House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying (St. Martin's True Crime Library) (5 page)

To show her appreciation, she danced for Richard Hobbs to phonograph music in the front room. To an adult male who had been to a night club even once in his life, the unsightly, scrawny woman’s dancing might have been ludicrous. To a 14-year-old boy, it was at least a new experience, especially when her shoulder strap slipped off. If a 37-year-old woman is drawn to teenage boys, it follows that teenage girls are her rivals.

Mrs. Wright and the Likens girls began talking about sex the latter part of August. Sylvia was reminiscing on her happy days in Long Beach, and she longed for her California boyfriend. Mrs. Wright began asking questions.

“Have you ever done anything with a boy, Sylvia?” she got around to asking.

“I guess so,” Sylvia said, not sure just what Mrs. Wright meant. She talked about the times she went skating with the boys and she and Jenny went with boys to a park on the beach.

Jenny and Stephanie joined the conversation. The talk drifted to a party the Likens children gave for their friends the time their parents took a two-day trip to Las Vegas. Sylvia admitted that she had crawled under the covers with her boyfriend.

“Why did you do that, Sylvia?” Mrs. Wright asked.

“I don’t know,” the girl said, shrugging.

Several days later, Mrs. Wright reminded the girl of her indiscretion. “You’re certainly getting big in the stomach, Sylvia,” she said. “It looks like you’re going to have a baby.”

Sylvia thought she was being kidded. “Yeah, it sure is getting big,” she agreed. “I’m just going to have to go on a diet.”

But Mrs. Wright was not kidding. She assured Sylvia and her own girls that any time they “did something” with a boy, they were sure to have a baby. And she kicked Sylvia between the legs to emphasize her point.

Paula was scandalized by Sylvia’s admission of indiscretion. Knocking Sylvia from her chair to the kitchen floor, she scolded, “You ain’t fit to sit in a chair.” Had that fat, rejected girl forgotten her own indiscretion with her Kentucky lover? Events proved, at any rate, that Paula was pregnant, and Sylvia was not.

Gertrude returned often to the sex theme. Was she madly jealous of Sylvia’s sex appeal? Was
she
responsible for the vicious mauling of the girl’s pubic region that showed up in the autopsy?

THE ROLLING
campus of Arsenal Technical High School is nearly a half-mile long and a quarter-mile deep. Situated on an old military campsite, Tech occupies many buildings and boasts more than 4,000 pupils. It is the largest preparatory school in the state of Indiana. It annually graduates more pupils from its night division than most high schools graduate in total. Within the iron rail fences enclosing the green grounds are a gymnasium and football stadium, academic buildings, an industrial shop and other facilities.

The size of the place, the iron fence and the austere brick buildings cause many a passerby to confuse Tech with the Indiana Women’s Prison. Tech is further west, in a slightly nicer neighborhood, but many of the inmates are just as tough. In the fall of 1965 they included Paula Baniszewski, Stephanie Baniszewski, and—Sylvia Marie Likens.

Tech is bordered on the west by Oriental Street and on the east by the antique neighborhood Woodruff
Place. The address is 1500 East Michigan Street. That places it two blocks north and two miles, three blocks west of 3850 East New York Street, where two pretty teenage girls with lovely long hair set out nervously for the first day of school early in September 1965.

Stephanie Baniszewski loved school. At a habeas corpus hearing four months later, when she was trying to get out of jail and back into school, she told a judge, “If school were a man, I’d marry it.” Her brothers and sisters called her “Einy” (for Einstein) because she brought home A’s and B’s on her report cards. Her narrow, plastic-framed glasses gave her radiant face an intelligent look.

Stephanie wanted to be a lawyer. Whenever her mother visited her lawyer, in hopes of dragging some more support money out of one of her ex-husbands, Stephanie went along. But Stephanie was not studying law at this time, nor did she have any idea she would soon have a need for legal advice. She was at present concerned with English and biology.

Her companion was Sylvia Likens, who by this time had become her good friend. At home they sang to one another. Stephanie would sing her favorite song to Sylvia, and Sylvia would reciprocate. Sylvia’s favorite was Shirley Bassey’s “Reach for the Stars.” She looked upward with hopes and dreams.

Sylvia did not share Stephanie’s love for school; she had been enrolled in Tech before and had dropped out on her 16th birthday. But she had a
good reason for going back. Both she and Stephanie had jobs in the school cafeteria, and that meant a free hot lunch every day, something they did not get at home.

