20-40 years for mother who hid babies' bodies in closet

A Pennsylvania woman who said she 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, 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 Dr 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 cooler, tub or cardboard box – 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.

Kalina, a home-health aide, also pleaded guilty to five counts each of abuse of a corpse and concealing a child’s death.

Dr Gottlieb described her as an alcoholic who was intoxicated during the births and said she did not fully recall what took place. She also suffered from severe depression and other mental health issues, he said.

Public defender Holly Feeney sought leniency on grounds that Kalina had learned to deny reality as she endured severe 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.

But Berks County judge Linda Ludgate dismissed the argument, saying Kalina had left the babies in tubs and containers “like garbage” and rebuked her for not getting help, at least after the first delivery.

“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 and 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, reading from a statement. “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.

Throughout questioning, he said their marriage had been sexless for 18 years and he had not seen his wife naked during that time, when she carried babies to full or nearly full-term births.

Only once, in 2003, did he suspect his wife might be pregnant, but his daughter rejected the idea.

Kalina went on to deliver that baby at a Reading hospital. She told the staff she was separated and gave the girl up for adoption. DNA tests show the girl is also the lover’s child.