Monster mom Gertrude Baniszewski and teen cohorts torture Sylvia Likens to death  

Joe Young/ASSOCIATED PRESS Richard Dean Hobbs, 15, (second from left) and Gertrude Baniszewski tortured Sylvia Likens to death in Indianapolis home. She and her daughter Paula got life.  

It had all the earmarks of schoolyard bullying gone horribly out of control. A group of children ganged up on another child, and tortured her to death.

But instead of a schoolyard, the scene of the crime was a family home and, instead of another kid, the ringleader was a parent.

When police came to the house at 3850 East New York St. in Indianapolis on the evening of Oct. 26, 1965, they found the lady of the house, Gertrude Baniszewski, 37, hysterical; upstairs in a bedroom on a filthy mattress was a dead teenager.

She was Sylvia Likens, 16, a boarder at the house. Baniszewski told police the girl had run off with a group of boys a few days earlier.

That afternoon, Sylvia had staggered back home, carrying a note to her parents.

In the note, she apologized for being bad and causing her caretaker, “Gertie,” grief. It said the boys had beaten her up and carved a message on her belly: “I am a prostitute and proud of it.”

In addition to the words cut into her skin, Sylvia’s frail body was covered with sores, scald marks, bruises and more than 100 cigarette burns. There were signs of starvation.

AP Paula Baniszewski was paroled in 1972 and stayed out of the public eye until last October, when it was revealed that she was working as a teacher in Iowa under the name Paula Pace.

Death, the coroner ruled, was from a blow to the head, but the other wounds seemed to have been inflicted over a long period of time. Police thought Baniszewski’s story seemed odd; in fact, it seemed much more plausible that the note was a fake, the story was a lie, and that the woman telling the tale was the killer.

Baniszewski had been entrusted with the care of Sylvia and her sister, Jenny, 15, in July 1965, when the girls’ parents, Lester and Betty Likens, fell on hard times and could not support their four children.

The couple found work in a carnival. Grandparents took their boys, but they needed to find someone to care for their girls.

Baniszewski lived on the same block as the Likens, and offered to care for them for $20 a week. Had Lester looked more closely, he might not have been so quick to take her up on the offer.

The environment was not particularly stable. Baniszewski had seven children between the ages of 17 and 18 months, and the house was a hangout for neighborhood kids.

The only adult in the home, Gertrude, was frail, asthmatic and easily lost her temper. She also refused to accept that she had two decades on the children running around, and would often flirt with and dance for the teenage boys, wrote John Dean in his book, “House of Evil.”

The house of horrors at 3850 East New York St. in Indianapolis where Sylvia Likens spent her short life being tortured by Gertrude Baniszewski and her teen band of sickos.

Pretty Sylvia Likens apparently brought out the woman’s inner mean girl.

Things got off to a rocky start. When the Likens’ first $20 money order was late, Baniszewski dragged the girls upstairs, slapped Jenny, and shrilled, “I took care of you two bitches for a week for nothing.”

From then on, their lives were filled with misery; Sylvia bore the brunt of the rage.

Soon, Gertrude called for reinforcements — children, her own and the ones hanging around her house — to mete out Sylvia’s punishment. One used her to practice his judo.

They burned her with cigarettes and, more than once, Gertrude forced her to dance naked in front of the other children. There were baths in scalding water, beatings and starvation. By fall, torturing Sylvia had become a hobby for the local kids.

It all culminated on one horrible night when Baniszewski, using a sewing needle, carved an “I” into the skin on Sylvia’s abdomen. She then turned the needle over to a 14-year-old neighbor, Richard Hobbs, to finish the job. She had to help him spell the word “prostitute.”

Anonymous/ASSOCIATED PRESS The house of horrors at 3850 East New York St. in Indianapolis where Sylvia Likens spent her short life being tortured by Gertrude Baniszewski and her teen band of sickos.

A few days later, Sylvia was dead and Baniszewski was under arrest, along with eight of her youthful accomplices, the oldest 17, the youngest 11. Police did not have a hard time getting details from the children. They explained their participation in the torture rituals by saying “Gertie” told them to.

Baniszewski insisted that the kids acted on their own. She knew nothing.

Baniszewski, her daughters Paula, 17, and Stephanie, 15, her son, Johnny, 12, and two teenage neighbors, Coy Hubbard, 15, the judo expert, and Hobbs were charged with murder. Stephanie was tried separately, and freed.

On May 19, 1966, the jury convicted the older woman of first-degree murder, her daughter Paula of second-degree murder, and found the rest of her youthful gang guilty of lesser homicide charges. The boys were sentenced to two to 21 years and were released in three.

By 1985, Gertrude was free on parole, having been a model prisoner. “The Lord has forgiven me and I have peace inside,” she said upon her release. Five years later, she died of lung cancer.

Despite an attempted prison break in 1971, Paula earned parole in 1972 and dropped out of the public eye.

She remerged briefly last October, almost 47 years to the day after Sylvia Likens died. She had been working as a teacher’s aide in an Iowa high school under the name Paula Pace. Somehow, her real identity became known and she was fired. “It was very shocking,” one surprised parent told the Marshalltown Times-Republican. “She’s always been very nice.”

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