He tells a story, and he reports: “Child after child, when asked to explain why he or she participated, said simply, ‘Gertie told me to.’”Ī mother of seven children and a 15-year-old boy were arrested on preliminary charges of murder last night after they were implicated in the death of a sixteen-year-old girl who had been tortured and murdered.
In House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying, the journalist John Dean doesn’t try to make sense of it all. Part true story, part cultural-philosophical-feminist critique, part novel, Millett’s book includes the running thoughts of victim and perpetrators, an effort to capture what the author imagines happened from the inside, but for me there is something wrong with this ventriloquism, and the imaginative intrusions fail. Kate Millett, artist and scholar, author of Sexual Politics, built cage sculptures about Sylvia and wrote The Basement: The Story of a Human Sacrifice, in which she tries to make sense of it all. One of the defense lawyers, Forrest Bowman Jr., wrote about the trial many years later and published a book in 2014. Several novels have been based on her story. True crime stories about her have appeared regularly over the years. There is a small monument to Sylvia Marie Likens in Willard Park in Indianapolis, Indiana, not far from a house that once stood at 3850 East New York Street, where they beat the girl with a police belt, a fraternity-style paddle, and a curtain rod, where they lowered her into scalding baths, pushed her down stairs, rubbed salt in her wounds, forced her to drink urine and eat excrement from a baby’s diaper, where they dehydrated and starved her and put out cigarettes on her body, where they branded words into her abdomen with a burning poker, and where they finally killed her.
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