House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying (St. Martin's True Crime Library) (3 page)

It listed 15 confessions of theft, sexual adventure and other misbehavior: “I am writing to tell you what I have done for the last two weeks….I done things that could cause a lot of trouble….I took $10 from Gertie Wright….”

The handwriting may have been authentic, but Kaiser knew the motivation was not. By this time he was irritated. He brusquely informed Mrs. Baniszewski that she was under arrest on a preliminary charge of murder and that she might contact an attorney if she chose.

By midnight, Mrs. Baniszewski and Richard Dean Hobbs were in custody on murder charges.
Three of Mrs. Baniszewski’s children and five neighbor children were taken into custody within the next few days on juvenile delinquency charges. They were Paula Marie Baniszewski, 17; Stephanie Kay Baniszewski, 15; John Stephan Baniszewski Jr., 12; Stephanie’s boyfriend, Coy Randolph Hubbard, 15; Randy Gordon Lepper, 12; Judy Darlene Duke, 12; Anna Ruth Siscoe, 13, and Michael John Monroe, 11.

By the end of the year, after a grand jury investigation, Mrs. Baniszewski, Paula, Stephanie, Johnny, Hobbs and Hubbard were being held in jail without bond on charges of first-degree murder. The other four children had been released to their parents, under subpoena as state’s witnesses. The stage was set for the most searing courtroom drama in Indiana history.

IT WAS
a hot July day in Indianapolis. The early afternoon sun beat down heavily on New York Street, a busy one-way thoroughfare bearing impatient traffic from the frustrating vehicle snarls downtown.

Many of the motorists, who traveled the route every day on their way home from work to fashionable East Side homes, harbored a mild curiosity about life on East New York Street. Teenage children wearing frayed tennis shoes and small fry in their underwear frolicked on the sidewalks, darting in and out of the small business establishments that dotted the neighborhood.

Weary, sweating adults sometimes leaned out the windows of their homes that were jammed tightly against the sidewalks, gazing at the children or the noisy tide of traffic.

An exciting life it must be, the motorists thought, retaining their preference for the gentler life.

Had they stopped to investigate, they would have
found a somewhat gentler life in that very neighborhood. Though New York Street itself was lined with rotting rental houses divided into apartments, side streets boasted modest, clean, well-kept homes of a generally blue-collar population—carpenters, laborers, policemen, a few teachers, an occasional lawyer or chiropractor. Most owned their own homes. The finger streets supported a stable neighborhood.

This particular day, the motorists might have seen three young girls, about high school age, strolling the sidewalk of New York Street. They would not have known the girls; this was a city of half a million. Unlike the people of most Hoosier communities, the residents of the Hoosier capital are city minded; they know few of their neighbors and still fewer outside their own neighborhoods.

These three girls happened to be two sisters and their best friend in the neighborhood; their names were Sylvia Likens, Jenny Likens and Darlene McGuire; their ages 16, 15, and 14 years, respectively.

They were happy. They kept up with the popular tunes; they talked about boys; they liked to skate and dance—that is, except for Jenny. Her skating and dancing were limited by a shriveled left leg in a steel brace, but she had learned to live with this from the age of four months, and she could keep up with her companions. And despite her deformity, she was not unattractive, so she could talk about boys, too.

The Likens girls had no particular reason to be happy, except that they were children and were
with a friend. Their mother had been arrested for shoplifting. That had never happened before. Their mother and father were separated. That had happened before. Since they were in the custody of their mother—their father residing in his hometown, the small city of Lebanon, 30 miles to the northwest—they were alone. That had happened before, too, and there was a certain amount of adventure and excitement in being unsupervised.

The Likens girls had just moved into the neighborhood a couple of weeks before, when their mother rented an apartment at 109 North Euclid Avenue, two blocks off New York Street. Before the parents’ separation, the family had just returned from three months in Long Beach, Calif., where Lester Likens had worked for Douglas Aircraft. The girls and their two brothers had liked the West Coast, but their parents were homesick, so they had returned to Lebanon, where Sylvia was born.

