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A Young, Tortured Girl is Dead |
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A Young, Tortured Girl is Dead
On October 26, 1965, Indianapolis police answered a call saying that a girl had died. The call came from a pay telephone in front of a Shell station in a poor section of the city. The caller was a teenaged boy whose voice had not finished changing into that of an adult man. He sounded very nervous and directed the police to the address, 3850 East New York Street, at which they would find the dead female.
When the cops got to the dingy, rundown, clapboard home to which the anonymous caller had directed them, they found the emaciated dead body of 16-year-old Sylvia Marie Likens. She was covered with bruises and small wounds, later revealed to be cigarette and match burns that numbered over 100. There were also large areas where the outer layer of skin had peeled off. Likens also had a large letter "3" branded on her chest. However, the most remarkable injuries, by far, were the words in block letters that had been burned directly onto her stomach: "I'M A PROSTITUTE AND PROUD OF IT!"
Room where Sylvia's body was found. Room where Sylvia's body was found.
Thus ended one of the most horrible crimes ever committed against a single victim.
The crime had been perpetrated by an informal group of teenagers and children, some as young as 11 and 12, led by a 37-year-old woman. That woman's name was Gertrude Baniszewski (pronounced "Ban-i-SHEF-ski" rather than the more fittingly ominously sounding way it looks like it should be said: "Ban-i-ZOO-ski" wink . Sylvia and her younger sister, the 15-year-old disabled Jenny Fay Likens (she had a limp due to polio and a brace around that leg) had been boarding with Baniszewski since early July.
At that time, the Likens parents had left Sylvia and Jenny in the care of Mrs. Baniszewski — they knew her as "Mrs. Wright" — so they would be free to travel the carnival circuit operating a
Baniszewski's Background
Gertrude Baniszewski's life up until the time she met the Likens family had been difficult and sad but in no way criminal (at least on her part). She was born Gertrude Van Fossan in 1929, the third of six children in a lower-class family. She always liked her Dad better than her Mom and suffered the trauma of watching her beloved father die of a heart attack when she was only eleven years old. Sometimes clashing with her mother as a teenager, she dropped out of high school when she was sixteen to marry 18-year-old John Baniszewski — and seems to have lived pregnantly ever after. Although John Baniszewski was a police officer, charged with enforcing the law, he frequently broke it to assault his wife when she annoyed him. John often ended disagreements between himself and Gertrude with his fists. The couple split up after a decade.
Awhile after she was divorced, Gertrude met and married Edward Guthrie but the marriage lasted only three months because Edward did not want the responsibility of caring for children who were not his (at that time, Gertrude had four kids). She and John remarried each other, then divorced seven years and two more kids later in 1963. A much younger man named Dennis Lee Wright took an interest in Gertrude. He was twenty-three and she thirty-seven when their romance blossomed. Although it was unfashionable at the time, they lived together for a while out of wedlock. Dennis could be abusive to his live-in girlfriend. He impregnated Gertrude twice. She suffered a miscarriage, then gave birth to Dennis, Jr. before her boyfriend absconded.
Gertrude Baniszewski Gertrude Baniszewski
At the time of her fateful meeting with the Likens family, the underweight Baniszewski had a kind of "young-old" look about her. She had a sadly careworn and prematurely lined face. Although not yet forty years old, she had been pregnant no less than thirteen times, giving birth seven times and enduring six miscarriages. A chain smoker, she suffered from asthma, bronchitis, and nervous tension. Her income consisted of haphazard child support payments (both of the fathers of her children were seriously delinquent) and the few dollars she managed to scrape together from occasional work like ironing and baby-sitting. Not wanting people to know that her youngest child was "illegitimate," she called herself and was called by others, "Mrs. Wright."
Betty Likens, together with daughters Sylvia and Jenny, had recently moved into one of the many rundown, boxlike little houses in the neighborhood. Betty and Lester Likens were recently separated. The family moved often as their father searched for jobs to keep the family's financial head above water. They had previously resided in this very area.
Sylvia and Jenny, together with a new friend named Darlene McGuire, were walking around the sidewalks in a normal, aimless teenaged manner when they met up with a girl named Paula Baniszewski. Paula was an overweight seventeen -year-old with a decided mean streak. Although not yet showing, she was also pregnant as the result of a brief fling with an adult, married man.
