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.