House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying (St. Martin's True Crime Library) (4 page)

“You’ll have to take care of these girls with a firm hand,” Likens told Mrs. Wright before he left, “because their mother has let them do as they please.”

SYLVIA LIKENS
was cute; friends called her Cookie. Her long curly hair hung below her shoulders. She was slender and pretty and in the bloom of life. She had something of a sassy look about her, but that was from keeping her mouth closed, even when she smiled. She was trying to conceal the gap left by a missing front tooth, knocked out in a childhood collision with a brother.

But Sylvia was a generally quiet, unassuming girl, and everyone liked her. She was helpful and gladly pitched in with the housework while the others played that summer at the Baniszewski house, just as she had helped at home, where she also gave her mother part of her earnings from a regular baby-sitting job and from ironing she took in. She was soon to find her housework appreciated about as much as Cinderella’s.

Sylvia was no angel, but she was a religious girl. She owned a Bible, and she had been baptized along with her brothers and sisters two years before at the
East 16th Street Christian Church in Indianapolis. Before the summer of 1965 was over, she was to find herself too busy with housework to attend Sunday school.

“Sylvia,” a neighbor recounted, “said she felt she was the odd one in the family because she was born between two sets of twins.” Danny and Dianna were two years older; Jenny and Benny, a year younger.

Sylvia was neither bright nor stupid. She made average grades in school and passed most of her subjects despite repeated absences. When she turned 16 on January 3, 1965, she quit school as her father, mother, brother and sister had done. But now established at the Baniszewskis’, she planned to re-enter Arsenal Technical High School, her mother’s alma mater, in September as a freshman.

Sylvia’s first week at 3850 East New York Street was pleasant enough. The girls would listen to phonograph records in the house or walk to one of three parks within a three-mile radius. Jenny, steel brace and all, would hobble along with the rest of them.

Mrs. Wright, struggling to pay the $55-a-month rent and keep the family in food, became understandably edgy at times. She would scream at the kids to get out of the house; that’s how some of the trips to the park started.

Neighbor children were always around too. Randy Lepper, the mischievous, cherub-faced 12-year-old from across Denny Street (the Baniszewski house was on the corner) dropped in regularly; so did Darlene McGuire. Later, in July, Richard Hobbs,
a 14-year-old from two doors north on Denny Street, was introduced to the household. Judy Duke, Anna Siscoe, Mike Monroe and others came over frequently, as the children in the neighborhood got acquainted. The Baniszewskis had occupied the home only several weeks, and already it was becoming a neighborhood center. Jenny’s twin brother, Benny, staying with his grandparents, spent two or three nights at the Baniszewski home that summer.

Meals were skimpy, but no one complained. A day’s fare might consist of two pieces of toast for breakfast, skipping lunch while at the park all day, and a bowl of soup for supper.

About July 17, Sylvia met the girl who was to become her best friend in the house. Danny was with them too as Mrs. Wright and her children, with Sylvia, took a drive in the children’s aunt’s car to pick up Stephanie, who was returning to Mrs. Wright. Not until she arose the next morning and saw Sylvia still there, plus Sylvia’s sister Jenny, did Stephanie realize there were two additions to the family.

But before Stephanie’s arrival, Jenny and Sylvia had gotten a taste of things to come. Mrs. Wright dragged them both upstairs, slapped Jenny, and snarled, “Well, I took care of you two bitches for a week for nothing.” The next day a money order from Lester Likens arrived in the mail for his girls’ care.

A few days later, Likens and his wife visited their daughters between fairs, and Likens gave Mrs. Wright another $20 in advance. The girls did not complain during their parents’ brief visit. Mr. and
Mrs. Likens often stopped by for a half-hour or an hour on weekends if they were home between fairs. When they were in Indianapolis for two weeks at the end of August for the Indiana State Fair, their visits were no more frequent, however.

Sylvia was paddled again the third week in July, when Mrs. Wright became convinced Sylvia was getting the Baniszewski children to loiter about grocery stores, snitching bottles to turn in for deposit return. The Likens girls’ father had told them they could pick up a few pennies by finding empty pop bottles to turn in; they spent part of their time in the park looking for bottles.

