Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying
    House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying
    House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying
    Ebook217 pages4 hours

    House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying

    By John Dean

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    ***Please note: This ebook edition does not contain the photos found in the print edition.***

    In the heart of Indianapolis in the mid 1960's, through a twist of fate and fortune, a pretty young girl came to live with a thirty-seven-year-old mother and her seven children. What began as a temporary childcare arrangement between Sylvia Likens's parents and Gertrude Baniszewski turned into a crime that would haunt cops, prosecutors, and a community for decades to come…

    When police found Sylvia's emaciated body, with a chilling message carved into her flesh, they knew that she had suffered tremendously before her death. Soon they would learn how many others—including some of Baniszewski's own children—participated in Sylvia's murder, and just how much torture had been inflicted in one HOUSE OF EVIL

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 29, 2008
    ISBN9781429944021
    Author

    John Dean

    John Dean is a former newspaper reporter who has had articles published in Rolling Stone, Esquire, and the Chicago Journalism Review. His books include House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying.

    Related to House of Evil

    Related ebooks

    Murder For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Why I Read True Crime

      Jan 24, 2018

      For years I have been unsuccessfully recommending true crime books to friends. The second you tell someone you’ve just read a mind-blowing book about Jeffrey Dahmer that they simply must read, they start to back away from you. The first rule of readi

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Living Victims

      May 8, 2020

      The Living Victims
      7 min read

    • Article

      ‘Go Ahead, Kill Her’

      Aug 6, 2020

      ‘Go Ahead, Kill Her’
      4 min read

    • Article

      Finally Free

      Aug 20, 2020

      Finally Free
      2 min read

    • Article

      Police Say One Man Is Tied To Multiple Killings In Missouri And Kansas

      Nov 9, 2021

      Perez Reed is facing charges of murder and assault in shootings that occurred in the St. Louis County area. The gun used in those attacks has been tied to other killings in St. Louis and Kansas.

      2 min read

    • Article

      'Most Prolific Serial Killer' In America Confesses To Murdering 5 More Women In Ohio

      Jun 7, 2019

      The new charges filed by prosecutors in Ohio are the latest decades-ago murders carried out by Samuel Little, who authorities say killed women in 19 states over nearly half a century.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Cruel Messages

      May 26, 2022

      Cruel Messages
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Living Victims

      May 8, 2020

      The Living Victims
      7 min read

    • Article

      Mummy’s Dark Side

      Sep 1, 2022

      Mummy’s Dark Side
      4 min read

    • Article

      America’s Deadliest Serial Killer Preyed On The ‘Less Dead’ For Decades – A New Documentary Seeks Answers

      Apr 20, 2021

      In 2018, while serving a life sentence for three killings dating back to the 1980s, Samuel Little, then 77 and in poor health, began talking. Over hundreds of hours, he confessed to a total of 93 murders. At least 50 of these confessions have been ve

      5 min read

    • Article

      3-Year-Old In Idaho Dies After She Was Stabbed At Her Birthday Party

      Jul 3, 2018

      The girl was one of six children and three adults stabbed in Boise over the weekend. Timmy Kinner was taken into custody after the attack and was charged with first-degree murder, among other things.

      1 min read

    • Article

      Killer curiosity

      Apr 29, 2021

      Killer curiosity
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Murder Of James Bulger 30 Years On

      Feb 7, 2023

      This week marks 30 years since two-year-old James Bulger was abducted and murdered by two 10-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. James would be in his 30s now. Would he be married? A father? With a career? All that was snatched away from

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Disappeared

      May 1, 2020

      The Disappeared
      15 min read

    • Article

      22 Hours Of Torture

      Aug 18, 2022

      It was 9.30am on a Sunday morning in August 2019 when 32-year-old Joshua Burgess casually walked into his local police station and told officers he wanted to turn himself in. Assuming it was a petty crime, they asked for his name so that they could s

      3 min read

    • Article

      Falling For A Killer

      Aug 5, 2021

      Falling For A Killer
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Inside Story: How Police And The FBI Found One Of The Country's Worst Serial Killers

      Dec 14, 2018

      WASHINGTON - The FBI analysts sat mutely, listening intently to the scratchy audio feed from an interview room across the hall. The two women were anxious, having spent months collecting and assessing ephemeral crumbs from the nomadic life of Samuel

