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Gertrude Baniszewski, also known as The Torture Mother, was an Indiana divorcee who oversaw and facilitated the prolonged torture, mutilation, and murder of Sylvia Likens, a teenage girl she had taken into her home in 1965. Baniszewski was sentenced to life in prison.
Sylvia Marie Likens (January 3, 1949 – October 26, 1965) was an American teenager who was tortured and murdered by her caregiver, Gertrude Baniszewski, many of Baniszewski's children, and several of their neighborhood friends. The abuse lasted for three months, occurring incrementally, before Likens died from her extensive injuries and ...
May 20, 2023 · Gertrude Baniszewski and her children tortured Sylvia Likens to death. The perpetrators even managed to involve an entire neighborhood of kids to help them commit this brutal murder. As the autopsy in the Sylvia Likens case later showed, she endured unimaginable torment before she died.
Oct 21, 2015 · On October 26, 1965, police found Sylvia Likens’s emaciated corpse—covered with more than 150 wounds ranging from burns to cuts—sprawled on a filthy mattress in the Indianapolis home of 37-year-old Gertrude Baniszewski, mother of seven and the architect of the girl’s gruesome death.
Oct 24, 2013 · On Oct. 26, 1965, Indianapolis police were called to 3850 E. New York St. where Sylvia's body lay on a mattress. Baniszewski told them the girl had been attacked by a gang of boys and she even...
May 4, 2017 · Gertrude Baniszewski got life in prison for first-degree murder. Paula Baniszewski, Gertrude’s 17-year-old daughter who subjected Sylvia to some of the worst abuse, got life in prison for second-degree murder. The three minors who were also arrested, including Baniszewski’s two sons, each did two years in a reformatory.
May 19, 2023 · Photo: Bettmann/Contributor via Getty Images. On this day in 1966, Gertrude Baniszewski and four teenagers — two of Baniszewski's children and two neighbors — were found guilty in perhaps the most shocking and horrifying murder in the city's history.
