Sylvia Likens: The Harrowing Case of Abuse, Torture and Lack of Justice in 1965
Updated: Aug 20
Sylvia Likens was fond of the Beatles, kept her mouth closed when she smiled because she'd lost a front tooth as a child, and was, by every account from people who knew her, a friendly and easygoing sixteen year old. In the summer of 1965 her parents, travelling carnival workers, left her and her younger sister Jenny in the care of a woman named Gertrude Baniszewski in Indianapolis for twenty dollars a week. By the time October ended, Sylvia was dead, and what had happened to her in that house was described by the prosecutor at trial as the single worst crime ever committed against an individual in Indiana's history.
It's a case that's stayed infamous for sixty years, not just for its cruelty but for how many people knew, and how little most of them did about it.
Quick Answers
Who was Sylvia Likens? A 16-year-old girl from a family of travelling carnival workers, left in the paid care of Gertrude Baniszewski in Indianapolis in 1965. Baniszewski, her children and a group of neighbourhood children tortured Sylvia to death over roughly three months.
Who was convicted of killing Sylvia Likens? Gertrude Baniszewski was convicted of first-degree murder. Her daughter Paula was convicted of second-degree murder. Her son John Jr. and two local teenagers, Richard Hobbs and Coy Hubbard, were convicted of manslaughter.
Did anyone involved in Sylvia Likens's death serve real time? Barely. Hobbs, Hubbard and John Baniszewski Jr. served under two years before parole in 1968. Paula was paroled in 1972. Gertrude, the only one to receive a life sentence, was paroled in 1985 and died in 1990.
A Girl Left in the Wrong Hands
Sylvia Marie Likens was born on 3 January 1949 in Lebanon, Indiana, the third of five children. Her parents Lester and Betty worked the carnival circuit, and in July 1965, with Betty in jail on a shoplifting charge and Lester back on the road, Sylvia and her younger sister Jenny, who walked with a limp from childhood polio, needed somewhere to stay. A family friend, Gertrude Baniszewski, offered to take them in for twenty dollars a week. Baniszewski was in her mid thirties, divorced multiple times, raising seven children of her own in a run-down two-storey house on East New York Street, and scraping by on odd jobs like ironing neighbours' laundry.
The first weeks passed without incident. Then Lester's payment arrived late, and Baniszewski's irritation turned into the first of what would become a summer-long, then autumn-long, campaign of violence, aimed almost entirely at Sylvia.
The Abuse Escalates
It started with a heavy wooden paddle and accusations, mostly invented, of theft, gluttony or promiscuity, each one used to justify the next beating. Baniszewski forced Sylvia to eat spoiled food pulled from the rubbish. She recruited her own children into the violence, and before long neighbourhood kids were joining in too, egged on by an adult who'd decided this one teenager deserved whatever was done to her. Coy Hubbard, a local teenager dating Baniszewski's daughter Stephanie, took to using Sylvia as a live target for judo practice, throwing her into walls and down the basement stairs.
Sylvia's older sister Dianna ran into her and Jenny at a local park that September and sensed something was badly wrong, but without an address to go on, and with the girls unwilling or unable to say more, she didn't push it. A few weeks earlier Dianna had given Sylvia a sandwich in that same park. When Baniszewski found out, she called it gluttony and forced Sylvia into a scalding bath as punishment. Around the same time, a neighbour anonymously reported visible sores on Sylvia to her school. A nurse visited, Baniszewski lied about her hygiene and a supposed runaway attempt, and nothing further was done.
Two neighbours, Raymond and Phyllis Vermillion, visited the house twice during this period and directly witnessed Baniszewski's daughter Paula abusing Sylvia, at one point hearing Paula boast about it afterwards. They noticed how withdrawn Sylvia had become. They chose not to report any of it. Around 1 October, Dianna tried to visit her sisters directly and was turned away by Baniszewski, who claimed she didn't have parental permission to let her in. Two weeks after that, Dianna ran into Jenny alone nearby and asked how Sylvia was doing. Jenny's answer was blunt: she couldn't say, or she'd be in trouble.
One evening at the dinner table, Baniszewski, Paula and a local boy named Randy Lepper force-fed Sylvia a hot dog piled with chilli sauce and mustard until she vomited, then made her eat what she'd brought back up. On another occasion, Baniszewski forced Sylvia to strip in front of the family and penetrate herself with a glass Pepsi bottle, telling everyone watching that it was meant to prove what kind of girl Sylvia really was.
