Behind Closed Doors Part 2

0:06 Welcome to Unspeakable, a true crime podcast where I tell stories of real crimes with real victims, whose cases are so shocking that many are left wondering how is this even real? I use my experiences in law enforcement corrections, and combine with my years as a criminal justice educator, dig deep into complex cases of evil acts, some so evil many feel they are unspeakable. Warning, Unspeakable is intended for mature audiences. If you are easily offended, then I'm not your girl. Listening discretion is advised. Hey y'all, Kelly Jennings, you're back for another episode of Unspeakable. What are you doing? Guess what?

1:03 I'm getting over this cold? Finally, so I think I'm doing better and I got a good episode for you today. But before I start, I gotta give some shout outs to some new patron members Patreon. So all the way from Blue Ridge, Illinois, Miss Donna Graham. Hey, Miss Donna, thank you so much for joining. And I've got some people from Texas, which I like Texas because my sister lives there, Miss Carla Griffith all the way in Tyler, Texas, along with Crystal Hill in tom Ball, Texas. Hey, y'all. Thanks for holding it down over there and for listening to my show. And I've got some people from the great state right here of Louisiana. Miss Shelby high Smith from Independence. Hey girl, what's up? Bella Robo? Bella Robo? I remember Bella Robo from Walker, Louisiana. And Caitlin Matrenga from Denham Springs, Louisiana. This is the ultimate. Oh my god, y'all. I taught these two kids. I remember, y'all, and I'm going to talk about it, but I remember ember, y'all. And to have kids join your Patreon after they had to suffer through your class for a whole year because they want to keep listening listening to you, that's just I don't know. That's awesome and I appreciate it.

2:10 And Caitlyn, you remember me calling you groop to darde? I do now the world knows. She worked at a restaurant where they spoke a different language and she said gooped to darte meant frog And why I remember that, I don't know, but I called her that. So hey, y'all, all right, And then brook Haven, Mississippi, I've got Peyton Myers, Hi, Peyton thank you so much. And then I thought this was kind of neat Hope Kansas. I didn't even know there was a Hope, Kansas. But I've got Neetzy is it flore or Florea, however you say it? Neetsy welcome, thank you so much for joining in with me. And then I've got Dixie Brown. Now I don't know where Dixie's from because Dixie didn't put your address in for me. I'm gonna put a post online though, so that you can. If you don't know how to put your address in on Patreon, I need you to do that because I gotta send you all y'all's gifts, right if you're a crime family member, I send out some quarterly gifts every now and then, so I want to be able to send that to you. I've got Summer Testing. She's from Walker two, Hey girl, Hey summer, how you're doing. And then Terry Underwood, also from Denham Springs, So glad to have you. Holly Queen if that ain't a name, Holly Queen a from Ella Bell, Georgia. Hey, Holly, I like your name. I like where you live too, La Belle. That's cute, all right. And then Zachary Louisiana is gonna be Lindsey Bunch and I am just beyond stoked to have all of y'all. Thank you so much for joining. If you want to join Patreon and you haven't joined yet, go ahead and go reach my Facebook page because I have all the instructions. They are go to patreon dot com and you can join two.

3:42 So I also had some people reach out. A couple of people reach out and say, hey, what about Apple podcast subscriptions? Do you have those? Well? Guess what. Thank you Jimmathy for your hard work and dedication to the podcast because he was able to get that set up for me. So there's now the ability to join through Apple Podcast subscription. So if you don't want to join Patreon, you're not. That's not your jam. Go over there and you can click and join on Apple Podcast subscriptions. So that's a good thing. We are always moving up and getting better day by day, so I think that's pretty cool. So did y'all listen to the podcast Awards that we went out? I had it on. I was I wan't even Lodylaw was watching football and I was watching the Podcast Awards at the same time because they kick Off started at the same time, I was dumbfounded whenever I heard my name come up. I genuinely lose dumbfounded. I know every time Taylor Swift wins an award, she acts like she's shocked and bothered.

4:35 Oh my god, I can't believe it. And whatever, Taylor, shut up. You're making billions of dollars and you know that you're you're fabulous. Okay, But Kelly Jennen's down in the swamps and South Louisiana was not expecting that whatsoever. I could tell you. We had to pause the television and go back and look at the screen again, like, wait a minute, Oh my god, y'all. The show one listener influenced of the Year Award. What I listen, I worked so incredibly hard to not only tell these victims stories, but I want you to know the facts. I want you to know. I want you to learn. And a lot of people tell me that they learn and that means so much to me. But to actually have my name, y'all, I just I cannot even I want thank you from the bottom of my heart. This show is not even a year old and it won an award. Are you kidding me? I'm just so incredibly touched, genuinely thrilled and humbled that you would think of me as an influencer and and I'm just from the bottom of my heart, I just want to say thank you, and to every single victim. I didn't get to give a thank you or or a speech or anything, but I'm gonna do it right now and say to every victim whose story that I told, this is one hundred percent for you. Without you, these stories couldn't be number one told, but people couldn't learn from your experiences and we could and benefit from them, and we do as a society learn from these. So for every victim whose stories I told, this one's for you. But also I

6:08 know that I have a lot of my students, former and current that listen and to my specific criminal Justice two students this year, y'all were around when this started. Y'all were in with me whenever I was talking about the music and getting excited and telling y'all to chase your dreams. And what do you know, look at this kid. So to y'all, to all of you, hey, I'm raising my crystal light in the camera. Cheers to you. Let me take a little gulp that one's for y'all. I'm thank you so very much. I'm just touched. As a result of that. I want to give away some free shit, so let's do it. So I'm gonna do two contests coming up. You're gonna have to check Facebook or whatever, but I'm gonna do two contests coming up where you can win free shirts and where you can win free unspeakable wine glasses, which I think are pretty freaking cute. So stay tuned. I don't have it all set up yet, but it's coming, so keep checking the Facebook, and I want you to watch it because I want to send y'all some stuff, and it won't be It's not hard. It's easy stuff that you can do to win you some merch and some some wine glasses. So so last episode, I started in on this Sylvia Liken's case where she was behind closed doors and being really mistreated by the woman that her parents trusted to take care of their daughter.

