Oh, I understand how it happens. Bloodlust comes up and… you know… takes over.
—My mom on the violence of crowds
Everyone knows in a basic way what violence is for. Even my mother, a housewife who grew up on a farm. Even me, a small seventy-year-old woman who makes her living with written words. Violence is for getting your way; for asserting your existence as an individual or a group; for venting torrential feeling; for sadistic pleasure. Sometimes, I think, it’s to assuage existential terror. Because if you’re doing the violence, at the moment anyway, it’s not being done to you.
I’ve been on the receiving end of violence more than once; sometimes I’ve had to submit to it, sometimes I’ve successfully fought back and escaped it. Because of my bodily experience I’ve become attuned to subtle social cues of possible violence: a look in the eyes, a tightening of the jaw, a way of moving, of speaking that precedes rage or cold deliberate cruelty. I’m aware of its presence in a way that perhaps most people in my social strata are not. I have a reliable (I hope!) sense of when to be afraid and when somebody’s just loudly venting or screwing around.
Apart from actual attack, I also know violence through the impulses and instincts of my own body and my (often) unwilled imaginative openness to horrific, inexplicable images, fantasies, vivid and sometimes truly terrible dreams. In particular, I apprehend these bewildering dreams—of murder, torture, dismemberment—like young children might understand violent fairy tales. They feel primal, inevitable, like some inhuman mechanism that expresses itself through humanity.
Not everyone has dreams like that. But almost everyone experiences—sometimes without wanting to—the public “dreaming” of horror movies, murder movies, true-crime videos and violent porn. (On a more private level, many engage in symbolic sexual violence, which seems to have become mainstream—think of the well-documented popularity of choking during sex.) I’ve seen countless representations of violence, but one in particular has, for who knows what reason, gotten snagged in my imagination: a romantic video made of fragments from one of Rob Zombie’s Halloween movies and set to a morbid love song. The five-minute mash-up rapidly intercuts scenes of happy domesticity (a loving mother, kids in face paint eating popcorn in front of the tube, teens affectionately goofing around) with gruesome murders committed by a beautiful little boy; delighted music plays, children laugh. Effectively sinister but oddly comforting too. Because it seems to understand something: an intimate blend of love and rage, innocence and evil that many people may recognize because they’ve glimpsed it in themselves. Innocence, after all, can mean an original state of being, prior to knowledge of right and wrong.
In a society that is adamant, if hypocritical, in its moral rejection of violence, the ubiquity of such violent imagery seems to have its own kind of purpose. It seems cathartic, or psychically protective—a safe ritual that admits the reality of violence and cruelty while also warding it off, like a ceremonial demon mask. Maybe it’s even necessary, a way to propitiate the inhuman mechanism that expresses itself through humanity.
Then there is the real thing touched on by such florid representation: the drive of some humans to inflict literal pain and death for no reason but the apparent compulsive enjoyment of it. While “everyone” may understand the pragmatic or raw emotive reasons for violence, I’m not sure anyone understands sadistic violence sans motive, especially when acted out on helpless victims or in the context of social normalcy. Or maybe we do understand, in the way I understand the dreams that horrify and bewilder me: on a primitive feeling level that translates into images but not words; maybe we just don’t want to admit that we understand.
●
Standing aghast before the apprehension of such brutal innocence, such irrational cruelty, I recall two extremely violent true stories, one of which appears to be purely, almost demonically cruel, with no rational purpose, and another which hints at purpose (or perhaps the better word is sense), not quite legible to the contemporary eye. I learned of both these stories from books I read years ago and never forgot: Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne and The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice by Kate Millett. The former is about the rise and fall of the Comanche tribe in the American Southwest, an account that at times dwells on Comanche torture practices; the latter is about the sadistic murder of a young girl in Indiana, circa 1965. These stories bear no relationship to each other except that in both of them violence takes place in a socially normative context—albeit a perverted one in the case of the murder—and that both involve children.
Empire of the Summer Moon has been immensely popular since its release in 2010, and everyone who has spoken to me about the book does so with excitement and reverence. Plainly they all admire its depiction of the extraordinary strength, skill and ferocity of the Comanche at war and at life—which for them almost seemed like the same thing. The Comanche’s use and enjoyment of torture is no deal-breaker for these fans; indeed, it seems like it would have to be part of the romance they have with the book. (Critics of the book have argued that the book both romanticizes and exaggerates the practice of torture not only among Comanche but virtually all Plains Indians; a recent Substack essay by historian Daniele Bolelli is one bracing example of such criticism.)
