Married Mother Kills Five Newborns from Affair, Hides Remains in Closet

Your Black World Reports. 

Michele Kalina is being accused by the state of hiding her pregnancies and killing five of her newborn children.  Police are also alleging that she proceeded to hide the remains of her kids in the closet.  Public defenders in her case are bringing up mental health issues and may argue that she is not competent to stand trial.

Judge Linda K.M. Ludgate will seek out independent psychiatric testing before she determines whether Kalina is competent to stand trial.  Thus far, there is no court date set and attorneys are disallowed to speak to the media.

According to DNA tests, the 45-year old Kalina conceived most of the children with a co-worker.  The affair lasted more than 10 years, and neither the man nor Kalina’s husband knew anything about the pregnancies.
The remains of the children were found in the closet by Kalina’s teenager daughter, who proceeded to call the police.  A set of bones were put in cement, and others in a cooler and plastic tub.

“It may be the way in which women resolve these dilemmas: `I’m pregnant again, and I don’t want to abort the child. But I don’t want anybody to know that I have the child,’” said Geoffrey R. McKee, a forensic psychologist at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine.

McKee says that women who kill their newborns are typically young mothers who don’t want to be found out as being pregnant.  Even if they are mentally ill, he argues that the illness is rarely a factor in the decision to murder the child.

“More often, it’s (the death) designed to avoid being detected as pregnant,” McKee said to the Associated Press.

Kalina is being charged with one count of criminal homicide for each child and also counts of aggravated assault, with multiple counts of abuse of a corpse and concealing the death of a child.  She started her affair with the co-worker in 1997 and told him that she had a cyst when she was pregnant.  When he asked why the weight was gone, she told him that the cyst had been removed.  The cyst appears to be the excuse she used for the other pregnancies, telling her boyfriend that it kept coming back.

In addition to the five children that Kalina allegedly killed, there was a sixth child that she put up for adoption.  The child was also fathered by the co-worker, according to reports.