The Girl Who Was Murdered By An Entire Neighborhood
Sylvia Likens: Virgin Sacrifice
Trigger warning: This is a true story. It contains disturbing details of abuse. Just wanted you to know that before you read. [editor]
Sylvia Likens was a pretty, harmless girl of 16 when her parents left her with an older woman and mother named Gertrude. They promised to send money to support the girl and her sister, also left in that near-stranger’s home. They promised to return for their daughter. These were parents used to promises.
The girls were used to being left. Their parents worked at a carnival and before that had worked who-knows-where, so they had to travel a lot. Or, they enjoyed the work. Or, being under-educated and largely unskilled, they could find no other work to support their growing family of two boys, two girls.
That particular summer, Sylvia’s mother was jailed for shoplifting and her father hit the road. The boys were left with the grandparents, who, one presumes, preferred boys to girls, as just about everyone does. The parents left the daughters with a woman whose maternal state made her supposedly safe. She had seven children already. What could go wrong?
Gertrude herself was also poor. Her children were raggedy and wan and poorly behaved. In the tradition of avenging women…
