Sylvia Likens - Aftermath

Aftermath

The boys would spend two years in prison. In 1971, Paula and Gertrude Baniszewski were granted another trial. Paula pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was released two years later. Gertrude, however, was again convicted of first-degree murder. She came up for parole in 1985, and despite a public outcry and petitions against her release, the parole board took her good behavior in prison into account, and she was released.

Gertrude Baniszewski changed her name to Nadine van Fossan, using her middle name and her maiden name, and moved to Laurel, Iowa, where she died of lung cancer on June 16, 1990. When Jenny Likens, who was then married and living in Beech Grove, Indiana, saw her obituary in the newspaper, she clipped and mailed it to her mother with the note: "Some good news. Damn old Gertrude died. Ha ha ha! I am happy about that." Jenny Likens Wade died of a heart attack on June 23, 2004, at the age of 54. The house at 3850 East New York Street in which Sylvia Likens was tortured and murdered stood vacant and run-down for much of the 44 years after the murder, and was demolished on April 23, 2009. The property will become a church parking lot.

Richard Hobbs died of lung cancer at the age of 21, four years after being released from the reformatory.

After the Westside Middle School massacre, John Baniszewski, by then calling himself John Blake, made a statement claiming that young criminals are not beyond help and describing how he had turned his life around. He died at the General Hospital in Lancaster, Pennsylvania following a lengthy illness with diabetes on May 19, 2005, at the age of 52, leaving a wife and three children.

Coy Hubbard, Stephanie Baniszewski’s boyfriend who beat Sylvia and practiced his judo flips on her, had been in and out of prison since his release and was later charged and acquitted of the murder of two men. He died of a heart attack on June 23, 2007, at the age of 56 in Shelbyville, Indiana. He had a wife and five children, seventeen grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Paula Baniszewski, at seventeen the oldest of the Baniszewski children, received a sentence of twenty years to life for her part in Sylvia’s death. While incarcerated, she bore a baby girl (initially named Gertrude) who was later adopted. She unsuccessfully attempted to escape twice from prison in 1971. In 1972, she was paroled and assumed a new identity. She eventually married and has two children; reportedly she lives in a small town in Iowa today. Baniszewski worked as an aide to a school counselor for 14 years at the Beaman-Conrad-Liscomb-Union-Whitten (BCLUW) school district in Iowa, having changed her name to Paula Pace and lied to the school district when applying for the job. She was fired when the school discovered her deception.

The murder charge against Gertrude’s second-oldest daughter, Stephanie, was dropped after she turned state's evidence against the others. She became a school teacher and assumed a new name. She also married and had several children.

The injury to person charges against the younger juveniles Anna Ruth Siscoe, Judy Darlene Duke, Michael John (Mike) Monroe, and Randy Gordon Lepper were dropped as well. Lepper died November 14, 2010 in Indianapolis at the age of 56.