The neighborhood was not unfamiliar. The house at 3838 East New York Street—now the home of the Monroe family—was one of the fourteen homes in and around Indianapolis in which the Likens family had resided since the 1944 teenage marriage of Lester and his Indianapolis sweetheart, who herself had grown up on the East Side. Likens had never done particularly well, drifting from job to job, but he had always managed to eke out a living, sometimes with welfare help from the township trustee.

Darlene knew a family in this same block of New York Street with seven children. Gertrude Wright
and her brood lived here, at 3850 East New York Street. The girls stopped in. Sylvia had no idea then that she would never get out.

She and Jenny made friends quickly with Mrs. Wright’s daughters, the Baniszewski girls. They asked Sylvia and Jenny to stay for supper. That is, Mrs. Wright asked Jenny. Jenny said yes, but not unless Sylvia could stay, too. She was puzzled that the woman’s invitation had not included Sylvia.

They returned to their mother’s apartment after they had eaten. Jenny reminisced on the events of the day. She and Sylvia and their mother had been on their way to Rollerland, about 10:30 that morning. Mommy said she was too warm in her black slacks. It was a hot day—Saturday, July 3, 1965. Children already were popping firecrackers as Jenny and Sylvia sat alone in the second-floor apartment.

The girls and their mother stopped into a discount house on East 10th Street, Jenny remembered. Mommy had tried on a pair of shorts or pedal-pushers—Jenny could not remember which now, even though she and Sylvia had been in the dressing room with their mother. They thought she was going to buy them, but Betty Likens just stuffed the shorts or pedal-pushers into her purse and strolled toward the door.

“Come on, Sylvia,” Jenny said. “Let’s get to the other side of the store. I don’t want to be with her when she does anything like that.” They left the store through another doorway and waited for their
mother on a bench outside. Mrs. Likens had barely exited when her arm was grabbed by a woman floorwalker.

Mommy was hustled back inside and forced to empty the contents of her purse. Out fell the stolen merchandise. Before being driven away in the paddy wagon, Mrs. Likens gave her daughters $2 from her billfold, saying, “Get something to eat.”

We were foolish to spend 70 cents of it on ice cream sodas, Jenny thought. It was lucky Mrs. Wright asked us to stay for supper.

Before the girls went for a walk with Darlene, they went to a pay phone to call the Women’s Prison and ask for Betty Likens. Their mother was not there, of course.

Now, as the firecrackers popped and darkness descended, Sylvia and Jenny began to feel lonely. They hoped Mommy would be back tomorrow.

The next day, tired of sitting around alone waiting for their mother, the girls went again to Darlene’s house. Sylvia and Darlene got into a convertible with another girl, but Jenny chose to stay behind. She went back to her mother’s apartment and accepted the landlady’s invitation to watch television downstairs. She was still lonely and was greatly relieved to hear Sylvia’s and Darlene’s voices outside.

Paula Baniszewski was with them. They set out for her house.

Paula was laughing. “I’m two months pregnant,” she said.

“Aw, you’re kidding,” Jenny said. She did not know Paula.

Darlene asked Sylvia and Jenny if they would like to help her clean house that summer. She said her parents were going to give her $5 a week for it.

Soon the girls arrived at Paula’s house. They had Cokes and talked. Two of the Baniszewski children, 12-year-old Johnny and 15-year-old Stephanie, were away on a vacation trip with their divorced and remarried father, John S. Baniszewski Sr., a policeman in the South Side suburb of Beech Grove. But there was no more room in the house than usual. Mrs. Wright’s sister-in-law and her two children were staying there then. Though it got noisy at times, their six-room share of the two-story, dingy, gray frame double on the corner was big enough to hold them all.

Sylvia and Jenny were invited to spend the night, and the children stayed up to celebrate Shirley Baniszewski’s 10th birthday at midnight.

If Gertrude Wright looked drawn and exhausted, there were reasons, not the least of which were the thirteen pregnancies—and six miscarriages—she had endured. The latest miscarriage had been in the preceding April, and it was complicated by the disappearance soon after of her eldest daughter, Paula, 17, who ran away with a married man to Hazard, Kentucky.

Gertrude had counted on Paula to help her run the house. She was forced to resume taking in ironing a few days after her miscarriage in order to keep the family going. By May, she was working as much
as sixteen hours a day, ironing, baby-sitting, and vending at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway during the month of the 500 Mile Race.

