Word: sylvia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Slaps & Punches. For two months, things went pleasantly enough. Then one day Paula Baniszewski, now 11, hit Sylvia on the jaw so hard that Paula broke her wrist. Paula's mother took to slapping Sylvia for ever more frequent, if imagined, offenses. She did not complain to her parents when they made a visit in early October. After that, her tormentors became increasingly sadistic. John Baniszewski Jr., now 13, and two neighbor boys, diabetic Richard Dean ("Ricky") Hobbs and Coy Hubbard, both 15, joined the laceration game. Sylvia was burned with matches and cigarettes, whipped with a heavy leather...
Forbidden to eat at one point, she was seen consuming scraps from a garbage can. Oct. 6 was her last day at school. Concerned by Sylvia's absence from church, the pastor dropped in to inquire about her, was told by the woman that the girl was being kept home because she stole things. At the time, Sylvia was tied to an upstairs bed, forbidden water or the use of the bathroom...
...torturing Sylvia had become a neighborhood sport, with at least four other youngsters taking part. Even Shirley Baniszewski, 10, and Sister Marie, 11, joined in. So did Stephanie, 15, whom Sylvia had accused of being a prostitute. In fact, John Jr. told police, at one time or another everyone in the family except Mrs. B.'s 18-month-old baby had burned Sylvia with cigarettes. Polio-crippled Jenny Likens was occasionally forced on pain of beating to join the assault on her sister...
Brands & Salt. Around mid-October, after Sylvia had wet her bed, Mrs. B. ordered her to sleep thereafter in the basement on a pile of filthy rags, along with the family's two dogs. Later, according to Hobbs, Mrs. B. told Sylvia, "Now I'm going to brand you." A three-inch sewing needle was heated with matches and, Hobbs said, "Gertie started putting words on her, but she got sick and told me to finish it." Etched in two tiers of inch-high block letters across Sylvia's lower abdomen, the words said...
About 2:30 the next morning, Sylvia, by then in what officials described as a state of "profound apathy," made what was apparently her only effort to get help. Using a coal shovel, she scraped on the basement floor for almost two hours. A woman next door was awakened and on the verge of calling police when the scraping stopped. That afternoon, as Sylvia lay moaning and mumbling incoherently on her pile of rags, Mrs. Baniszewski, Ricky, John B. Jr. and Paula sprinkled a box of soap powder on her, then added hot water. Afterward, John Jr. sprayed her with...