7:19 They were going to pay twenty dollars a week for her to for her and her sister Jenny to be taken care of, and things just were not going like the parents had expected. So I'm going to pick up where we had talked about that the kids were, you know, their mom and dad were gonna go work at the circuit, this traveling circus, and that this left them with their children that would have to be you know, following with them their kids, Danny, Benny, Jenny, and Sylvia. And while the boys and Sylvia could maximize income helping the parents work, the issues was that her, the little sister, Jenny, the workload was just going to be too demanding for her because she had disabilities left over from about with folio, and she had braces on her legs and she would be standing most of the time, and that would just be too hard for Jenny. That's why they were left with Gertrude Benichetsky. So at first, like I told you, things were okay, ish, but not great. Remember how I told you that to keep up appearances, that gert the mom would make the kids go to church. Well, the church pastor where the girls would attend church, commented on, you know, one day, on Sylvia's wonderful belief in God, and whenever he was saying how wonderful it was that she just had this pure heart and that it was beautiful how much she believed in God. It started a chain of horrid, horrid events. So Gertrude would begin venting her frustration at this fact upon the Liking sisters by way of beating their naked bottoms

8:50 with multiple items. Okay, so the fact that the pastor acknowledged how how great and true her faith was in God, Gert got mad and wanted to take retaliation against against her. And so she, like I said, we hit him with a multitude of things, but one of them was a quarter inch thick paddle that she would use to just beat their bare bottoms with really no reason as to why. It was like the kids could not be seen as good kids since their father's payments had become late. In the eyes of Gert. So I remember he was sending the money twenty dollars a week, but then it came late, and from that point forward it was like the girls had to pay the wrath of their father's late payment. But I mean, they're just kids, y'all. There at the mercy of adults, one of whom seems to have you know, one of these kids seems to have her shit together, Sylvia. But because of that, she's going to pay the price. So Gert was quoted as saying things like, well, I took care of you two little bitches for a week for nothing, right, I didn't get paid. And so she beat both of the Likns girls with that paddle severely, and Sylvia, as a result, was like, Okay, well, if we're gonna get beat because daddy's payments were laid and because the pastor is talking nice about me, maybe I need to just try harder.

10:07 And so she did. And Sylvia tried harder to clean and to pick up after the Banichetsky kids. But y'all, the harder she tried, the worse it seemed to get. Doing the right thing did not provide the results that one would expect. Right, you try harder, you do better, and you want the benefit of that and the kudos, and she just didn't get it. Rather than easing up on the girls, Gert would just get madder and then become even more abusive. So be damned, it doesn't matter what they did. The abuse just would escalate, and eventually Gert Benicheski had begun to focus her abuse almost exclusively upon Sylvia. Okay, Sylvia is the older of the two, and you know, it just making me wonder, like why I'm a why person. I think you'll know that by now if you've been listening. And even if it's crazy or just evil, I still want to understand and why somebody does things, like what makes you go there?

11:03 And so side note, just you know, this is why I'm terrible at math, because whenever teachers were teaching the math, the why never made sense. And that's why I couldn't do math. And if I would ask, the teachers would just be like, well that's just the way it's done. Okay, well why, like show me give me a picture. So shout out to math teachers. I'm representing the kids who just don't get it. Okay, I didn't get the why, and then you started inserting into math equations like like letters and shit, and I'm like whoa, Like what is happening here? And then they pull some devil's magic and start that imaginary number bullshit and I'm like ready to just fight somebody because I just don't understand why and why are numbers imaginary? I don't know math. Math is math is crazy. Just get out of here with that. But but that's why I do a podcast and I don't contribute, you know, amazing things to the world. I just fuck math. I digress. But anyway, I don't understand the why in math, and so since I don't understand the why in math, I want to understand the why and beatings and nobody body can seemed to tell me the why. But her primary motivation, in my opinion, was self hatred and self loathing of the fact that Sylvia still had the potential to be anything that she wanted. She still had a fresh slate, she was not married, she was young, she hadn't had children, her body was still cute, little teenage body, and I just think she was jealous of Sylvia's youth and her appearance, her respectability, and just the unbridled attention that she held still. According to the National Library of Medicine, I

12:37 did a little bit of research on this, and among all types of social emotions, envy is both typical and common, with widespread effects, especially for individual mental health. Okay, so I was kind of curious as to like, you know, people are like, oh, well, Girt's just crazy. Okay, Yeah, while she's kind of a jerk, but a lot of a jerk, But what's that about? And envy is defined as a painful emotion characterized by feelings of inferiority, hostility, and resentment. And I think that fits the bill perfect for Girt in this situation, usually caused by lacking the good qualities, achievements, or possessions of others in social comparisons.