I thought of this book in relation to violence generally because it is one of the few I’ve read that gave me a sense of insight on said subject—this is due to the unique and intimate context the author is able to provide. The most compelling accounts of Comanche culture in Empire of the Summer Moon were written by their former captives, most dramatically those that the tribe had seized as children (after raping/slaughtering their parents) and then adopted and raised accordingly. What is striking in the stories is not only the violence described (it is horrendous) but the ultimate response of some of the kidnapped children. I have read other tales of kidnapped, enslaved and brutalized peoples from all over the world, and I don’t think I’ve ever before read of victims who bonded with their captors so fully, with what finally became mutual affection and respect.
The simplest explanation for this bonding is Stockholm syndrome on an epic scale—these children, who were very young and therefore unformed, wanted to survive. In addition to that, they came from a more physical world than we can imagine, a world where mortality was closer and more visible in the form of fatal illness and the butchering of animals for food. They were the descendants of Europeans whose cultures practiced public violence: drawing and quartering, burnings and hangings which could function as spectacle as well as punishment. Physical suffering and cruelty must’ve had a somewhat different meaning for them than they do for us.
One of the most striking documented stories is that of a ten-year-old girl named Bianca (“Banc”) Babb whose introduction to Comanche life was a raid during which she saw her mother stabbed with a butcher knife, shot through the lungs with an arrow and then scalped while she was still alive. Banc and her brother (“Dot”) were thrown across horseback and furiously ridden to an Indian village where the little girl was given to a childless Comanche woman to raise; the woman treated her tenderly, and Babb acclimatized to tribal life so quickly and thoroughly that she came to love it. She was only with the tribe for seven months before being ransomed—her adoptive mother gave her up with great reluctance, and actually tried to run away with her—yet she became deeply attached during that time. “She loved the war dances,” Gwynne writes, and the “informality of meals”; she “learned the language quickly and so well” that, in her words, “it was rather a hard job for me to get my tongue twisted back so I could talk English again to my folks.” Although she didn’t always get enough to eat and had to work hard, she nonetheless recalled that “every day seemed to be a holiday.”
Another girl, an eight-year-old named Minnie Caudle, was sheltered by a Comanche woman who “slept with her to keep her warm and tried to shelter her from the events of the first night, when Minnie’s two aunts were raped and tortured as they wept and prayed.” The next day the aunts were killed, but Minnie was coddled and “treated with great kindness.” Like Bianca Babb, she was captive for half the year before being ransomed. “As long as both of them lived,” Gwynne writes, “Banc and Minnie defended the Comanche tribe”:
Minnie Caudle “would not hear a word against the Indians,” according to her great-granddaughter. Her great-grandson said, “She always took up for the Indians. She said they were good people in their way. When they got kicked around, they fought back.” This is asserted against the brute facts of her own experience, which involved watching her captors rape and kill five members of her family. Banc Babb, against all reason and memory, felt the same way. In 1897 she applied for official adoption into the Comanche tribe … Banc’s brother Dot Babb described it as “bonds of affection almost as sacred as family ties.” … The children all had the sense that, at the core of these most notorious and brutal killers, there existed a deep and abiding tenderness.
The most historically important of these “loved captives” was the legendary Cynthia Parker, who at nine years old saw her family viciously massacred, two of her female relatives gang-raped and tortured—she herself was initially beaten senseless along with the other kidnapped children—and yet grew up to be a fully integrated member of the tribe, marrying a chieftain and raising the last great Comanche chief, Quanah Parker. Her blood relatives never gave up searching for Cynthia and eventually they found her; she was “rescued” after enduring the massacre of what had become her community and the loss of her sons (she did not know they had survived). However, she had no desire to return to “civilization” and indeed lived the rest of her life among her (supposedly) fellow whites in a state of almost wordless grief. She did not live to see that Quanah had not only survived but would go on to become an honored man in both white and Indian societies.
