Serial Killer of the Month: Gertrude Baniszewski
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Sylvia Likens was found crumpled on the filthy mattress — mutilated, dead. This was a cold October day, the 26th. In 1965. She was only 16. An emergency call alerted the authorities that a girl had stopped breathing. When the police arrived in the room on the second floor they found her on the urine soaked bed, half naked. Her young body bore the marks of cigarette burns, cuts, deep bruises and the words “I am a prostitute and proud of it” carved out of her belly.
The woman whose house the police investigated was Gertrude Baniszewski. She calmly, almost dryly, explained how the girl’s death occurred. Baniszewski claimed that Sylvia had been staying in the house all that summer. She had been living with her sister Jenny. Baniszewski said that she had brought this terrible torture and death upon herself because she had run away. It was while she was on her own that she was attacked by a pack of rabid young men, and returned home with the wounds and mutilations from which she quickly died.
Sylvia’s sister Jenny told a very different story. The real story, she said, started with the Baniszewski house’s lack of income. Gertrude had been taking care of the household and simultaneously supporting seven children. She made a meager living selling bottled soda at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and she received child support payments from her ex-husband. As a result, the family’s diet was largely canned soup, which was heated on an electric griddle, because they had no stove.
The Likens paid Gertrude $20 a week to watch their children while they were traveling with the Florida Circus. They moved in July 1965. When Jenny and Sylvia’s parents were late with the first payment for the baby-sitting, Gertrude decided to give the girls a beating. While hitting them she shouted, “I took care of you bitches for nothing.” And though Gertrude got paid the next day, her attitude didn’t change. Her brutality escalated over the next three months as she changed her form of attack from simple fists, to paddles, to belts and finally to wooden boards. It was Sylvia who she singled out for harder punishment. To aid her with this sadistic regime, she enlisted the help of two of her own children. And when more help was needed she drafted some neighborhood bullies. One of the bullies used Sylvia as a human punching bag, and used her to practice his martial arts throws, into cement walls and down stairwells.
The local boys, and her own children, would also assist Gertrude in applying specific brutal torture to Sylvia just for the pure sadistic joy of it. They would slowly make deep cigarette burns on her body, in the end more than 150 such wounds. And the worst was still yet to happen.
When Sylvia accidentally urinated on the mattress one night, she was imprisoned in the basement. It was here that she was systematically starved and dehydrated being left no option but to sup on her own waste, and to drink her own urine. Then at her most wretched, Gertrude forced her to strip, which culminated with inserting a Coke bottle into her vagina. Then with a heated knife blade Gertrude proceeded to carve those words into her belly. It is tragic, and ironic that she finally died when she fell to the cement floor from a high window where she was trying to get help from the neighbors.
It was little surprise that at her trial Gertrude was given a life sentence. In 1985, she was released on parole. She might be that nice old lady just across the hall.
Read more from July 1998:
The Reverend Horton Heat
CD Reviews: July 1998
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