia, very much the young lady in an outfit replete with hat and white dress gloves, is on the left.  Taller than the other girls, she is bent slightly at the knees and is leaning forward a bit so as to fit into the picture.  The three friends are in the middle, with Jenny standing on the right. 

The paucity of information about her means that there are as many Sylvias as beholders.  Reading not only the Millett and Dean books but also the multitude of postings on the various websites devoted to her, it seems people feel compelled to project themselves on Sylvia.  You have your Sylvia, I have mine. 

The first people to project upon Sylvia were Gertrude and Paula Baniszewski.  For all intents and purposes Sylvia Likens had ceased to exist as a person once Gertrude confined her to the house, only to be endlessly redefined in other people’s imaginations.  Mother and daughter had an agenda, as we would now say.  Gertrude and Paula were not paragons of chastity—Gertrude had just broken off a relationship with a man fourteen years her junior after having his baby and miscarrying another while Paula was pregnant after a fling with a married man.  And yet they proclaimed themselves upright Christians just the same.  To square the circle, as it were, they ascribed their sins to their teenage boarder with terrifying results.  Their Sylvia was a dirty, promiscuous liar and thief unworthy of life let alone of sharing their home.

Then there are the literary Sylvias.  John Dean portrays Sylvia as an unlucky girl from the wrong side of the tracks, a “Cinderella for the prince who never showed.”  For Kate Millett, Sylvia is a transcendent victim of patriarchy.  These accounts are the gateway, if you will, to that portion of Sylvia’s world we can access.  They are the springboard for others to search for understanding.

It’s interesting to read the various online discussion threads devoted to Sylvia.  The posters are identified by age and gender, many of whom are under twenty.  While most of the threads seriously discuss aspects of the Likens murder and the motivations of the individuals involved, some are endearingly whimsical as well.  What was Sylvia’s favorite color?  Her favorite season?  Which Beatle was her favorite?  Would she like today’s music?  How would she like today’s social media?  What would she have done with her life had she hadn’t died young?  (Some guesses are fanciful—pop music diva.  Others are more prosaic—schoolteacher.)  To her younger devotees, Sylvia is a virtual BFF from another time.

Perhaps this isn’t such a bad thing if it makes us more empathetic.  There are lots of people who feel a need to connect with Sylvia in some way.  There are occasional posters on the message boards who say they knew Sylvia while she was alive, claims which are usually debunked.  Such claims of having known Sylvia or the Likens family do not seem to be a recent phenomenon.  Kate Millett wrote of a speaking engagement in Florida in the mid-1970s during which she mentioned in passing that she was beginning work on the book which eventually became The Basement.   After the talk, Millett was approached by a young woman who said she had gone to school with Sylvia in the fall of 1965.  Millett made time to chat with the woman about her memories of Sylvia.  Following the discussion Millett wondered how much of the woman’s story was true.  One does detect a fabulist streak in these claims of familiarity.  Better to think idly about alternative endings to Sylvia’s story than to stir up trouble with phony claims of knowledge.

As interesting as speculating on what might have been can be, the luckiest thing that could have happened to Sylvia Likens would have been obscurity.  Had she not met up with Gertrude Baniszewski she would have lived her life quietly and safely within her circle of family and friends.  In this alternate telling of Sylvia’s story she would finish school, get married, and start a family since few young people of limited means went on to further schooling in those days.  If she was fortunate the marriage would last.  She was said to have a rapport with younger children, and I like to think she would have been a good mom.  If she worked outside the home it would likely be in a service occupation such as waitress, cashier, or nurse’s aide.  By now, she would be retired and enjoying her grandchildren.  I am certain she would have been happy with such a life, or at least content.

Life takes interesting twists and turns, though.  I am sure Sylvia would have had many opportunities to find happiness and personal fulfillment.   It’s a pity she never had the chance.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar