the torture and death of a sixteen year old girl...coming to a theatre near you!

~A young pretty maiden, abandoned by her parents and alone in the world, is held captive and menaced by a cruel and sadistic adult. With nobility of character, she silently suffers her torments, patiently waiting for good-hearted prince or knight to appear, vanquishing her evil keeper and carrying her off to the freedom and happiness her gentle soul deserves. This premise has fed countless childhood fables throughout the centuries, from the Brothers Grimm to Hans Christian Anderson. In the twentieth century, those old fables would be given a new life through Walt Disney, providing the source material for his best and most loved films. But what do we do when the heroic prince never arrives, never fights his way through the enchanted forest to resurrect the fair damsel with a kiss? What do we do when the story ends not with the beautiful virgin safe and happy, facing a bright future at her liberator’s side, but rather with her broken and tortured corpse dumped on a soiled mattress, ruby-red lips now unkissable after being chewed through out of starvation and despair?


~In the summer of 1965 the parents of sixteen year old Sylvia Likens and her younger sister Jenny left Indianapolis in hopes of making it as food vendors with a traveling carnival. Not wanting to be burdened with the two young girls, they left them in the care of single mother of seven, Gertrude Baniszewski. Because Mr. Likens had only met the woman he was leaving his daughters with the day before, he was unaware that her household was even more stricken with dirt and poverty than his own; that, with the addition of Sylvia and Jenny, there would now be ten people in a house with only three spoons, so that meals had to be eaten in shifts. Without investigating the complete stranger, or even looking around inside the rat-hole of a house, Ma and Pa Likens went off to follow their carny dreams, pausing only long enough to offer Ms. Baniszewski the regrettable advice; "You'll have to take care of these girls with a firm hand because their mother has let them do as they please”.


~And it was with a firm hand Gertrude met the responsibility of caring for her new wards. During the second week of their stay, Jenny and Sylvia were stripped and beaten with a paddle when the twenty dollar weekly fee for their up-keep arrived a day late. As grim as this event may sound, the use of pain and humiliation in the punishment of children -or teenagers- at this time and place (Indianapolis is a hub of evangelical Christianity and a stone’s throw from the Mason-Dixon line) was the rule, not the exception. The cruel and humiliating nature of corporal punishment is an essential ingredient in the endless cycle of poverty and despair, and because these two girls had only ever experienced life in terms of parental bullying, random violence and capricious beatings that was their lot in life, there was nothing unusual or unique in this particular violation. No, as members of the underclass, as minors, as females there was nothing of interest for Sylvia and Jenny in this undeserved thrashing…but there was an important corner turned for their abuser, Gertrude Baniszewski. Standing over her two naked and bruised victims, listening to their wailing and pleading, the frail and sickly woman (she was less then forty at the time…she looks about sixty) felt something deep within her, something formerly suppressed by a lifetime of abusive and abandoning husbands, grueling poverty and crippling ignorance. What Gertrude had sought desperately for in the arms of countless men, in the seven children she suckled at her breast, in the countless hours praying to an absent God, suddenly stared up at her with crystalline clarity from the raw and torn flesh of the two terrified girls. We’ll never know exactly what that special something was that Gertrude Baniszewski discovered that night; even if she had possessed the language or insight to communicate what she felt, it’s doubtful she would have shared it with the outside world. But whatever words we choose to translate her motives into a language we can understand, it all comes out the same. Whether it was pure spite, envy, sadism, repressed sexual fury or just blinding hatred of life that suddenly filled Gertrude’s brittle, black heart, they all equal the same thing: power.


~So from July through October of 1965, the Baniszewski house became a theatre of degradation and horror beyond description. While at first both of the Likens girls were set to take center stage, Gertrude quickly limited her rage to Sylvia. Resulting from a childhood bout of polio, Jenny Likens was an undersized 15-year-old cripple. The sight of Jenny hobbling around with her leg brace must have offered little by way of sadistic pleasure for her keeper. Sylvia, on the other hand, was a healthy, attractive girl, who’s consistently remembered as being bright and humorous. For a figure as prematurely twisted and bitter as Gertrude Baniszewski, whose own children were cow-eyed dullards, the warmth of gregarious youth breezing through her dark hovel must have been too much to bear, and so she annihilated it. The task of snuffing out such a joyful and sunny light was more than the frail and sickly could handle, so she enlisted the help of her own children, particularly her daughter Paula and son John. They quickly extended the circle by bringing in other neighborhood teenagers, who were only too willing to participate in the torture and violation of (the usually nude) Sylvia. Abusing Gertrude’s slave became a common pass-time for local kids, so endlessly enjoyable that boys like Coy Hubbard and Richard Hobbs would interrupt their pleasure long enough to run home for a quick dinner with the parents. The few adults who either noticed Sylvia’s wretched appearance or over-heard her tormented howls, instantly dismissed the situation as falling within the scope of punitive punishment for an unruly or disobedient child.


~Once death finally ended Sylvia Likens’ four-month ordeal, her body would offer a final and damning testament regarding the reasonable limits of corporal punishment. Forced starvation had eaten away her once blossoming womanhood; the only meals they had ‘allowed’ her to eat was soup without a spoon and forced consumption of her own waste. Large patches of skin had peeled off as a result of the baths in scaulding water they had dropped her in. The coroner would discover more than 150 cigarette burns peppering her body, a result of Gertrude’s use of her flesh as an ashtray. While it’s never been confirmed that either Gertrude or any of the teenage boys engaged in overt sexual activity, there was a communal rage focused on Sylvia’s genitals; months of kicking, punching and violation with coke bottles had left her groin grossly swollen and disfigured. Not only had she bitten clear through her own lip, but the nails of both her hands were bent back and bloody, the result of desperately trying to claw her way out of her basement prison. And most famously, most horrifically, burned into the stomach of this dead, broken 16 year-old virgin, were the words: “I’M A PROSTITUTE AND PROUD OF IT!” .

~Why, you may well ask, am I writing about this tragic, pointless crime on a web-site dedicated to discussing film? Because, ladies and gentlemen, soon the events described above will be a movie, playing at a theatre near you. Thanks to the fine folks in Hollywood, California, you too will be able to reserve a front row seat to watch and enjoy the spectacle of an adolescent girl’s brutal torture and death. For those of you who only are hearing about this case from reading this site, rest assured, there are other vile, disgusting facts I did not include in my description, that will be a pleasant surprise when settled in at your local multiplex. You too can soon know what Gertrude knew, the pleasure of watching Sylvia naked and trembling, pleading for the pain and humiliation to end. Before, the sight of Sylvia’s degradation was the sole property of her tormentors; the rest of us having to depend on the limitations of imagination when witnessing her destruction. But no longer will we have to rely on the faulty medium of the written word to enjoy Gertrude’s handiwork, now we will have every bruise, every tear rendered in absolute reality through state of the art technology. The feeble scraping of a shovel against the basement wall, Sylvia’s desperate (and futile) attempt to make contact with the outside world, will now ring with perfect clarity- THX will give the depth and volume necessary to truly appreciate another’s suffering. Sylvia Likens spent the final four months of her life in the darkest corner of Hell. Thanks to the magic of motion pictures, that visit to Hell will now be permanent. For all eternity, her violation will be acted out, rewound, then acted out again.

~I fully appreciate that the filmmakers’ motives in digging up and displaying Sylvia Likens’ corpse are completely free of exploitation or satisfying prurient curiosity. Indeed, I assume that everyone involved in this project believe themselves to be noble and selfless in the telling of this story. As the release date approaches, we will certainly hear from the actors, writers and director a uniform speech of horror and outrage when first learning of Sylvia Likens’ murder. And I for one will believe them. I don’t doubt for a second that they didn’t experience the same nausea and sleepless nights I and countless others did when reading Kate Millet’s book on the subject, “The Basement”. Where my reaction to this sad story differs is I never felt I had the right to make it my own.


