House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying (St. Martin's True Crime Library) (10 page)

Meanwhile, all six Baniszewski children were taken to the Juvenile Center and held as material witnesses.

Hobbs was transferred from the county jail to the detention ward of Marion County General Hospital when police learned he was a diabetic. He would
reside there, chained to an iron bed, until the end of his trial seven months later.

He was permitted to visit his mother in Community Hospital before she died, and precautions were taken to ensure that she did not become aware he was in custody. He was permitted also to attend her funeral November 11, and precautions were taken then to ensure he made no attempt to escape.

Kaiser talked to Mrs. Baniszewski again Wednesday, October 27, after she and Hobbs appeared in Municipal Court Room 6. Their case was continued until the following Monday, November 1.

The woman had not brought her attorney. She sat down at 9:50 a.m. in a small, bare room with Kaiser and Lt. Spurgeon D. Davenport, a skilled and debonair black man who, at that time, was chief of homicide investigations.

She admitted then, “I know the kids have been mistreating Sylvia.” Then she admitted that she had made Sylvia sleep in the basement—“only three times”—because she had wet the bed.

“Isn’t the reason she wet the bed,” Kaiser suggested, “because you injured her kidneys when you hit her on the back with that paddle?”

But she knew nothing like that, she insisted. She did recall once telling Johnny, “Go get some shit and make her eat it.” She also recalled burning Sylvia on the arm with a cigarette, once, about a month ago.

But it was the children who mistreated Sylvia, she said. “Paula did most of the damage; she broke her wrist once hitting Sylvia. And I saw Coy Hubbard
beat her up once. Coy Hubbard did a lot of the beating.”

But Mrs. Baniszewski (Kaiser learned that was her legal name when he talked to her again Friday, October 29) insisted she had done nothing wrong and therefore did not need an attorney. She also saw no reason to sign a statement for police, and she did not.

Who was Coy Hubbard? Police heard that name and a few others mentioned as they talked to the principals in the crime. They soon found out who Hubbard was, and officers from the juvenile detail were sent to Howe High School early that afternoon. He was whisked out of class at 3 p.m., into a squad car and downtown to police headquarters, where he was questioned by Sgt. Don R. Campbell and Lt. William Crossen of juvenile branch.

Like Hobbs, Hubbard declined calling for his parents. Police notified his mother at work by telephone, and she hastened to her boy’s side; but she did not get to him in time to keep him from talking. In his signed statement, Hubbard admitted: “I hit her with my hand….I do not remember why…but Mrs. Wright had spanked her….I flipped Sylvia on the floor; I think I did this because of something she said about Stephanie….I burned Sylvia on the arm with a match…. Last week I was at the house and I took Sylvia down two or three steps of the basement stairs and put her hands behind her and pushed her the rest of the way down.”

Earlier that day, two other juvenile officers—Sgt. Leo Gentry and Policewoman Harriet Sanders—had
talked to Paula and Johnny Baniszewski. Like Hubbard, they were held only on the juvenile delinquency charge of “injury to person” at that time.

Paula, in her signed statement, admitted, “In three months, I beat Sylvia Likens with the police belt about 25 times on the butt.” She admitted breaking her wrist on Sylvia’s jaw, giving Sylvia a black eye, and pushing her down the stairs two or three times. “Johnny teased Sylvia and made fun of her,” Paula added. Paula emphatically denied being pregnant.

Johnny, in his signed statement, admitted, “Once my mother let me take her upstairs and spank her, but most of the time I used my fists….I used matches and Mom used cigarettes to burn her.”

Did he gag her? “Yes, Mom told me to so that Sylvia wouldn’t make too much noise when we hit her…. Some of the time I did this [hit Sylvia] for something she had done.”

Johnny listed something else police wanted—names. Others who had beaten Sylvia, he said, included Paula Baniszewski, Stephanie Baniszewski, Marie Baniszewski, Shirley Baniszewski, Anna Siscoe, Judy Duke, Darlene McGuire, Randy Lepper, Mike Monroe, Coy Hubbard and Richard Hobbs.

The next day, Thursday, October 28, police arrested Anna Siscoe and Mike Monroe. On Friday, October 29, they arrested Judy Duke and Randy Lepper. All were charged with “injury to person.”

