House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying (St. Martin's True Crime Library) (7 page)

“No, they haven’t been,” the woman replied, somewhat indignant.

“Well,” the nurse continued, “we received an anonymous phone call that there were children here with open, running sores.”

“You can check my children,” Mrs. Wright said. “None of them have open sores on their body.”

“Well, this woman said there was one girl with sores all over her body,” the nurse continued. Jenny sat staring, motionless, her eyes wide open.

Gertrude bristled. “Jenny, go do the dishes!” she snapped. Calmed down some, she said firmly, “I know who you’re looking for. Jenny’s sister, Sylvia.
She has sores all over her body; she won’t keep herself clean. I finally kicked her out of the house.” Mrs. Sanders wanted to know why.

“She’s not worthy to stay here,” Mrs. Wright said. “She’s a prostitute; she runs around with all the neighborhood boys.” Paula chimed in with her own distaste for Sylvia.

“I don’t know where she would be now,” Gertrude said. Jenny knew that her sister was then in the basement of that very house, but she did not say anything. Gertrude and Paula knew it, too.

“She even called my daughters prostitutes,” Gertrude said, continuing the verbal barrage. “Who called you, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” the nurse said. “I didn’t take the call. It was an anonymous call.” She later was to learn that the caller was Mike Monroe’s mother, from a few doors down the street.

Mrs. Sanders rose to leave. She drove to her office and filed a report on a “one time only” card.

Other visitors to the home that fall included the police. Besides the two runs they made to 3850 East New York Street in connection with Mrs. Wright’s failure to pay the newsboy, they made runs to the house on September 10 and October 20, 1965. The September 10 run was for first aid for Marie Baniszewski, who had accidentally cut a gash in her wrist. Police rushed her to Community Hospital for stitches to close the wound.

The October 20 run was on a report of a burglary. The youth who lived in the other half of the house,
Robert Bruce Hanlon, banged on the door that evening, demanding the return of some things he said the children had stolen from his basement.

Gertrude told him be was knocking at the wrong door, and they argued on the porch. She called the police, telling them she had found Hanlon halfway through her window. The police locked him up on a burglary charge.

Mrs. Vermillion and her husband had witnessed practically the whole scene from their car, parked in the street. When Mrs. Vermillion heard the youth could get a 10-to-20-year sentence for burglary, she became concerned. As a witness, she helped free him of the charge.

Jenny saw her older sister, Dianna Shoemaker, in the park twice in September, but no one was too concerned about Sylvia then. When Jenny did become concerned, she was too frightened to tell anyone.

LITTLE JENNY
Likens was confused. Staring her in the face, from the top of her wooden desk in her eighth grade general science class, was something she understood to be a “tuition.” Gertrude had told her never to bring a “tuition” home with her “because I won’t pay it.” But the teacher had told Jenny, as she understood it, that since her parents did not own any house or furniture, she would have to pay tuition. It was $165. She could not take it home to Gertrude, and the teacher would not let her go home without it.

“Maybe I should take it to Grandmother Grimes,” thought Jenny. “She doesn’t live too far away, down near Southeastern Avenue. I could probably get there before suppertime. But if Gertrude found out, I’d get the belt. And if I don’t get home right after school, Sylvia will get the belt. I’d hate to leave Sylvia alone there. I wish Sylvia were with me now so we could both go to Grandmother Grimes.

“Sylvia was always so good to me,” Jenny’s
thoughts continued. “I remember the times she took me to Rollerland. She knew I couldn’t skate, so she made me put a skate on my good foot, and she gave me her hand and pulled me around the rink. Sylvia was so nice to me. I just couldn’t go to Grandmother Grimes and leave her alone at Gertrude’s. Something awful might happen. But I can’t take the tuition home. Gertrude’ll hit the ceiling. I’ll get the belt, or the board. Oh, what’ll I do!”

She took the “tuition” home. Gertrude’s reaction was not so violent as expected. She just laid the “tuition” on a high shelf and said she would give it to Sylvia and Jenny’s daddy.

Lester Likens never paid the tuition. As events proved, his daughters never got their full year of school anyway.

The last time Jenny and Sylvia had seen their older sister Dianna in the park was a hot, still day in September. The smell of autumn had not yet pervaded the air. They told Dianna that Sylvia had it pretty rough. Every time something went wrong, they said, it was “Paula, get the board!”

