Sylvia Likens: The Murder Next Door

In 1965, sixteen-year-old Sylvia Likens moved into a crowded Indianapolis home for twenty dollars a week. Within months, that house became the site of the most brutal child torture case in state history. What started as late payments and small punishments spiraled into a closed world of beatings, humiliation, and group violence that no one outside the door stopped.

This episode strips the case down to its core: how ordinary people allowed cruelty to grow, how responsibility evaporated, and how Sylvia’s final days exposed a household—and a community—failing at every turn. Direct, unsentimental, and grounded in the record, it tells the story without excuses and without looking away.