The Bizarre Case of Father and Son

Brutal crime is seldom commonplace but, even so, as Sherlock Holmes might have observed, from the outset the case possessed some curious features. On the afternoon of Jan. 8, a neatly dressed, well-spoken man posing as an insurance agent appeared at the door of Mrs. De-Witt Romaine in Leonia, NJ. Then, brandishing a knife and a gun, the man forced his way inside and tied up the three occupants. Remarkably, his accomplice was a young boy who appeared to be no older than eleven or twelve and whose long, sandy-colored hair gave him a somewhat girlish appearance.

For two hours, as family members and friends came to the house, the pair seized and tied up each new arrival. The final visitor was Maria Fasching, 21, a practical nurse who lived in the neighborhood and was looking in on Mrs. Romaine's invalid mother. Taken to the basement by the intruders, the young nurse apparently resisted the man's attempt to molest her; helplessly, the hostages upstairs heard her scream: "I thought you weren't going to hurt me!" Police later found her dead in a pool of blood, with stab wounds in her back, throat and chest.

Five Break-ins. The murder attracted widespread publicity, and soon the Bergen County police received calls from Pennsylvania and Maryland authorities: a man and boy with a virtually identical modus operandi were wanted in those states. In November, in the Philadelphia suburb of Lindenwold, N.J., a man and boy forced their way into a home and tied a housewife to a bed. The man raped her; then the two invaders ransacked the house for jewelry and cash. There was a similar sex-and-robbery crime in early December in Susquehanna Township, Pa. There, a man and boy bound and assaulted four women, made ugly sexual threats and stole $20,000 worth of jewelry. A similar pair invaded homes in Baltimore on Dec. 10 and Dumont, N.J., on Jan. 6. Before Maria Fasching, no one had been killed, but there had been five break-ins by a man and boy in the three-state area within three months. Conceivably, there may have been other incidents: because of embarrassment, women often fail to report sex crimes to the police.

Shirt Clues. The police could not, of course, be sure that all the crimes were the work of the same man and boy, but the combination was so unlikely as to create a strong presumption. As the various law-enforcement agencies compared notes, the presumption grew. Explained New Jersey's Bergen County prosecutor, Joseph Woodcock: "Most of the victims described the man's age between 40 and 45. They said the young boy was eleven or twelve. Basically, the method of operation was the same. The man seemed to cut electrical cords indiscriminately. He used some pieces to tie the victims, but he seemed to cut many more pieces than he needed to tie them up." There were other similarities: many of the women victims were forced to disrobe; sexual assault or molestation was always threatened and often carried out; the robbers always stole jewelry and money; and because of the youth's long hair, many of the victims were uncertain at first whether he was a boy or girl. The man, much like the infamous Boston Strangler, liked to tie his victims on a bed and toy with them. Once, in a particularly perverted scene, he commanded the boy to rape a woman; the boy could not.

The investigators soon got a break. The pair who fled the murder house in Leonia were seen near by minutes later washing blood from the man's shirt in a puddle of water and then discarding the shirt when the blood failed to wash away. Local police retrieved the bloodstained shirt the same day, and it was a veritable marquee of clues. Inside the collar were a manufacturer's trademark, a store label and a launderer's stamp. The manufacturer was able to pinpoint a store in Philadelphia where the garment had been sold. The dry cleaner was quickly found; only three blocks away lived the shirt's owner, Joseph Kallinger, 38, a shoe repairman who, with his wife Elizabeth, 40, and their five children occupied a house in the working-class Kensington area of Philadelphia. On the bottom floor of the house was a shoe repair shop that Kallinger owned and operated. True, Kallinger's name was misspelled on the shirt. But that, the dry cleaner explained, was because his machine could not print more than eight letters across; dropping an / had been the solution, and he knew the shirt well.

Child Abuse. Photographs of Kallinger matched the descriptions provided by New Jersey victims, but the police did not move in on him at once: there was always the chance that he had discarded the shirt, perhaps given it to the Salvation Army, and that someone else had been wearing it in Leonia. Only when Kallinger's fingerprints, which were on file as a result of his arrest for child abuse, were found to match one at the scene of the Susquehanna Township robbery did Harrisburg police arrest Kallinger and charge him with one count of burglary, four counts of armed robbery and four counts of kidnaping. His son Michael, 13, and another son James, 11, were also taken into custody. After several hours, James was released, a move that seemed to point to Michael as the youthful accomplice. As a minor, Michael is not liable to routine criminal charges in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania and New Jersey authorities found in the Kallinger house evidence, some of it stolen goods, that was linked to the Dumont robbery and the Leonia murder and robbery.

A father's slinking off with his scarcely teen-age son to commit various alleged acts of robbery, sexual brutality and finally murder may be a new twist in the already sufficiently demented and bizarre annals of crime. But it is, astonishingly, only the latest episode in a series of events that, at least to Philadelphia newspaper readers, have made the whole Kallinger family well known over the past few years. In January 1972, three Kallinger children went into court to press charges of extreme physical abuse against their father. Kallinger languished in jail for seven months awaiting trial because he was unable to raise the $75,000 bail. When he finally stood trial, his sons testified that their father had chained them to the kitchen stove and beaten them.

Kallinger's daughter Mary Jo, then 13, testified that he had tied her hands over her head and burned her thigh with a hot kitchen spatula, while holding a knife at her throat to keep her from screaming. The jury convicted Kallinger of aggravated cruelty to minors as well as assault and battery. He was sentenced to four years probation, and returned home to a tearful reconciliation with his family. That was well reported and photographed in the local press. An assistant district attorney in the case called Kallinger "a walking time bomb" and pleaded with the court to place him under psychiatric care. Kallinger's sentence required him to seek psychiatric help, but apparently he never did.

Boy's Death. One of his present attorneys, Malcolm Berkowitz, met Kallinger in May 1973, and over the next several months obtained sworn affidavits from the three children in which they recanted their original testimony. Berkowitz claims that the children were prepared to withdraw the charges against their father shortly after making them but that the police officers who took the charges down threatened to send the children to a detention home if they went back on their story. With the affidavits claimed as new evidence, Berkowitz in November 1973 asked for a new trial for Kallinger, a motion that the judge in the case still has under advisement.

Within months, there was more trouble in the Kallinger home. Joseph Jr., 13, was sent to a state psychiatric facility for observation and treatment. The reason was the boy's homosexual involvement with an older man. After a six-month stay, Joseph Jr. returned home for a month, then ran away. Last Aug. 8, his body was found under the rubble of a collapsed building in downtown Philadelphia. That also was reported in the local press. Police still do not know the cause of the boy's death, but one month before it occurred, Kallinger had taken out life insurance policies on two of his sons. Joseph Jr.'s policies called for a total award of $59,000 to Kallinger and his wife in the event of the boy's accidental death, but the three insurers have thus far declined to pay.

Too Truant. Kallinger took a kind of satisfaction in the notoriety that his family had received. He pinned the newspaper clippings detailing his family's woes to .the wall of his shoe repair shop, and he frequently pointed them out with pride to customers.

The Kallingers' neighbors are divided in their opinion of the family. Some neighbors find the Kallinger boys roughnecks who are too often truant from school, and their father a sour-tempered man given to the brandishing of a gun during neighborhood disputes. Others describe Kallinger as an expert cobbler who is unfailingly polite and neighborly to his customers.

Berkowitz vows that he will fight Kallinger's extradition from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, where he is wanted on suspicion of Fasching's murder. But first the victims of the New Jersey crimes will face Kallinger and Michael in a line-up this week. If their identification is positive, the saga of the Kallingers of Kensington will take its grimmest turn yet.

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