House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying (St. Martin's True Crime Library) (9 page)

Ricky had numerous friends at school, and the adults in the neighborhood liked him too. He was known to have shoveled snow and run errands for neighbors without asking a dime.

When Mrs. Hobbs was taken to the hospital Sunday, October 24, neither she nor her husband was aware that Ricky was acquainted with a large family called the Baniszewskis. She did not know her son had carved the words “I’m a prostitute and proud of it!” on a girl’s belly the day before.

When Mrs. Hobbs died November 8, 1965, at the age of 43, a day after her son’s 15th birthday, she was not aware that Ricky was under arrest, being held without bond on a charge of murder.

That same Sunday night she had entered the hospital, October 24, 1965, two doors down the street, on a mattress on the grubby floor of an upstairs bedroom, someone else lay dying. But no one had the idea she was going to die, unless her utterance to her sister the night before came from a premonition that she, herself, knew.

She had the words “I’m a prostitute and proud of it!” freshly carved into her belly; above that, a red, ugly “3.” The young woman was 16 years old, soon to be 17. Her name was Sylvia. Mrs. Hobbs had slightly more than two weeks to live; Miss Likens had slightly more than two days. Mrs. Hobbs’ condition already was terminal; Sylvia’s was not, so far as anyone knew. But the rapid series of events that were
to occur to her in those next two days, some of them already described as part of her longest weekend, were to bring her to a moribund state much quicker than her 43-year-old neighbor.

Sylvia was somewhat recovered by Monday evening, enough to climb the stairs to the second story, take a bath and chat with Stephanie. It was then, as she saw Sylvia naked in the bathroom, that Stephanie first realized Sylvia had been branded. Stephanie’s mother, who said Ricky had done the tattooing and branding, assured her daughter that the words would fade from Sylvia’s skin in time.

That was doubtful, but it was an academic proposition anyway. There was no time. And Gertrude, who had been to her doctor that day for treatment for vomiting and a nervous rash covering her face and chest, was in no mood to give Sylvia’s wounds time to heal.

Gertrude knew she was in trouble, and she resented Sylvia for it. She slapped the girl; Johnny punched her. Randy Lepper walked into the room and watched them. Gertrude suggested they lose Sylvia and call the police to go looking for her. She picked up a chair to swing at Sylvia, but it broke as she swung clumsily. Gertrude’s dope-induced clumsiness also accounted for a black eye she gave herself as she swung the paddle at Sylvia and missed.

The thought of taking Sylvia somewhere and losing her obsessed Mrs. Wright as the group drifted into the front room. She instructed Sylvia’s sister Jenny to run upstairs and get dressed. “You and Johnny are going
to blindfold her and take her to Jimmy’s Forest,” she said.

Sylvia, for once, panicked. She made it as far as the front porch, but Gertrude dragged her back inside. Worried about the girl’s unhealthy look, Mrs. Wright tried to make her eat two pieces of toast. “I can’t swallow,” Sylvia mumbled through her swollen mouth. As though she could force Sylvia to eat, Gertrude whipped her across the face with a brass curtain rod, again and again until the pieces were bent into right angles.

Coy Hubbard finished work at Laughner’s Cafeteria at 8:30 p.m., and he stopped in at Mrs. Wright’s on his way home to get his exercise. His appearance stopped the sport for a while because his one hard blow with a broomstick knocked Sylvia unconscious. Mrs. Wright dragged the motionless girl to the basement. It was the last time Coy Hubbard saw Sylvia alive.

A half-hour past midnight, a car with two occupants pulled to the curb of the half-lit, somewhat quieted New York Street. When the motor died, the woman and her husband heard a scraping sound coming from the direction of the Baniszewski house. A strange time to shovel coal.

Mr. and Mrs. Vermillion went on inside their own house next door. But the noise from the neighbors’ house was not getting any softer, and an occasional shout rose above the scraping. Mrs. Vermillion’s combination of annoyance and curiosity guided her outdoors; she saw a light in the Baniszewski basement,
and she decided that the basement was the source of the noise.

Inside, the younger children, including Jenny, had gone to bed.

The noise continued. “Well, I just may have to call the police to stop that,” the neighbor woman mused. But it stopped—at 3 a.m. What happened in the basement that night was known only to Gertrude and to Sylvia; one of them never told, and the other never had a chance to.