The Baniszewskis lived on the borderline of the Tech district. Richard Hobbs, who lived just around the corner, went to Thomas Carr Howe High School, a mile to the east. Stephanie’s boyfriend also went to Howe, where he was a troublemaker. Six feet tall and carrying 170 pounds, Coy Hubbard had found at the age of 15 that he did not have to take any lip from anybody, and that included teachers.

Sylvia had no reason to fear Coy at that time; in fact, he was one of her friends. She had met him before school started, had accompanied Stephanie to Coy’s house on Linwood Avenue twice. In turn, Stephanie had accompanied Jenny and Sylvia to visit their Grandmother Grimes, who lived not far away.

Paula also re-entered Tech that fall, as a sophomore in the evening division. She worked at a drug store in the daytime.

Johnny Baniszewski, who had been living with his father, also returned to his mother’s home that September so that he could resume his education at Public School No. 78, where the other Baniszewski children and Jenny Likens were enrolled. Johnny, at 12 years, was large for his age. His straight brown hair drooped slightly over his forehead, and he showed signs of becoming a handsome young man. His quick, round eyes gave him an impish look.

When Lester Likens visited his daughters the last
day of September, he was pleased to learn that both were back in school. He was confident he had done the right thing in leaving them with Mrs. Wright. Had he checked with the Tech High School administration, he would have seen a different picture. Sylvia’s attendance record was spotty. Her last day there was October 6, one day after Mr. and Mrs. Likens’ last visit to the Baniszewski home.

In a school so large as Tech, one would think that one quiet, retiring girl might not be missed. That is not true. The school sent repeated notices to Mrs. Wright inquiring about Sylvia’s absences. Mrs. Wright answered some of the notices and even made visits to the schools to talk to Sylvia and Jenny’s teachers. The teachers, impressed by the woman’s apparent concern for the girls, were saddened to learn they had no great interest in school.

Even Stephanie was surprised at Sylvia’s poor attendance. She was puzzled when Sylvia eventually dropped out altogether. “She just doesn’t want to go,” Stephanie’s mother told her.

That may have been true, notwithstanding the fact that Mrs. Wright had forbidden her to go. Sylvia had enough unhappy experiences at Tech High School to want to stay home.

One involved a remark she had made to a male classmate.

A stranger approached Stephanie in the hall at Tech one day to ask how much she took.

“What are you talking about?” Stephanie demanded.

“How much do you want to go to bed with me?” the boy specified.

“Who told you I’d do that?” Stephanie was indignant. She may have been the only virgin in the Baniszewski household.

“A friend of yours,” the boy laughed.

“Some friend,” Stephanie snorted.

“Her name is Sylvia,” the boy told her.

When Stephanie got home, she had it out with Sylvia. When Sylvia admitted planting the rumor, Stephanie slugged her in the chin. Sylvia, in tears, apologized. That brought tears to Stephanie’s eyes too. But it did not end there.

Sylvia, smarting from all the chiding she had suffered in regard to her own sexual experience, had spread rumors about Paula too. Johnny brought one of the rumors home.

When Coy Hubbard heard about the aspersions on his beloved’s purity, he flew into a rage. He slapped Sylvia, banged her head against the wall and gave her a flip, judo style, onto her back on the floor. He never forgave her.

Neither did Mrs. Wright. She gave Sylvia the board at the time, and grosser indignities were to follow.

But the incident that served as Mrs. Wright’s pretense for keeping Sylvia out of school was the alleged theft of another girl’s gym suit.

Sylvia needed a suit for her physical education class. One morning, before setting out for school, she asked Mrs. Wright for money to buy one, and
was refused. When she came home that evening, she had a gym suit.

“I bet she took it,” Gertrude mumbled to her children. Stephanie had not gone to school with Sylvia that day and could not help her. She lay half asleep in the front room, recovering from a poisonous spider bite that had kept her out of school for two days. She dozed off again but was soon awakened by loud bickering between Gertrude and Sylvia.

“You took it!” Gertrude accused.

“No,” Sylvia pleaded. “I found it, on the sidewalk.”

Gertrude slapped her on the face and arms and kicked her shins. “You took it!” she shouted, tousling Sylvia’s hair roughly.