13:22 And I think that Gert is going back to when she was sixteen and she is seeing this little girl full of full of just life and still has a clean slate, like I said, and she just resents it and it pisses her the hell off. And people who experience envy want to either obtain these advantages or they want to see others lose them. And I'm telling you, I think it fits the bill of Girt because she doesn't want to see these lichens kids succeed, specifically Sylvia. She wants her to suffer because she's everything that Gert is not. Now it's bad enough that an adult woman is hateful towards Sylvia, but enough other jealous person in the house would be Gert's oldest daughter, Paula. So Paula is a problem in Sylvia's life or sure, as I'm going to lay out for you. But remember how I mentioned last episode that Paula was pregnant by a married, you know, older man.

14:16 This is gonna play a role in the Likings Girls abuse as well. Okay, so see, you know, Paula started to gain weight due to her pregnancy, and she got mad and she felt like, oh, well, I'm gaining weight, right, I'm losing my body and I'm obviously knocked up, and the guy doesn't want me and he was with somebody else. And so she got mad at the Likings Girls, specifically Sylvia, because she felt like Sylvia, now this is in her fucking head, this isn't even real, but she felt like Sylvia was getting more attention from the neighborhood boys. How much that's not even true. Sylvia is not even getting to be around other people. She's getting her butt beat every day at home. So even though it's not even true, both Gert and paul I acted as though if other people's light shine somehow, it's going to fade their own and as a result, some things are are gonna take place. Now, dealing with jealous teens is hard. Okay, Lord have mercy. If I've got some moms on here who don't know the struggle, Okay, jealous teens, that's an issue. But the best way that I would think that you would go about handling this situation if you brought to other girls into your home and your daughter's pregnant and she's jealous of them, is first, why don't you start with normalizing that emotional experience. We've all felt jealousy from time to time. It's natural, right. It's an understandable and quite honestly normal feeling for girls to

15:46 feel that sting of jealousy when someone's doing better and it's perceived better by others, even if it's just in that teen's mind. And it's also understandable that jealousy is an intensely uncomfortable situation. It's uncomfortable emotion as well. It just doesn't feel good. So ideally I would have expected Gert to reassure Paula that she's not alone in this feeling, and she could provide some validation and some relief and kind of help her daughter work through it. But that's the issue here. Gert herself is a hot ass mess and she doesn't know how to deal with it appropriately, and she has her own jealousy issues. So in essence, we now have an issue of the blind leading the blind right now, Paula is the oldest in the home, and she kind of takes over as the pseudo adult as Gert's life kind of continues to spiral out of control and Girt spends a lot of her time smoking cigarettes and laying in the bed.

16:41 So Paula would din start dishing out punishments and really harsh punishments on Sylvia in lieu of Gert, because Gert was too sickly at the time, and she would get winded considering chain smoking and asthma don't mix do well together, and she couldn't she'd get too tired to try to beat Sylvia, so Paula would take over. And Paula wouldn't just mean either, y'all. She was downright vicious, like just vicious, and she enjoyed the power that she exerted over Sylvia. And this was even experienced by Sylvia. Sylvia when Paula would hit her on the back of the head with objects, just come up and just wail her in the back of the head with objects, and she got joy out of punching Sylvia. This power struggle that she felt she was in.

17:29 She would physically overtake Sylvia and she even punched Sylvia so hard one time in the face that she broke her own wrist. She punched a girl that was not even defending herself so hard she broke her own wrist. And why would your wrist break while you're punching someone. It's because she wasn't punching her in a soft spot of the body. She was primarily primarily focusing her blows on Sylvia's teeth and her eyes. She was smoking her in the eye sockets and in the mouth. And if you have ever been hit once, let alone more in the face, specifically the mouth, the pain behind that and then the black eyes and the punching of the eyes, it's just horrid.

18:18 Now, As if that wasn't a sign that maybe the beatings were a bit overboard, if breaking your own wrist on someone else's face is not a sign that maybe you need to chill out. Even more sick is that Paula had to go get a wrist a cast put on her broken wrist, And when she got home she quickly figured out, I got me a weapon, and it hurts to punch someone and then them get hit not just even by a wrist, but now by a cast, and it hurts Sylvia even more. In the future beatings, she would use her cast as a weapon to beat Sylvia, and Sylvia just had no choice but to become a punching bag, and there was no one there to protect her. I mean, I just imagine when they were beating her. Remember they would beat her. Little sister too, had those casts on her legs, and one time, you know, they ripped her pants down to beat her, and her clothes got tangled up in her little braces on her legs, and neither sister could do anything about it. Just had to take the wild beatings from these two women.

