In July 2010 Michele Kalina's husband and their teenage daughter opened a locked storage closet in the family's apartment in Reading, Pennsylvania, and found the skeletal remains of five infants. 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. Kalina was arrested that August.
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 DNA tests showed he was the father; she had hidden the pregnancies from him as well. 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. She thought four had been essentially 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.
On August 4, 2011, she pleaded guilty in Berks County to one count of third-degree murder, for the boy, and to five counts each of abuse of a corpse and concealing the death of a child. 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, Kalina 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. Less than two weeks later the court refused a request to reduce the sentence. No parole or release has been reported.