The bunch of teenagers headed to the Baniszewski house where they shared soft drinks and laughs. Paula invited them to spend the night. Sylvia and Jenny didn't have to ask their Mom for permission since she was in jail.
Foster Care
The next day, Lester Likens, having been informed of his wife's arrest, went with his oldest son, nineteen-year-old Danny, to his estranged wife's place to pick up Sylvia and Jenny. Not finding his daughters there, he began canvassing the neighborhood. Darlene MacGuire told him they were at the Baniszewskis.
When Lester got to "Mrs. Wright's" home, it was late in the evening and he was both tired and distraught. He talked about how he and Betty had reconciled and were going to travel with a carnival. Mrs. Wright graciously offered to let him spend the night sleeping on the couch in her cluttered and dusty living room.
The next day, Lester asked, or Gertrude offered (accounts are unclear), to board Sylvia and Jenny. Regardless of whose idea it was for Mrs. Wright to care for them, an agreement was made that she would board them for $20 a week.
Over a year later, in court, Lester Likens would be asked if he had inspected the home in which he left two of his five children. He replied, "I didn't pry," an odd way to describe not bothering to take a look-see about a place one's children will be living in. If he had, he would have found that the household had no stove, only a hot plate, that it possessed fewer beds than were needed for those already living there, and that its kitchen drawers boasted a grand total of three spoons. During Sylvia's tragic stay, the pitiful number of spoons would shrink to only one.
Thus, Lester Likens placed his minor daughters in the care of a woman he had known for only a couple of days and who had not been recommended to him by anyone. He did know, however, that she had the responsibility of caring for a large family without the help of a husband or other adult in the home.
Before leaving, Lester gave Mrs. Wright some advice that he would later have much reason to regret: "You'll have to take care of these girls with a firm hand because their mother has let them do as they please."
Who Was Sylvia Likens?
Sylvia Likens Sylvia Likens
Sylvia's photograph shows a pretty, freckled teenager with wavy dark hair and bangs, gazing into the distance with an expression that, as one of the prosecutors said at the trial of her killers, seems "full of hope and anticipation." The girl described in The Indiana Torture Slaying by John Dean (he has since changed his name to Natty Bummppo to prevent confusion with the John Dean of Watergate fame) and in the non-fictional and non-speculative passages of Kate Millett's The Basement, appears to have been a fairly average youngster. She enjoyed attending church and made average grades in school. She liked roller skating and dancing. Nicknamed "Cookie," she is said to have had a lively sense of humor and tended to smile with her mouth closed because she was self-conscious that a front tooth was missing (the result of some childhood roughhousing with a brother).
Dean quotes an acquaintance as remembering that Sylvia felt like "the odd one in the family because she was born between two sets of twins." Both twins in the Likens family were fraternal rather than identical and both were of different sexes. Danny and Diana were two years older than Sylvia while Jenny and Benny were a year younger.
The Likens family was always poor and the marriage was troubled; Lester and Betty had split up, then gotten back together, more than once. Given the demands of two sets of twins and the extra care that had to be given Jenny because of her disability, it seems reasonable that Sylvia may have felt rather neglected by her parents.
In her sixteen years of life, Sylvia had known no less than fourteen addresses because the family moved so frequently. In the past, she had been left at a grandmother's house or boarded out when Lester and Betty did not find it feasible to take Sylvia and Jenny along with them.
Like most teenagers, Sylvia made a little cash through odd jobs. She baby-sat and did ironing (ironically, the same jobs Gertrude Baniszewski held). Also like most in her age group, Sylvia enjoyed music. Her favorite rock group was, unsurprisingly in that era, The Beatles. She also enjoyed singing herself. During her early time with the family B., she would sing to Stephanie Baniszewski, who returned the favor. Sylvia's favorite tune had a lyric about "all the stars in the sky."
Jenny Likens with her older sister Diane Shoemaker Jenny Likens with her older sister Diane Shoemaker
Sylvia appears to have been very close to her disabled sister. When the girls went on one of their frequent roller skating expeditions, Jenny would put a skate on her good foot and Sylvia would pull Jenny around the ring so Jenny could experience skating even with the steel brace around one leg.