But Dianna thought they were exaggerating. Their own father had used a belt himself to keep his girls in line, and usually they deserved it. Once in California, Sylvia and Danny had gotten it for staying out all night. Back in Indianapolis, Sylvia and Jenny got it for fooling around in the supermarket when they should have been on their way home. Dianna had felt that sting of leather herself. So she didn’t pay much attention, even though Sylvia and Jenny
insisted that Sylvia was getting it for things she had not done.

Sylvia did not see Dianna again. She and Jenny were not sure where Dianna lived. They saw her in the park a lot, and they thought she lived on Tuxedo Street or Sherman Drive or around in there. But she moved around a lot. The police found her for Jenny the night of October 26 so that Jenny would have a place to spend the night.

In the house, Sylvia and Jenny liked Stephanie and Shirley the best. Both of them were friendly and “real nice girls,” Jenny thought. They were not really mean like the others. Like Johnny, for instance. She thought of the one time after school when he slipped up behind her sister, shouted “Hey, Sylvia!” and punched her on the arm when she wheeled around, saying, “That’s for calling my mother a name.” No one, not even Johnny, had actually heard Sylvia calling Gertrude a name, but Gertrude
said
Sylvia did.

Stephanie was upset. Her nervous fainting spells were cropping up again. After one hectic day, she sat down at the table, whipped off her glasses, and just cried. “Fighting, fighting!” she sobbed. “That’s all we ever do around here! I wish we’d quit!”

One reason Stephanie felt so bad about it was because she had been in on it. She was thinking about the time Sylvia had come home from school and Gertrude ripped Sylvia’s blouse off her to show Stephanie she was wearing Stephanie’s brassiere. That made Stephanie mad. She pummeled Sylvia
seven or eight times, repeating, “What do you want to do that for, Sylvia, why do you do it?” Sylvia just stood there, took it, and cried.

Stephanie was angriest the time she came home from school to find Sylvia nude in the middle of the living room, surrounded by a ring of onlookers including Randy Lepper, Johnny, Gertrude, Jenny and Paula. Sylvia was squatting, with a Pepsi bottle inserted in her vagina. Stephanie rushed to the middle of the room and slapped Sylvia, hard. “Get up to your room, Sylvia,” she ordered.

She had not seen the prelude. She had not seen Gertrude order Sylvia to undress, and to spread her legs, and to insert the bottle, to prove to Jenny “what kind of girl you are.”

Gertrude and Paula were most jealous of Sylvia. Gertrude often told Sylvia, “I could pass for 20. I could put my fancy clothes on, and saunter down the street, and get the boys to whistle and honk at me just like you do, Sylvia.” But she knew it was not the truth. She had managed to convince the girls she was only 31, but she was not pretty. Thirteen pregnancies and a lifetime of hard work had taken care of her. The only boys she could attract were young boys who wanted the sexual experience, like Dennis Wright, who had planted his seed in her twice but then had beaten her and finally left her, and like Richard Hobbs, who was drawn to the home to watch Gertrude expose part of her belly as she danced to the striptease music from the phonograph, exulting, “This is just the way they do it down at the Fox Theater.”

Paula had equal reason to be jealous. She knew she was pregnant, or at least had a good idea that she was. Despite the talk of Sylvia’s pregnancy, Sylvia did not look pregnant. The autopsy was later to prove Sylvia was not. It was not fair that Sylvia was not pregnant; she was already prettier than Paula, wasn’t that enough?

Stephanie had less reason to be jealous. She was slender, like Sylvia, and she was pretty too. She had a steady boyfriend, Coy Hubbard, who said he had loved her always. She also made good grades at school; she continually brought home A’s and B’s on her report card, and the other children enviously called her “Einy.”

So Stephanie was able to accept Sylvia as a friend, striking out only when convinced—usually by Gertrude—that Sylvia had transgressed some moral precept, or when she saw Sylvia engaged in such revolting behavior as the Pepsi bottle incident. Of course, Stephanie had no idea of what was really going on; looking back, she could see that she herself might have been the target of the seething frustration that pervaded every corner of her home, had Sylvia not been there. But she could not see that at this time, and so her help for her friend Sylvia—when it came—was too little and too late.