By October, Baniszewski had branded the words I'M A PROSTITUTE AND PROUD OF IT into Sylvia's stomach, with a local teenager, Richard Hobbs, helping finish the burn. Neighbourhood children were, by some accounts, charged five cents apiece to come down and see her.
Into the Basement
On 6 October, after weeks of abuse had left Sylvia unable to control her bladder, Baniszewski moved her permanently into the basement. She was kept there largely naked, malnourished, dehydrated and at times tied to the staircase railing with her feet barely able to touch the floor. Baniszewski, her children and the local kids who'd been drawn into it forced her into scalding baths and rubbed salt into open wounds. At one point Baniszewski and her twelve-year-old son smeared waste from a baby's nappy into Sylvia's mouth, then gave her half a cup of water and told her that was all she'd get for the rest of the day.
On 22 October, John Baniszewski Jr. offered Sylvia, by then severely malnourished, a bowl of soup to eat with her fingers, then snatched it away the moment she tried to eat. Baniszewski briefly allowed Sylvia to sleep upstairs again on the condition she stopped wetting herself. The next morning, finding she had anyway, Baniszewski forced her to insert an empty glass Coca-Cola bottle into herself in front of the other children as punishment, then sent her straight back down to the basement.
Late in October, Baniszewski dictated a letter for Sylvia to write, meant to convince her parents she'd run away and been assaulted by a group of anonymous local boys, a fabricated story built specifically to cover for what was actually happening in that basement. Around the same time, Baniszewski and her son began planning to abandon Sylvia, blindfolded, in a patch of nearby woods and let her die there rather than be found in the house.
Sylvia knew what was coming. "Jenny, I know you don't want me to die, but I'm going to die. I can tell it," she told her sister, not long before the end.
Sylvia's Final Days
On 25 October, overhearing Baniszewski and her son discussing the plan to leave her in the woods, Sylvia tried to run for the front door. She was too weak and injured to make it. Baniszewski caught her, beat her around the face with a curtain rod until it bent, and another teenager involved in the abuse, Coy Hubbard, struck her once more and knocked her unconscious. That night, from the basement, Sylvia screamed and beat the walls with a spade trying to get a neighbour's attention. One neighbour later told police she'd heard the commotion, decided it had stopped by around 3am, and never called anyone.
By the morning of 26 October, Sylvia could no longer speak clearly or control her limbs. She was delirious, unable to recite more than the first four letters of the alphabet, unable to stand. When Paula told her to get up or be thrown into a long jump, Sylvia couldn't respond. She tried and failed to bite into a rotten pear she'd been given, telling those nearby she could feel her own teeth loosening.
That afternoon, some of the same people who'd tormented her for months gathered in the basement again. Sylvia, barely able to move, tried to point at their faces and name them, managing only fragments: you're Ricky, you're Gertie. Baniszewski shouted at her to stop, telling her she already knew who she was. John Baniszewski Jr., laughing, sprayed her down with a garden hose that Randy Lepper had brought to the house at Gertrude's request. Sylvia made one final attempt to reach the stairs and collapsed before she got there. Baniszewski responded by stamping on her head, then stood over her in silence.
Not long after, Richard Hobbs arrived, slipped on the wet basement steps and found Baniszewski's daughter Stephanie already there, crying, holding what was left of Sylvia's emaciated, badly lacerated body. The two of them washed her, dressed her in clean clothes and laid her on a mattress upstairs. Sylvia's last words were that she wished her father was there, and that Stephanie would take her home. Stephanie told her younger sister Shirley she'd be alright.
When Stephanie realised Sylvia had stopped breathing, she tried to revive her while Baniszewski insisted, to the children still in the house, that the girl was faking. Sylvia Likens died that evening. She was sixteen.
Discovery and Arrest
Baniszewski struck Sylvia's body with a book, still shouting at her to stop faking, before panic set in and she sent Richard Hobbs to call the police. Officers arrived to find Sylvia's body on a soiled mattress, and Baniszewski tried to hand them the fabricated letter as an explanation. It was Jenny who broke the case open. Get me out of here and I'll tell you everything, she told police, and did.
The autopsy recorded more than 150 separate wounds, in various stages of healing, along with severe bruising and nerve and muscle damage consistent with months of sustained abuse. Sylvia's vaginal cavity was found nearly swollen shut, and several of her fingernails had been broken backwards. The coroner, Dr Arthur Kebel, listed the cause of death as a subdural hematoma from a blow to the head, compounded by shock and malnutrition.