A Dubious Start
The Likens girls' first week with the Baniszewskis passed without incident, getting to know the other kids and starting at a new school. However, during the second week, the Likens parents' payment was slow to arrive. Gertrude screamed at her boarders, "I took care of you two bitches for nothing!" Both girls had to lie across a bed and expose their bare buttocks so Baniszewski could spank them.
The payment came the next day.
However, the next week brought another paddling for the sisters because Mrs. Wright believed that Sylvia was leading the other kids into stealing out of stores.
Three major accusations against Sylvia would recur. One of them was that she was dishonest, another was that she was physically unclean, and the third, leading to the gruesome work on her belly, was that she was sexually promiscuous.
Were any of these accusations true? Sylvia's mother had shoplifted from a store in Indianapolis and Sylvia herself was to admit that she stole at least one acquisition. However, it is also true that Mrs. Wright accused the girl of stealing, and punished her for it, when she did not. The Likens family had a custom of going through debris looking for empty soda pop bottles to turn in for refunds and Gertrude would erroneously believe that treats Sylvia acquired through this means were stolen.
There is no reason — prior to her enforced dirtiness — to think that Sylvia's hygiene was particularly bad.
Sylvia was, in all likelihood, a virgin. It is also possible that she was flirtatious.
Paula Baniszewski Paula Baniszewski
Gertrude Baniszewski was probably projecting her personal fears outward through these charges. There is no evidence that she ever stole but theft had to be sorely tempting to one in her circumstances. Her personal hygiene and the cleanliness of her household were poor which is understandable considering that she was a chronically ill woman trying to cope with many youngsters and an infant. She had reason to fear for her own and her daughters' reputations for chastity since she had twice been pregnant out of wedlock and, at the time the Likens girls stayed in her house, her own seventeen-year-old unmarried daughter Paula was pregnant.
Early in her stay, Sylvia attended church each Sunday with the Baniszewski kids. Paula Baniszewski tattled to her mother that Sylvia had pigged out at a church supper so Mrs. Wright and some of the children came up with a punishment that had, as many of the torments inflicted on the Likens girl would, a perverse logic to it. Sylvia's frankfurter was passed around the Baniszewski table and loaded with condiments. Sylvia was ordered to eat this concoction. The girl complied, then promptly vomited — and was forced to eat her vomit.
Sometime after this, Mr. and Mrs. Likens stopped by for a visit, as they had a few days after their daughters had been paddled for the late payment. On this occasion, as on the previous visit and those that would follow, neither of the Likens girls complained about the way they were being treated.
"Was She a Masochist?"
This leads us to a troubling psychological puzzle. In his foreword to The Indiana Torture Slaying, prosecutor Leroy K. New says "I have been repeatedly asked why Sylvia did not just simply run away." When the crime was first discovered, a newspaper reporter asked, "Was she a masochist?"
There are several things, other than masochism, which could account for her passivity. First, Sylvia had a limited frame of reference as to what constitutes inappropriate discipline. As noted by Dean, Sylvia and Jenny "were accustomed to being punished, often unjustly." The early "paddlings" the Likens girls received might have been unfair but they were not clearly abusive. Grown-ups frequently make issues out of youngsters' eating habits as in the universally famous "eat your vegetables!" scolding so even the hotdog with way-too-much of "everything on it" would not necessarily be seen as beyond the pale.
Indeed, at least one adult witnessed abusive incidents and, although disturbed by them, did not consider them serious enough to report them to the police.
According to The Indiana Torture Slaying, a middle-aged couple with two kids, Raymond and Phyllis Vermillion, moved next door to the Baniszewskis late in August of 1965. Phyllis Vermillion worked the night shift at an RCA plant and needed a babysitter for her children. She decided to visit Gertrude Baniszewski, thinking that the mother of seven who had taken in two boarders might be a good person to care for the Vermillion youngsters.
The two neighbors sat around a table and drank coffee while kids yelled at each other and baby Dennis fussed and cried. Vermillion noticed a slim, pretty but timid and nervous- looking girl who had a black eye. "That's Sylvia," sighed Gertrude. Paula Baniszewski added, "I gave her the black eye." Just before making this boast, however, Paula filled a glass with hot water and threw it at Sylvia.
Understandably, Phyllis Vermillion decided to look elsewhere for a babysitter. Less understandably, she did not report what she had seen and heard to the authorities.
