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. Wrights vicious kicks to the girls 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 Likenss 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 victims 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 girls 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.
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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 Baniszewskis 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.
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