House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying (St. Martin's True Crime Library) (18 page)

On cross-examination, New confronted her with numerous contradictions between her trial testimony and the testimony she had given before the Marion County grand jury.

Although she told the trial jury she did not recall being out of bed on October 26, the day Sylvia died, and had not been upstairs or in the basement (her bedroom was on the first floor), her grand jury testimony had been that the “smell in the basement… was gagging me, and I started, you know, wanting to vomit, so I came back up,” and, “When I went upstairs that one time, her eyes were open then.” New asked her if she recalled that grand jury testimony. “I really don’t remember what I did at the time,” she replied, showing signs of belligerence.

“In any event,” New said, “you were not sleeping.”

She told the trial jury she did not recall saying anything to Sylvia as the girl lay incoherent in the basement on October 26. But her grand jury testimony had been, “I asked her to please come up and let them clean her up.”

“Why did you want her upstairs instead of downstairs?” asked the deputy prosecutor.

“Were you lying to the grand jury?” he asked. “Are you lying to
this
jury?”

She replied, “No, sir!” to both questions.

New, who had been energetically pacing the floor between the prosecutor’s table and the witness stand, arching his eyebrows and breathing like a dragon exhaling flame, drew out the horrid autopsy photographs of Sylvia’s fantastically mutilated nude body. “I have seen that,” she snapped, “and if you don’t mind, I don’t want to see it again.”

But New shoved the photos under her nose, and she recoiled, her mouth gaping.

“Why don’t you want to look at this girl’s body?” he asked.

“I don’t think anything dead is very pleasant to look at,” she said.

“Now, did Sylvia have sores on her body?” New asked.

“No—not to my knowledge,” the woman said.

“Now, the fact is,” New said, “you’re lying, aren’t you?”

“No, sir,” she said.

“Now, as a matter of fact,” New said, “you beat
this little girl and scalded her with hot water, Mrs. Baniszewski?”

“No, sir, I did not,” she said. She said she was not blaming the children for injuring Sylvia, either. New asked her whether testimony and signed statements of others, including her own children, contained lies. She said yes. Asked why her son Johnny would lie about her, she said, “I imagine he’s a pretty scared little boy.”

“Are
you
scared?” New asked.

“I’ve been scared about a lot of things for a long time,” she said.

“Did Reverend Julian lie to this jury?” New asked.

“He most certainly did!” she said.

“I think that’s all,” said New, concluding his cross-examination. Gertrude was cross-examined briefly by the other defense lawyers, and then Erbecker tried to recoup some of his losses with additional questions. But soon Mrs. Baniszewski began to twist in the witness chair, complaining, “My back is hurting pretty bad.” Court was adjourned early, at 4:16 p.m.

When court reconvened at 9 a.m. the next day, Wednesday, May 11, Deputy Prosecutor New had a few omitted questions to ask. To counterattack Erbecker’s suggestion that Mrs. Baniszewski went before the grand jury on poor advice from her previous lawyer, John Hammond, New introduced in evidence the waiver of immunity she had signed before testifying. It set out clearly that she did not have to testify and that any testimony she gave could be used against her.

Before the waiver was allowed into evidence, Erbecker gained permission for preliminary questioning to determine whether Mrs. Baniszewski knew what she was signing. “Did you know,” he asked, “that what you were signing could conceivably send you to the electric chair?” New’s objection was sustained.

New then brought out more grand jury testimony to conflict with her testimony the previous day, in which she said she had spent much of October in bed sick. She had told the grand jury, “I never got to go to bed. You see, I’ve got children…”

When Erbecker regained the witness, he began to ask more questions about John Hammond. Erbecker said he was attempting to show that Hammond dealt all the Baniszewski cases out to other attorneys after the grand jury investigation. Objection sustained. “Hammond’s not on trial,” Judge Rabb reminded.

Erbecker’s next witness was young, crew-cut Dr. William A. Shuck Jr., Marion County jail physician. He confirmed that Gertrude was a chronic sufferer of asthma and bronchitis. He added that she had had a severe rash about the face and neck at the time of her arrest, probably eczema. He said he had prescribed a tranquilizer, Thorazine, for her.

On cross-examination, New asked Dr. Shuck whether he believed Gertrude to be sane or insane. “I have no opinion,” the doctor said. But he said he saw nothing to indicate she was insane.