~Just as I said in my piece about the recent glut of 9/11 movies, I don’t think filmmakers choose these weighty subjects out of the cynical intention to turn a quick buck. Not only will the main character in this film die (never a development that plays well with the movie-going public), but of her murderers, Gertrude is the only one who served any real prison time (20 years; Paula served three, the boys released after a year and a half). If a producer were looking to secure box office profits, he would be better served by something a little more tailored to the American pallet, like a Rob Schneider vehicle called “The Gassy Guy”-about a bumbling stooge who uses his considerable flatulence to both fly and fight crime. “The Gassy Guy” loans itself to a marketing blitz of toys and video games, in a way that the story of Sylvia Likens does not (at least I pray it won’t). It is not crass exploitation that drives filmmakers who choose projects like this; rather, it is out of the deeply held belief that art can affect change in such a profound way that we can no longer ignore the screams of a tortured child. This is an awfully noble goal, and one that reveals a total failure on the artist’s part to understand the limited role he serves.
~When artists aspire to conquer new territory and succeed, it is brilliant. When, however, that same territory has been previously explored by others, it becomes vital that the artist find some new and unexpected way to communicate their ideas. Can this new film (which seems to be alternating between using Millet’s “The Basement” for its’ title or the even less subtle “An American Crime”) really create a new way of seeing, can it tell a story that we haven’t already heard? The ugliness of child abuse is hardly new to our cultural dialogue; it wouldn’t take me more than ten minutes of channel surfing to locate either a talk show offering a detailed accounting of childhood trauma or a dramatized retelling of those same events. The declaration that a legacy of silence veils these crimes hardly seems accurate anymore. There now exists a veritable library of recent books- both fictional and non-fictional- that sift and resift through the ashes of destroyed childhoods, plus there exists not one, but two cable channels (Lifetime and Oxygen) whose programming seems limited to adaptations of those books. At the center of all this, we find the endless, endless chatter of talk shows offering the viewer fifty minutes to explore the wreckage of others’ lives. Any artist claiming that the subject of child abuse is ignored or downplayed by the culture at large is so disconnected from the modern world that his or her value as a social critic must be seriously questioned.


~During the past six years, the countless crimes of our current president have become fodder for young artists. A visit to any gallery nestled in your local bohemian district will show just how contemptuous our best and brightest are toward the policies of Bush and his goon squad. And while this contempt is certainly valid, what courage is there in expressing it in the safe venue of the art gallery or poetry slam, where you’re guaranteed an agreeing and appreciative audience? Every indicator points to “The Basement”/”An American Crime” being slated as an independent film with a limited release. The production company, Killer Films, has been responsible for the lion’s share of interesting movies made in the past ten years, including “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”(2001;Mitchell), “Series 7: The Contenders”(2001;Minahan) and “Happiness”(1998;Solondz). This film may play well on the festival circuit and in art houses, deeply moving its’ audience of intellectual humanists. And that’s the crux of the problem; there is certainly a built-in audience for any dark and thought-provoking movie pairing Catherine Keener and Emily Page (fresh off last year’s indie hit “Hard Candy”)… it’s just not the right audience.


~Assuming its’ a well-made, the select viewers that see this movie will be saddened and angered after watching the torture and death of Sylvia Likens, still pondering her horrible fate as they stop off on the way home to pick up some fresh produce from the organic market. More than one plate of pad thai will remain uneaten, the brutality of what was just witnessed too cruel and inhuman to wash away even with a second bottle of Bacca Bella Cabernet Sauvignon Riserva. And while I don’t want to negate the legitimacy of the rage of this particular viewer (it is the same rage I experienced when I first read Millet’s book), I can’t help but find it to be the misspent impotence of the passive voyeur. The simple fact of the matter is, the audience that will see this movie does not significantly over-lap those who would beat and starve a child to death, nor are these people who would dismiss evidence of gross abuse out of cultural and religious beliefs regarding corporal punishment. Making generalizations is wrong only to the extent to which they exclude important exceptions, so I fully concede that it is a possibility that somewhere, at some point in time, a child of intelligent, liberal parents was mercilessly beaten to a pulp. The possibility of that one exception made, the filmmakers would better serve their noble cause, and reach the appropriate audience, by investing their money in a series of Public Service Announcements hosted by Larry The Cable Guy…ideally run during commercial breaks in Fox Sports’ telecast of NASCAR races.