Early in October, Vermillion paid another social call to the large family next door. Again she saw Sylvia, who looked dazed, even zombified, and who had another black eye plus a swollen lip. "I beat her up," Paula readily volunteered. Later, Paula began hitting the listless girl with a belt.
Again Phyllis Vermillion left the house without believing she had seen something the police ought to know about. If a supposedly normal, responsible adult could not recognize these actions as criminal, why should anyone expect an untutored teenager like Sylvia to be able to do so?
Running away may never have occurred to her. Where would she go? By the time sleeping out in the street became preferable to life with the Baniszewskis, it wasn't an option: she was tied up and/or locked in the cellar.
In fact, there was one instance, which will be described later in this essay, in which she and Jenny did complain about mistreatment. They were not believed. The fear of being disbelieved — which would prove well founded — probably contributed to Sylvia's previous silence.
Another reason for her failure to complain about the mistreatment may be that she anticipated the question traditionally asked of kids who get picked — why don't other people like you? — and knew she could not answer it
Complaining to others would have meant having to tell them what had been done to her. As the mistreatment worsened, it is likely that shame silenced Sylvia.
Both Sylvia and her sister were, for good reason, terrified of Gertrude. They greatly feared the woman's wrath if they should "tell."
Finally, Sylvia was probably fiercely protective of her younger sister and feared that "telling" would lead to revenge being taken out on Jenny.
The Slow Descent into Horror
It is important to emphasize the truth that Sylvia's life at the Baniszewskis did not turn into a horror overnight. It was a slow slide from getting unfairly punished on occasion in July, to getting "picked on" and physically hurt in various ways regularly around August and September, to the mind-boggling torture that characterized the last few weeks of October.
During her first weeks with Gertrude, Sylvia went to the same church the Baniszewskis did, listened to phonograph records with the other kids, watched TV, and took trips to the park with friends. She attended high school with Stephanie and Paula. She ate with Gertrude and the other kids.
The Baniszewski home The Baniszewski home
Of course, meals at the Baniszewski home were not a terribly enjoyable experience for any of its residents. Ten people had to be fed without a stove. They ate things like crackers and sandwiches. Soup formed a major part of their diets since it could be heated up on the hot plate. However, they had to eat it in shifts since they had three spoons when Sylvia got there, then two, and finally only one. The sole spoon would be used, rinsed off in the sink, and then handed to the next hungry person.
It is believed that, sometime late in August, Sylvia let it slip that she had once allowed a boyfriend to get under the bed covers with her. "You're going to have a baby!" Gertrude announced. Then Mrs. Wright kicked the girl hard in the crotch. Many more kicks to the genitals would follow and the autopsy would show that Sylvia's pubic area was horribly mauled.
Sylvia's imagined pregnancy outraged the genuinely pregnant Paula Baniszewski. Paula knocked Sylvia onto the floor, saying, "You ain't fit to sit in a chair."
Apparently as revenge, Sylvia told some of her fellow students at Tech High School that the two oldest Baniszewski girls, Stephanie and Paula, were "prostitutes."
Coy Hubbard Coy Hubbard
Stephanie's fifteen-year-old boyfriend, Coy Hubbard, heard about this, flew into a rage, and beat Sylvia up. Coy was a handsome guy with dark, curly hair. He was big for his age and frequently a disciplinary problem at school. As he would many times in the future, Coy practiced judo on Sylvia, flipping her against walls and onto the floor. Mrs. Wright gave Sylvia yet another paddling.
Mrs. Wright encouraged neighborhood children to believe bad things about Sylvia and take "revenge." Heavyset, thirteen-year-old Anna Siscoe liked Sylvia until Gertrude told her that Sylvia had said Anna's mother was a hooker. Anna viciously attacked the older girl. During the melee, Sylvia supposedly clutched her stomach, saying "Oh, my baby!"
It appears that Sylvia, although probably a virgin, had been convinced by those around her that she really must be pregnant. She may have been ignorant of the specifics of reproduction.
Gertrude whispered similar things about Sylvia making sexually-oriented slanders into the ears of her daughter Paula as well as a girl named Judy Duke and more fights resulted.