On the top floor of the six-story police wing of the City-County Building in Indianapolis were the city’s four traffic and misdemeanor courts, Municipal
Court Rooms 3, 4, 5 and 6. Through their doors passed the cream of society and the scum of the earth, from executives appearing on speeding charges to notorious felons on their way to grand jury investigations or higher courts.

Each courtroom in the modern, new building had a large gallery with seats for more than a hundred spectators and standing room for nearly that many more. Usually the seats were occupied by persons waiting to be arraigned or tried on minor offenses; seldom were all the seats in use.

But at 2 p.m. Monday, November 1, 1965, defendants had to stand in line outside Municipal Court Room 6, as curious spectators had filled the gallery long before that. The city’s curious, many of them from the several thousand workers in the City-County Building, had come to get a glimpse of the sadistic Likens murderers.

An attorney in the crowd remarked, “If some of these people had been this concerned about Sylvia earlier, she probably would be alive today.”

Dianna Shoemaker, Sylvia’s older sister, also was in the crowd. She told a newspaper reporter she had gone to Mrs. Baniszewski’s house about a month before to see Sylvia, but the woman had refused to let her in, saying, “I’ve got permission not to let you see her.”

She said she saw Jenny on the street about two weeks later and stopped to talk, but Jenny said, “I can’t talk to you or I’ll get in trouble.”

After a brief hearing, Judge Harry F. Zaklan ordered
that Mrs. Baniszewski, Paula, Stephanie and Johnny Baniszewski and Richard Hobbs be held without bond on murder charges for grand jury investigation. Coy Hubbard’s case was continued until November 24. Anna Siscoe, Judy Duke, Randy Lepper and Mike Monroe were to be kept in the Juvenile Center on delinquency charges.

Hobbs was kept in the hospital detention ward. The others were sent to the Marion County Jail.

Mr. and Mrs. Lester Likens were sleeping comfortably in their hotel room in Jacksonville, Florida, the night of October 26, 1965. They had been doing well with their lunch stand in the Florida carnival, and in a week they would be back home in Indiana. It was the last fair of the season. They had saved enough money on the northern tour to buy their own stand by the time they headed for Florida.

The telephone rudely interrupted their slumber. The caller was D. L. Burton, a former neighbor in Indianapolis. The news was bad. Likens could not believe it.

In semi-shock, he and his wife, Betty, climbed into their clothes and caught a taxi back to the fairgrounds, from where a friend gave them a lift to the airport. They arrived in Indianapolis to claim their daughter’s mangled body about midday on Wednesday, October 27.

In police headquarters, Likens asked to see the signed statement of his other daughter, Jenny. He began reading it but could not finish. Tears welled in his eyes, then poured forth.

Late-afternoon shadows shaded the Russell & Hitch Funeral Home in Lebanon, Indiana. The lilt of children’s laughter could be heard faintly outside, from the direction of the school. Inside, children and adults wept. It was Friday, October 29. The Rev. Louis Gibson was assuring his listeners that the soul of Sylvia Likens was in heaven.

“We all have our time,” the preacher reminded, “but we won’t suffer like our little sister suffered during the last days of her life.” He strode toward the gray open casket, whispering, “She has gone to eternity.” A portrait of Sylvia taken before her stay at 3850 East New York Street adorned the casket.

A fourteen-car procession followed the hearse to Oak Hill Cemetery on the outskirts of East Lebanon. Mr. and Mrs. Lester Likens and their surviving children rode with Likens’ brother Leroy, member of the Rev. Mr. Gibson’s congregation at Charity Tabernacle in Indianapolis.

A few more words, a hymn, a tree swaying in the breeze, a few falling leaves—and it was over.

The Likens family returned to the home of Lester’s mother, Mrs. Ernest Martin.

Had Sylvia been tortured to death in Lebanon, rather than in Indianapolis, an immediate session of the Boone County grand jury would have been called to investigate the case. But in Marion County, where Indianapolis is the county seat, each case must wait its turn before a hard-working, nearly full-time grand jury.

The six members of the grand jury in the latter half of 1965 were particularly busy. By the time they got around to the Likens case on December 4, they had questioned more than a hundred witnesses in an investigation of the county jail set off by the state’s largest daily newspaper, the
Indianapolis Star.