Jenny did not see her sister before school the next morning, but she came home for lunch shortly before noon and, after fixing two pieces of toast, descended the basement steps. Sylvia was half-sitting, half-lying on the floor. She refused the toast. Jenny could not make out the words Sylvia was trying to say.

Before Jenny returned home from the afternoon school session, Mrs. Wright had Sylvia propped up in the kitchen, trying to feed her some milk and donuts. She had thrown Sylvia to the floor in frustration, but had propped her back up in the chair and had handed her the donuts and glass of milk. Sylvia mumbled something unintelligible and threw the glass of milk to the floor, spastically. Shirley, who had been home all day with a cold, watched, not knowing what to say.

Gertrude gave Sylvia another glass of milk. Sylvia attempted to raise it to her mouth but again lost control of her arm. She was taken back down to the basement.

She was lying on the floor of the basement when
Paula came home from her new job at a downtown cafeteria. Sylvia just lay there, moaning, mumbling. She tried to recite her ABC’s, but could not get past D: “A, B, C,…D,…,” and over again. Gertrude was shouting at her to clean herself up. She had moved her bowels.

“If you don’t get up,” Paula said, “I’ll give you a broad jump.”

Other children gathered in the basement; Jenny had arrived home shortly after 3:30. Ricky Hobbs stopped in to say hello; he was still in his school clothes. Sylvia managed to look around and point at Hobbs and Mrs. Wright. “You’re Ricky,” she drawled, “and you’re Gertie….”

“Shut up,” Gertrude snapped. “You know who I am.”

“All my teeth feel loose,” Sylvia said. She had a rotten pear in her hand but was having trouble biting into it.

“Don’t you remember, Sylvia?” Jenny asked. “Your front tooth was knocked out when you were seven.”

Sylvia collapsed on the floor near the steps. Infuriated, Gertrude stepped onto the girl’s face, first one foot, then the other, and just stood there a moment.

Jenny had hoped to earn some money that afternoon, and shortly she left the house with a rake. She was never to see her sister and companion alive again.

Marie had stopped down in the basement. “Hi, Sylvia,” she said quietly, waving her hand slightly.

Sylvia’s hand moved slightly, and she tried to say
something, but it appeared to be too much effort. Marie left with Jenny.

“You faker!” Gertrude shouted at Sylvia. “Clean yourself up.”

At Gertrude’s request, Randy Lepper had brought over his parents’ garden hose so that Gertrude could clean out the basement, as he understood it. When he reached the bottom of the steps, he saw Johnny turning the hose on Sylvia, laughing. Someone had covered the girl’s body with Trend detergent to aid in the cleansing.

Gertrude, who had climbed the basement steps back to the kitchen, saw that Stephanie was home now and explained that Sylvia had had an accident in her shorts. She asked Stephanie to wash Sylvia. It was about 5 p.m.

Stephanie dropped her books, trotted down the stairs, and saw her brother already washing Sylvia, with the hose. Sylvia, half-lying, half-sitting, was mumbling something incoherent. “Turn off that hose!” Stephanie instructed her brother. She intended to carry Sylvia upstairs for a bath but found her too heavy. Stephanie, worried, began to cry.

Ricky Hobbs had done his homework, changed clothes and eaten dinner, and he was on his way back to the Baniszewski house. He was a little curious about Sylvia.

When he opened the Baniszewskis’ back door and walked in about 5:30, he slipped down the basement stairs. Gertrude was slumped against the wall, crying; Stephanie, cuddling Sylvia, was crying too.
“What’s the matter?” the boy asked. Stephanie said she thought Sylvia might be dead.

But Hobbs detected short, labored breaths from Sylvia and, with Stephanie’s help, managed to drag the girl up to the kitchen. Her skin was cold, and someone wrapped her in a blanket. Hobbs thought she was having extreme trouble breathing and began to apply pressure respiration.

Stephanie ran upstairs to turn on the water for a warm bath. Soon Johnny, who had finished hosing off the basement floor, called from upstairs that the bath was ready. Stephanie grabbed Sylvia’s feet, and Hobbs grabbed her under the arms. They started up the stairs. Near the top, Sylvia’s wet, slippery body fell from Hobbs’ grasp, and her head banged on the steps.

Gertrude followed them upstairs. “She’s faking!” she repeated. “She’ll be all right!”

But when Stephanie began to undress Sylvia for the bath, Gertrude ordered them to dump Sylvia in the tub with her clothes on. “Hurry!” she said. Sylvia managed to groan. “I wish my daddy was here,” she moaned faintly.