Was Sylvia impugning the morals of the females around her? It is possible. She was being taunted about her own alleged sexual indiscretions and may have tried to direct similar negative attention elsewhere to take it off of herself. You're weird. No, you are, is a battle heard each day in schoolyards throughout the world. However, it's also possible that Gertrude was making false accusations to get others stirred up against her favorite scapegoat.
Paula Baniszewski soon made a hobby out of plunking Sylvia in the head with anything that came to hand whether dish, bottle, or can. Often when a group was tormenting Sylvia, her sister Jenny would be ordered to hit her. Timidly, Jenny refused. An infuriated Gertrude slapped her face. Jenny then complied but later said she used her left hand instead of her right (she is right-handed) so it wouldn't really hurt Sylvia.
The Sexless Sex Crime
In early October, an incident occurred that led Mrs. Wright to order Sylvia to quit school. Sylvia had no gym suit for her physical education class and Gertrude would not give her the money to buy one. However, Sylvia came home from school with just such a suit that she claimed she had "found." Gertrude believed, not unreasonably, that the suit was a theft. Badgered about it, Sylvia confessed that she had indeed stolen it. The woman slapped and kicked the girl, then whipped her with a belt.
Mrs. Wright left the subject of Sylvia's stealing to return to that of her alleged promiscuity and, after scolding the teenager, began kicking her in the crotch area. Later that day, still not satisfied that the girl had been adequately punished for theft, she applied a lighted match to Sylvia's "sticky fingers" and gave her yet another whipping.
Heat would become a major feature of Sylvia's torture. Its origin probably lies in an incident in which Gertrude Baniszewski's abusive boyfriend, Dennis Wright, put a cigarette out on her neck.
The motley group began burning Sylvia with cigarettes and lighted matches. Paula Baniszewski broke her hand hitting Sylvia, then used the cast to beat the girl. The favorite pastime of several kids in the area was getting Sylvia: kicking, hitting, flipping her around through Coy Hubbard's judo tricks or imitations of them, and burning her.
The autopsy would disclose two indices of how much agony Sylvia would endure: she had broken each of her fingernails backward in painful clawing and had bitten her lower lip so deeply it was partially severed.
As the persecution of Sylvia worsened, it became increasingly sexual in character. However, it was also a peculiarly "sexless sex crime." The sexual aspect started with the constant teasing, alleging that she was sexually promiscuous and escalated with Mrs. Wright's vicious kicks to the girl's crotch. There would be other sexual-like assaults, including one to be described shortly, but no "sexual assaults" in the standard meaning of the term. There are no reports of Gertrude ever touching Sylvia in any manner suggestive of lesbianism. None of the young males who excitedly took part in the beatings and torturings of the girl are believed to have either raped her or forced any type of oral sex upon her. The autopsy would disclose a gross swelling of Likens's genital region due to the kicks but none of the internal vaginal lacerations consistent with rape and tests for semen would be negative.
Since the group inflicted almost every sort of assault the human mind could come up with, the omission is puzzling. Mrs. Wright. probably had a horror of being thought "perverted" (assuming she was even familiar with the term) which would explain her not assaulting her victim's sex organ with fingers or tongue. Perhaps Coy Hubbard feared offending Stephanie if his girlfriend considered a rape "two-timing." It is also possible, as Millett speculates in some of her more credible fictional passages, that they genuinely believed Sylvia was a "slut" and feared sexually transmitted diseases or a more ambiguous sort of "contamination" from such contact.
The Brutality Escalates
On one awful day, Mrs. Wright was indignant because she was told that, much earlier in the girl's stay, Sylvia had had a bit of extra cash: she knew that the girl had to have been either stealing or prostituting. Sylvia could not just be turning in empty soda pop bottles as she claimed. So, while several kids were at the Baniszewski house, Gertrude forced a weeping Sylvia to perform an awkward striptease in front of the bunch. When Sylvia was fully nude, Mrs. Wright made the weeping girl shove a soft drink bottle up her v****a.
At the climax of this horror, Stephanie Baniszewski came home from school. Seeing Sylvia naked before a bunch of kids, shoving a bottle up herself, and unaware that her own mother had ordered this performance, the outraged Stephanie rushed up to Sylvia and slapped her. Then she furiously ordered Sylvia to go to her room.
