House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying (St. Martin's True Crime Library) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Danny inside. They left briefly for a quick supper of White Castle hamburgers, which they brought back to the house and shared with Mrs. Wright and her children.
    Then Likens and his son continued their search. Jail officials told him his wife had been released. Not finding her at her Euclid Avenue apartment, he returned to Mrs. Wright’s, exhausted and somewhat under the influence of liquor. As he sat in the easy chair, he cried, spouting words of love for his wife and his five children. He and Danny accepted Mrs. Wright’s offer for them to spend the night in her living room.
    Before he fell asleep, Lester talked of his carnival plans. Mrs. Wright saw her opportunity and seized it. She offered to board the girls for $20 a week and treat them like her own. Her own daughters insisted on it, and the Likens girls agreed. Lester gave his tentative approval, pending the approval of his wife.
    Jenny and Sylvia that night shared an upstairs bedroom with Marie Baniszewski, 11; Shirley Baniszewski, just turned 10, and Jimmy Baniszewski, 8. The children were to take turns with a bed in the room and a mattress laid out on the floor. That night, Jenny and Sylvia slept on the bed.
    Up at daybreak, Lester Likens found his wife at her parents’ home at 333 South Temple Avenue, and told her of the carnival plans.
    They returned to Mrs. Wright’s, and Mrs. Likens agreed to the terms for her daughters. Lester plunked down $20 in advance. Neither he nor his wife so much as inspected the house. Neither had gone beyond the living room; neither knew that there was no stove, but only a hot plate in the kitchen; that there was a shortage of beds upstairs. “I didn’t pry,” Likens was to testify later. “I was going to let my mother in Lebanon take care of them, but she had her hands full.”
    “You’ll have to take care of these girls with a firm hand,” Likens told Mrs. Wright before he left, “because their mother has let them do as they please.”

3
THE HONEYMOON ENDS
     
    SYLVIA LIKENS was cute; friends called her Cookie. Her long curly hair hung below her shoulders. She was slender and pretty and in the bloom of life. She had something of a sassy look about her, but that was from keeping her mouth closed, even when she smiled. She was trying to conceal the gap left by a missing front tooth, knocked out in a childhood collision with a brother.
    But Sylvia was a generally quiet, unassuming girl, and everyone liked her. She was helpful and gladly pitched in with the housework while the others played that summer at the Baniszewski house, just as she had helped at home, where she also gave her mother part of her earnings from a regular baby-sitting job and from ironing she took in. She was soon to find her housework appreciated about as much as Cinderella’s.
    Sylvia was no angel, but she was a religious girl. She owned a Bible, and she had been baptized along with her brothers and sisters two years before at theEast 16th Street Christian Church in Indianapolis. Before the summer of 1965 was over, she was to find herself too busy with housework to attend Sunday school.
    “Sylvia,” a neighbor recounted, “said she felt she was the odd one in the family because she was born between two sets of twins.” Danny and Dianna were two years older; Jenny and Benny, a year younger.
    Sylvia was neither bright nor stupid. She made average grades in school and passed most of her subjects despite repeated absences. When she turned 16 on January 3, 1965, she quit school as her father, mother, brother and sister had done. But now established at the Baniszewskis’, she planned to re-enter Arsenal Technical High School, her mother’s alma mater, in September as a freshman.
    Sylvia’s first week at 3850 East New York Street was pleasant enough. The girls would listen to phonograph records in the house or walk to one of three parks within a three-mile radius. Jenny, steel brace and all, would hobble along with the rest of them.
    Mrs. Wright,