When Mrs. Wright found out about it from her children, both Jenny and Sylvia “got the board.” That means they were whipped with a quarter-inch-thick fraternity-style paddle. If Sylvia was lucky, she got it in the back. Eventually she got it in the back of the head. If Gertrude was feeling weak from her asthma or bronchitis, she would delegate the punishment to Paula, who didn’t mind.

It was not to Sylvia’s advantage that neighbor children were mobbing the house the fourth week in July, because that irritated Mrs. Wright. Children were in before she got out of bed in the morning; Randy Lepper was often there as early as 9 a.m. Mrs. Wright, feeling nagged and tired, was losing her ironing, and she began to focus her resentment on Sylvia.

Things got worse in August, but there were still some happy times. Sylvia found things not a great deal worse than they had ever been for her. But the
month was to be marked by two incidents, impugning her honesty and her chastity, which may have helped Gertrude rally resentment of the other children against Sylvia. The incidents involved Sylvia’s admission of a sexual indiscretion in California earlier in the year, and an accusation of stealing.

But in Sylvia’s mind, the incidents were obscured by the happier thoughts, like trips to the parks and the regular attendance at Sunday school with the Baniszewski children. They all attended the Memorial Baptist Church, a fundamentalist institution on Alabama Street near a bawdy movie house. When the movie house burned down later, the church’s pastor, the Rev. Roy Julian, praised the fire as an “act of God” and “the answer to our prayers.”

The Rev. Mr. Julian was pleased at the Likens girls’ regular attendance at his church, and he was particularly proud of them on Sunday, August 22. That day, accompanied by the Baniszewski girls, Jenny and Sylvia “came forward” before the congregation and publicly confessed their faith.

But although Paula came forward too, her spirit seemed less than Christian. On the first of August she had broken her wrist slugging Sylvia on the jaw and then bragged about it at church. It was common knowledge in the congregation. Paula even told one church matron, “I tried to kill her.”

The woman passed it off as so much childish talk.

Paula gave that impression—childishness, immaturity. She had managed to get through nine and a half years of school and was not stupid, but she
made no strong effort to understand. She preferred to explain all happenings as acts of God.

Perhaps she was saddled with too much responsibility at too early an age. Playing second-in-command to an emotionally unstable adult was hardly good on-the-job training for adulthood. But Paula’s physical appearance, with 160 pounds hanging on a 5-foot-4½-inch frame, did little to evoke any sympathy for her. And something had instilled a streak of meanness in her.

The fracture of her wrist did not stop her; the cast she wore for six weeks was just another weapon. She slammed Sylvia in the mouth with it, and blood spurted. Sylvia cried.

Paula was satisfied in her own mind that Sylvia had called Mrs. Wright an unspeakable name. “If you say anything else,” she told Sylvia, “I’m going to break the cast on you.” Paula had merely taken her mother’s word for it that Sylvia had made the foul utterance; she had not heard any name-calling herself.

How many false charges were levied against Sylvia? No one will ever know. But she was “spanked” the day Mrs. Wright missed $10 from her purse, and Mrs. Wright told Sylvia she knew she was stealing from the neighborhood drug store, too.

If Sylvia ever had $10 during her stay with Mrs. Wright, no one saw her spend it. Had she any money, she surely would have spent it on food. She was always hungry. She was a growing girl, and she needed
something to eat. But when she managed to find some nourishment the other children missed out on, she was punished.

The home’s food supply was especially low the third week in August, a couple of days before Gertrude’s child support check was due. The only milk in the house was reserved for the baby, Dennis Wright Jr. The rest of the family were down to soup and crackers, then only toast and margarine. The children had to eat their soup in shifts, because there were only three spoons in the house. Later, two of them were lost.

Envy reigned. If someone got something to eat, the others knew, and they were not happy about it. One Sunday, in the evening, the children received a rare treat: They attended a church supper. Sylvia had the first opportunity in weeks to eat something she liked. She would be sorry. When the children got home, Paula tattled on both Sylvia and Jenny for “eating too much.” They were stripped, and they “got the board.”

Sylvia was clubbed 15 times on the back.

One day the girls met their older sister, Dianna—a divorcee at 18—in the park. She bought Sylvia a sandwich. Sylvia thought she would get away with that one, but Marie Baniszewski remembered it two months later, and the punishment was worse than 15 blows on the back.