WHAT SOCIOLOGICAL
explanation could there be for the bizarre events that followed Sylvia Likens’ last day of school, October 5, 1965? What strange comment was it on our civilization, the steady crescendo of events that led to a pretty girl’s death in a crowded city neighborhood at the hands of a mob of children directed by a physically mature but grotesquely vengeful adult? What kind of jungle was the packed little neighborhood on East New York Street?

Readers of fairy tales, devotees of melodrama, might have seen some hope radiating from the Cinderella situation into which Sylvia was descending. The prime elements of the classic fairy tale were there: Sylvia was prettier than Mrs. Wright’s true daughter Paula, but subordinated to her. Soon she found her new bed was a pile of rags in the basement. Extrapolating the situation in terms of the fairy tale, the devotees of melodrama could see an imminent rescue for Sylvia. But this was not
melodrama. This was real life. Sylvia had no fairy godmother, and her prince never appeared.

It was about October 12, or two weeks before her death, that Sylvia intermittently began to share the basement with the puppy that was kept there. The reasoning was that Sylvia was not keeping herself clean—there was some talk she had wet the bed and therefore she did not deserve to sleep upstairs with the human beings. A visit to the doctor might have shown that Sylvia’s incontinence was due to an injury to the kidneys, perhaps suffered in one of those judo flips in which Coy Hubbard missed the mattress. But the doctor money was reserved for Gertrude, who was suffering more frequent attacks of asthma and nerves brought on, she said, by her problems with Sylvia.

It was a typical basement, small and dank. Rickety wooden steps led to the bottom, turning 90 degrees to the left two steps down from the kitchen, then 90 degrees right, again two steps further down. The long flight the rest of the way down ended only a couple of feet short of the concrete east wall. Around to the left were a couple of sinks; a bare light bulb burned above. A partially clothed set of bed springs was stacked in the corner, but it was far beyond use. Sylvia’s makeshift bed was a pile of rags and old clothes, halfway under the staircase, short of the large coal furnace.

The girl’s descent to her dungeon was ceremonious. “Here’s how you do it,” Gertrude instructed Paula, Stephanie, Johnny, Randy Lepper and Coy
Hubbard. With that she gave Sylvia a shove, and she tumbled through the two 90-degree turns to the bottom. Coy Hubbard learned the lesson well, and soon improvised a variation. He gripped Sylvia’s hands tightly behind her and gave her a quick start with his foot.

Paula also invented some variations. Descending from the second floor, where she had been to the bathroom, Sylvia was met on the stairs by Paula’s outstretched foot, and tumbled into the living room. She was met at the bottom by Gertrude. “I hate you! I hate you!” Gertrude would shout. “You’re going to get the hell out of my house!”

Sylvia’s diet during her stay in the basement consisted largely of crackers and water, often only the former.

It was about the same time that the baths began. Still “concerned” about Sylvia’s cleanliness, Gertrude arranged for her children to bathe her about every other night. They said Sylvia was reluctant to bathe, and no wonder: The tub was filled entirely from the hot water spigot.

To overcome Sylvia’s reluctance, Gertrude or the children would bind her hands and feet and lift her into the tub. When she fainted in one of the baths, Gertrude yanked her hair and beat her head against the side of the tub to revive her. When Sylvia screamed, she was hit in the side of the head with the fraternity paddle. Eventually, Johnny tied gags in her mouth to keep her screams from disturbing the neighbors.

It was also about this time that Sylvia began her career as a human ashtray. Perhaps enticed by the smell of burning flesh the time she burned Sylvia’s fingers for stealing, and remembering the time Dennis Wright put a cigarette out on her own neck, Gertrude tried the same trick on Sylvia. Sometimes she was content to toss lighted matches at the girl. One of them set her clothing on fire, but it was quickly extinguished.

The children soon picked up the smoker’s habit, and Sylvia’s body began to show the little round sores that Dr. Kebel found so many of when he examined her body.

There were also some big round sores, more the size of a baseball, and caused by something besides cigarettes. These larger sores received medical treatment. For instance, Gertrude applied rubbing alcohol to Sylvia’s arms and legs. Jenny hoped this indicated the woman had some concern for her sister, after all.

Paula applied her own brand of first aid to the large raw spot on Sylvia’s knee. Gertrude supplied the salt as Coy Hubbard held the patient. Paula rubbed a little in slowly. Hubbard said, “That ain’t the way to do it,” and they rubbed more in, hard. It just increased the bleeding and Sylvia screamed more.