The Forbidden Closet

Michele Kalina was a home health aide in Reading, Pennsylvania, married since 1986 and raising a daughter, Elizabeth. One closet in the family’s high-rise apartment was off limits. It stayed locked, and Elizabeth had been told for years never to look inside it.

In July 2010 the closet was finally opened. Inside a cooler were bones, and in another container an infant’s skeleton was set in concrete. Police recovered the remains of five newborns. Investigators determined that Kalina had given birth in secret over more than a decade, hiding each pregnancy from her husband and from the coworker she had a long affair with by blaming cysts on her fallopian tubes. The Berks County district attorney said at least four of the babies were carried to or near full term and born alive. Testing also turned up a living sixth child, a daughter born in a Reading hospital in 2003 and given up for adoption.

Kalina was charged with homicide in October 2010. On August 4, 2011, she pleaded guilty to one count of third-degree murder along with counts of abusing a corpse and concealing the death of a child, and Judge Linda Ludgate sentenced her to the maximum, twenty to forty years in state prison. Twelve days later the same judge refused to reduce it.