Joseph Kallinger was a shoemaker in Philadelphia. In 1974 and early 1975 he and his young son forced their way into homes in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, robbing the people inside and sexually abusing some of them. The last of these invasions, in Leonia, New Jersey, on January 8, 1975, ended with the killing of Maria Fasching, a licensed practical nurse who had come to the house to see a friend. A Bergen County jury rejected his insanity defense and convicted him of her murder in October 1976.
Two other deaths came into the courts much later. In 1974 two boys had died in Philadelphia: Kallinger's own son, Joseph Jr., who was 14, and Jose Collazo, a 10-year-old from the neighborhood. The police suspected Kallinger, but the deaths stayed officially unsolved until 1983, when a book written with his cooperation described him killing both boys. He was charged in Philadelphia that summer and by 1988 was serving two life sentences for those murders.
Much of what has been written about his childhood and his mind comes from Kallinger himself, through the 1983 book, and rests on his own word.
Kallinger was adopted as a child. A writeup in the Dengrove Collection at the University of Virginia School of Law Library, which holds courtroom sketches from his trial, says he was adopted at the age of four by a couple who abused him severely, and that as an adult he in turn abused his first wife, who left him, and his second wife, whom he married in 1958. He and his second wife had five children, the same writeup says. His wife and the surviving children were never accused of any crime.
He worked as a shoemaker. United Press International described him in 1983 as a former shoemaker from Philadelphia and in 1988 as a cobbler. When a Pennsylvania court had to decide in 1982 which county should pay for his psychiatric care, it held that his legal residence was Philadelphia, his domicile before his imprisonment, because a prisoner's involuntary absence does not change where he lives in law.
The Dengrove writeup also records that three of his children went to the police about his violence at home and later took back what they had said. Psychologists who examined him in custody, it says, measured his IQ at 82 and diagnosed schizophrenia. Other diagnoses followed in later years. In 1990 a Pennsylvania court recorded that a psychiatrist, Dr. Mokarram Jafri, had diagnosed him with a borderline personality disorder, which the court described as a serious mental illness.
Jose Collazo was 10 years old and lived in Kallinger's Philadelphia neighborhood. Joseph Kallinger Jr. was 14, one of Kallinger's sons. Both boys died in Philadelphia in 1974. Little else was reported about who they were, and the records give no reliable account of how they died beyond what Kallinger later told his biographer.
The Dengrove writeup says Kallinger had taken out a life insurance policy on Joseph Jr. before the boy's death and that the insurance company refused to pay. According to UPI, the police suspected Kallinger at the time, but both deaths were still officially unsolved when he described them himself in The Shoemaker, published in 1983. The son who later went with him on the home invasions was a child, was never tried as an adult for any of these events.
In 1974 and January 1975 Kallinger and his young son entered homes in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The New Jersey Supreme Court, writing in 1988, described what they did as a criminal rampage in both states, in which they threatened and sexually abused the people in suburban homes while robbing them. The same opinion said that on three occasions Kallinger murdered his victims.
The crimes reached the courts of several counties. In Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, Kallinger was convicted in 1975 of a series of crimes. In Camden County, New Jersey, he was later sentenced for robbery and attempted rape, UPI reported in 1988. In Bergen County, New Jersey, his son was charged in juvenile court with two armed robberies, said to have taken place on January 6 and January 8, 1975, and with the murder on January 8. Several of the people who survived these invasions were women who were sexually assaulted.
The last invasion took place in Leonia, in Bergen County, at a two-story stucco house that belonged to a married couple. The New Jersey Supreme Court's 1988 opinion, which drew on the trial record, sets out what happened there. Kallinger and his son held eight people in the house hostage. Kallinger ordered several of them to undress and tied them up, and he sexually abused two of the women.
Maria Fasching was a licensed practical nurse and a friend of one of the people who lived in the house. New Jersey 101.5 gave her age as 21 in a 2020 retrospective. According to the account in Schreiber's book, as the court summarized it, she arrived at about 2:45 p.m. and was seized like the others. Kallinger ordered her to attack a man who was tied up and helpless. She refused, and he killed her with a knife.
Her parents, Alfred and Marguerite Fasching, and her sister, Valerie Collins, later went to court over the book that described her death. Little else about her life was reported.
