Free House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying (St. Martin's True Crime Library) by John Dean Page B

several days.
    Gertrude called Sylvia up from the basement. The girl trudged up the stairs. Wearing a tan pair of Bermuda shorts and a light blouse, she appeared listless, and she sported a number of bruises and patchy sores. Gertrude ordered her to stand in the corner, between the doors to the basement and to the dining room.
    “Do you know how to put on a tattoo, Ricky?” the woman asked.
    “Yes, I guess so,” the boy replied.
    “Do you know what a tattoo is, Sylvia?” Gertrude asked.
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Well,” the woman snapped at Sylvia, “you have branded my daughters; now I am going to brand you.” And then, to the others: “She’s a prostitute, and she’s proud of it; so we’ll just put it on her stomach.”
    Mrs. Wright instructed her younger daughters to bring her a sewing needle.
    Stephanie, who had been out of school sick a couple of days, was asleep in the front room.
    “Take your clothes off, Sylvia,” Gertrude ordered. The girl hesitated. Gertrude ripped Sylvia’s blouse and shorts off, and the girl stood naked in the corner.
    Gertrude pulled up a chair and began to carvewith the sewing needle. She managed to carve a large block “I,” an apostrophe, and the first leg of the “M,” then turned away. “You take over, Ricky,” she said, handing him the needle. “I’m getting sick.”
    She started for the front bedroom, where Stephanie was sleeping.
    “Wait,” yelled Ricky. “How do you spell prostitute?”
    Gertrude sat down and wrote out the entire message on a piece of paper: “i’m a prostitute and proud of it!” Then she sent Jenny to the grocery.
    Before Hobbs resumed the tattoo, he asked Marie to strike a match. He held the needle in the flame to sterilize it.
    Then he continued the tattoo, etching in steady, short strokes. Sylvia, past the point of crying, gritted her teeth and moaned. The Hobbs boy struck her with the back of his hand whenever she flinched. The etching brought blood to the surface of the skin.
    Hobbs had just about finished when Jenny returned from the store. Soon, there was a knock on the door. The mischievous, cherubic face of Randy Lepper showed through the glass. Ricky, Jenny and Shirley hustled Sylvia to the basement; Gertrude said she did not want Randy to see Sylvia naked. After she was partially clothed again, Gertrude called them upstairs to show Randy the work of art.
    Randy asked about the tattoo and the bruises. Gertrude said Sylvia had been to a sex party.
    About 15 minutes later, Ricky and Shirley gotaround to branding her. They had taken Sylvia back to the basement. “Look for something we can print an ‘;S’ with, Shirley,” Ricky instructed.
    Shirley hunted around through the basement rubble and brought Ricky a three-foot crowbar and a smaller anchor bolt. Hobbs selected the anchor bolt. By applying half of the circular hook-end twice, he reasoned, they could print the “S.”
    The matches Shirley held were heating her fingers faster than they heated the anchor bolt; so Ricky set fire to some newspapers in the large sink and heated the hook end to a glowing red. Sylvia, who had begged him to quit during the tattooing, squirmed. Hobbs struck her on the chest with the back of his hand several times and told her to lie still. She obeyed, gritting her teeth. Hobbs applied the first loop. Shirley applied the second.
    Either Hobbs applied his half backward, or Shirley misunderstood that she was to apply the lower loop instead of the upper. In any event, both loops pointed the same direction, and Sylvia wound up with a freshly burned-in “3” on her chest, just above the “prostitute” message. Ricky had at first handed Jenny the bolt, asking her to do the other loop. She had handed it back, saying, “No, I ain’t going to burn her.” Shirley and Ricky took Sylvia upstairs to show Gertrude their work.
    “Sylvia, what are you going to do now?” the woman chided. “You can’t get married now. What are you going to do?”
    Sylvia