19:26 It's just disgusting. And rather than ease up once she broke her wrist and then she did get the best of Sylvia over and over and over again, rather than easing up, Paula went all in and she would go and openly bragg to people, openly in the neighborhood and at school of what she had done. And something that is even sadder is that no one ever seemed to intervene, even being told openly, I'm beating the hell out of this girl with my cast. I hit her so hard in the face, I broke my wrist. No one checked, they just were like, uh really, And it was almost like a pack mentality would go into existence when Gert would get mad. It just it was sickening, like like they were like a bunch of wild animals and they would just become a pack and attack as a group. So what do I mean by a pack mentality? Though? So real quick, let me tell you this, and I'm not going to go into a lot of detail, but there was a case one time that I was I was watching and this guy ends up murdering his wife. Okay, And what was really interesting at the crime scene was that they owned big dogs, and so when the crime scene investigators got there, they thought it was bizarre. There was blood everywhere and the dogs were covered in blood, and one dog was locked up in a bath bedroom and you know, and one

20:56 one wasn't. And they wouldn't figure out why would the dogs have attacked each other when the dogs were the dogs had clearly attacked each other, and they couldn't figure out why why are they attacking each other? These dogs have lived together forever, the owners raised them together. It doesn't make sense. But what they found out was that the dogs were attacking each other out of a stress reaction and a redirection of agitation, which is an animal, animalistic type of instinct. So, you know, I kind of I get that in that episode, So I know what you're thinking, though, So where is everyone's moral compass? How could everyone? How could everyone just turn a blind eye when there are other teams seeing this happening as they're partying and they're hanging out at the house. It's very obvious to everyone there what's happening. How is no one saying anything? Is it that they didn't care? Or was it something larger at play here? And I'm inclined to think that some of them did just choose evil. Okay, they did, Paula was being a freaking bitch, an evil one at that, But what about the rest of them? What about the ones that kind of watched in silence? You know?

22:10 How did they not say something or at least share an eye look with someone else going damn, like is this? Why are we doing this? And my belief here is that I think they suffered from what's known as the bystander effect. And if you've if you've never heard of that and you're like, so what is that? Let me let me tell you. You can find a lot about this online. You can go look. I know there's a website Psychology Today dot com and you can go there and you can look. But to save you some time, I'm just going to explain it. The bystander effect occurs when the presence of others when the presence of others discourages an individual from intervening in an emergency situation, and this happens more often than you would think. This includes everything from when when you're trying to stop or wanting to stop a bully, to intervening on an assault or something even even bigger, like a larger crime. The key to this effect is that the raider the number of bystanders, the less likely it is for any one of them to provide help or assistance to the person that's in distress. Because there's a ton of them and the one individual is less likely to jump out of the crowd. People are more likely to take action in a crisis when there are few are no witnesses present in that crazy like they're they're more likely to go at it on their own. But the reasoning and behind this, y'alls, there's two factors at play. It's diffusion of responsibility right, diffusion of who is responsible, but also social influence and the factors here have to be looked at. So it's not like there's just a whole bunch of evil people

23:42 there. There's there are some people that are being evil, but all those other kids that are playing around that aren't saying anything. It's almost, I don't want to say it's normal, but it's it's almost a common offense that happens where people do nothing. That diffusion of responsibility and that social influence in the room affects people. The perceived diffusion of responsibility means that the more onlookers there are, the less the personal responsibility individuals will feel to take action. If you're by yourself and you see someone in danger, you feel like it's upon you to go help the person in danger. But if there's a ton of people there, then it takes away that personal value you have to the scene. Everybody's watching. It's not me involved, it's all of us watching this happen. Why am I the one that goes and does something? And then that social influence means that individuals are going to monitor the behavior of those around them, and that will help them determine how they should act. If nobody's doing anything, then nobody's going to do anything. If everybody's doing something, then everybody's going to do something. But that social factor there is huge.

24:53 And when the adult of the home leaves a teenager in charge and the person that now sets the tone or the standard of behavior is a teenager who obviously has hate for the other teenager, I can see how they would rather be like in the abuser click rather than receiving the brunt of it. So I hope that hopes you kind of understand why people sit back and it's like everyone in their mama can see what's happening, but nobody does anything. There's a psychological component to that, and basically it's really sick. But once the Benicheski kids saw that, oh, I'm in my mom's good graces when they were being abusive to those likings girls, especially Sylvia, it escalated quickly because they saw positive response from their mother. So aside from the verbal abuse and the beatings, there was a social emotional abuse that was happening as well.

25:53 And Gertrude decided that while maybe her home and everything that's going on in her life is falling apart on the inside. She wanted to save face in the eyes of the public, and so she started forcing the kids to go to church. And by forcing them to go, I mean a lot like this became hyper religiousness that she was forcing the kids to go to church. And so at one of the events that the kids would all go attend, they were serving a meal. Like you know, if you go to church, they'll have meals. People like to break bread, you know, and talk and food makes everything easier. I love food, I love eating. But the Liking sisters were in a different boat, right because they're starving, they're hungry, they were not being fed consistently, and so as you can imagine, food was a very welcome sight for these girls. And hot dogs were the meal of the day, and so the girls happily ate their fill while the food was being served. And honestly, what an absolute blessing right for them to have full bellies for once in a long time. They were hungry, they got to eat. The church provided that, and the church looked lovingly on the girls. Upon return home from that event, though, Paula found it appropriate to immediately tattle on the girls, but it wasn't enough just to tell the truth okay, that they were scarfed down the food in response to like immense hunger. No, she decided that she needed to beef the story up right, She need to really hammer it home, and so she claimed that they were making a scene in front of all of the parishioners,

27:23 and Paula's chain of events claimed that the girls were engorging themselves and that she thought, oh my gosh, this is going to obviously really reflect badly on you, mom, because they made a scene. It looks like you're not feeding them, which hashtag she wasn't, but god forbid other people should know. So hearing this, Gert immediately flew into just a rage and all out just psychotic moment. And you know, you know, like Kruella de Ville the old cartoons when we were young, all of us, and when she would get mad in that cartoon, that's kind of what I envision whenever I see Gert flying into this rage. Just a bony, chain smoking, mean hearted, selfish bag of flesh, you know, just raging on two young girls, and no one is there to jump in and protect them. So the initial abuse, you know, it was the beatings in the starvation.