One time, Sylvia’s “gluttony” was dealt with at a kitchen table session involving an adulterated hot
dog. Gertrude’s, Paula’s and Randy Lepper’s hot dogs were just like ball-park frankfurters, but Sylvia’s had something extra. It was passed around the table so the others could take turns loading it with mustard, ketchup and other spices. When she was forced to eat it, she vomited. So they made her try it again. She would have preferred that second helping to something she was forced to eat late in October.

There also were times she didn’t eat at all. One such day in September, Gertrude had given Jenny a quarter to spend at a school festival, and Jenny came home with a sucker. “Don’t you wish you had one, Sylvia?” Gertrude taunted. Not too long afterward, Sylvia was given a bowl of soup, but was told to eat it with her fingers.

Another time Sylvia did not eat was when Gertrude was convinced she
had
eaten. “I smell White Castles on your breath,” Gertrude said. “Danny bought you a hamburger, didn’t he?” Gertrude also saw mustard on Sylvia’s lips, but Jenny and the little children didn’t.

Sylvia insisted she had not seen her brother Danny since school let out, and she certainly had not had a hamburger, such a sin as it was. But Gertrude was convinced and slugged Sylvia in the eye until it became black and blue, trying to make her confess. Whether or not Paula had seen mustard or smelled White Castle onions, she too was convinced that Sylvia deserved to be punished. She
yanked at Sylvia’s long tresses and pulled her from the kitchen chair onto the floor.

“I didn’t,” Sylvia sobbed, picking herself up. “I wasn’t with him.”

Jenny also bore the brunt of unjust punishment. One day at Brookside Park, she spotted an abandoned tennis shoe. Because of her deformity, she did not need shoes that matched, so she tried on the lone shoe and wore it home.

“Did you steal that?” Gertrude asked. Her children—Paula, Stephanie, Shirley, Marie and Jimmy—glared at Jenny tensely.

“No,” the accused girl replied.

“Don’t lie to me,” Gertrude said. Her voice was heavy with menace.

“I’m not lying to you,” Jenny pleaded.

“Paula, get the board,” Gertrude instructed. Sylvia got about 10 licks then too because she had been at the park with Jenny and failed to confirm Mrs. Wright’s suspicion.

Mr. and Mrs. Likens visited their daughters about the middle of August, but they saw nothing out of the way, and the girls did not complain, other than to say they were hungry and would like to go to a drive-in for a Coke or a hamburger. They were accustomed to being punished, often unjustly.

Gertrude’s temper was not improved by getting involved with the wrong end of the law for the first time in her life, at the age of 37, in August. Her physical condition was such that she didn’t feel like working;
the asthma season was just coming on. Paula was not working at the time either, and the support money was neither enough nor regular. Among the first to suffer in the vicious economic circle was the neighborhood newspaper boy. Mrs. Wright had not paid him; and that, in Indianapolis, is a crime. Police served a warrant on Mrs. Wright on August 18, 1965, for failure to pay a newsboy. When she also failed to answer the warrant, and police were sent to arrest her August 27, she became defiant.

Now she faced two charges—defrauding a newsboy and resisting arrest. She paid fines of $1 and costs on each count in Municipal Court the 29th of September. That was her total police record until October 26, 1965.

Things in general looked ominous for Sylvia, but she was buoyed by her confession of faith in church August 22. She told Gertrude she was “saved.”

“Are you?” the woman asked.

“I don’t think so,” said Paula.

Sylvia had only a few more opportunities to get right with God. Most of the remaining Sunday mornings of her life she was kept home to get the house ready for company.

Lester Likens and his wife visited the Baniszewski home again August 26, and Lester gave Mrs. Wright another cash payment for boarding his daughters. Had he only known the double meaning of that word.

Lester eventually produced money order receipts to prove $220 was paid to Mrs. Wright over the
three months his daughters stayed with her, and he testified he paid her at least $80 more in cash.

That the Baniszewski home was a neighborhood mecca is no wonder. A house full of girls is enough attraction for neighborhood boys. These included Richard Hobbs, Randy Lepper, Mike Monroe, Stephanie’s boyfriend, Coy Hubbard, and others. Couple this attraction with Gertrude’s fondness for boys, and the picture becomes clearer. Gertrude’s paramour, Dennis Wright, was not yet of voting age when he fathered the 37-year-old woman’s youngest child. Gertrude was still a woman, and she appreciated the boys’ presence as much as Paula and Stephanie did. The boys liked her, too.