Kallinger and his son were arrested on January 17, 1975, New Jersey 101.5 reported. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court's 1978 opinion in the boy's juvenile case confirms that he was held in Pennsylvania custody from that date on charges from Dauphin County. According to the Dengrove writeup, both were arrested on the strength of eyewitness testimony. On January 20, 1975, the boy was charged in the Bergen County Juvenile Court with the murder in Leonia and the two armed robberies.
Kallinger's son, then 13, was dealt with in the juvenile courts of both states. On March 6, 1975, the Dauphin County Juvenile Court adjudicated him delinquent and committed him to the Youth Development Center. In early 1976 the Bergen County prosecutor asked for his return to New Jersey under the Interstate Compact on Juveniles, and on March 8, 1976, the Bergen County Juvenile Court found that New Jersey was entitled to custody. The Dauphin County court and the Superior Court of Pennsylvania agreed that Pennsylvania had to send him back. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court heard a further appeal and on October 5, 1978, held that his return was mandatory under the compact; the only question, it said, was when. It sent the matter back to the Dauphin County Juvenile Court to decide the timing, allowing that court to weigh Pennsylvania's own interest in treating him. Three justices dissented and would have kept him in Pennsylvania, noting that the director of the Youth Development Center and Pennsylvania's compact administrator opposed sending him. The final juvenile outcome in New Jersey was not reported.
Kallinger was tried first in Pennsylvania. He pleaded insanity. The Dengrove writeup says a Pennsylvania jury deliberated for less than an hour before finding him sane and guilty of robbery. In 1975 the Dauphin County court sentenced him to combined prison terms of not less than 30 and not more than 80 years, according to the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania.
His lawyer on appeal was Malcolm W. Berkowitz. Reid H. Weingarten, a deputy district attorney, with District Attorney LeRoy S. Zimmerman, answered for the Commonwealth. On October 26, 1977, the Superior Court of Pennsylvania affirmed the judgment of sentence without a published opinion.
After the Dauphin County trial, Pennsylvania sent Kallinger to New Jersey, where he was tried in Bergen County for Maria Fasching's murder. His defense lawyer was Paul Giblin. Kallinger again pleaded insanity. The Dengrove writeup notes that his head moved almost constantly in the courtroom, and it describes his behavior as testing how far a man of below-average intelligence could go in appearing psychotic.
The jury took about two hours, the Dengrove writeup says, and found him sane and guilty of murder, robbery and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The verdict came on October 12, 1976, according to the New Jersey Appellate Division, and he was sentenced to life in prison, to run consecutively to the 30 to 80 years he was already serving in Pennsylvania. The Appellate Division affirmed the conviction and the sentence in an unreported opinion in 1979.
Giblin's fees and costs for the defense came to 311,888.53 dollars, the Appellate Division recorded. To pay him, Kallinger assigned to Giblin, on July 6, 1976, his rights under a contract he had signed the year before with the writer Flora Rheta Schreiber.
Kallinger returned to Pennsylvania in March 1978 and was held at the State Correctional Institution at Huntingdon. In May 1978 the superintendent there asked a court to order involuntary psychiatric treatment under the state's Mental Health Procedures Act, and the Huntingdon County court committed him to Farview State Hospital, Pennsylvania's hospital for mentally ill offenders in Wayne County. UPI reported in 1988 that he had been sent to Farview after attacking another inmate at Huntingdon. (A 1990 Commonwealth Court opinion dates his commitment to Farview to 1977; the 1982 opinion, which sets out the dates in more detail, gives May 1978.)
The cost of his care led to a lawsuit between public bodies. Dauphin County paid for his treatment at Farview at first, until a change in the law took effect on January 26, 1979. In October 1980 the county asked a court to decide who should pay from then on. On April 19, 1982, the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania ruled that the answer depended on his domicile before prison, and assigned the cost to Philadelphia County, up to 120 dollars a day after January 26, 1979.
He stayed at Farview for about ten years. When the New Jersey Appellate Division wrote about him in May 1986, he was still held there.