Gertrude had never had it easy. Her father, whom she adored, died of a heart attack before her very eyes when she was 11 years old. The third of six children and not overly fond of her mother, Gertrude quit school at the age of 16 and soon married John Baniszewski, who was two years older. She clerked in drug stores and dime stores and bore her husband four children.

She divorced him after 10 years, and there followed an unhappy three-month marriage in Kansas to a man named Edward Gutherie, who did not care for the children. Gertrude returned to Indianapolis and lived with her former husband, Baniszewski, for seven more years, bearing him two more children.

She divorced him again in 1963, and began cohabiting with her young lover, Dennis Lee Wright, and bore him a son, Dennis Jr. When he deserted her, she filed paternity suits against him for support of Dennis Jr. and for expenses of the miscarriage. The woman suffered physical abuse at the hands of Wright and perhaps one of her other husbands, and she was a chronic sufferer of asthma and nervous tension. Her chain-smoking complicated her respiratory ailments.

In the summer of 1965, Gertrude—5 feet 6 inches tall but weighing barely 100 pounds—began to feel the pressure she had felt fifteen years before, when she had suffered a nervous breakdown after the
birth of Stephanie. She looked at least 10 years older than her 37 years. With her own children, and neighbor children, in and out of the house all day, she had her hands full. But the appearance of the Likens girls, she soon saw, presented an opportunity to supplement her meager income, which at the time consisted of child support payments, payment for ironing, and the few dollars brought in occasionally by Paula, who had returned from her Kentucky spree, disillusioned and only a little wiser.

“How old do you guess my mother is?” asked Paula.

“How old is your oldest daughter?” Jenny asked of Mrs. Wright.

“Paula is 17,” she said.

“Then I would say you are 37,” Jenny said.

“No,” she said, “I’m 31.” This “young” woman felt a little tired that night, though, and retired early.

Shortly before midnight, there was a knock at the door. “There are two men out there,” said Shirley, peering through the glass in the door.

Jenny took a peek. “It’s my daddy and my brother Danny,” she exulted.

Lester Likens drew his girls out on the porch before asking, “Where’s Mommy?”

“She’s in jail,” they whispered, not wanting the others to hear.

Likens said he and Danny, 19, had been looking all over for his wife and the girls after finding no one in the Euclid Avenue apartment. Darlene had directed him to the Baniszewski house. Lester said he
had plans to go on a tour of Indiana county fairs, to operate a concessions stand with a carnival company, and he wanted “Mommy” to go with him. “You girls get ready,” he said. “You’re going to Lebanon.”

Gertrude was awakened by the sound of male voices. She invited Lester and Danny inside. They left briefly for a quick supper of White Castle hamburgers, which they brought back to the house and shared with Mrs. Wright and her children.

Then Likens and his son continued their search. Jail officials told him his wife had been released. Not finding her at her Euclid Avenue apartment, he returned to Mrs. Wright’s, exhausted and somewhat under the influence of liquor. As he sat in the easy chair, he cried, spouting words of love for his wife and his five children. He and Danny accepted Mrs. Wright’s offer for them to spend the night in her living room.

Before he fell asleep, Lester talked of his carnival plans. Mrs. Wright saw her opportunity and seized it. She offered to board the girls for $20 a week and treat them like her own. Her own daughters insisted on it, and the Likens girls agreed. Lester gave his tentative approval, pending the approval of his wife.

Jenny and Sylvia that night shared an upstairs bedroom with Marie Baniszewski, 11; Shirley Baniszewski, just turned 10, and Jimmy Baniszewski, 8. The children were to take turns with a bed in the room and a mattress laid out on the floor. That night, Jenny and Sylvia slept on the bed.

Up at daybreak, Lester Likens found his wife at her parents’ home at 333 South Temple Avenue, and told her of the carnival plans.

They returned to Mrs. Wright’s, and Mrs. Likens agreed to the terms for her daughters. Lester plunked down $20 in advance. Neither he nor his wife so much as inspected the house. Neither had gone beyond the living room; neither knew that there was no stove, but only a hot plate in the kitchen; that there was a shortage of beds upstairs. “I didn’t pry,” Likens was to testify later. “I was going to let my mother in Lebanon take care of them, but she had her hands full.”