House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying (St. Martin's True Crime Library) (22 page)

“The issue here,” New insisted, “is not the electric chair or a hospital, but law and order. Will we allow such acts? Will we allow such brutality on a human being?…

“Where is the compassion, Mr. Nedeff?” The deputy prosecutor was whining indignantly. “I can’t help but speak for Sylvia Likens. Not for the Hobbs boy, but for Sylvia Likens.

“Will we shy away from the most diabolical case ever to come before a court or jury? There isn’t a shred of evidence in the testimony that Gertrude was ever insane.

“The time is here now,” he said. Tension gripped the courtroom. You could tell something special was coming. Quoting from the scripture, New continued:

“‘When a man smiteth another man so that he dies, he also must be put to death!’

“If you go below the death penalty in this case,
you will lower the value of human life by that much for each defendant.

“Are we going to allow them to plead simply that their mother is dying of cancer?…because he’s a 12-year-old, he’s entitled to mercy?

“The blood of this girl will forevermore be on their souls—not on mine, and not on yours as jurors.” New accused defense lawyers of trying to “hoodwink” the jury by shifting blame. He criticized their “brazen attitude” in rapping the prosecution for failing to identify the fatal blow.

“Every mark on that girl’s body,” New contended, “contributed directly to her death, and that was the testimony. The subdural hematoma was the ultimate blow.

“This is the most hideous thing Indiana has ever seen and I hope will ever see.

“I can’t hear a word these people are saying,” he cried, gesturing toward the defense lawyers, “because the voice of Sylvia Likens cries out to both God and man.”

He recounted the callousness of the crime, then stated:

“The state makes no demand for anything. But it is my considered opinion that this has been the most terrible crime ever committed in the State of Indiana and deserves the most terrible penalty possible under the law of the State of Indiana.

“What you do here will have a profound effect on the behavior of children for the next generation….

“All we hear is this whining appeal,” he said of the defense’s tear-jerking arguments, “anything but the blame where the blame belongs.”

New felt obligated to explain Sylvia’s failure to escape, however. “I think she trusted in man,” he said. “I think she did not believe these people would do this to her and continue to do it. How can these defense counsel come in and ask that question, ‘Why didn’t she leave?’…

“Poverty has nothing to do with bestiality. I’ve lived in poverty myself.”

New was finishing. “I don’t envy you,” he told the jurors. “It took courage, it took a great deal of patience for you to sit through this testimony.

“I say the verdict should be first-degree murder, and the penalty should be death.”

New’s argument, no doubt one of the greatest orations in American courtroom history, had taken only 34 minutes. Judge Rabb immediately launched into instructions, which took another half-hour. The jury began deliberation shortly after 5 p.m.

Supper was ordered for the jury in its deliberation room at the rear of the court. The courtroom emptied briefly as lawyers, newsmen and spectators went out for supper. They began drifting back in an hour.

George Rice and Leroy New discussed philosophy in Judge Rabb’s chambers. Forrest Bowman and his pretty, pregnant wife, who had been a spectator throughout the trial, played euchre with newsmen in the antechambers; soon Bowman dropped out and
John Baniszewski Sr. joined the game. William Erbecker had gone home and gone to bed.

An untold number of cigars and cigarettes were smoked. Some observers were beginning to wonder whether the jury might “hang”—fail to reach a verdict. But the gallery was still half full of spectators at midnight.

Finally, about 1:30 a.m., the jury notified the bailiff it had a verdict. Newsmen rushed to telephones. Lawyers began to pace back and forth. Erbecker had been summoned from his home about an hour before to discuss the possibility of sending the jury to a hotel for the night.

The defendants, who had been kept in the jail during deliberation, tripped lightly into the courtroom at 1:40 a.m. Sheriff’s deputies and policemen ringed the courtroom scene. The jury foreman handed the verdict forms to a bailiff, who handed them to the judge, who read the verdicts without hesitation.

Gertrude Baniszewski was guilty of first-degree murder and should be imprisoned for life in the Indiana Women’s Prison.

Paula Baniszewski was guilty of second-degree murder and should be imprisoned for life in the Indiana Women’s Prison.

Richard Hobbs, Coy Hubbard and Johnny Baniszewski all were guilty of manslaughter and should be imprisoned for two to twenty-one years in the Indiana State Reformatory. (Johnny would be the youngest inmate in the institution’s history.)