      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for House of Evil

    4/5

    63 ratings7 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      It was a very twisted and interesting case but the book itself seemed poorly written. It was more like a list of facts and less like the telling of Sylvia’s story. Someone like Ann Rule would have done a much better job.
    • 5/5
      This is a clear, cut to the chase, book.
      Tough subject matter of a factual case.
    • 2/5
      I read this in one sitting. I was already familiar with this horrific crime, and found Dean's research to be thorough enough (although still scratching the surface in terms of background). However the execution of the book was incredibly poor. The writing style was inconsistent and patchy and often times felt like he was wavering between trying to create a pulp fiction account of event and at other moments he was clinical and bland in his recounting of courtroom events. As for my rating, the two stars are based solely on content.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The book is written explicitly as a history of this crime, with very little editorializing on the events, and without being overly sensational or dramatic on the details. In this respect, one can take an objective look at this event from a distance of 50 years and not be caught up in the emotions of it. Unfortunately, it is still a mystery as to exactly why these people did what they did. The Stanley Milgram experiments give us some idea of the obedient nature of people, even when directed to do terrible things. That only explains part of the puzzle. There are many details involved in the lead-up to this crime that would explain a lot of what happened, but they were never recorded and are forever lost to us in this world.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Such a terribly compelling story of Sylvia Likens. So many questions left unanswered. Why? Why did no one say anything? Why did she not run away? Why did she not defend herself? Why did no one else defend her? One of the worst crimes committed in this country, this book tells the sad tale of Sylvia's last months of torture. I do wish the author would've gone more in depth about the last months Sylvia endured, rather than alluding to them. I also would've preferred a slimmed down version of the trial - too much mumbo jumbo.This book proves you can get away with murder in Indiana. Terrifying and eye opening.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I saw the movie "An American Crime" first and actually found this a few months later at a thrift store and it's a really good book. Horribly tragic story and I thought Ellen Page looked remarkably like Sylvia Likens. In my opinion the movie was pretty good too!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      On October 26, 1965, the body of sixteen-year-old Sylvia Likens was found in the basement that had become her prison. She died there alone as the result of the horrific abuse inflicted on her by the woman who was meant to be caring for her; Gertrude Baniszewski. Gertrude and her children reguarly subjected Sylvia to beatings and burnings until her body could take no more. Sylvia was failed in so many ways, even after her death. This is her story.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    House of Evil - John Dean

    Author’s Preface to the New Edition

    THE ORIGINAL edition of this book sold more than 55,000 copies in 1966 and 1967, and I was surprised. I was a newspaper reporter, and I knew that I was reporting a big story that had been broadcast around the world; but I had this lingering wonderment at who would want to read so much about it.

    While I was reporting on the Sylvia Likens murder case for the Indianapolis Star, I fantasized about writing a book on it. I shared my dream with a writer for Time magazine who was covering the case, and he agreed that it would be a good idea. But I did not send out a book proposal to agents or publishers. I was commissioned to write the book—by David Zentner, the publisher of Bee-Line Books Inc., then of Cleveland, Ohio (later of New York).

    Only after the book was published did I realize that Bee-Line’s main line had been pornography. My book and another published the same year—Viet Nam Mission to Hell!, by Val Seran—were Bee-Line’s entrées into the publishing mainstream. Previous titles in the company’s catalog included such titles as Peekin’ Place, Some Came Sinning and In Hot Blood.

    What really surprised me, though—much more than the initial sales—was that the book became a cult classic. Long after it went out of print (the first printing was 75,000 copies, and they did not sell out), I kept getting queries from people from all over the country and a few from overseas—by mail and by telephone—asking where they could get a copy (this began long before eBay and AbeBooks.com came around).

    A few of the queries came from playwrights, filmmakers and television writers (two women in New York said they had connections with Bill Moyers and wanted to produce a documentary). Sadly, I told them all, the book was out of print (I made photocopies of my last, dog-eared copy of the book for some of the writers).

    A student at Indiana State University—who was not from Indiana, but from the Southwest—visited me to examine my archives in order to write a term paper about the case.

    The oddball movie director John Waters published an essay in which he fantasized about getting a copy of The Indiana Torture Slaying in his Christmas stocking.

    What is it about this case? I wondered.

    And to one of my many correspondents I mused, I wish I knew who owned the copyright on that book.

    Who does own the copyright? he asked.