The Baniszewski's bathroom The Baniszewski's bathroom
One night in October, Sylvia wet her bed. This could have been the result of psychological anxiety — if anyone ever had reason to be nervous, she did — or it could have been because the many cruel blows to her stomach and crotch had weakened control in that area. However, her tormentors decided that she must now live down in the basement with the dog because she was too dirty to live with human beings. Paula punished Sylvia's bed-wetting by preventing her from using the toilet, thus forcing her to befoul herself.
At the same time, her torturers began a regimen of forced bathing in which they tied up the "dirty girl" and forced her into the Baniszewski's old-fashioned, claw-footed bathtub tub after filling it with scalding hot water. Sometimes she was put in the tub by Gertrude and Paula and on some evenings fourteen-year-old Richard (Ricky) Hobbs was there to assist. Hobbs was a soft-featured, good-looking lad who sported straight blonde hair parted on the side, wore thick eyeglasses with black horn rims and often hung out at the Baniszewski house.
Paula Baniszewski rubbed salt into Sylvia's wounds.
Sylvia was often kept nude or nearly so for days at a time. She became a game for the neighborhood kids to enjoy, burning, punching, and now pushing her down the stairs to the cellar, then forcing her back up just to throw her back down again.
On one occasion, the starving teenager was allowed up from the cellar and told to try to eat soup with her fingers. Famished, she made an attempt at it only to have the soup grabbed away from her by John. Later, Mrs. Wright. and John forced the girl to eat s**t and drink urine.
No Rescue in Sight
One of the most depressing aspects of the Sylvia Likens case is the realization that there were several times when, if people had acted just a bit differently than they did, Sylvia could have been rescued. People have always asked, "Why didn't they tell someone?" In September, Sylvia and Jenny told someone. That someone was their older, married sister, Diana Shoemaker, a slim, attractive woman with jet black hair. Sylvia was being picked on, both girls said. Every time something, anything, went wrong, Mrs. Wright would shout, "Paula, get the board!" Jenny backed up Sylvia's claim that the latter was constantly punished for things she didn't do.
Diana blew them off. They were exaggerating. They had to be. No one likes to be punished but they probably deserved it, she thought.
The Baniszewski home had visitors. Phyllis Vermillion's visits, the assaults she witnessed, and her failure to do anything about them have already been described.
A twelve-year-old girl named Judy Duke described some of the goings-on to her mother while Mrs. Duke was washing dishes. "They were beating and kicking Sylvia something terrible," the girl reported.
"Oh, well, they're just punishing her, aren't they?" Mrs. Duke asked rhetorically.
The Rev. Roy Julian tried to visit all the members of his congregation. The Baniszewskis attended his fundamentalist Christian church and he was at their home in September. He and Mrs. Wright chatted amiably while sitting on the worn couch of her living room.
Mrs. Wright complained about her husband's failure to pay child support, her numerous medical problems, and all the troubles she had with the kids. Sylvia was by far the worst of the lot, Mrs. Wright asserted. In a horrified tone, she told the man of God, "Sylvia has been skipping school and making advances on older men — for money!"
The Rev. Julian remembered Sylvia, the pretty girl who had "come forward" one Sunday to confess her faith. How awful if she should be sinning so terribly! He asked to speak with her.
Gertrude told him, "Ask her sister."
Jenny, who had been constantly threatened by Mrs. Wright, mechanically recited some of Sylvia's misdeeds: "She tells lies. And at night, after all of us go to bed, she slips down and raids the icebox." Jenny hoped she could please Gerty without having to repeat the most humiliating, sexual sins attributed to her sister. It appeared to work.
Rev. Julian prayed with Gertrude, then left.
He came back for another visit a few weeks later. Again Mrs. Wright complained about the terrible problems she was having with Sylvia. "Sylvia said at school that Paula is going to have a baby," Gertrude claimed. "But I know my daughter, and I know Sylvia. Paula's not going to have a baby; it's Sylvia."
The minister was concerned about the hostility Paula had confessed she harbored. "Paula told me," he claimed, "that there was hatred in her heart for Sylvia."
Mrs. Wright told him it was the other way around and the minister left the house for the last time.
++++an excerpt from+++ A Young, Tortured Girl is Dead By Denise Noe
sullen_seeker of d dead · Sun Jun 01, 2008 @ 01:57am · 0 Comments |
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