Sound asleep in a chair in the courtroom antechamber as Dr. Shuck testified was another man,
about 40, dark-complexioned, neatly dressed. A newspaper photographer was having fun snapping pictures of him in his slumber. He was soon called as the next witness for Gertrude Baniszewski, and he identified himself as Jerome Joseph Relkin, a psychologist. His credentials were a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Rutgers University in 1950, a master’s from Temple University in 1959, practical completion of his course work for a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Purdue University, and internships at the Dr. Norman M. Beatty Memorial State Mental Hospital in Westville, Indiana, and the Larue D. Carter Memorial State Mental Hospital in Indianapolis.

He was writing his dissertation in criminal psychology, specifically in the areas of “aggressive” and “impulsive” behavior. He had tested and interviewed Gertrude Baniszewski for three hours in the jail the previous Sunday. Tests he had given her included the Thematic Apperception Test and the “hand test,” a relatively new test designed to find a subject’s potential for overt aggressive behavior, he said. The “hand test,” he said, had been worked out by a couple of psychiatrists about three years before, and he was doing research on it himself. It involved showing subjects a series of pictures of hands and gauging their reactions.

Relkin had shuffled to the stand and chosen to “affirm” rather than “swear” that his testimony would be the truth and nothing but the truth.

He testified that Gertrude, “rather than being sadistic, is masochistic; she has a need to be punished herself.”

On the issue of legal sanity, Relkin was not much help to Erbecker. “She is not psychotic,” he said. “She knows right from wrong.”

But he did back up Gertrude’s denial. “Her story is probably true,” he said. “She just became overwhelmed with all those children.

“When the children started to take over, I really believe her that she really went on drugs—and withdrew. She would wake up, take more drugs, and go back to sleep. She was overwhelmed, psychologically. She just crumbled, and they all took over.”

He said her personality was “very inconsistent” with that of someone who would harm people.

“Is she aggressive?” asked Erbecker.

“No, not at all,” said the witness. And he said, “She has a great need to be loved.”

Relkin was all but destroyed that afternoon in cross-examination by Leroy New and Forrest Bowman.

“No impulsive behavior pattern?” New asked.

“I would not consider it impulsive, no,” the psychologist said.

New referred to Relkin’s drawing evidence of masochism from the fact that Gertrude had been beaten by her mate. “Did she say she enjoyed that?” he asked.

“No,” Relkin admitted, “she did not say that.” But she had indulged in masochistic behavior “by allowing
herself to be beaten by her lover” and “allowing her children to take over,” he said.

“How would she react toward hostility toward her?” asked Bowman, attorney for Coy and Johnny.

“She would take it,” the witness said.

“How would she react to a harsh examiner?” Bowman had in mind Leroy New’s brutal cross-examination of Mrs. Baniszewski the day before, in which she became defiant and outspoken.

“She would probably break down and cry,” said Relkin.

“Would she get sarcastic?”

“No.”

“Do you have an opinion as to
your
type of personality?” Bowman asked the psychologist.

“Certainly I do.”

“Let me say,” the lawyer continued, searching for a phrase, “do you have passive or defensive traits…what’s the danger?”

“Many times,” Relkin answered, “a psychologist puts his own traits into the results.”

“Would you describe Mrs. Baniszewski as a warm, loving, affectionate woman?” asked Bowman. Relkin said he would.

New had another question. “Would she be reluctant to call her daughter a liar?”

“Yes.” In fact, Relkin said, he had told her that was what she would have to do to help herself.

“Did you encourage her to help herself?” asked New.

“Yes.” No more questions.

Erbecker’s next line of witnesses included four physicians and four jail matrons. The physicians, all of whom had treated Mrs. Baniszewski at one time or another, confirmed her long medical history of asthma, bronchitis, anxiety, a kidney infection, a nodule in the breast, indigestion, insomnia, tiredness, headaches, tension, and the eczema-like rash at the time of her arrest.

One of the doctors was Paul G. Lindenborg, who said he had treated Mrs. Baniszewski at his office on October 25, the day before Sylvia’s death. Under cross-examination, he said he could find no record of having treated her on October 23, contradicting her testimony that she had gone to his office that morning.