28:18 But again, this is going to escalate. So I guess the animalistic need to get more of a response from the girls was fueling inside of Girt and so she started a new tactic of abuse to to really get a rise out of the girls, and this would center around food. But it wasn't to limit it. She and Paula would not allow Sylvia to eat the meals that they would prepare at the house. She would make them watch her watch, but she would not be allowed to eat. She says, now, Sylvia, you are only going to be allowed to eat our leftovers. Everyone is done. You can pick through the leftovers. But here's the kicker. It wasn't just leftovers, No, it was the leftovers that were in the garbage can in the bag. So to make sure that Sylvia knew that she was lower than a dog to the family, she would have to pull food from the garbage cans and they would get specially excited when that food was old and bad, or if it had spoiled, because rotten food was now going to be the new weapon of choice. So, realizing that their situation of hunger was turning rather dire, the Likns girls decided to take steps to kind of help themselves out. They were like, man, let's go, let's go

29:51 try to make some money or do something. We got to eat. So they did what I would think young girls of the time, you know, in the sixties would would do. And so they go to like a local park area, and they start collecting soda cans that they could turn in for some change. And after doing so, you can still kind of see the child within, because once they got that little bit of money and they could go buy some food, they instead decided, you know what, let's treat ourselves. And they went and they got them some candy. They bought candy with that little bit of change that they had earned from the bottles, and so Sylvia and Jinny ate what they wanted of the candy, and then they decided to be kind and that kindness would be shown through sharing the remaining candy with the kids in the Banichetsky house, the younger ones. But that's going to come back to bite them horribly because when Gert found out that they had candy number one and that they had shared it, she immediately turned and accused them of stealing it. There was no way that you earned this right, you stole it. Now, what's crazy is that there was no basis or fact to work with. Gert would simply go with whatever she wanted to be the truth. Here, the reality doesn't even matter. It's what she wanted it to be. And she wanted the Lichens girls to be horrid human beings so badly that she would rather make up things than acknowledge their goodness. And

31:22 then she would use her own lies to fuel the rage that she had to abuse the girls. It's like the poor Lichens girls, they just couldn't get ahead. It didn't matter specifically Sylvia. And at this point now it's gone way more sinister as lies about the girls are now considered the truth and they act as the justification for their abuse. So whatever was claimed was now the truth. And you go into dangerous territory. I don't care who you are, where you are, but whenever whatever you say becomes the truth and the lies become the truth, you are starting to tread now in water that you're not going to be able to come back from because there's no sense of reality.

32:06 So along with the abuse and the starvation and now the lies, humiliation would become the next order of business. So during a conversation within the house, for some reason, Sylvia was allowed to participate, and this was kind of neat right because she had been ousted from the group and mistreated for so long. But they were talking a bunch of the kids in the living room and Gert was there, and Sylvia was allowed to participate in the discussions that they were having, and she made the mistake of mentioning that she had a boyfriend back whenever she lived in Long Beach in California with her family, and those were obviously happier times and she clung to them, even if they were just memories. So the people in the family had questions right about this boyfriend, and like a lion leading a lamb to slaughter, Gert inserted herself in that conversation and she began to inquire about this boyfriend, So, what was he like? What did y'all like to do? Did y'all ever do anything?

33:10 Well, seems like, you know, normal questions, But the reality is these questions are a bit ambiguous and it would depend on the experience of the person being asked as to what this would mean. After all, we know perceptions reality, right, Well, Sylvia either misunderstanding the question or unsure of the exact meaning of what, quote unquote do something meant? Innocent innocently replied, I guess so, So, further prodded, she would explain, yeah, we we did stuff. And they were like, like, what what did y'all do? And she says, well, one time we went skating and I even got to go to the beach with him one time.

33:52 It was it was fun, right, we got to hang out. Now, don't forget either, while these questions are being asked, that these aren't girls Gert's girls either. These aren't even her kids. So why she would have the authority or even the desire to ask these types of questions is enough to see that she was wanting to find something to use against the girls. But they're young girls, you know, they're they're not seeing at all for what it is. Now, Remember, whatever was claimed by Gert was regarded as the god given truth, and so Gert would begin to claim that the very girl that she was beating and refusing to feed was getting fat. So she starts fussing, there, you're getting fat, which is how incredibly ludicrous, Right, they're not even she's starving them. And supposedly, according to things that I've read, Sylvia would assume that Gert was kind of like joking with her, and she said something to the effect of, yeah, sure is getting big big. I guess I'm gonna have to go on a diet and you know, like pats her belly like jokingly because she's so skinny.