Cynthia Parker, Minnie Caudle and Bianca Babb did not directly participate in the violence committed by male warriors, but adopted boys were another story. Here is an account written by Herman Lehmann, a former child captive who became a full Comanche warrior, in which he describes a victorious attack on a camp of Tonkawa Indians, including the enthusiastic torture of the wounded:
A great many of the dying enemy were gasping for water, but we heeded not their pleadings. We scalped them, amputated their arms, cut off their legs, cut out their tongues, and threw their mangled bodies and limbs upon their own campfire. … Some of them were able to flinch and work as a worm, and some were able to speak and plead for mercy. We piled them up, put on more wood, and danced around in great glee as we saw the grease and blood run from their bodies, and were delighted to see them swell up and hear their hide pop as it would burst in the fire.
Note that Lehmann doesn’t say that “they” but that “we” were delighted. Delighted!
These stories, set in the context of Comanche culture and the historical time generally, convey to me an admittedly subjective sense that many of these favored captives (as opposed to the enslaved, who described rape and abuse) became deeply committed to Comanche life not in spite of the violence it entailed but in part because of it. Not because the captives were especially cruel people but because—I’m tempted to conclude—in experiencing both the extreme violence and the extreme “tenderness” of tribal life they embraced an unalloyed fullness of being that their native culture did not afford them. The author certainly did not say this, but I came away feeling that, for the Comanche, violent cruelty had a spiritual dimension, some profound sense that their captives, once integrated into their society, readily understood.
But “spiritual” is a vague word here or maybe anywhere, a placeholder for feelings and experiences outside the range of human comprehension. In using it I have a sense of what I mean, but, as noted above, it is hard to translate into words: something chthonian rather than celestial, an alignment with a force of impersonal destruction that briefly exalts those who become its conduit and so reinforces the magnificent and amoral power of life. For the Comanche of the nineteenth century, I can imagine that alignment with such force would be about survival and triumph over death—even a kind of Bacchic joy.
It’s impossible for me to see anything like that kind of brutal joy or survival imperative in the torture-murder of a sixteen-year-old girl named Sylvia Likens in 1965. I said earlier that I read The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice, but technically I didn’t read it—I skimmed it. It was too horrible to actually read. I came across it when I worked at a bookstore in 1982 and the title got my attention. I picked it up during my lunch break, paged through for half an hour, and put it down too sickened to eat. I didn’t pick it up again, yet it stayed with me, like the aftereffect of an illness.
I don’t want to go into detail about what was done to Likens; you can find out if you want but I strongly suggest you don’t. It’s unbearably sadistic, possibly the worst thing I’ve ever heard of. I believe the Comanche would’ve been aghast—because the victim was not an enemy but a child from the same “tribe,” entrusted by her parents to her torturer, and also because what happened was completely at odds with the (stated) social ethos of the community. I see what was done by the Comanche as acts of war consistent with their ethos in that historical moment. What was done to Sylvia Likens was a grotesque betrayal of intimate trust, of family and community; the child went to school with her murderer’s kids, she was friends with one of them. According to the testimony of the Comanche captives I have quoted, their deep cruelty was counterpointed by their deep tenderness. There does not seem to have been anything like tenderness in the murder house.
Likens fell into the killer’s hands because her parents were itinerant carnival workers who often left their two girls (Sylvia and her sister Jenny) in the care of others while they traveled. In July of ’65 they were entrusted to Gertrude Baniszewski, who agreed to care for the girls for twenty dollars a week until their parents returned in November. Baniszewski was the single mother of seven children, a sickly bitter woman who apparently developed a hatred for Sylvia within the first two weeks of her stay. The abuse at first took the form of harsh discipline and humiliation, and rapidly escalated into torture and starvation that went on for three months. It was a family effort: Baniszewski’s children participated in the torture, with two of them doing so aggressively. Occasionally Sylvia’s sister was forced to join them. Several neighborhood children also enthusiastically took part. Once, a Baptist minister inquired about what was going on; Baniszewski told him that the girl was being punished for prostituting herself. This explanation was accepted.
What was this violence for? Forrest Bowman, a defense attorney for two of the juvenile killers, remarked many years later that he thought Baniszewski “had a miserable life” and that “what … this ultimately was about was jealousy.” Yeah, okay. Baniszewski really was miserable: poor, ugly, uneducated, overburdened with childcare, she had been rejected by two husbands, one of whom beat her, and one lover who also abused her. I imagine she could’ve been rabidly jealous of the young girl’s hope and goodness; Sylvia was a confident, attractive and happy child who had a decent chance at life. Jealousy is a very relatable explanation for what happened. It is also a very inadequate one. Many miserable middle-aged women might be jealous of an innocent girl and even be hateful to her because of it. But just about none would torture her to death, enlisting their own children to do so.
