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THE TORTURING DEATH OF SYLVIA MARIE LIKENS
The Sexless Sex Crime


In early October, an incident occurred that led Mrs. Wright to order Sylvia to quit school.  Sylvia had no gym suit for her physical education class and Gertrude would not give her the money to buy one.  However, Sylvia came home from school with just such a suit that she claimed she had "found."  Gertrude believed, not unreasonably, that the suit was a theft.  Badgered about it, Sylvia confessed that she had indeed stolen it.  The woman slapped and kicked the girl, then whipped her with a belt. 

Mrs. Wright left the subject of Sylvia's stealing to return to that of her alleged promiscuity and, after scolding the teenager, began kicking her in the crotch area.  Later that day, still not satisfied that the girl had been adequately punished for theft, she applied a lighted match to Sylvia's "sticky fingers" and gave her yet another whipping.

Heat would become a major feature of Sylvia's torture.  Its origin probably lies in an incident in which Gertrude Baniszewski's abusive boyfriend, Dennis Wright, put a cigarette out on her neck.   

The motley group began burning Sylvia with cigarettes and lighted matches.  Paula Baniszewski broke her hand hitting Sylvia, then used the cast to beat the girl.  The favorite pastime of several kids in the area was getting Sylvia: kicking, hitting, flipping her around through Coy Hubbard's judo tricks or imitations of them, and burning her.

The autopsy would disclose two indices of how much agony Sylvia would endure: she had broken each of her fingernails backward in painful clawing and had bitten her lower lip so deeply it was partially severed.

As the persecution of Sylvia worsened, it became increasingly sexual in character.  However, it was also a peculiarly “sexless sex crime.”  The sexual aspect started with the constant teasing, alleging that she was sexually promiscuous and escalated with Mrs. Wright’s vicious kicks to the girl’s crotch. There would be other sexual-like assaults, including one to be described shortly, but no “sexual assaults” in the standard meaning of the term.  There are no reports of Gertrude ever touching Sylvia in any manner suggestive of lesbianism.  None of the young males who excitedly took part in the beatings and torturings of the girl are believed to have either raped her or forced any type of oral sex upon her.  The autopsy would disclose a gross swelling of Likens’s genital region due to the kicks but none of the internal vaginal lacerations consistent with rape and tests for semen would be negative.

Since the group inflicted almost every sort of assault the human mind could come up with, the omission is puzzling.  Mrs. Wright. probably had a horror of being thought “perverted” (assuming she was even familiar with the term) which would explain her not assaulting her victim’s sex organ with fingers or tongue. Perhaps Coy Hubbard feared offending Stephanie if his girlfriend considered a rape “two-timing.”  It is also possible, as Millett speculates in some of her more credible fictional passages, that they genuinely believed Sylvia was a “slut” and feared sexually transmitted diseases or a more ambiguous sort of “contamination” from such contact. 

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.  When Sylvia was fully nude, Mrs. Wright made the weeping girl shove a soft drink bottle up her vagina.

At the climax of this horror, Stephanie Baniszewski came home from school.  Seeing Sylvia naked before a bunch of kids, shoving a bottle up herself, and unaware that her own mother had ordered this performance, the outraged Stephanie rushed up to Sylvia and slapped her.  Then she furiously ordered Sylvia to go to her room.

Police photo of the bathroom
Police photo of the bathroom

One night in October, Sylvia wet her bed.  This could have been the result of psychological anxiety -- if anyone ever had reason to be nervous, she did -- 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.  Sometimes she was put in the tub by Gertrude and Paula and on some evenings fourteen-year-old Richard (Ricky) Hobbs was there to assist. Hobbs was a soft-featured, good-looking lad who sported straight blonde hair parted on the side, wore thick eyeglasses with black horn rims and often hung out at the Baniszewski house.

Paula Baniszewski rubbed salt into Sylvia's wounds.

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.

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.


CHAPTERS
1. A Young, Tortured Girl is Dead

2. Baniszewski's Background

3. Who Was Sylvia Likens?

4. "Was She a Masochist?"

5. The Slow Slide into Horror

6. The Sexless Sex Crime

7. No Rescue

8. Sylvia's Last Weekend

9. The Torture Killers on Trial

10. 1985: SLAM into Action

11. Inspired by the Likens Case

12. Bibliography

13. The Author

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