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something extra. It was passed around the table so the others could take turns loading it with mustard, ketchup and other spices. When she was forced to eat it, she vomited. So they made her try it again. She would have preferred that second helping to something she was forced to eat late in October.
    There also were times she didn’t eat at all. One such day in September, Gertrude had given Jenny a quarter to spend at a school festival, and Jenny came home with a sucker. “Don’t you wish you had one, Sylvia?” Gertrude taunted. Not too long afterward, Sylvia was given a bowl of soup, but was told to eat it with her fingers.
    Another time Sylvia did not eat was when Gertrude was convinced she
had
eaten. “I smell White Castles on your breath,” Gertrude said. “Danny bought you a hamburger, didn’t he?” Gertrude also saw mustard on Sylvia’s lips, but Jenny and the little children didn’t.
    Sylvia insisted she had not seen her brother Danny since school let out, and she certainly had not had a hamburger, such a sin as it was. But Gertrude was convinced and slugged Sylvia in the eye until it became black and blue, trying to make her confess. Whether or not Paula had seen mustard or smelled White Castle onions, she too was convinced that Sylvia deserved to be punished. Sheyanked at Sylvia’s long tresses and pulled her from the kitchen chair onto the floor.
    “I didn’t,” Sylvia sobbed, picking herself up. “I wasn’t with him.”
    Jenny also bore the brunt of unjust punishment. One day at Brookside Park, she spotted an abandoned tennis shoe. Because of her deformity, she did not need shoes that matched, so she tried on the lone shoe and wore it home.
    “Did you steal that?” Gertrude asked. Her children—Paula, Stephanie, Shirley, Marie and Jimmy—glared at Jenny tensely.
    “No,” the accused girl replied.
    “Don’t lie to me,” Gertrude said. Her voice was heavy with menace.
    “I’m not lying to you,” Jenny pleaded.
    “Paula, get the board,” Gertrude instructed. Sylvia got about 10 licks then too because she had been at the park with Jenny and failed to confirm Mrs. Wright’s suspicion.
    Mr. and Mrs. Likens visited their daughters about the middle of August, but they saw nothing out of the way, and the girls did not complain, other than to say they were hungry and would like to go to a drive-in for a Coke or a hamburger. They were accustomed to being punished, often unjustly.
    Gertrude’s temper was not improved by getting involved with the wrong end of the law for the first time in her life, at the age of 37, in August. Her physical condition was such that she didn’t feel like working;the asthma season was just coming on. Paula was not working at the time either, and the support money was neither enough nor regular. Among the first to suffer in the vicious economic circle was the neighborhood newspaper boy. Mrs. Wright had not paid him; and that, in Indianapolis, is a crime. Police served a warrant on Mrs. Wright on August 18, 1965, for failure to pay a newsboy. When she also failed to answer the warrant, and police were sent to arrest her August 27, she became defiant.
    Now she faced two charges—defrauding a newsboy and resisting arrest. She paid fines of $1 and costs on each count in Municipal Court the 29th of September. That was her total police record until October 26, 1965.
    Things in general looked ominous for Sylvia, but she was buoyed by her confession of faith in church August 22. She told Gertrude she was “saved.”
    “Are you?” the woman asked.
    “I don’t think so,” said Paula.
    Sylvia had only a few more opportunities to get right with God. Most of the remaining Sunday mornings of her life she was kept home to get the house ready for company.
    Lester Likens and his wife visited the Baniszewski home again August 26, and Lester gave Mrs. Wright another cash payment for boarding his daughters. Had he only known the double meaning of that word.
    Lester eventually