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The True Horror Behind An American Crime: The Sylvia Likens Case That Still Haunts America

Before it was a movie, it was a living nightmare: The true story of Sylvia Likens—tortured and killed in suburban Indiana by a woman trusted to protect her. An American Crime barely scratches the surface of the horror.

aliciapatterson 3 min read · 1 year ago

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Sylvia Likens

-In 1965, behind the closed doors of a seemingly normal home in Indianapolis, Indiana, a slow and monstrous horror unfolded—one so disturbing that decades later, it still defies comprehension. That horror was the torture and murder of 16-year-old Sylvia Likens, a case so deeply unsettling that the 2007 film *An American Crime* could only partially convey the trauma and terror.

Sylvia was a typical teenage girl—sweet, shy, and full of life. Her parents, carnival workers, left Sylvia and her younger sister Jenny in the care of a local woman named Gertrude Baniszewski. On the surface, Gertrude was a struggling single mother doing the best she could. But underneath, she was a volatile, unstable woman with a terrifying ability to manipulate and control.

What began as verbal abuse quickly turned into a daily ritual of physical torture. Gertrude, her children, and even neighborhood kids participated in Sylvia’s slow destruction. Sylvia was starved, beaten, burned, and humiliated in ways so depraved, the autopsy would later describe over 150 wounds on her body. She was kept in a basement, denied basic human dignity, and stripped of all hope—by people she should have been able to trust.

The film An American Crime, starring Catherine Keener as Gertrude and Ellen Page as Sylvia, tried to do the impossible: retell a horror so real and gut-wrenching that courtroom transcripts read like a horror novel. The most terrifying part? Much of the movie is verbatim from trial documents. The film didn’t need to exaggerate. Reality had already gone too far.