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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.
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.
May 20, 2023 · 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.
Oct 24, 2012 · Gertrude Baniszewski was convicted of first-degree murder again at a second trial. She was paroled in 1985, changed her name to Nadine Van Fossan and moved to Iowa. She died in...
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 · Gertrude and Paula Baniszewski were sentenced to life terms at the Indiana Women's Prison in Indianapolis. The boys were sentenced to two-to-21-year terms at the Indiana State Reformatory in ...
Jul 16, 2024 · The 2007 film, ‘An American Crime,’ depicts the harrowing torture and murder of a sixteen-year-old girl, Sylvia Likens, at the hands of her caregiver, Gertrude Baniszewski.
May 19, 2023 · 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.
May 4, 2017 · 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.
In December 1965, a grand jury indicted Gertrude Baniszewski, her daughters Paula, 17, and Stephanie, 15, and her son John Jr., 12, and two neighbors, Coy Hubbard and Richard Hobbs, both 15, on charges of first-degree murder. The highly publicized April 1966 murder trial drew national attention.