34:57 But now in her mind, Gert had all she need to make the assertion to everyone else that Sylvia was pregnant from her boyfriend from a previous summer. Like it's stupid, it doesn't even make sense, but because Gert claimed it, the family went with it. So I mean, I guess she was showing really late. I mean, I don't know. Gert should know a pregnancy by now, she's had about four hundred of them. Give me a freaking break. But maybe she should have been paying a little bit more attention to her own daughter, Paula, who actually was pregnant. But no, she'd rather just accused Sylvia of being pregnant, But that would make too much sense, right for her to pay attention to her own kids who were not doing what they should have been doing. She instead went on a tirade about how any girl who quote unquote did something with a boy was gonna have a baby, and she obviously had to do something about this. So she decided, you know what she needed to do since Sylvia was acting this way and acting like a whore, she needed to stomp Sylvia's genitals. She throws the girl down and ghetto stomps, I don't know the other term, but stops the girl between the legs, throws her legs open, and stomps her between the legs. The amount of pain and force and flicked up on her and in front of other people. To make it just as humiliating as possible, and it doesn't even make sense, she stomps this girl's crotch, and Paula, the ho who actually was pregnant, also decided that she was going to

36:30 joinp in. So now we've got this grown woman and Paula the ho who actually is pregnant, and they both decided to join in and just stomp, just curb stomp this poor child between her legs in front of everyone, and while Sylvia is on the ground writhing in pain, the others just found it amusing. They thought it was funny. And I don't mean one kick, y'all, I mean multiple stompings on the vagina, kicking her in her genitals, and in Paula would add insult to injury because Sylvia had gotten herself up and put herself in a chair, which was extremely painful, and Paula would flip the chair over, like kick her over in it and then bend down and just sneer in her face that she wasn't fit for a chair. She was below, that she didn't even deserve a chair because of all the made up shit that they're pretending is real. So Paula and Gert then decided to tag team Sylvia while she's laying there just in pain, trying to process what's happening, and they decided to scream and spu just obscenities in her face, and they start calling her a whore who tells her that she slept with all the boys in the neighborhood. And then they started saying, and you're full of STDs two as a result of it, you're nothing but a whore.

37:44 So they humiliated her and they berated her in front of all of these other teens, and they did nothing. They just watched as she writhed in pain so much showed that her vaginal area would swell up like tremendously and she would be all bruised, I mean hurt. She would not even be able to walk or sit properly after this beating that she took. And so you know, when I listen, I know other podcasts have done this story before, and other people have and they kind are like, oh yeah, and then she kicked in her crotch and that's horrible. Ow that hurts. But I thought, you know, maybe we got to put this into a legal perspective. Okay, obviously, teenagers and other kids in the neighborhood know what's going on, but the law enforcement isn't aware at this point. But I found another instance that I thought was kind of interesting because it became a huge case.

38:36 Okay, so we're kind of sidebar in here another story, but just follow me. There was a guard. This was in I think nineteen ninety nine. There was a prison guard who got in a hell of a lot of trouble because he was found guilty of violating a prisoner's Eighth Amendment rights. Because this guy, his name was John Walsh. Okay, he was a lieutenant in the Orleans County. This in New York jail, and he weighed about four hundred pounds and his nickname. He liked to be called hammer Jack. And so there was an inmate named Norvin Folks. And Norvin would go to jail a lot. Okay, he was a frequent flyer for whatever reason. He was mentally ill. On top of his other problems. He had been housed in a mental hospital at one point, and he was a huge smoker, like horribly addicted to smoking. And so around nineteen ninety one is when this would take take place. Though Folks heard another guard repeatedly shouting, big Jack, give me a cigarette. I need a cigarette. I need a cigarette. And at that time that inmate was being held naked. That Folks inmate was, he was naked, and he was in a strip a strip cell. And so he responded by saying, Okay, guess what, Norvin, I'll give you a cigarette, but you know the routine. You have to put your dick through the bars. So the mentally ill inmate did as he was told. He complied, why because the officer is in charge, and he did what the officer told him. And that's when Walsh stepped

40:09 on his penis. He stepped on it with such force that the inmate's eyes like bulged out of his head. He was in so much pain and he started shrieking, and then he gave him a cigarette. And then the following year, whenever folks came back to jail, the same kind of thing happened. He wanted a cigarette, that same officer said, well, who am I? Who am I? You gotta tell me who I am? And the inmate said, hammer jack, right, if you want a cigarette, you gotta put your dick out the bars. And when he did, he stomped that inmate on his penis and he rocked his foot back and forth like he was putting out a cigarette. Okay, so that ends up going to like the Supreme Court. I mean it was huge, and he was absolutely slammed in the eyes of the law, and he got a federal indictment on this and was thrown in prison for it. So if it's bad enough that we will recognize that school, you know, kicking a male or punching, you know, putting your foot and grinding it into someone's genital areas is so horrific that you get a federal indictment behind it. This young girl should have had the same justice there. I don't care that she's a female. You don't that's horrific that you would even think to do that to someone, And even the courts agreed that this is absurdly horrid. And when you're doing it to someone who's under your control and they were powerless and at your mercy, it makes it even worse. Not to mention it was based on the lie,

41:43 So both Girt and Paula were ate up with jealousy. And Sylvia, who was believed to be completely inexperienced sexually according to the reports she was. She was not an experienced girl sexually at all. Would take the wrath of a mother and her daughter whose own lives are out of control, and both of whom attempted to use sex as an attention tool. But yet they're going to turn on this young girl who has no sexual experience and take it out on her. I think that Sylvia was everything that Gert and Paula weren't, but they desperately wished that they were. But the question now becomes why didn't the Likns girls tell anyone what was going on? All they do is open their mouth when they went to school, or when they went to church or wherever they went. But it's really simple why they didn't they were trying to survive, and they were afraid that if they did tell, it would only get worse for them. So they have these people called forensic interviewers, if you've never heard of that, and they back up the same sentiment that I'm telling you. These interviewers, they're the ones that question children and what are known as c AC interviews when abuse has been suspected. That's a child Advocacy center SAC where they go. And the thing here is that children cannot adequately process all that has happening, and obviously they don't have the maturity to navigate what will happen to them in the future. And so when summarizing it up, you know, why don't kids tell? In general? Here's a little insight from the Alliance for Children as to what are the common commonalities of kids,

