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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.
It has been the most enduring nightmare in Indianapolis True Crime history — the Oct. 26, 1965, torture-murder of 16-year-old Sylvia Likens.
After being left in the care of family friend Gertrude Baniszewski, 16-year-old Sylvia Likens was brutally tortured and ultimately murdered in Indianapolis on October 26, 1965.
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.
Two women scuffled over a seat at the Sylvia Marie Likens murder trial today and one came off the loser — the lost seat and a cut hand.
Gertrude Baniszewski (left), in custody of a police matron, weeps after a jury delivered a guilty verdict against her and four teenagers in the torture slaying of 16-year-old Sylvia Liken on May 19, 1966.
Gertrude Baniszewski (1929–1990), also known as Gertrude Wright and The Torture Mother, was an Indiana divorcee who oversaw and facilitated the prolonged torture, mutilation, and eventual murder of Sylvia Likens, a teenage girl she had taken into her home.
