Depictions
The case has since been subject to numerous fictional and non-fictional adaptations.
- Author Natty Bumppo (formerly John Dean) wrote an account of the murder, House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying.
- Patte Wheat's By Sanction of the Victim is a fictional story based on the incident, set in the 1970s.
- Author Kate Millett wrote a semi-fictional book relating to the incident, The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice. Millett stated in an interview that the murder of Sylvia Likens "is the story of the suppression of women. Gertrude seems to have wanted to administer some terrible truthful justice to this girl: that this was what it was to be a woman."
- Mendal Johnson's only novel Let's Go Play at the Adams bears similarities to, and may have been based on, this case.
- Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door is a fictional story loosely based on the murder set in the 1950s and a movie based on the book was released in 2007, with Blythe Auffarth in the main role.
- The film An American Crime starring Catherine Keener as Baniszewski, Ellen Page as Likens, and Jeremy Sumpter as Coy Hubbard premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007.
- The Sylvia Likens case was documented on the “Born Bad” episode of Deadly Women on the Investigation Discovery channel.
- A play called Hey, Rube, written by Janet McReynolds, was produced but never published. she had a baby and named it Gertrude.
Read more about this topic: Gertrude Baniszewski
Famous quotes containing the word depictions:
“Surely, of all creatures we eat, we are most brutal to snails. Helix optera is dug out of the earth where he has been peacefully enjoying his summer sleep, cracked like an egg, and eaten raw, presumably alive. Or boiled in oil. Or roasted in the hot ashes of a wood fire.... If God is a snail, Bosch’s depictions of Hell are going to look like a vicarage tea-party.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)