House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying (St. Martin's True Crime Library) (19 page)

Rabb ruled it would be out of order to allow Erbecker to confer with Marie now, but he instructed John Hammond that Erbecker had a right to talk with Marie when the cross-examination was finished.

Suddenly, Gertrude slumped in her chair, complaining of shortness of breath. Erbecker asked for a recess. Rabb ordered that Dr. Shuck be summoned from General Hospital; the trial would go on until he arrived. The call for Dr. Shuck and a resuscitator sparked rumors through the City-County Building that Gertrude had suffered a heart attack.

Marie, wearing a yellow dress, appeared paler than yesterday.

New, who had debated during the night whether
to cross-examine Marie himself or have Marjorie Wessner attempt the job, began the questioning, gently.

Marie cried almost from the start.

“Now, Marie,” New said soothingly, “can you tell me why you’re crying?”

“I’m nervous,” the girl said.

New ran over details of the crime with her, particularly the ones she said she had seen the other children commit. She said Johnny once hit Sylvia “as hard as he could.”

“Was your mother there when this happened?” New asked.

“Yes, sir,” Marie said.

New asked about the time Johnny tied Sylvia in the basement. “You do your best, Marie,” he said. “If you were down there, I want you to tell everything you remember.”

New handed Marie the fraternity paddle; and her foster mother, in the courtroom again this morning, clasped her hands to her face. Marie said her mother had applied it two or three times to Sylvia’s bottom.

“Did she ever hit her anywhere else?” New asked.

“No, sir!” Marie said.

New summoned Darlene McGuire into the courtroom. Marie had testified the day before that Darlene, one of Sylvia’s best friends, had put a cigarette out on Sylvia. Confronting Marie with Darlene staring her in the face, New asked her if she still remembered that. Marie stuck to her story.

She said the branding occurred on a Tuesday the week before Sylvia died. Richard Hobbs, Shirley and Johnny Baniszewski, and Mrs. Baniszewski were present, she said.

“Then there was no school that day?” New asked.

“No,” Marie said, but she could not think what holiday it might be, on October 19.

Marie said she had just come up from the basement and saw Ricky scratching the letter “I” on Sylvia’s stomach. Shirley had heated the needle with a match, Marie said.

“Now, Marie,” New cautioned. “Shirley said you lit the match. Who is telling the truth?” Marie was telling the truth, Marie insisted. She also insisted that her mother was in bed and had nothing to do with the branding or tattooing.

“Now, Marie,” New admonished, “you’re not telling the truth, are you?”

“Yes, I’m telling the truth!” New confronted her with contradictory testimony. “No, sir,” she admitted, sobbing.

Marie said Paula lit the paper in the sink to heat the makeshift branding iron. “Now, Marie,” New reminded, “Shirley says you’re the one who lit the paper, and you stood there and watched. Is Shirley not telling the truth, or are you not telling the truth?”

Marie reddened; tears welled in her eyes. She seemed about to burst. “O God help me!” she blurted, tears gushing.

“Do you think you can tell us, Marie, really what
happened?” New asked. Marie admitted heating the tattooing needle herself.

Richard Hobbs had been at school, she mentioned. “I thought you said there wasn’t any school?” New reminded.

Sylvia was branded a different day—Monday—Marie explained.

“A school day?”

“Yes. It was after school.”

“Then Richard Hobbs was not in school.”

“I forgot what happened,” Marie said.

“Did you talk to your mother and Mr. Erbecker yesterday before you testified?” New asked her.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “We talked about if Mom did anything wrong.” She said neither Erbecker nor her mother had told her to lie.

New returned to the subject of matches. “Did you ever see your mother burn Sylvia?”

“Yes, sir,” she admitted, “with a match.”

“Did you see her hit her with a belt?”

“Yes, sir.” New brought out the belt. Marie said she herself had been beaten with the large, leather police belt when they lived in Beech Grove.

New asked where she had got the matches to heat the tattooing needle. “From Mom.” She restated that Richard Hobbs was the only one who used the needle, from the beginning.

“Now, Marie,” New resumed, “are you trying to protect your mother?”

She again burst into tears. “The truth has to be
told,” she sobbed. But she insisted that Gertrude did not participate.

New confronted the child with Richard Hobbs’ signed statement in which he admitted branding Sylvia. “You testified that Paula was the one who held the hot iron?”