On August 19, 1975, Kallinger signed a contract with Flora Rheta Schreiber, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of Sybil, giving her the book, magazine and film rights to his life story. He and his wife were to receive 12.5 percent of what Schreiber earned from it. Schreiber interviewed him at length and drew on his family, his neighbors and his psychiatrists. She described the result as a psycho-biography.
Simon and Schuster published The Shoemaker: The Anatomy of a Psychotic in hardcover in 1983, and New American Library brought out the paperback in 1984. It ran to 423 pages. Schreiber received advances of 475,000 dollars and about 75,000 dollars in royalties, and the publisher's lawyer told the court the book had not been a commercial success. Kallinger himself received nothing from it. Under the assignment and a 1983 settlement, payments went to Giblin, who had received less than 30,000 dollars toward his fees by 1988.
The book's chapter on Leonia, "The Hunting Knife," runs to 21 pages. The New Jersey Supreme Court found that about half of it set out Kallinger's own recollections, taken from Schreiber's interviews with him, and the rest re-created the events from testimony that survivors gave at his trial.
The book contained what UPI called a confession to the 1974 killings of Joseph Jr. and Jose Collazo. In July 1983 Kallinger, who was then serving his sentence for the New Jersey murder in a Pennsylvania state mental hospital, was brought to Philadelphia, formally charged in Municipal Court with the two murders, and held in the city jail without bail. Assistant District Attorney Arnold Gordon said the charges arose from the book. A hearing was set for July 20, 1983.
He was convicted. UPI reported in August 1988 that he was serving two life sentences for the 1974 murders of his son and of Jose Collazo, and in 1990 the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania described him as a convicted murderer serving two consecutive life sentences. The date and details of the Philadelphia trial and verdict, and any appeal from it, are not given in the reports.
Maria Fasching's parents and sister sued Kallinger, his wife, Schreiber, Simon and Schuster, New American Library and Giblin in New Jersey, seeking to reach the money the book earned. They relied in part on New Jersey's new law, in force from January 26, 1983, which was meant to hold the profits of criminals who sold their stories for the benefit of victims. On May 30, 1986, the Appellate Division ruled in Fasching v. Kallinger that the statute did not apply to authors and publishers, and it upheld the dismissal of the family's claims for unjust enrichment, defamation and invasion of privacy. It noted that a Pennsylvania court had reached the same result in 1985 when Jose Collazo's parents brought an unjust enrichment claim against Simon and Schuster.
The family's remaining claim, against the money assigned to Giblin, came back to the Appellate Division in 1988. On August 11, 1988, the court held that the statute could not reach a contract made before it took effect, because applying it would be unfair to a lawyer who had agreed to defend Kallinger in reliance on the earlier law. A wrongful death count had also been dismissed.
People who had been held in the Leonia house also sued Schreiber and her publisher, over a sentence in the Leonia chapter and over the retelling of what had been done to them. On February 18, 1988, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled against them. It held that the sentence they objected to was not defamatory, and that the book's account of the crimes came from public court records and testimony that had been widely reported at the time, so its publication was protected. One justice dissented on the defamation point.
In 1988 the Department of Public Welfare decided that Kallinger no longer needed inpatient psychiatric care. His lawyers fought to keep him at Farview, arguing that he would be killed or would kill if he went back to a prison. In May 1988 Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge Edward Blake barred his transfer until a mental health commitment hearing could be held. The department appealed to the Commonwealth Court on July 11, which allowed the move to go ahead, and Kallinger, then 51, was taken from Farview to SCI Huntingdon. "The patient is no longer in need of inpatient psychiatric care," said Matt Jones, a spokesman for the welfare department. Ken Robinson, a corrections spokesman, said Kallinger had "been around long enough" for prison officials to know the security issues.
He was sent back to Farview for short periods. On May 17, 1990, he was readmitted from Huntingdon, and on June 22 he said he would refuse to eat or drink. He also refused treatment for an abscess on his foot. He told staff that he had seen a vision of Christ who told him to join him, and that he wanted to meet his maker. On June 30 he agreed to go to Wayne Memorial Hospital for intravenous fluids and antibiotics, but he went on refusing food.