After the bath, Ricky and Stephanie dried Sylvia and dressed her in warmer clothes, a sweater and pedal-pushers. They laid her on the mattress in the bedroom.

Gertrude followed them into the bedroom, shouting frantically, “Faker! Faker!” She picked up a book and slapped Sylvia hard on the side of the head.

Hobbs practically pushed the hysterical Mrs. Wright down the stairs.

Shirley brought up some hot tea and asked how Sylvia was doing. “Oh, she’ll be all right,” Stephanie assured, but she had already suggested to Ricky to call a doctor.

Stephanie raised Sylvia’s head and brushed the girl’s hair back; she seemed to revive somewhat. “Oh, take me home, Stephanie,” she pleaded.

Suddenly, she stopped breathing. Hobbs came back in and put his ear to her chest, listening for a heartbeat. “Do you know how to give mouth-to-mouth respiration?” he asked Stephanie.

“Yes,” she said.

“Okay, give it to her,” Hobbs said.

Gertrude wandered back into the room, screaming. “Stop screaming and get out!” Stephanie ordered. She began the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation; and Sylvia began breathing once more.

Stephanie understood that Ricky had gone to call the police instead of a doctor, and she was hoping they would get there soon with a mechanical resuscitator. She still was expecting police to revive Sylvia when they rushed into the room. But to her dismay, they did nothing. Sylvia was dead.

IF THE
general citizenry of Indianapolis was shocked by the horror of the murder, detectives and attorneys were at least equally shocked at the casualness and lack of remorse shown by the children who participated in it. Child after child, when asked to explain why he or she participated, said simply, “Gertie told me to.”

Did Gertie Wright have a hypnotic evil eye? Hardly. More than hypnotic, she was a hypochondriac, a whiny medicine hound. But she was the authority in her own household, and she had a way of getting what she wanted done. Children harboring some pent-up hostility, egged on by slanders on Sylvia Likens, encouraged by the mob psychology of seeing others mistreat her, found that their own mistreatment of Sylvia was sanctioned—even prescribed—by the only adult in the house.

But their behavior was not sanctioned by society in general, or by the law in particular. And when the police closed in on them, the children found they no
longer had even Mrs. Wright to back them up. For the haggard woman appealed to her physical ailments as evidence she could not possibly have been able to cause Sylvia any great harm. She told police she was in bed sick most of October and did not even see Sylvia much of that time. If anyone harmed Sylvia, she concluded, it must have been the children.

The first one questioned in the case, after Jenny Likens, was Richard Hobbs. Ricky, when questioned at the scene, had gone along with Gertrude’s little tale—that Sylvia had come to the back door that evening, battered and bruised.

Asked what he was doing there, the boy told police, “I’m a friend of Gertrude’s.” He mentioned also that his father did not allow him to stay out late at night, so police let him go home for the time being. He watched television a while before going to bed shortly before 9 p.m., the time at which police rapped on the door and told construction worker Woodrow Hobbs that his 14-year-old son would have to come along with them.

At police headquarters, on the fourth floor of a six-story wing off the towering City-County Building, the boy talked freely and more truthfully after Detective Sgt. Kaiser told him Jenny had implicated him. Ricky’s father had always instructed him to be truthful.

The next day, when the defendants appeared for arraignment in Municipal Court, Kaiser advised the elder Hobbs he had better get an attorney for the boy. “Sgt. Kaiser,” the man replied, “if my boy’s involved in
this thing, I want him to tell you the truth and cooperate.” Kaiser took a signed confession from the boy that afternoon, in which Ricky admitted his participation in the tattooing and branding, adding that he hit Sylvia 10 or 15 times on the chest with the back of his hand.

“Why didn’t Sylvia get up and leave?” a newspaper reporter asked the Hobbs boy later. “Was she a masochist?”

“To tell you the truth,” the boy replied, “I didn’t know Sylvia that well. It was just a casual relationship.”

He had just happened to be there when Mrs. Wright told him to tattoo Sylvia, and he did it. It was that simple.

Next to talk to Kaiser was Mrs. Wright. Kaiser learned that her true legal name was Baniszewski, and she was to be known as Gertrude Baniszewski throughout the court proceedings.

She fidgeted, and she told the detective she was being treated by a doctor for nerves and asthma. She denied all knowledge of Sylvia’s mistreatment. Kaiser slapped a preliminary murder charge on her, told her she could get an attorney if she wished, and said he would see her in court the next day.