sister, Dianna Shoemaker, at a local park. Both Jenny and Sylvia informed Dianna about the abuse they were enduring at the hands of their caregiver, adding that Sylvia was being specifically targeted for physical abuse and almost always for things she had neither said nor done. Neither sister mentioned the actual address where they resided and, initially, Dianna believed her sisters must have been exaggerating their claims regarding the scope of their mistreatment. Several weeks prior to this, Sylvia and Jenny had encountered Dianna in the same park, while in the company of 11-year-old Marie Baniszewski, and Sylvia had been given a sandwich to eat when she mentioned to her sister that she was hungry. Likens remained silent about the matter, although Marie revealed this fact to her family in late September. In response, Gertrude accused Likens of engaging in gluttony before she and Paula choked and bludgeoned her. The pair then subjected Likens to a scalding bath in order to "cleanse her of sin," with Gertrude grabbing Likens' hair and repeatedly banging her head against the bath to revive her whenever she fainted. Shortly after this incident, the father of a neighborhood boy named Michael John Monroe phoned Arsenal Technical High School to anonymously report that a girl with open sores across her entire body was living at the Baniszewski household. As Likens had not attended school for several days, a school nurse visited East New York Street to investigate these claims. Gertrude claimed to the nurse that Likens had run away from her home the previous week and that she was unaware of her actual whereabouts, adding that Likens was "out of control" and that her open sores were a result of Likens' refusal to maintain decent personal hygiene. Gertrude further claimed that Likens was a bad influence on both her own children and her sister. The school made no further investigations concerning Likens' welfare. The immediate neighbors of the Baniszewski family were a middle-aged couple named Raymond and Phyllis Vermillion. Both initially viewed Gertrude as an ideal caregiver for the Likens sisters and both had visited the Baniszewski residence on two occasions while the girls had been under Gertrude's care. On both occasions, however, the Vermillions witnessed Paula physically abusing Likens—who on both occasions had a black eye—and openly boasting about her mistreatment of the child to them. Upon their second visit to the Baniszewski household, both