If I were to guess at psychological reasons, I would make it a little more complicated. I see Baniszewski as a degraded and battered woman seeking relief by degrading and battering another female much further, making her victim an external representation of what she felt, a representation that could then be destroyed. And maybe she did get relief. If she, Baniszewski, was doing the violence then it was not being done to her.
This, too, seems a very inadequate explanation. It is just too neat. Here, at the end of my ability to think about or understand my subject, I find myself remembering a time much earlier in my life when nothing was neat. I was a teenager, living away from home, living hand to mouth. I was pretty nice most of the time, sincerely so. But I also harbored great anger that I didn’t know how to handle; I was capable of real hate. I could especially feel jealous hate for people who seemed to be morally better than I was or just more normal; people who were happy. I wasn’t devoured by these feelings because I had hope for something better—hope that I eventually realized because I had multiple opportunities to do so.
That was a long time ago, and I find it hard to vividly remember those feelings. But even the little I do recall is chastening: they were scalding, ugly, poisonous, sometimes so overwhelming that they seemed to be coming from outside of me. Or from some place so deep in me that I couldn’t locate it. Either way was frightening, and I was frightened by and ashamed of these feelings. If my life had been as miserable and closed as Gertrude Baniszewski’s was, I wonder how much of my psyche might’ve been eaten up by such feelings and how that would’ve manifested in my behavior. You might say I chose to disallow that part of my nature, or you might say I was just lucky enough to be able to make my life much, much better. I think it was both. I wonder how I would’ve stood up to the kind of shitty hand that Baniszewski was dealt.
What is violence for? Still trying to answer the question, I recall the words of another child killer, Myra Hindley of the U.K., who, with her lover, raped and murdered five children whom they buried in Saddleworth Moors. Hindley, who was a lapsed Catholic, is said to have remarked to someone who visited her in prison, “Evil can be a spiritual experience too.”1 The words are perhaps fatuous, but to me they are also imaginatively powerful. Because they evoke what I’ve felt in some of my terrible dreams, what I called the “inhuman mechanism.” They also suggest a sordid version of what I imagined the Comanche felt: an alignment with a force of destruction that briefly exalts those who become its conduit. Such “exaltation” in the form of crude power might be intoxicating to a woman like Baniszewski; indeed such “exaltation” could have something like demonic force.
But “demonic” is another vague term, a placeholder word, evoking a single image, like a scary mask, for something outside our range of comprehension; an unseeable nexus of human will, overpowering emotion and… something else that must be acknowledged. And cathartically, ritually warded off. To the extent possible.
Art credit: Katia Lifshin, Staged Fight, 2021. Oil on canvas, 60 × 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Moosey Art.
Everyone knows in a basic way what violence is for. Even my mother, a housewife who grew up on a farm. Even me, a small seventy-year-old woman who makes her living with written words. Violence is for getting your way; for asserting your existence as an individual or a group; for venting torrential feeling; for sadistic pleasure. Sometimes, I think, it’s to assuage existential terror. Because if you’re doing the violence, at the moment anyway, it’s not being done to you.
I’ve been on the receiving end of violence more than once; sometimes I’ve had to submit to it, sometimes I’ve successfully fought back and escaped it. Because of my bodily experience I’ve become attuned to subtle social cues of possible violence: a look in the eyes, a tightening of the jaw, a way of moving, of speaking that precedes rage or cold deliberate cruelty. I’m aware of its presence in a way that perhaps most people in my social strata are not. I have a reliable (I hope!) sense of when to be afraid and when somebody’s just loudly venting or screwing around.
Apart from actual attack, I also know violence through the impulses and instincts of my own body and my (often) unwilled imaginative openness to horrific, inexplicable images, fantasies, vivid and sometimes truly terrible dreams. In particular, I apprehend these bewildering dreams—of murder, torture, dismemberment—like young children might understand violent fairy tales. They feel primal, inevitable, like some inhuman mechanism that expresses itself through humanity.