The Department of Public Welfare asked the Wayne County Court of Common Pleas on July 3, 1990, for authority to treat and feed him. The court first granted a preliminary order, then on July 10 dissolved it, finding him competent to refuse. The Commonwealth Court stepped in on July 13 with a preliminary injunction allowing involuntary treatment and feeding. Two lawyers appeared for Kallinger at his own request, one arguing that he had a right to die and the other that the state had to keep him alive, and the court appointed a guardian ad litem, David Ferleger. On August 14, 1990, Judge Pellegrini ruled that the state's interests in keeping order in prisons, preserving life, preventing suicide and protecting the integrity of the medical profession outweighed what remained of a prisoner's right to privacy. Farview was ordered to feed him through a nasogastric tube and give him medical care while he refused, and his commitment was extended until staff decided he could be fed at a prison.
Kallinger died in prison in 1996, New Jersey 101.5 reported in a 2020 retrospective, which gave the cause as a seizure. That report did not give the exact date or place of his death.
Proven by final judgment: the murder of Maria Fasching (Bergen County jury, 1976; affirmed 1979); the robbery and related offenses in Dauphin County (1975; affirmed 1977); the robbery and attempted rape in Camden County; and the 1974 murders of Joseph Kallinger Jr. and Jose Collazo, for which he was serving two life sentences by 1988. The date of the Philadelphia verdict was not reported.
His own account: almost everything published about his childhood, his inner life and the voices and visions he described rests on what he told Schreiber and his examiners. Juries in two states heard his insanity defense and rejected it. The Pennsylvania court that ordered him fed in 1990 found him competent.
Differences between sources: the Camden County term is 42 to 51 years in UPI's 1988 report and 42 to 52 years in the Commonwealth Court's 1990 opinion. The year of his first commitment to Farview is May 1978 in the 1982 opinion and 1977 in the 1990 opinion. UPI's 1988 report dates the nurse's killing to 1974; the New Jersey courts give January 8, 1975. The age of the son who went with him is given as 13 in January 1975 by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court; other ages appear in reports of the book.
1958: marries his second wife, according to the Dengrove writeup; they have five children.
1974: Joseph Kallinger Jr., 14, and Jose Collazo, 10, die in Philadelphia; the deaths stay officially unsolved until 1983.
January 6 and 8, 1975: the two armed robberies in Bergen County with which his son was later charged.
January 8, 1975: home invasion in Leonia; eight people held hostage; Maria Fasching is killed.
January 17, 1975: Kallinger and his son are arrested; the boy is held in Pennsylvania on Dauphin County charges.
January 20, 1975: the boy is charged in the Bergen County Juvenile Court.
March 6, 1975: the boy is adjudicated delinquent in Dauphin County and committed to the Youth Development Center.
1975: Kallinger is convicted in Dauphin County and sentenced to 30 to 80 years.
August 19, 1975: contract with Flora Rheta Schreiber for his life story.
July 6, 1976: assigns his rights under the contract to his lawyer, Paul Giblin.
October 12, 1976: convicted of Maria Fasching's murder in Bergen County; life, consecutive to the Pennsylvania term.
October 26, 1977: Superior Court of Pennsylvania affirms the Dauphin County judgment.
March 1978: returned to Pennsylvania and SCI Huntingdon.
May 1978: committed to Farview State Hospital.
October 5, 1978: Pennsylvania Supreme Court rules that his son must be returned to New Jersey.
1979: New Jersey Appellate Division affirms the murder conviction.
April 19, 1982: Commonwealth Court assigns the cost of his care to Philadelphia County.
1983: The Shoemaker is published by Simon and Schuster.
July 1983: charged in Philadelphia with the murders of his son and Jose Collazo.
1985: a Pennsylvania court rejects the Collazo family's claim against the publisher.
May 30, 1986: Appellate Division decides Fasching v. Kallinger.
February 18, 1988: New Jersey Supreme Court rules against members of the Leonia household in their suit over the book.
August 1988: moved from Farview back to SCI Huntingdon; reported to be serving two life sentences for the Philadelphia murders.
August 11, 1988: Appellate Division rules on the Faschings' remaining claim.
May 17, 1990: readmitted to Farview; on June 22 says he will refuse food and water.
August 14, 1990: Commonwealth Court orders that he be fed and treated.
1996: dies in prison, as reported by New Jersey 101.5 in 2020.