House of Evil is the same book.
If you want this book now, and at a reasonable
price, go to your favorite retailer in town or on line.
Because publication of this book has been taken over by St. Martin’s press, Borf Books can no longer sell it except as a collector's item; and we will need proof of your purchase of House of Evil, the St. Martin’s publication, before we can sell our publication to you. Please send us an e-mail if you want to purchase the second edition of The Indiana Torture Slaying as a collector’s item. borf@borfents.com |
Borf Books 270-597-2187 by Bee-Line Books, has been called “Perhaps the rarest true crime paperback” – Mr. Mike’s True Crime Books |
Also from Borf Books: |
AGONY IN INDIANAPOLIS [publisher’s introduction to first edition, 1966]
Here, step by step – from the discovery of a pretty teen-ager’s abused body through a long, agonizing trial – is the almost unbe- lievable story of a woman and children whose sadism shocked the world. |
In July of 1965, Mr. and Mrs. Lester Likens of Indianapolis left their 16-year- old daughter in the care of a total stranger while they went on tour with a carnival. In three months the girl was dead, the victim of savage, extended brutality. The crime – committed by a divorcee and a coterie of sadistic children motivated by mob psychology – shocked grizzled police veterans as well as newspaper readers from coast to coast and overseas. The five-week trial of the divorcee and four children – two of them her own – on charges of first degree murder gave com- placent Indiana citizens their most searing courtroom drama in years. |
Sylvia Likens |
The murder of Sylvia Likens became an item of daily conversa- tion as people read how she was beaten, burned, starved, scalded, tattooed and branded until death mercifully stepped in. And the name of the divorcee, Gertrude Baniszewski, alias Gertrude Wright, came to rank alongside that of the Marquis de Sade. In this book, written by a newspaperman who covered the trial, the whole story is told in complete, shocking detail for the first time. |
Two children – a boy and a girl in their early teens – knelt over the motionless body of an- other teen-age girl, trying to breathe life back into her mangled, emaciated form. They were trying to deny what was already, but for a few last, labored breaths, a fact. A deputy prose- cutor was later to call this death “the most ter- rible crime ever committed in the state of Indi- ana.”
“She’s faking!
She’s all right!” screeched
The boy, a gangly 14-year-old whose |
“Someone better call a doctor or somebody,“ his companion told him when he regained the top of the stairs. Stephanie Baniszewski, 15 years old, had never looked more serious. A glint of reproach in her eyes told Richard Hobbs that she meant it.
He started back down, taking the last three |
What Patrolman Melvin Dixon saw after he entered the house was the long, thin body of a teen-age girl stretched out on her back on a mattress on the floor of the upstairs bedroom. Although she wore sweater and slacks, her midriff was exposed; and Dixon could plainly see the words “I’M A PROSTITUTE AND PROUD OF IT!” freshly carved on her belly. |
Above that inscription, deeply branded into her chest, was a large, curious “3.” Her light brown hair was shaggy, disheveled and cut short. Her face was covered with sores, and the left side of her face was discolored where the skin had eroded. There were open sores also around the markings on her abdomen, and bruises. Dixon knew that she was dead. . . . |
Other literary works on the case
The Sylvia Likens case has inspired at least five*
other books, a
The books* are
By Sanction of the Victim, a novel by
Patte
Another novel – Let’s Go Play at the Adams’
(whew! that’s
Let’s Go Play at the Adams’, The Basement, and The
Girl * All those asterisks are for Lavinia Jewel's The Punishment |
“Over hamburgers sold!”