The
Star’s
first story of its series on the jail appeared October 27, the same day Sylvia’s murder was reported, and stole the headlines from the murder—which, under almost any other circumstances, would have been the main story. Later, the jail probe fizzled when the sworn statement of a prisoner was discredited.

The grand jurors also had spent several weeks on an investigation of the state’s securities market and the secretary of state’s office. The securities business had been muddied by a $2 million stock fraud and by a federal court injunction against a complicated stock promotion, and the youthful secretary of state had admitted receiving campaign contributions—before and after the campaign—from securities dealers whose activities he was supposed to be regulating.

The grand jurors had been concerned also with a bribery case involving a veteran sheriff’s detective who had been caught by the county sheriff stuffing a roll of paper money into his pocket that had just been handed to him by an ex-convict.

Another matter on the grand jurors’ minds was a child-stealing case against a Tennessee couple who
had tentatively adopted an Indianapolis woman’s baby, then fled the state with the child when the mother refused to sign the adoption papers.

It seemed that murder was too mundane for the Marion County grand jury. And yet, the grand jury already had returned more than a hundred indictments in routine crime investigations that fall, many of them for murder.

There was a question of whether the Likens case would ever be heard by the present grand jury. The week before the Likens case did reach them, jury members had attempted to resign in a huff after a judge charged them with “whitewashing” the charges levied against the jail by the
Indianapolis Star.
But the two Criminal Court judges refused to let the jurors resign before the end of the court term, December 31.

The day the grand jury’s investigation of the Likens case began, the Baniszewski family attorney filed a motion for writ of habeas corpus to get Stephanie Baniszewski released on bond.

The attorney, John R. Hammond, in his motion filed on December 3 in Criminal Court, Division 2, contended that the state had no evidence to support a murder charge against Stephanie. Hammond also contended that it was illegal to hold 15-year-old Stephanie in the county jail because that deprived her of her schooling required by the state’s compulsory education law for children under 16.

“How well do you like school?” Judge Saul I. Rabb asked the girl at her hearing four days later.

“Judge,” she said, “if school were a man, I’d marry it.”

She later was transferred to the county Juvenile Center, where she could attend school.

Stephanie showed her confidence of her innocence by waiving immunity from prosecution and testifying before the grand jury. The investigative body, whose hearings are kept secret by state law, also heard from another 15-year-old girl that day, Jenny Fay Likens. Three policemen testified to round out the December 4 grand jury hearing.

Later, Gertrude Baniszewski also asked to be heard by the grand jury. Her testimony was to embarrass her later. Although grand jury testimony normally is secret, there is a provision for its release. It can be read from at trial to show conflicts between a witness’s grand jury testimony and his or her trial testimony.

Grand jury testimony thus can be useful to the state not only for its investigative value, but also for its value in impeaching witnesses and in prosecuting perjury cases. Gertrude Baniszewski found this out the hard way.

There was one slight matter to be disposed of before the grand jury could report on the Likens case. On December 21, Coy Hubbard was bound from Municipal Court Room 6 to the grand jury on a charge of murder.

The grand jury’s final report of the year, on December 30, contained two indictments for first-degree murder, one for second-degree murder, one
for voluntary manslaughter, one for bribery, one for involuntary manslaughter, three for assault and battery with intent to gratify sexual desires, four for assault and battery with intent to kill, seven for rape, one for sodomy, one for aiding an escape, two for aggravated assault and battery, four for larceny, one for forgery, and one for attempted arson.

Conviction of first-degree murder in Indiana carried a sentence of death in the electric chair or life in prison, as determined by the judge and jury. No woman or child had ever been sentenced to death in Indiana.

One of the first-degree murder indictments returned by the Marion County grand jury on December 30, 1965, named Gertrude Baniszewski, 37 years old; Paula Baniszewski, 17; Stephanie Baniszewski, 15; Johnny Baniszewski, 12; Coy Hubbard, 15, and Richard Hobbs, also then 15—all charged with striking, beating, kicking and otherwise inflicting fatal injuries on one Sylvia Likens—with premeditated malice.

No charges were levied against Anna Siscoe, Judy Duke, Randy Lepper or Mike Monroe. They were released to their parents. Marie, Shirley and Jimmy Baniszewski were placed in separate foster homes by the Marion County Department of Public Welfare.