Michele Kalina

Victims

5 deaths - 1 conviction, for third-degree murder of the one baby she recalled being born alive; the other four were assessed as essentially stillborn and no cause of death could be established, so no further homicide count was brought

Years active

1996 - 2010

Location

Berks County, Pennsylvania, USA

Method

Asphyxia, poisoning or neglect

Status

Charged with criminal homicide in October 2010 and pleaded not guilty. Pleaded guilty on August 4, 2011 in Berks County to ONE count of third-degree murder, together with five counts each of abuse of a corpse and concealing the death of a child, and was sentenced by Judge Linda K. M. Ludgate to the statutory maximum of twenty to forty years. A request to reduce the sentence was refused less than two weeks later. The single murder count rests on the third baby, a boy: she told a defence psychiatrist she recalled him moving and that she might have wrapped him too tightly in a towel. Forensic evidence indicated the other four were essentially stillborn, and by the time the remains were found the cause of death could not be determined for any of them.

Kalina was born in 1966 and lived in Berks County, Pennsylvania, with her husband and two surviving daughters. She worked as a phlebotomist.

Between 1996 and 2010 she gave birth five times without her family knowing, and each baby died at or shortly after birth, by suffocation, poisoning or simple neglect. She wrapped the remains and kept them in a plastic container in a closet in the house.

They were found in 2010 by her adult daughter, looking for something else.

She pleaded guilty and on August 4, 2011 received the maximum available sentence of twenty to forty years.

This entry belongs with Diane Odell, Sabine Hilschenz, Megan Huntsman, Gertraud Arzberger and Stella Williamson in this archive. The shared feature in all six is not the killings but the keeping: the remains stayed in the house, for years or decades, and in almost every case the discovery was accidental. Here it was a daughter opening a closet.

The pregnancies were concealed in an occupied family home, five times, over fourteen years, and the entry records that as the fact the case turns on.