The Trial
Gertrude Baniszewski, her children Paula and John Jr., and local teenagers Richard Hobbs and Coy Hubbard were tried jointly beginning in April 1966. Prosecutors sought the death penalty. The defence argued the younger participants had been manipulated and coerced by Baniszewski herself. Sylvia's sister Jenny testified in detail about what she'd witnessed. Baniszewski took the stand, denied responsibility, and claimed she'd been too unwell, and too affected by her asthma medication, to control what happened in her own house.
The jury wasn't convinced. On 19 May 1966, Baniszewski was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life. Paula was convicted of second-degree murder. Hobbs, Hubbard and John Jr. were convicted of manslaughter. Charges against Baniszewski's second-eldest daughter Stephanie were dropped after she agreed to testify against the others. Asked at trial why she'd chosen to cooperate, Stephanie said she was there in the hope she could help someone. Her mother's own lawyer shot back with one word: herself.
Retrial, Parole and a Second Chance at Freedom
In 1970 the Indiana Supreme Court overturned Baniszewski's conviction, ruling that pretrial publicity had compromised her right to a fair trial. At the retrial, Paula pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter for a reduced sentence. Baniszewski was convicted again and returned to prison. She never fully accepted responsibility, insisting for the rest of her life that she couldn't clearly remember what had happened. She was paroled in 1985 despite public protest, moved to Iowa, and died of lung cancer in 1990.
The others were free far sooner. Hobbs, Hubbard and John Baniszewski Jr. all served under two years before their parole in February 1968. Paula was paroled in 1972.
What Happened to Everyone Else
Paula changed her name to Paula Pace and spent fourteen years working as a school counsellor's aide, concealing her past, before the school discovered who she really was and fired her in 2012. She married and had children of her own, including the daughter she'd given birth to while awaiting trial in 1966, who was later adopted out.
John Baniszewski Jr. lived under the name John Blake, became a lay minister, and spent years counselling children of divorced parents. Decades later he spoke publicly a handful of times about what he'd done, at points admitting he'd enjoyed the notoriety the case brought him while also claiming, implausibly, that he'd only hit Sylvia once. He died in 2005 of complications from diabetes, aged 52.
Richard Hobbs died of lung cancer in 1972, less than four years after his release, aged just 21. Coy Hubbard stayed in Indiana under his own name, was repeatedly imprisoned on later, unrelated charges, and was tried and acquitted of a 1977 double murder before dying of a heart attack in 2010, aged 56.
Several of the neighbourhood children who took part, including Anna Siscoe, Randy Lepper, Michael Monroe, Darlene McGuire and Judy Duke, had the charges against them dropped entirely. Lepper, who'd smirked on the stand while describing striking Sylvia up to forty times, died in 2010 aged 56. Siscoe died in 1996, already a grandmother. Monroe died in 2023.
Baniszewski's three youngest children, Marie, Shirley and James, were placed with separate foster families after her arrest and had nothing to do with what happened to Sylvia. Once their father regained custody in the late 1960s, all three were legally renamed Blake. Marie married and later died of natural causes in 2017, aged 62. Separately, Dennis Lee Wright Jr., another of Baniszewski's children, was adopted out and renamed Denny Lee White. He died in 2012, aged 47.
Jenny Likens
Sylvia's sister Jenny survived, but not unscarred. She married, had two children, and spent the rest of her life on anxiety medication, carrying what she'd watched happen to Sylvia. She died of a heart attack in 2004, aged 54. Fourteen years earlier, when Gertrude Baniszewski's obituary ran in the local paper, Jenny had clipped it out and mailed it to her mother with a note that read simply: "Some good news. Damn old Gertrude died. Ha ha ha! I am happy about that."
Remembering Sylvia
The house on East New York Street where Sylvia died was demolished in 2009, and the lot is now a church car park. In 2001, a six-foot granite memorial to her was dedicated in Willard Park on Indianapolis's east side, giving the case a physical place of remembrance the original scene never really allowed for. Sylvia herself is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Lebanon, Indiana, the town where she was born.
The case is widely credited with pushing Indiana, and eventually other states, toward tougher mandatory reporting laws for suspected child abuse, precisely because so many adults, a school nurse, two separate neighbours, a member of the public who phoned in a tip, had some knowledge that something was wrong and none of it was enough to save her. Sylvia's Child Advocacy Center now carries her name and continues that work today.
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For another caregiver who escaped serious consequences for years of abuse, read Eunice Spry: The Foster Mother That Got Away With Abusing Children in Her Care for 20 Years.
For another case of prolonged confinement and abuse hidden in plain sight, see Inside the House of Horrors: The Tragic Turpin Family Case.
Sources
Sylvia’s Child Advocacy Center is dedicated to her memory and the cause of protecting children from abuse in every corner of our community.
