The Torture and Death of Sylvia Likens
In July 1965, Lester and Betty Likens, suggested that Gertrude Wright (a.k.a Gertrude Baniszewski) take their two daughters - Sylvia Marie Likens, 16, and Jenny Faye Likens, 15 - as boarders in return for $20 a week in compensation while they worked across the state.
However, when Lester Likens’s first $20 payment failed to arrive on time, Baniszewski beat the girls. Jenny was frail and had polio. Most of Mrs. Wright’s abuse fell on Sylvia. She often accused Sylvia of being promiscuous and would beat her and kick her repeatedly in her vagina.
On one awful day, Mrs. Wright was indignant because she was told that, much earlier in the girl’s stay, Sylvia had had a bit of extra cash: she knew that the girl had to have been either stealing or prostituting. Sylvia could not just be turning in empty soda pop bottles as she claimed. So, while several kids were at the Baniszewski house, Gertrude forced a weeping Sylvia to perform an awkward striptease in front of the bunch (which included Wright’s teenage daughters Stephanie and Paula Baniszewski and her 12-year-old son, John). When Sylvia was fully nude, Mrs. Wright made the weeping girl shove a soft drink bottle up her vagina.
One night in October, Sylvia wet her bed. This could have been the result of psychological anxiety or it could have been because the many cruel blows to her stomach and crotch had weakened control in that area. However, her tormentors decided that she must now live down in the basement with the dog because she was too dirty to live with human beings. Paula punished Sylvia’s bed-wetting by preventing her from using the toilet, thus forcing her to befoul herself.
At the same time, her torturers began a regimen of forced bathing in which they tied up the “dirty girl” and forced her into the Baniszewski’s old-fashioned, claw-footed bathtub tub after filling it with scalding hot water.
Paula Baniszewski rubbed salt into Sylvia’s burns.
Sylvia was often kept nude or nearly so for days at a time. She became a game for the neighborhood kids to enjoy, burning, punching, and now pushing her down the stairs to the cellar, then forcing her back up just to throw her back down again. Some of the children participating were as young as 10-years-old. Wright also made Jenny participate or else face the same punishment as her older sister.
On one occasion, the starving teenager was allowed up from the cellar and told to try to eat soup with her fingers. Famished, she made an attempt at it only to have the soup grabbed away from her by John. Later, Mrs. Wright. and John forced the girl to eat shit and drink urine.
The last weekend of Sylvia’s life began when Mrs. Wright decided to let her sleep upstairs in a bed again. However, she attached a strange condition to this: Gertrude instructed John, Stephanie’s boyfriend, Coy, and Stephanie to tie Sylvia to the bed so she could not get up during the night to go to the bathroom. “You can’t go to the bathroom,” Gertrude said, “until you’ve learned not to wet the bed.”
Sylvia wet the bed that night.
The next morning began with a second forced striptease, again climaxed by Gertrude forcing Sylvia to insert a soda bottle up her vagina. Then Mrs. Wright decided to take another revenge on Sylvia for having slandered Paula and Stephanie at Tech High. “You have branded my daughters so I will brand you!” she told the confused teenager.
Sylvia was forcibly stripped, then tied down, and gagged. Gertrude heated a sewing needle and carved an “I,” apostrophe and part of the “M” before handing the needle to a 14-year-old neighbor boy and telling him to finish the job.
The words carved on her stomach: “I am a prostitute and proud of it.”
The next day was Sunday, October 24. Gertrude and John both beat the girl. Then Coy stopped by and hit Sylvia in the head with a broomstick, knocking her unconscious.
The next day, Sylvia was taken upstairs for a final — non-torturous — bath. She was placed in the tub clothed. When taken out of it, Stephanie and her brother Ricky realized that Sylvia was not breathing. Stephanie attempted to give Sylvia mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It did no good.
Sylvia was dead.
Cause of death was determined to be brain swelling, internal hemorrhaging of the brain and shock induced by Sylvia’s extensive skin damage. Sylvia also suffered from extreme malnutrition.
(Source: trutv.com)