Not everyone has dreams like that. But almost everyone experiences—sometimes without wanting to—the public “dreaming” of horror movies, murder movies, true-crime videos and violent porn. (On a more private level, many engage in symbolic sexual violence, which seems to have become mainstream—think of the well-documented popularity of choking during sex.) I’ve seen countless representations of violence, but one in particular has, for who knows what reason, gotten snagged in my imagination: a romantic video made of fragments from one of Rob Zombie’s Halloween movies and set to a morbid love song. The five-minute mash-up rapidly intercuts scenes of happy domesticity (a loving mother, kids in face paint eating popcorn in front of the tube, teens affectionately goofing around) with gruesome murders committed by a beautiful little boy; delighted music plays, children laugh. Effectively sinister but oddly comforting too. Because it seems to understand something: an intimate blend of love and rage, innocence and evil that many people may recognize because they’ve glimpsed it in themselves. Innocence, after all, can mean an original state of being, prior to knowledge of right and wrong.
In a society that is adamant, if hypocritical, in its moral rejection of violence, the ubiquity of such violent imagery seems to have its own kind of purpose. It seems cathartic, or psychically protective—a safe ritual that admits the reality of violence and cruelty while also warding it off, like a ceremonial demon mask. Maybe it’s even necessary, a way to propitiate the inhuman mechanism that expresses itself through humanity.
Then there is the real thing touched on by such florid representation: the drive of some humans to inflict literal pain and death for no reason but the apparent compulsive enjoyment of it. While “everyone” may understand the pragmatic or raw emotive reasons for violence, I’m not sure anyone understands sadistic violence sans motive, especially when acted out on helpless victims or in the context of social normalcy. Or maybe we do understand, in the way I understand the dreams that horrify and bewilder me: on a primitive feeling level that translates into images but not words; maybe we just don’t want to admit that we understand.
●
Standing aghast before the apprehension of such brutal innocence, such irrational cruelty, I recall two extremely violent true stories, one of which appears to be purely, almost demonically cruel, with no rational purpose, and another which hints at purpose (or perhaps the better word is sense), not quite legible to the contemporary eye. I learned of both these stories from books I read years ago and never forgot: Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne and The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice by Kate Millett. The former is about the rise and fall of the Comanche tribe in the American Southwest, an account that at times dwells on Comanche torture practices; the latter is about the sadistic murder of a young girl in Indiana, circa 1965. These stories bear no relationship to each other except that in both of them violence takes place in a socially normative context—albeit a perverted one in the case of the murder—and that both involve children.
Empire of the Summer Moon has been immensely popular since its release in 2010, and everyone who has spoken to me about the book does so with excitement and reverence. Plainly they all admire its depiction of the extraordinary strength, skill and ferocity of the Comanche at war and at life—which for them almost seemed like the same thing. The Comanche’s use and enjoyment of torture is no deal-breaker for these fans; indeed, it seems like it would have to be part of the romance they have with the book. (Critics of the book have argued that the book both romanticizes and exaggerates the practice of torture not only among Comanche but virtually all Plains Indians; a recent Substack essay by historian Daniele Bolelli is one bracing example of such criticism.)
I thought of this book in relation to violence generally because it is one of the few I’ve read that gave me a sense of insight on said subject—this is due to the unique and intimate context the author is able to provide. The most compelling accounts of Comanche culture in Empire of the Summer Moon were written by their former captives, most dramatically those that the tribe had seized as children (after raping/slaughtering their parents) and then adopted and raised accordingly. What is striking in the stories is not only the violence described (it is horrendous) but the ultimate response of some of the kidnapped children. I have read other tales of kidnapped, enslaved and brutalized peoples from all over the world, and I don’t think I’ve ever before read of victims who bonded with their captors so fully, with what finally became mutual affection and respect.
The simplest explanation for this bonding is Stockholm syndrome on an epic scale—these children, who were very young and therefore unformed, wanted to survive. In addition to that, they came from a more physical world than we can imagine, a world where mortality was closer and more visible in the form of fatal illness and the butchering of animals for food. They were the descendants of Europeans whose cultures practiced public violence: drawing and quartering, burnings and hangings which could function as spectacle as well as punishment. Physical suffering and cruelty must’ve had a somewhat different meaning for them than they do for us.
One of the most striking documented stories is that of a ten-year-old girl named Bianca (“Banc”) Babb whose introduction to Comanche life was a raid during which she saw her mother stabbed with a butcher knife, shot through the lungs with an arrow and then scalped while she was still alive. Banc and her brother (“Dot”) were thrown across horseback and furiously ridden to an Indian village where the little girl was given to a childless Comanche woman to raise; the woman treated her tenderly, and Babb acclimatized to tribal life so quickly and thoroughly that she came to love it. She was only with the tribe for seven months before being ransomed—her adoptive mother gave her up with great reluctance, and actually tried to run away with her—yet she became deeply attached during that time. “She loved the war dances,” Gwynne writes, and the “informality of meals”; she “learned the language quickly and so well” that, in her words, “it was rather a hard job for me to get my tongue twisted back so I could talk English again to my folks.” Although she didn’t always get enough to eat and had to work hard, she nonetheless recalled that “every day seemed to be a holiday.”