    Light bulb! I didn’t know. But I knew enough copyright law to realize that the original copyright had expired; and I hired a copyright lawyer in Washington, D.C., to find out who owned the renewal rights.

    You do! he wrote back, in so many words, after a little research. So I republished the book myself, in 1999, and printed it myself, under the imprint of a small press I had founded in 1980, and it has sold steadily ever since. I made more money on the first hundred copies I published myself than I did as the author on the 55,000 copies that had been sold more than thirty years before.

    And now, finally, a Hollywood movie has been made about the case—An American Crime, which debuted at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.

    But all this merely demonstrates the continuing fascination with the murder of Sylvia Likens by Gertrude Baniszewski and a gang of children. It doesn’t explain the fascination. And I remain at a loss to explain it.

    Many writers, including the writer and director of An American Crime, have compared the Likens case to William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, in which a community of unsupervised children commit unspeakable atrocities on their fellows.

    But that comparison has never convinced me. The children in Lord of the Flies had no adult supervision. The children who participated in the murder of Sylvia Likens were not merely sanctioned, but were even directed, by an adult—the divorcee Gertrude Baniszewski. I find the Sylvia Likens murder more comparable to the murders committed by the minions of Charles Manson than to the murders in Lord of the Flies.

    I have received compliments over the years for the straightforward narrative of The Indiana Torture Slaying, but I have taken some criticism for not explaining why that divorcee and those children would commit such a crime, and why the Likens girls did not flee. I have three things to say about that.

    First, I’m not a psychologist, and I was not asked by my publisher to pretend to be one. In fact, it was not really clear to me what the publisher wanted when he commissioned me to write the book. I sent him a manuscript within a month of the verdict, based principally on the trial, and he sent it right back. No, no, he said. "Have you read In Cold Blood?"(Truman Capote’s seminal true crime novel, published the year before.)

    No, I confessed.

    Read it, he said. And then send me another manuscript. That’s what I want.

    I did, and I did; and now you have it.

    So, that’s the first thing I have to say: Just the facts, ma’am.

    Second: There’s a book on the Internet about the case, at crimelibrary.com, by Denise Noe, a writer in Atlanta. The title of one of the chapters of her e-book is The Sexless Sex Crime. Her point was that, although Sylvia’s tormentors accused her of sexual misconduct and forced her to masturbate with a Pepsi-Cola bottle, there was no evidence that any of them had personally sexually assaulted or molested her.

    But I disagreed that the Sylvia Likens crime was sexless, and I e-mailed Ms. Noe and argued with her about that title (we have since become friends). I pointed out that Ricky Hobbs, age 14 at the time of the murder, was not a friend of the Baniszewski children. He was a friend of Gertrude Baniszewski. He even said so, to both the police and the coroner’s investigator. That and other sexual innuendos, including defense attorneys’ portrayal of Gertrude Baniszewski as a siren, were reported in the articles I wrote for the Indianapolis Star at the time as well as in my book.

    There’s a photograph of Gertrude Baniszewski and Ricky Hobbs in court together that is worth a thousand words. It shows Baniszewski and Hobbs as a couple.It’s one of the most remarkable journalistic photos you will ever see. In my mind it ranks with the 1930s photos of the Okies, with the 1945 Iwo Jima photo, and with the photo of the young girl running toward the camera, and away from the napalm, in Viet Nam. I don’t know who took the courtroom photo of Gertrude and Ricky. I saw it in a detective magazine, uncredited and uncopyrighted.

    There was a sexual relationship between Ricky Hobbs and Gertrude Baniszewski. I am not saying that they had sexual relations. Only they would know that, and both are deceased. Hobbs denied it vehemently on the witness stand (Gertrude Baniszewski was not asked). But denial is fiercest in the face of circumstantial evidence impossible to rebut. I have reservations about the credibility of Hobbs’ denial. What else besides sex would motivate an otherwise decent young man to carve words upon a girl’s belly with a burning wand? Everything fits—including Hobbs’ death at 21 years of age from cancer. He was a tormented young man.

    So, there’s a little psychology for you. All I am saying is that sex is a powerful enough motivation for murder. We know that from history. Sex was Charles Manson’s most powerful persuasion of the young women who killed for him (and of the men who killed for him, too, rewarded by sexual favors from his women).

    But while we can speculate forever on Ricky Hobbs’ motivation in the murder of Sylvia Likens, and on the others’, we’ll never

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1