43:16 and when we say kids, y'all, we're even talking about teens, why they don't speak up? The first one is, oftentimes the victims may somewhat care for who's abusing them, and so they may be concerned that if they speak up, it's going to get that perpetrator in trouble. I don't know that that's necessarily the case here, but that is a commonality and amongst you know abuse cases. The second one, the fear of the consequences, not only for the perpetrator but for the victims themselves and their families, can make immediate disclosure of what's happening to them really difficult. Perpetrators oftentimes make threats, they say I'm going to hurt you, I'm gonna hurt your family, And when X is involved, there's a stigma tied to that. So victims may also believe that they are going to be looked at shamefully and that maybe it's their fault and that they are impure or dirty. And so when they feel that shame and they're embarrassed about what happened, and then on top of that they fear the repercussions, they don't speak up. They don't say anything that wouldn't make sense to right, So in a kid's mind, at least some victims of sexual abuse live in homes where they feel a lack of support due to the dysfunctional family dynamics, which is pretty much what these girls are in. And if they're separated from their parents or you know, their caretakers aren't going to listen to them. They're not going to say anything. And when children feel responsible for their well being as well as the wellbeing of their

44:49 families, they're often afraid of ruining relationships because the perpetrator, you know, the perpetrator who's taking care of them. If they report back and then their family doesn't look like they're taking care of them, it becomes a problem for everyone involved, and they're worried about their own parents, so they just don't speak up. Remember, though you can't assess a child or a teen's actions through a full grown adult's eyes, their perspective is different and they're going to respond differently. So after they beat her in her genitals, Gertrude and Paula would then proceed to go around town making false accusations about sylvia likings and making sure everybody knew it. They were making claims that she was extremely promiscuous and very hard to handle, and that she had actually started making a living as being a prostitute. And then anybody who would listen, they would also say, Oh, and she's pregnant too. She's just unruly, she's unmanageable, she's a whore, she's pregnant, and she's been sleeping with people for money.

45:55 Gert would also make things unspeakably difficult for both of the liking sisters because then she would start going on these tangents to them about the filthiness of the horse Silvia, and then she would force Jenny to beat Sylvia. She would turn siblings against each other. And I don't know that Jenny ever actually turned on Sylvia, but she would try to make her turn on Sylvia, and poor Jenny, if she didn't comply, then she would receive a beating two And the psychological component of this type of abuse is honestly just as scary as the physical part. Now, if I'm going to give any credit to Girt, it's going to be this. She is skilled at war, psychological war to be specific. Okay, she has mounted an offensive that none of the teens in the house are aware of. And it's called triangulation, right if you've never heard of this, It's where an adult will pit kids against one another for their own gain, and in essence, what ends up happening is the kids can't bond with the other kids because you know, they learn through this trial and error that they've got to kind of self preserve as well, and so they're taught basically in this situation that Gert is the only one who can make sense of things, and she calls the shots. And so when triangulation is explained, it's going to be kind of like this. The dysfunction starts when the adult is going to isolate and discredit the truth teller, and

47:25 in this situation it's Sylvia. And as this goes on, it will it's going to give credit to Gert's delusions of what she believes is happening in her home. So when a child becomes a scapegoat, it shifts the attention away from the abuser and it makes everyone question the integrity of the abused. It's sad, but it happens. And so there's usually going to be the scapegoat and the golden child. And the golden child in this situation is Paula. Paula can do no wrong, Paula's in charge, and Paula and teaming up on the skategoat scapegoat, which is Sylvia. So Sylvia, the scapegoat, is going to take all the blame for the problems of the home, and all of the efforts are now going to go towards isolating and discrediting her in the home as well as around town, because then it's going to preserve inside the home when the whole town looks at this girl as if she's a problematic, you know, whore. All right, So we've got all this isolation tactic happening and try to discredit Sylvia on top of all the abuse that's happening.

48:25 So moving forward, I want you to remember this, there's other neighborhood children who've been watching and seeing what's going to happen, and some of them are even going to participate in further abuse of Silvia. So the neighborhood kids, you know, there was a lot of them, but there were a few of them that would actually play a larger role in this. In this case, their names are Mike Munroe, Randy Lepper, Darlene Maguire, Judy Duke, and Anna Cisco. Now you don't have to remember all their names. I'm going to talk you through it, but I just wanted you to know there's a couple of them at play here. So Randy Gordon Lepper is his last name, and Coi hub are both fifteen year old boys, and Coy is the boyfriend of one of the Benichetski girls named Stephanie. So why would I be talking about these other teens in the case. And that's because what takes place next is is even worse, so kind of like a game for sport. One day, they were having supper at the house and Girt and Paula were there, as well as that neighbor Randy Gordon that had just mentioned, and they thought it would be fun to force feed the starving Sylvia a hot dog that they completely overloaded with condiments. So imagine a hot dog that is grotesquely overloaded to the point that you can't even see the hot dog or the bun. I'm talking like gobs of mustard and ketchup, all sorts of spices. And as someone who doesn't personally like hot dogs, this makes my stomach turn. I'm not a fan of those. I can't imagine if you're starving and then you're being force fed a ton of this together, how gross that might be. But as you can imagine, it made Sylvia sick

49:59 and a result, after they force fed her, she vomited, and then, thinking it was hilarious, they then up the ante and they forced Sylvia to eat her own vomit they got it all together and they made her eat it. And hopefully you know me by now, and you know that I'm not telling you these things for salaciousness or anything like that. This is for Sylvia that I'm telling you because I want you to understand what this was. It wasn't just eat until you puke. Okay, there's a medical data on the effects of force feeding somebody when they're actually starving, and so let's just get real with it real quick. Through the National Library of Medicine, where a look, they've covered this, and force feeding is something they look at almost as a as a method of war, and they consider it formal torture to do that to someone, and force feeding, you know, is some that's even looked at now on like a human rights level. The argument is that it breaches your civil liberties and it's the excesses of power over somebody.

