The True Story of Sylvia Likens

In 2007, a film entitled An American Crime starring Ellen Page became a controversial indie sensation. It depicted the story of a teenage girl that was tortured to death by a friend’s parents. But little actually know that the film was based off of a real life tragedy that occurred in 1966. The film actually ended up being a pretty accurate description of the terrible story that took place, but there are some details that were considered too gruesome and therefore, left out. Let’s take a deeper look at the abuse and murder case of Sylvia Likens.

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A Little Background

Sylvia’s parents worked for various carnivals in Indiana and surrounding states. Her parents had recently separated, and because they had spent much time on the road for these carnivals, decided that it would be best if their children stayed with a family friend until they figured out custody and residence once the divorce became final.
Sylvia had recently befriended a seventeen year old girl named Paula who had five other siblings ragining in age from two to twenty two. The children were all being raised by their single mother. Needless to say, the mother, Gertrude Banszewski, was hard up for cash, so when Sylvia’s father came to her offering twenty dollars per week to let his children live with her, she jumped to take him up on the offer.

Exclusive Abuse

It later came out in court documents that Gertrude Banszewski suffered from extreme depression and she would often beat her own children with paddles for no apparent reason or for the tiniest things. Her daughter, Paula, who had originally befriended Sylvia, always did her best to stay in her mother’s good graces, and took a few bad comments from her mother about Sylvia and ran with them. Paula accused Sylvia of stealing her boyfriend from her and then getting pregnant by him. In actuality, it was Paula who was pregnant. Sylvia was in fact a God-fearing All A student and medical reports would later reveal that she was not pregnant and there was no way that she could have been as she was still a virgin at her time of death.
Believing her daughter, she forced Sylvia, in front of all the children living in the house, to shove a glass bottle inside of her body in an attempt to abort the fetus. As if this wasn’t traumatic enough, a few days later, Paula lied again to her mother, stating that Sylvia had started rumors about her at their high school that she was engaging in prostitution. Again, this was something that was untrue entirely. Also on that fateful day marked three weeks since Gertrude had received any sort of payment from Sylvia and her sibling’s father.

As a result, Gertrude fell into a frenzy of depressive rage and threw Sylvia down the basement steps and denied all of the other children any rights to see her unless it was to beat her, which was something she often encouraged.
Sylvia was tied to a post in the basement and severely beaten. The children would take turns going into the basement and beating her, burning her with boiling water and hot irons, and putting out cigarette butts on her skin. While the children were definitely being brainwashed by their mother to do so (yes, even the three year old was found to be participating in the abuse of Sylvia), what might be the most disturbing fact is that the children who were in school would often bring their friends over to partake in the abuse as well. She had tried to escape once, but overall was too weak to do so.

Relief

Sylvia or her siblings had no way of contacting their own parents as they had no idea where they were at or what phone number to even begin to dial. Since Sylvia had been pushed down the stairs and tied to the post, she never was untied again. She would go weeks without food and days without water. The children and Gertrude continued to beat her and even brand letters into her skin. Finally, eleven months later, after an entire day’s worth of severe beatings and burnings, Sylvia Likens died from a combination of a brain hemorrhage and severe shock.
Realizing that this would probably happen at some point, she had forced Sylvia in prior weeks to write a letter stating that she had become a prostitute and hit the open road with a group of men. Once Gertrude realized that Sylvia was dead and had one of her daughter’s boyfriends to call police stating that Sylvia had ran away.

Justice Served

However, as soon as police came to the Banszewski property, the youngest of Gertrude’s daughters pleaded quietly to them to get her out of there. The police then entered the premises and along with the statement they were just given had reasonable cause to arrest everyone in the household. Gertrude Baniszewski and her daughter, Paula, were sentenced to life in prison while the rest of the participants that were old enough were charged with manslaughter, which carries a 20 year sentence.