Another girl, an eight-year-old named Minnie Caudle, was sheltered by a Comanche woman who “slept with her to keep her warm and tried to shelter her from the events of the first night, when Minnie’s two aunts were raped and tortured as they wept and prayed.” The next day the aunts were killed, but Minnie was coddled and “treated with great kindness.” Like Bianca Babb, she was captive for half the year before being ransomed. “As long as both of them lived,” Gwynne writes, “Banc and Minnie defended the Comanche tribe”:
The most historically important of these “loved captives” was the legendary Cynthia Parker, who at nine years old saw her family viciously massacred, two of her female relatives gang-raped and tortured—she herself was initially beaten senseless along with the other kidnapped children—and yet grew up to be a fully integrated member of the tribe, marrying a chieftain and raising the last great Comanche chief, Quanah Parker. Her blood relatives never gave up searching for Cynthia and eventually they found her; she was “rescued” after enduring the massacre of what had become her community and the loss of her sons (she did not know they had survived). However, she had no desire to return to “civilization” and indeed lived the rest of her life among her (supposedly) fellow whites in a state of almost wordless grief. She did not live to see that Quanah had not only survived but would go on to become an honored man in both white and Indian societies.
Cynthia Parker, Minnie Caudle and Bianca Babb did not directly participate in the violence committed by male warriors, but adopted boys were another story. Here is an account written by Herman Lehmann, a former child captive who became a full Comanche warrior, in which he describes a victorious attack on a camp of Tonkawa Indians, including the enthusiastic torture of the wounded:
Note that Lehmann doesn’t say that “they” but that “we” were delighted. Delighted!
These stories, set in the context of Comanche culture and the historical time generally, convey to me an admittedly subjective sense that many of these favored captives (as opposed to the enslaved, who described rape and abuse) became deeply committed to Comanche life not in spite of the violence it entailed but in part because of it. Not because the captives were especially cruel people but because—I’m tempted to conclude—in experiencing both the extreme violence and the extreme “tenderness” of tribal life they embraced an unalloyed fullness of being that their native culture did not afford them. The author certainly did not say this, but I came away feeling that, for the Comanche, violent cruelty had a spiritual dimension, some profound sense that their captives, once integrated into their society, readily understood.
But “spiritual” is a vague word here or maybe anywhere, a placeholder for feelings and experiences outside the range of human comprehension. In using it I have a sense of what I mean, but, as noted above, it is hard to translate into words: something chthonian rather than celestial, an alignment with a force of impersonal destruction that briefly exalts those who become its conduit and so reinforces the magnificent and amoral power of life. For the Comanche of the nineteenth century, I can imagine that alignment with such force would be about survival and triumph over death—even a kind of Bacchic joy.
It’s impossible for me to see anything like that kind of brutal joy or survival imperative in the torture-murder of a sixteen-year-old girl named Sylvia Likens in 1965. I said earlier that I read The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice, but technically I didn’t read it—I skimmed it. It was too horrible to actually read. I came across it when I worked at a bookstore in 1982 and the title got my attention. I picked it up during my lunch break, paged through for half an hour, and put it down too sickened to eat. I didn’t pick it up again, yet it stayed with me, like the aftereffect of an illness.
I don’t want to go into detail about what was done to Likens; you can find out if you want but I strongly suggest you don’t. It’s unbearably sadistic, possibly the worst thing I’ve ever heard of. I believe the Comanche would’ve been aghast—because the victim was not an enemy but a child from the same “tribe,” entrusted by her parents to her torturer, and also because what happened was completely at odds with the (stated) social ethos of the community. I see what was done by the Comanche as acts of war consistent with their ethos in that historical moment. What was done to Sylvia Likens was a grotesque betrayal of intimate trust, of family and community; the child went to school with her murderer’s kids, she was friends with one of them. According to the testimony of the Comanche captives I have quoted, their deep cruelty was counterpointed by their deep tenderness. There does not seem to have been anything like tenderness in the murder house.