51:09 And so there was this pamphlet that was published that was talking about force feeding, and they say, when you force feed somebody who is hungry or starving, that it's considered and this is a direct quote a Nazi style torture. And so they didn't excerpt in there from someone who survived force feeding after they had starved. And this is a quote from them, but they said, as at last it happened today. On my nineteenth day of hunger, I was forcibly fed. It was unpleasant in the extreme. Actually, what led up to the force feeding was that on Saturday, after I took a bath, I fainted and my blood pressure dropped a bit, which I promise you Sylvia was experiencing as well if she's starving, so forcible feeding was the next step. I really panicked as I thought I was suffocating. It only takes a few minutes, but it's like an eternity to crown matters. I was violently sick afterwards, and it brought everything up in my stomach. I feel a wee bit better now, but I'm dreading going through it again tomorrow.

52:15 It's only to be expected that after nineteen days without food, my stomach would reject anything that you try to feed it. Now, that was not Sylvia, that was another person's experience. But even they're telling you how horrible it was. And during another event, an Irish civil rights demonstration, there was a psychiatrist there named Brian Lavery, and he asserted that the psychological effects of force feeding someone who has been starving is similar to the psychological effects of someone who has been raped multiple times. I'm not comparing starvation to rape. I'm not, but if you had to equate it, it's that horrific. But what it does, what seems clear about it altogether is the manner by which force feeding was performed against Sylvia. It was done with the purpose of loss of her dignity and to grade her. So at one point after that happened, and just some semblance of trying to show her retaliation in any small way that she could, Sylvia was actually still going to school at this point, so she decided that she was going to say something ugly about the Bannichetski girls.

53:25 So she went to school that was at Arsenal Technical High School, and she told a kid at the school that Stephanie and Paula Panajetski were prostitutes. And she did that just because she was upset because they were they were singling her out just for the similar things. Right, They're going around school saying she's a whore, and she's a prostitute and all this stuff, and Sylvia's not even sexually experienced. So after she says it, to this classmate, Stephanie Banichetsky was jokingly propositioned by a boy later that day, and so when she asked that boy, why, why would you say that to me? He says, well, Sylvia said it. Sylvia said you're a prostitute.

54:06 And I could see that happening, right, kids being stupid and saying what kids say. Well, in typical teenage fashion. When they got home after school, Stephanie went up to Sylvia and asked her about the rumor, and, being the bold teen that Sylvia was and continued to try to be, she owned up to it. She told the truth. She said, yeah, I did say it. Okay, I said it, and Stephanie reacted inappropriately and swiftly punched Sylvia in the face. Now, something that was kind of interesting about that exchange to me was that Sylvia did immediately apologize and through tears and pain, she was crying because it hurt. But then Stephanie responded back by starting to cry as well, and I almost felt like they both knew they had done something that was kind of not representative of who maybe they really were or who they wanted to be. And so while this change seemed to be almost out of like a sweet broken heartedness in a weird way.

55:06 There was someone watching it wasn't gonna have one second of it, and that would be Stephanie's fifteen year old boyfriend I previously mentioned named Coy Randolph Hubbard. So when he heard the rumor, he lost his ever loving shit and he didn't sit back and think about what Sylvia was going through and try to assess everything he knew to be happening in that home because he knew it and he knew that Sylvia was being abused. No, instead, he decided that he would brutally attack Sylvia, and I mean brutally slapping her across the face. He continuously was banging her head into the walls, and he eventually flipped her body backwards onto the ground like a wrestler, you know how they throw their opponents down. He flipped this girl back and slammed her down on the ground.

55:55 But no one talks about what that must have felt like. Anytime I hear someone tell this story, they just talk about, oh, he did these horrible things. What do you think it felt like? I mean, think about it. You know, a boy is beating up a girl in the freaking nineteen sixties, and this is when girls are still supposed to be girls back then, if you know what I mean, they're still wearing dresses, and you know, ladylike is the way you're supposed to be. And here's a boy beating up a girl who had no defensive training, who couldn't defend herself, and gert Trude saw it and felt when she found out about it, she did something about it. She took a paddle and beat the ship out of Sylvia. Again. I think I've had enough for the day.

56:46 It's been a long episode. There's a lot left, so we're gonna have to go into a part three. But as you can see, this little girl is going through a lot. She's being mistreated physically, a motionally, and anyway I think that you could, you could abuse somebody. And we've got all these other kids seeing it and people watching it and nobody really saying anything, and I don't know, it infuriates me. It really makes me mad. And the fact that gart would even let a one of her teenagers be in charge of a household, that paul A bitch makes me even madder. But I mean, all I would have to say to her at this point is shut up, slept. The only test you could pass was a pregnancy test.