“I guess I’m mistaken,” Marie admitted. “Ricky Hobbs really done it.”

Marie’s testimony now was coming free and easy; there were no more tearful interruptions. New reminded her of her difficulty the day before. “Are you telling the truth today?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” she said. When asked about the basement bath of garden hose and detergent Sylvia received, Marie said, “Mom was in on it too.”

Marie had testified that Sylvia was unclean. “Who told you that?” New demanded.

“I don’t remember,” she said, looking downward.

“When you said that yesterday, that wasn’t true, was it?”

“No, sir.”

She changed her story of walking to Dr. Lindenborg’s office to say she had ridden a bicycle there.

New asked about the judo flips. He asked Marie to step down before the jury. Standing nearly twice as tall as the little girl, the deputy prosecutor held out his large, rough hand and asked Marie several times to grasp it as if she were going to flip him. She stood back and explained it in words but feared to touch him.

Was Gertrude ever present during the judo flips,
New asked? “Yes, sir,” Marie replied. “She’d just sit there and crochet.” She admitted hearing her mother say, during Sylvia’s fight with Anna Siscoe, “Let them fight their own battles.”

The scraping heard by Mrs. Vermillion, Marie testified, was Paula firing the furnace, at 1 a.m. “I know, because I always kissed Paula good-bye.”

“Now, Marie, that didn’t happen, did it?” New scolded.

“I heard them at 1 o’clock,” she insisted. “Paula was getting ready to go to work.”

“At 1 o’clock in the morning?”

“She always went to work early. Our clock didn’t work too good.” Paula was due at her cafeteria job at 8 a.m.

New eyed the clock in the rear of the courtroom now. He asked for the noon recess. Marie had undergone more than two hours of cross-examination by one of the toughest examiners in the state, and she was not through yet.

In about 20 minutes that afternoon, Marie also admitted to New that she had seen her mother whip Sylvia and hold her head under running, scalding water.

It was George Rice’s turn to cross-examine. He knew that Marie attended Sunday school faithfully, and he asked her if she had read in the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” Marie said yes, she knew that meant to tell the truth.

“Would you say you violated that commandment yesterday?” Rice asked her.

“I guess,” she stated hesitantly, “I would have to say no. I was confused yesterday; I was sort of mixed up today.”

She said she loved both her mother and Paula, Rice’s client, and added that when Paula brought home her wages, “She handed half of it to Mom, and kept half of it to herself, and gave all us kids an allowance, too.”

Attorney Forrest Bowman asked Marie again whether she had told the truth the previous day. “Yes and no,” she said. But she said that everything she had said today was the truth.

“You haven’t told any lies today?” Bowman insinuated.

“Yes, sir,” Marie answered quickly. “Ooops!” she said, clapping her hand to her mouth, realizing her mistake. Nearly everyone in the courtroom, including Judge Rabb and Marie herself, laughed.

“Marie,” Bowman said, “you like to agree with people when they ask you questions, don’t you?… You like to get along with people, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” she said; and Bowman skillfully led her through a series of five more “Yes, sir” answers to prove his point.

Then Marie admitted that she knew that her mother had started the tattoo.

Bowman asked her how Erbecker made her feel. “He had me confused yesterday,” she said.

“Did anybody tell you to tell the jury that Richard Hobbs, Coy Hubbard, Johnny and Paula did things your mother did?” Bowman asked.

“No, sir,” she said.

“Did anybody
confuse
you so you might tell the jury something besides the truth?”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“
Who
got you confused?” asked lawyer James Nedeff, when his turn came.

“Mr. Erbecker,” Marie said. “I didn’t know what to say, and I was afraid I’d say something wrong.”

“When you said, ‘O God help me!’,” Nedeff said, “that’s when you decided to tell the truth?”

“Yes, sir.”

Marie, Erbecker, Mrs. Baniszewski and John Hammond had another short talk in the conference room during the ensuing recess. When court resumed, Erbecker had a few questions for Marie.

During the talk they just had, “I did not say anything at all at any time, did I?”

“No, sir.”

“Now, you’re not confused now, are you?”

“No, sir.”

“Yesterday, didn’t I tell you to tell the truth no matter who it hurt?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Isn’t it a fact—” Erbecker began.

“Objection to the form of the question,” interrupted Forrest Bowman. Sustained.

