The Punishment Game

REVISED EDITION - Sylvia Mare Likens entered the home on Eastside New York of Indiana in July of 1965 a beatiful sixteen year old girl, with big sparkling eyes and a radiant smile, filled with hope and happiness for the future.
She left the house in October of 1965 battered and covered in bruises. She had been starved and burned, cut and scalded, and most remarkbly, seven words carved directly into her stomach: 'I'm a prostitute and proud of it!'
She was dead.
The crime had been perpetrated by an informal group of teenagers and children, some as young as eight years by a thirty seven year old woman named Gertrude Banizewski. To the killers it was all a game. To the rest of the world this remains one of the most horrible crimes ever commited against a single victim.

• House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying (St. Martin's True Crime Library)
• Torture Mom: A Chilling True Story of Confinement, Mutilation and Murder (True Crime)
• The Girl Next Door
• The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice
• Sylvia
• A Checklist for Murder: The True Story of Robert John Peernock
• The Darkest Night: Two Sisters, a Brutal Murder, and the Loss of Innocence in a Small Town
• Small Sacrifices
• Bone China Girls: A Poetic Account of a Female Crime
• While She Slept: A Husband, a Wife, a Brutal Murder