On July 29, 2010, Michele Kalina's teenage daughter opened a locked storage closet she had been told to stay out of, in the family's apartment in the 700 block of Court Street in Reading, Pennsylvania, and found skeletal remains. The first officers to respond did not think the bones were human; they were called back later that day when more were found. They were in storage containers, an insulated summer cooler, a cardboard box and a tub filled with cement. "One body was encased in concrete," said the Berks County district attorney, John Adams. "It was a very bizarre case. The others were wrapped in garbage bags." The remains were estimated to range from thirty-two weeks' gestation to newly born. Early reports put all five in the closet; by the time of the plea, detectives said four sets had been found there and a fifth had been recovered from the Conestoga Landfill in New Morgan, Berks County. When her husband told her about the police visits, Kalina left. A police affidavit quoted her telling him, "I don't know where to go," and that she was concerned she was being framed. She was arrested on a city street in August, and in October she was charged with homicide.
She had gone to Albright College for three semesters and married in 1986, at nineteen. The couple's first child, a son born the next year, had cerebral palsy and serious developmental delays, which her husband blamed on a bad delivery, and she looked after the boy at home for seven years until her husband was laid off and became the caregiver for him and for their daughter, born in 1991. She worked as a home-health aide. Her husband told investigators their marriage had not been sexual in eighteen years and that he had not seen his wife naked in that time, the years in which she carried five babies to full or nearly full term. Only once, in 2003, did he suspect she was pregnant, and his daughter talked him out of it.
The babies were conceived during an affair of more than a decade with a co-worker, and detectives said DNA tests showed that at least four of the babies were his; neither he nor her husband had known about the pregnancies. The 2003 pregnancy was the exception to the pattern. She delivered that child at a Reading hospital, told the staff she was separated, and gave the girl up for adoption. DNA showed she too was the co-worker's child. The other five she delivered alone in the bathtub, by her own account, between 1996 and 2010.
She told a defense psychiatrist, Dr. Jerome Gottlieb, that she had wrapped each baby in a towel and stored the body in a tub or container in the locked closet. The first birth, he said, had taken her by surprise, and she had panicked; she did not remember the other four. She maintained that four had been stillborn and denied doing anything malicious. But over several visits she recalled that the third baby, a boy, had moved. "She (said she) might have wrapped the baby too tightly with a towel so that the baby couldn't breathe," Gottlieb testified. That boy's body had been wrapped in towels, clothing and bags and encased in cement in a tub. By the time the remains were found, years of decomposition had made it impossible to determine how any of the five had died.
A December 2010 gag order kept the parties quiet for most of the next year. In June 2011 her public defender raised her mental state and the plea was put off; in July, after independent psychiatric testing, a judge found her competent. On August 4, 2011, she pleaded guilty in Berks County to one count of third-degree murder, for the boy, whom prosecutors called John Doe E because his remains alone held enough physical evidence to support the charge, and to five counts each of abuse of a corpse and concealing the death of a child. The first assistant district attorney, M. Theresa Johnson, asked whether she admitted that she had caused the death of one of the babies with malice. "I do," Kalina said. She also admitted concealing the deaths of all five, whether they had been born dead or alive. Her husband testified that he had never known she was pregnant, that he loved her and that he meant to stay married to her. Reports gave her age that day as forty-five and as forty-six. Gottlieb described her as an alcoholic who had been intoxicated at all the births, could not fully recall them, and suffered from severe depression; he suggested she had put the memories of the babies into a psychological closet, much as she had put their remains into a real one. The public defender, Holly Feeney, argued that she had learned to deny reality in order to survive severe physical and sexual abuse as a child. Reading from a statement that began, "I, Michele Kalina, by my actions, did cause the death of my baby," she said she felt great remorse and had nightmares, urged anyone in her situation to tell someone, and threw herself on the mercy of the court. By another account she sobbed and said, "I cry for the babies, and nothing I can do can bring them back."
Judge Linda K. M. Ludgate was not persuaded. She said Kalina had left the newborns in tubs and containers "like garbage," and that after the first birth in the bathtub she could have stopped and asked for help, but instead "she got pregnant and gave birth again and again and again and again." She imposed the maximum, twenty to forty years in state prison, with the sentences on the lesser charges running consecutively to one another but concurrently with the murder sentence. Johnson told reporters afterward that she could not believe anything Kalina said, calling her a master manipulator, and that Kalina alone had the answers to the questions the case left behind. Less than two weeks later the court refused a request to reduce the sentence, which her lawyer had argued dwelt on the seriousness of the crimes rather than on Kalina's need for treatment. No parole or release has been reported.
1986: at nineteen, Michele Kalina marries.
1996 to 2010: by her own account, she delivers five babies alone in the bathtub and hides their remains in a locked closet.
2003: she delivers a girl at a Reading hospital and gives her up for adoption.
July 29, 2010: her teenage daughter opens the locked storage closet in the family's apartment in Reading and finds skeletal remains.
August 2010: Kalina is arrested on a city street.
October 2010: she is charged with homicide.
December 2010: a gag order keeps the parties quiet for most of the next year.
July 2011: after independent psychiatric testing, a judge finds her competent.
August 4, 2011: she pleads guilty to third-degree murder for the boy prosecutors called John Doe E, and to abuse of a corpse and concealing the death of a child; Judge Linda K. M. Ludgate later imposes twenty to forty years.