Woman jailed for hiding five dead babies in closet

A PENNSYLVANIA woman who secretly gave birth in her bath five times, killed one of the babies and hid all five bodies in a closet, was sentenced to the maximum 20 to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to murder.

Michele Kalina, aged 46, conceived the babies through a long affair with a co-worker and hid the pregnancies from him and her husband. She told a psychiatrist she had wrapped each baby with a towel and then stored the body in a tub or container in a locked closet.

She thought four were “essentially stillborn” and denied doing anything “malicious”, said Jerome Gottlieb, a defence psychiatrist. But over the course of several visits with him, she recalled that the third baby, a boy, had moved. That death was the basis for the one count of murder.

“She (said she) might have wrapped the baby too tightly with a towel so that the baby couldn’t breathe,” Dr Gottlieb said.

That boy’s body was then encased in cement and stored with the others in a closet.

The five bodies decomposed for years until her teenage daughter found the skeletal remains last year. By then, authorities could not determine how the babies had died.

Public defender Holly Feeney sought leniency on grounds that Kalina had learned to deny reality as she endured physical and sexual abuse as a child. Dr Gottlieb suggested she put memories of the babies in a “psychological closet”, much as she put their remains in a physical one.

Judge Linda Ludgate dismissed the argument, saying Kalina had left the babies in containers “like garbage” and rebuked her for not getting help.

“After the first time she gave birth in the bathtub and wrapped the baby and put the baby in a container, she could have stopped... and asked for help, but she did not,” judge Ludgate said. Instead, “she got pregnant and gave birth again and again”.

Kalina sobbed as she told the judge she had nightmares about her children.

“I cry for the babies, and nothing I can do can bring them back,” she said. “I am very upset and ashamed about what happened.”

Her husband Jeffrey Kalina, 54, a disabled stay-at-home father for much of their 25-year marriage, told the court he still loved his wife and would have raised her lover’s children had he known about them.