Likens fell into the killer’s hands because her parents were itinerant carnival workers who often left their two girls (Sylvia and her sister Jenny) in the care of others while they traveled. In July of ’65 they were entrusted to Gertrude Baniszewski, who agreed to care for the girls for twenty dollars a week until their parents returned in November. Baniszewski was the single mother of seven children, a sickly bitter woman who apparently developed a hatred for Sylvia within the first two weeks of her stay. The abuse at first took the form of harsh discipline and humiliation, and rapidly escalated into torture and starvation that went on for three months. It was a family effort: Baniszewski’s children participated in the torture, with two of them doing so aggressively. Occasionally Sylvia’s sister was forced to join them. Several neighborhood children also enthusiastically took part. Once, a Baptist minister inquired about what was going on; Baniszewski told him that the girl was being punished for prostituting herself. This explanation was accepted.
What was this violence for? Forrest Bowman, a defense attorney for two of the juvenile killers, remarked many years later that he thought Baniszewski “had a miserable life” and that “what … this ultimately was about was jealousy.” Yeah, okay. Baniszewski really was miserable: poor, ugly, uneducated, overburdened with childcare, she had been rejected by two husbands, one of whom beat her, and one lover who also abused her. I imagine she could’ve been rabidly jealous of the young girl’s hope and goodness; Sylvia was a confident, attractive and happy child who had a decent chance at life. Jealousy is a very relatable explanation for what happened. It is also a very inadequate one. Many miserable middle-aged women might be jealous of an innocent girl and even be hateful to her because of it. But just about none would torture her to death, enlisting their own children to do so.
If I were to guess at psychological reasons, I would make it a little more complicated. I see Baniszewski as a degraded and battered woman seeking relief by degrading and battering another female much further, making her victim an external representation of what she felt, a representation that could then be destroyed. And maybe she did get relief. If she, Baniszewski, was doing the violence then it was not being done to her.
This, too, seems a very inadequate explanation. It is just too neat. Here, at the end of my ability to think about or understand my subject, I find myself remembering a time much earlier in my life when nothing was neat. I was a teenager, living away from home, living hand to mouth. I was pretty nice most of the time, sincerely so. But I also harbored great anger that I didn’t know how to handle; I was capable of real hate. I could especially feel jealous hate for people who seemed to be morally better than I was or just more normal; people who were happy. I wasn’t devoured by these feelings because I had hope for something better—hope that I eventually realized because I had multiple opportunities to do so.
That was a long time ago, and I find it hard to vividly remember those feelings. But even the little I do recall is chastening: they were scalding, ugly, poisonous, sometimes so overwhelming that they seemed to be coming from outside of me. Or from some place so deep in me that I couldn’t locate it. Either way was frightening, and I was frightened by and ashamed of these feelings. If my life had been as miserable and closed as Gertrude Baniszewski’s was, I wonder how much of my psyche might’ve been eaten up by such feelings and how that would’ve manifested in my behavior. You might say I chose to disallow that part of my nature, or you might say I was just lucky enough to be able to make my life much, much better. I think it was both. I wonder how I would’ve stood up to the kind of shitty hand that Baniszewski was dealt.
What is violence for? Still trying to answer the question, I recall the words of another child killer, Myra Hindley of the U.K., who, with her lover, raped and murdered five children whom they buried in Saddleworth Moors. Hindley, who was a lapsed Catholic, is said to have remarked to someone who visited her in prison, “Evil can be a spiritual experience too.”1Or at least, that’s what I had remembered: the line in fact comes from a 2006 film about the murders, inspired by a sentiment the visitor had shared with the screenwriter. The words are perhaps fatuous, but to me they are also imaginatively powerful. Because they evoke what I’ve felt in some of my terrible dreams, what I called the “inhuman mechanism.” They also suggest a sordid version of what I imagined the Comanche felt: an alignment with a force of destruction that briefly exalts those who become its conduit. Such “exaltation” in the form of crude power might be intoxicating to a woman like Baniszewski; indeed such “exaltation” could have something like demonic force.
But “demonic” is another vague term, a placeholder word, evoking a single image, like a scary mask, for something outside our range of comprehension; an unseeable nexus of human will, overpowering emotion and… something else that must be acknowledged. And cathartically, ritually warded off. To the extent possible.
Art credit: Katia Lifshin, Staged Fight, 2021. Oil on canvas, 60 × 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Moosey Art.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.