“All right,” Sylvia cried, “I took it!” That was a mistake. The confession in, the punishment began. Sylvia was whipped with a three-inch-wide black police belt, which John Baniszewski Sr. had given his ex-wife a couple of years before to apply to their children when they got out of order. Mrs. Wright, remembering a mysteriously acquired tennis shoe, whipped Jenny too.

Then she sat Sylvia on the couch and began lecturing her again on the evils of premarital sex. Sylvia did not realize that “Mrs. Wright” had never been married to “Mr. Wright,” who had gotten her pregnant twice.

“You should never do anything with a boy until you’re married,” the woman lectured.

“I didn’t,” Sylvia whined.

Mrs. Wright kicked her in the vagina. “You should never, never, never, never, never…,” she repeated. Sylvia moaned. Stephanie jumped out of bed, screaming at her mother. “She didn’t do anything!”

Stephanie was crying when Coy Hubbard came over, and Mrs. Wright explained to him that Sylvia had upset her. So he helped the woman apply her macabre discipline.

To impress upon Sylvia the sin of sticky fingers, for stealing a gym suit, Mrs. Wright held a lighted match to Sylvia’s fingers. “I don’t want to ever catch you stealing anything again,” she said.

“I hate you!” the woman shouted, whipping Sylvia in the rear three times more. “You’re ruining my life!”

She told Sylvia and Jenny both, “Get your clothes. You’re going to the Juvenile Center.” She did not follow through on that threat, and, as justice would have it, it was her own children who wound up at the center for delinquents, within six weeks.

GERTRUDE WRIGHT
had a sense of timing that could turn child’s play into sadism. A psychologically passive woman among her peers, she had a way with children—an evil way. For whatever motive, she was able to mobilize children’s play energy to serve her own dark purposes with Sylvia Likens. In this sordid venture, she was ably seconded by her aide-de-camp, Paula, who had become extremely jealous of Sylvia.

What started as horseplay turned out to be quite rough on the wretched Likens girl. One popular household sport at 3850 East New York Street in the autumn of 1965 was judo. The children practiced judo flips on one another; the mattress on the floor provided a handy landing mat.

Paula, Stephanie, Coy and Sylvia were playing the game one day; and when Coy flipped Sylvia, he missed the mattress. That was fun, and it set the pattern from then on. Coy later found the judo flip to be an effective form of punishment when he believed Sylvia had questioned Stephanie’s virtue.

Sylvia was a flipper too, but she always managed to come out on the short end of things. For example, there was the day Jimmy leaped on her back for a promised piggy-back ride. Sylvia, surprised, exercised her new skill to flip the boy on the floor. But Jimmy had kidney trouble, and his sister Shirley naturally thought it mean to toss him on his back. She slapped Sylvia. Sylvia did not slap back. Mrs. Wright and the children learned to take advantage of her reluctance to fight back.

Pudgy, whiny-voiced Anna Siscoe, 13, found herself in a fight with Sylvia the first of September. When it was all over, she realized it was Mrs. Wright who had caused the fight and encouraged it.

Anna originally liked Sylvia, as did nearly all those who knew her. But she did not appreciate the remarks Sylvia was supposed to have made about her mother. Mrs. Wright told the Siscoe girl, “Sylvia said your mother goes out with all sorts of men for $5.” Anna slapped and kicked the unresisting Sylvia, then dug in her fingernails and scraped the length of Sylvia’s back.

Other children moved to break up the fight, but Mrs. Wright called out, “Let them fight their own fight. Get up, Sylvia.” The girl kicked Sylvia in the abdomen; Sylvia writhed and clutched her belly, moaning, “Oh, my baby!” It appeared that Mrs. Wright had convinced her she was pregnant. After the fight, Mrs. Wright graciously applied Merthiolate to Sylvia’s wounds.

Fights with Judy Duke and Paula and Stephanie
had similar origin and encouragement. A pretty 12-year-old blonde with a lagging I.Q., Judy slapped and kicked Sylvia when told by Mrs. Wright that Sylvia had called her a bitch.

Paula was choking Sylvia once in September. Gertrude pulled her daughter off twice, then assumed an air of indifference. “Just let them fight; it’s their fight,” she said. Paula had been told that Sylvia had spread rumors she was a whore.

Sylvia’s supposedly best friend in the house, Stephanie, also went along with the rumor-fed mob psychology. Told by just about everyone that Sylvia had been bad, Stephanie took it upon herself to apply the paddle.