ILLUSTRATES: Andre Toma
Incited to kill by an imaginary head, he robbed houses and tortured the inhabitants.
1. He was born in Philadelphia in 1936 and, before he turned 2, he was adopted. Stephen and Anna Kallinger used to punish him using everything from strapping to hammer blows. As a result, at the age of 6, he had to operate on a hernia in his spine. His parents told him that his penis had also been operated on to make it small and non-functional (a lie)
two. An only child, Kallinger had no friends and spent most of his time helping his adoptive parents in the family shoe shop. In 1944, aged 8, he was sexually abused by a group of knife-wielding older boys. This aggression was so traumatic that, in the future, he would only be able to maintain an erection by holding a knife.
3. At the age of 17, he married his girlfriend, Hilda, and had two children, but the union lasted only three years. In 1958, he remarried after leaving a psychiatric hospital. He had five children: Joseph Jr., Mary Jo, Michael, James and Bonnie Sue. Extremely abusive, Kallinger used to apply the same punishments he had suffered in childhood.
4. Kallinger was denounced by three of his children in 1972 and served a four-month sentence. Mary Jo revealed that she was often tied up and burned on the buttocks with a hot spatula, while Joseph and Michael said they were beaten with a hammer handle and leather thongs. In prison, Kallinger was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
5. Believing he was given a divine mission to save humanity, Kallinger began communicating with Charlie, an imaginary head who ordered him to kill. In July 1974, with the help of his son Michael, then 13 years old, he made his first victim: Jose Collazo, a 10-year-old boy, was stabbed to death and had his penis ripped off.
6. A few weeks later, the second victim: his own son Joseph Jr. With the justification of taking pictures, Kallinger and Michael took him to an abandoned building. There, they tied him to a construction ladder and threw him into a flooded area, where he drowned.
7. Father and son started a wave of robberies in several cities starting in November 1974. The two posed as salespeople and forced entry. Armed with knives and a gun, they arrested and tied residents and stole money and valuables. They tortured four families. Two victims were forced to perform oral sex on Kallinger and another was stabbed
8. In January 1975, the pair staged a robbery of a packed house. Nurse Maria Fasching, 21, was stabbed to death for rejecting an order to cut off the penis of one of the victims with her teeth. As he fled, Kallinger discarded his bloodstained shirt. Clothing was found and connected him to the crime
Curiosity: Kallinger confessed to the murder only after being arrested for other crimes and was never tried for the death of Joseph Jr.
9. Within days, the police went to Michael’s house. Investigators discovered a hole in the wall that bordered the residence next door. There, they found Kallinger on the phone with his attorney. He was arrested, faced two trials and was sentenced to life in prison. Michael was sentenced to probation until age 25.
10. Kallinger attempted suicide several times in prison. In one, he suffocated himself with a plastic mattress cover. In another, he set himself on fire with lighter fluid. He was transferred to a psychiatric hospital and then to one for the criminally insane. There, he tried to kill an inmate. In his final years, he lived in solitary confinement under suicide watch.
WHAT END DID IT TAKE? He died in prison on March 26, 1996, aged 59, of cardiorespiratory arrest. Michael went to reform school and got foster parents
SOURCES Super Delirious episode of the series Index of Evil (Discovery Channel), Joseph Kallinger “The Shoemaker”research surveyed by the Department of Psychology at Radford University, and the Murderpedia and Crime Library websites