Gertrude moaned as the verdicts were read. The
other defendants sat expressionless and colorless, then a few cried. They were sentenced, according to the jury’s recommendations, the following Tuesday, May 24, 1966.

Many courthouse observers found the verdict satisfactorily selective, confirming the idea of a joint trial. But there were dissatisfied elements in the public. A woman called the court to ask, “What kind of crime do you have to commit in Indiana to get the electric chair?” The jurors had been ready to put Gertrude in the chair at one point in their deliberation, according to one report; but they came down to the life sentence to reach agreement on another part of the verdict.

Another woman wrote to a newspaper, “I did not agree with the jury…. Why should they [the defendants] be confined at our expense to live when they had no mercy whatsoever on that poor girl?”

A man wrote to the same newspaper: “Well, Indiana has done it again…. It’s the only state in the union where you can get away with murder.”

However, the electric chair was a somewhat less than real possibility. The state’s governor had declared a moratorium on executions until the state legislature had time to consider a repeal of capital punishment, which was considered likely to pass.

The defendants went to prison, but their lawyers were filing appeals and motions to set aside the verdict. Many observers thought Gertrude Baniszewski was lucky to get away with her life. When Erbecker filed a motion for a new trial for her, one wag suggested
that the meanest thing Judge Rabb could do would be to grant it.

The grand jury reconsidered the evidence against Stephanie Baniszewski and set her free, as expected. She went to live with her father. Her younger sisters and brothers remained in foster homes.

Paula Baniszewski found life in prison comfortable. It was the nicest bed she had ever had, she told her attorney.

IN HIS
fifth-floor office in the City-County Building, overlooking the City Market, Leroy K. New was musing over events of the past five weeks. The conversation was casual; the men were in shirt sleeves. But New sounded earnest as he spoke of Jenny Likens, the innocent but guilt-ridden girl who had won her way into the hearts of prosecutor’s deputies, police, newsmen, and other spectators.

“You know,” New said, “somebody ought to do something for that girl.” He leaned back in his chair, his hands folded behind his head, his eyes slightly elevated. “She ought to be in school. Her folks have a job lined up for her to answer the telephone for a taxicab company in Lebanon, but she’ll be doing that when she’s 50. She needs a new brace, too….”

Within a few days, Leroy New did something for Jenny Likens. He virtually adopted her. With the help of others on the prosecutor’s staff, he bought her a new brace. He enrolled her in North Central
High School, where he would take her every morning on his way to work from his home in suburban Carmel.

Jenny’s parents had separated again but were talking of a reconciliation that might include rejoining the carnival. Either way, the prospect of further schooling had seemed dim for their 16-year-old daughter until the deputy prosecutor and his family invited her to come live with them. And Lester and Betty Likens could see the move as a wonderful opportunity for their daughter.

Jenny had been less than eager to return to school until New talked to her and she met his two well-bred daughters and began to share their enthusiasm. Soon they were sharing their time and their clothing with Jenny. How long Jenny would stay at the New home was indefinite. She might take some vocational training later, get a part-time job and rent a room of her own in the city. The important thing now was to get her back into a school-going atmosphere.

Before long, Jenny had her books; and, even before school began, she was working problems in mathematics, dividing fractions and such, and getting half the problems right, too. Her speech was still crude, but she was not dull. A brightness lurked deep in her dark, sad eyes.

Life was like a dream for Jenny Likens. She was learning to cook; she was learning to speak correctly; she was driving the tractor-lawnmower around New’s huge yard; she was swimming every day in
the neighbors’ private pool. She loved her own parents, but Mr. and Mrs. New also had understandably worked their way into a warm spot in her heart. “I just wish,” she told me, “me and Sylvia could have been left with people like this, instead of with Gertrude.”

But because of Sylvia, Jenny’s heart also bore a burden of guilt that would probably never dissolve entirely. Despite her rationalization of her failure to aid her dying sister, she would forever feel the weight of that failure. She would feel it especially heavy whenever she entered a church, without the sister who always had accompanied her to the altar.

Jenny Likens was fortunate, however. She had her life, she had love, she had a future. Others were not so lucky.