Erbecker may have saved his reputation with those few questions, but his 11-year-old witness had been thoroughly discredited.

ERBECKER CALLED
two more witnesses that Thursday after Marie left the stand, both hospital librarians prepared to introduce voluminous records pertaining to Gertrude’s medical history. Each volume contained about 50 pages. Judge Rabb refused to allow their admission into evidence because they failed to qualify under technical rules laid down by the Indiana Supreme Court. It was just as well, perhaps. Contained in one of the volumes was a report in which a doctor quoted Gertrude as saying she was not sure she had the right lawyer. That could have been grounds for mistrial.

Mrs. Baniszewski’s chief witness on Friday, May 13, was a taxi driver who said his records showed he took someone from 3850 New York Street to “3048 Arlington Avenue” on October 23, 1965. It tended to corroborate Mrs. Baniszewski’s assertion that she went to Dr. Lindenborg’s office, which was at 3016 North Arlington, that day. The cabbie,
Uyless Pack, testified on cross-examination that he was not sure Mrs. Baniszewski had been his passenger or whether he went to 3048 North Arlington or 3048
South
Arlington, which would have placed them near Gertrude’s old hometown of Beech Grove.

Other witnesses called by Erbecker included two insurance agents, an attorney, and a deputy county clerk. By the clerk, the attorney was trying to show that Gertrude’s ex-husband was delinquent in child support, but the clerk’s testimony was not admitted, for technical reasons. By the attorney, Erbecker was showing that Mrs. Baniszewski had filed suits against Dennis Wright for support. By the insurance agents, he showed that she was unable to afford to continue her insurance payments. Finally, at 2:10 p.m., Erbecker announced that he was ready to rest his case, with the exception of one minor witness to be called the next week.

At the beginning of the day, Forrest Bowman withdrew the insanity pleas of Coy Hubbard and Johnny Baniszewski. Bowman and Paula’s attorney, George Rice, would rest their cases quickly. Their three clients declined to take the stand.

Rice’s first witness for Paula was her father, John S. Baniszewski Sr., 39 years old, former suburban policeman and now a troubleshooter at an East Side RCA plant. Rice was trying to show discipline problems that might have arisen from Gertrude’s handling of the children, but objections to most of his
questions—on grounds that they were irrelevant to the issues at trial—were sustained.

In some instances, however, Rice was happy enough just for the jury to hear the questions, one of which was: “Do you recall that on October 27, 1964, at 8:30 p.m., before your then residence, Gertrude Baniszewski and Paula Baniszewski appeared there and Gertrude Baniszewski struck Paula Baniszewski forcibly two times, and over your objection said, ‘I’ll hit her any time, or way, or place I please!’?”

Another purpose Baniszewski served, so far as Richard Hobbs’ attorney James Nedeff was concerned on cross-examination, was to testify that Dennis Wright was only 23 years old—thus supporting the theory that Gertrude was a siren for men and boys like Richard Hobbs.

Baniszewski was Paula’s only witness. Forrest Bowman had the floor for brother Johnny.

The principal of Johnny’s two witnesses was Helen Brand, recreation director of the Juvenile Center, who testified, “We have no difficulty controlling Johnny, no, sir.” Bowman wanted to contradict Gertrude’s testimony that Johnny was hard to control. Bowman’s other witness for Johnny was Policewoman Harriet Sanders, who testified that she was released from subpoena after her partner, Sgt. Leo Gentry, testified about Johnny’s confession. The implication was that the prosecution was afraid to subject her to cross-examination.

For Coy Hubbard, Bowman called one witness—Coy’s employer, James Moore, manager of Laughner’s
East 10th Street Cafeteria. He said Coy was a good worker and worked regularly from 4:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.—including Monday, October 25.

“Do you know if he hit a girl by the name of Sylvia on this date?” Leroy New asked on cross-examination. Moore did not.

Another dramatic high point was reached in the trial late that Friday afternoon as Richard Hobbs took the witness stand in his own defense. There was a feeling among courthouse observers that at least one of the children would have to take the stand, to explain his behavior, so that the jury would have some hook on which to hang its sympathy. Hobbs, who had performed a disgusting indignity to Sylvia’s body, but who had not indulged in prolonged brutality as the others had, may have been the least vulnerable. But he soon was to find himself nonetheless quite pained by Leroy New’s cross-examination.