The jail matrons testified that Gertrude looked very thin and sick at the time of her arrest, that she looked even worse than the haggard woman she was at this time. “She looks good to the way she was then,” said Ella Mae Staples.

Jerome Relkin had provided the comic relief in the 2½-week-old courtroom drama. Erbecker’s next witness, 11-year-old Marie Baniszewski, provided the pathos.

THE LITTLE
girl in the baby blue dress, with rosy cheeks and curly blond hair, had been waiting in the antechamber about an hour, flanked by her elderly foster mother and her lawyer, John Hammond.

She entered the courtroom with those two adults, who took seats near the press table. She swore to tell the truth and wiped her eyes as she identified herself as Marie Baniszewski, 11 years old. Did she know why she was on the witness stand in Criminal Court, Division 2, Erbecker asked?

“I’m here to testify to see if my mama killed Sylvia Likens,” she sobbed. So far as she could see, according to her testimony, her mama did not kill Sylvia Likens.

“Did you ever at any time see your mother strike her?”

“Only when she’s bad.”

She had once seen her mother paddle Sylvia, Marie said. Then she began sobbing again and stopped talking.

Erbecker had already scored. He moved for adjournment so that the girl could regain her composure overnight. “Let’s go on,” the judge said; “it’s early yet.” It was not quite 4:30 p.m.

Marie said she had never seen her mother hit Sylvia with a paddle or burn or scald her in all of September or October. Back near the press table, Marie’s foster mother, a Mrs. Simpson, was fuming.

Marie said she saw the other children mistreat Sylvia, but her mother usually was sick in bed. “I was always by her side,” she said. Often, she said, she was out of the house to get her mother a prescription. She said she walked to Dr. Lindenborg’s office (which was more than four miles away through city traffic) “nine or six times” to get prescriptions.

Sylvia had never slept in the basement, Marie said. She said she had never heard her mother tell others to mistreat Sylvia, but she had heard her tell them not to. Food was never denied to Sylvia, she said.

Her mother had gone to the doctor’s office “about 11 o’clock” on October 23, the day Sylvia was branded, Marie said. “11 a.m. or 11 p.m.?” Erbecker asked. “In the afternoon,” Marie said.

“Did you ever see your mother hurt Sylvia in any way?” Erbecker asked her.

“No,” she said. Erbecker had no more questions, and court was adjourned.

At the beginning of his questioning, Erbecker had established Marie’s competence to testify by asking her whether she knew what happened to little girls
who lied. “They get punished,” she said. She cried as she spoke the words.

John Hammond was mad. He had not expected Marie to be called as a defense witness by Erbecker, and he had not known that Erbecker and Mrs. Baniszewski had had a private conversation with Marie the day before. Just before she testified, she was called into another conference with her mother and Erbecker in a small room adjoining the court. Hammond accompanied Marie into the room but left after about a minute. “I didn’t like the conversation,” he said. He reported that Erbecker was asking Marie leading questions such as, “You never did see your mother do anything to anybody else, did you?” Erbecker did not put words into the girl’s mouth, Hammond said, but he was essentially repeating the mother’s testimony and the girl was affirming it. Hammond said Marie indicated she did not want him, her own lawyer, in the room.

During Marie’s testimony, Gertrude fixed her eyes on the girl, nodding yes or no with almost every question. A deputy sheriff noticed it and reported it to a deputy prosecutor. There would be more on the subject the next day.

As court convened, Erbecker complained that he had been denied permission to talk to one of his witnesses. The witness was Marie Baniszewski, the denier was John Hammond; and Hammond reported to the court that he merely had advised Marie not to have any more private conversations with her mother’s lawyer.

Before Marie was cross-examined, a deputy sheriff was taken as a witness out of order. He was a medical assistant and merely confirmed some of Dr. Shuck’s testimony.

Then Erbecker asked the judge for permission to consult with his witness. “We had some omitted questions,” he explained.

Deputy Prosecutor New objected strenuously. “At this time,” he said indignantly, “I would like to tell the court the State of Indiana got this witness on cross-examination last night,” meaning that, as a point of order, the state now had the floor to ask the witness questions. “We have reason to believe,” New continued, “this witness has been persuaded to lie on the stand. And it is objectionable if Mr. Erbecker would talk to her.”