Danny and Benny Likens were at that very time roaming the dingy streets of Indianapolis’ Near West Side. They had part-time jobs at a drive-in restaurant, but they were not making enough money to live on. A good part of what 19-year-old Danny was making, he was losing at a nearby pool hall. Sixteen-year-old Benny, Jenny’s twin brother, was losing his ambition. In their financial trouble, the boys had been evicted from one boarding house and spent their nights wherever they could find shelter; sometimes it was just a doorway.

Where were Danny and Benny Likens headed? Like Jenny, they were not dull. They were likable. But was their fate to be vaguely equal to that which had befallen their late sister, Sylvia? If not so physically
agonizing, at least excruciating in terms of the length of the misguided lives they might lead?

If a lesson was learned from the case of Sylvia Likens, now was the time to apply it. Were innocent children to suffer again from lack of concern and attention?

“The voice of Sylvia Likens cried out to God and man.”

THE CONVICTIONS
of Gertrude and Paula Baniszewski were reversed on appeal by the Indiana Supreme Court, ruling 4 to 0 (with one abstention, by a justice who had worked for the Marion County Prosecutor) that the jury had been unduly prejudiced by pre-trial publicity and that separate trials should have been granted to the defendants. Gertrude was convicted of first-degree murder again in her second trial, in 1971 in Peru, Indiana, on change of venue, and again sentenced to life in prison. She was released on parole in 1985, on a 3-2 vote by the parole board. Paula, rather than face retrial, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in 1971, for a 2-to-21-year sentence, and served 2 more years in prison (she escaped twice, both before and after the reversal of her first conviction, but was recaptured each time).

Coy Hubbard, Ricky Hobbs and Johnny Baniszewski were released on parole in 1968.

Ricky Hobbs died in 1972, at the age of 21, of cancer.

Coy Hubbard was sent to prison again, for armed robbery, in 1978. And he was tried in 1983 for the murder of two young men in rural Putnam County in 1977, but was acquitted by a jury. Also a husband and father, he died in 2007 at age 56, a resident of Shelbyville, Indiana.

Johnny Baniszewski changed his name to John Blake and became a lay pastor in Texas. He married and had children. He died in 2005 of complications of diabetes.

Gertrude Baniszewski changed her name to Nadine Van Fossan while yet in prison, in 1984. She moved to Iowa after her release on parole. She died in 1990 at the age of 62, of lung cancer.

Stephanie Baniszewski went to college and became a teacher in New York state. She married and had children, as did Paula Baniszewski, who moved to Iowa.

Jenny Likens enrolled in the Job Corps in Maine in 1966. She received electronics training and got a computer job at an Indianapolis bank. She died in 2004 at the age of 54. Survivors included two children and a grandchild.

The Likens girls’ parents were divorced in 1967. Betty Likens died in 1999 at the age of 71. A clipping of Gertrude Baniszewski’s obituary was found among her keepsakes.

Jenny’s twin brother, Benny, died four months later in an East Side Indianapolis apartment at age
49, and was cremated at county expense. His father, living in California, learned of the death only months afterward when a letter he wrote the boy was returned marked “Deceased.”

James Nedeff died in 1974 at the age of 50. Judge Rabb died in 1976 at age 72. George Rice died in 1991 at age 80. William Erbecker died in 1991 at age 81. Detective Sgt. William Kaiser died in 1991 at age 67. John Hammond died in 1996 at age 69. Leroy New died in 2005 at age 86. Marjorie Wessner left Indianapolis in 1989 to work at the Christian Science headquarters in Boston and is now retired. Forrest Bowman was still practicing law in Indianapolis as of this writing.

The Sylvia Likens case has inspired at least four other literary works:
By Sanction of the Victim
, a novel by Patte Wheat (Major Books, Chatsworth, Calif., 1976);
Hey Rube
, an unpublished play by Janet McReynolds of Boulder, Colo. (and JonBenét Ramsey connections), produced in 1976;
The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice
, by Kate Millett (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1979), including an imagined narrative by the victim, and
The Girl Next Door
, a novel by Jack Ketchum (Overlook, Woodstock, Ga., 1989). Millett also created sculpture on the theme, shown in a multimedia exhibit at the Noho Gallery on LaGuardia Place, New York, early in 1978.