~But maybe this has less to do with protecting children from meeting the same fate as Sylvia Likens and more to do with commiserating with other sensitive bystanders. What happened in the Baniszewski house does not end with a moral that we can apply to our own lives; there is no call to action found in the broken body of Sylvia Likens. All we are left with is our despair and disgust, as well as our utter helplessness in stopping this thing from happening again. Isn’t that the real motivation for making this movie and the real motivation for seeing it? The authoritarian household is the nursery of the authoritarian state, so as the majority of Americans move farther and farther to the right, the rest of us can do nothing--nothing, but react in impotent horror at the sight of parents using terror to train the next generation of Soldiers For Christ. Like the artist displaying the image of a bloodied George W. Bush dancing away the blues, the purpose of this film is not to sway anyone’s opinion, or convert them to a position different from the one they started with. Instead, it’s there to reassure us by echoing our weak and pointless protests against the rising tide of mass insanity. This sounds reasonable enough, but it’s still a lie, and worse, it’s exploiting a victim to enrich our own lives.

~With Jenny’s death in 2004, the last of the Likens family is gone, freeing the filmmakers from any concern about lawsuits or royalties (it’s doubtful that any of the remaining killers will endanger their anonymity looking for a handout). They won’t be alone in enjoying this new freedom, since there’s a concurrent production of Jack Ketchum’s “The Girl Next Door,” a novel based on the same events. I suspect both the Millet book and John Dean’s “The Indiana Torture Slaying” will come out in new, expanded editions soon, feeding our prurient curiosity in ways ratings sensitive movies can’t. It’s funny to think that Sylvia Likens will soon be enjoying such celebrity, considering how little people valued her when she was alive. First neglected and then abandoned by irresponsible parents, she then became the plaything of a pack of vicious animals, used up and thrown away like garbage. This short, pitiful life ended as it had been lived, unwanted and unloved. But now, more than forty years after the last breath was crushed out of her lungs, Sylvia Likens finally has value. Not value in who she was or what she might have been; that’s both unknown and uninteresting. Sylvia’s value has nothing to do with the individual, and everything to do with who, and what, destroyed her. For those few of us left sane in a country hell-bent on losing its’ mind, her battered and bruised corpse serves as a kind of totem to clutch as the red-state tidal wave threatens to wash us all away. We are losing control of our country to a violent mob of religious fanatics, war-mongers and bigots, but have, as cheap compensation, the innately superior belief that nothing in our beliefs would result in the torture and death of a sixteen year-old girl. And while this may be true, it fails to admit that we then benefit just as much from Sylvia Likens, our self-satisfied sense of humanity and pity feeding off her corpse just as much as their deranged pleasures. By making her a prop in our theatre of righteous liberalism, we are in serious danger of engaging in the same dehumanizing exploitation that her killers enjoyed. While the endless physical agony of the beatings and burns must have been beyond endurance, the worst aspect of what Sylvia Likens went through was that all this bodily torture was suffered in front of a crowd of leering and hooting spectators. Each afternoon, they would march her out from her cage in the basement, strip her naked, and visit every pain and degradation their twisted minds could produce. We may shake our heads crying in condemnation as we contemplate this spectacle, reacting in horror at the sight of her naked and violated body. But to feed our pity, we must keep her in that wretched state, forever doomed to parade across our stage to take her place in the torture chamber of our nightmares. Whatever our reasons, we are still keeping Sylvia chained in the basement, forcing her to reveal her humiliating wounds to satisfy our needs. In the end, we are just as guilty as her tormentors of watching her suffer so that we may feel better about ourselves. For the powerless, the captor’s motive means nothing when the outcome is the same.

the basement where Sylvia Likens was kept prisoner for the final months of her life; the room where she spent the final hours of her life.