Joseph Kallinger

Joseph Kallinger (December 11, 1935 – March 26, 1996) was an American serial killer who murdered three people, including his teenage son, and tortured four families. He committed these crimes with his 15-year-old son Michael.

Kallinger was born Joseph Lee Brenner III at the Northern Liberties Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Joseph Lee Brenner, Jr. and his wife Judith. In December 1937, the child was placed in a foster home, after his father had abandoned his mother. On October 15, 1939, he was adopted by Austrian immigrants Stephen and Anna Kallinger. He was abused by both his adoptive parents so severely that, at age six, he suffered a hernia inflicted by his adoptive father. The punishments Kallinger endured included kneeling on jagged rocks, being locked inside closets, consuming excrement, committing self-injury, being burned with irons, being whipped with belts, and being starved. When he was nine, he was sexually assaulted by a group of neighborhood boys.

As a child, Kallinger often rebelled against his teachers and his adoptive parents. He dreamed of becoming a playwright, and had played the part of Ebenezer Scrooge in the local YWCA's performance of A Christmas Carol in the ninth grade. When Kallinger was 15, he began dating a girl named Hilda Bergman whom he met at a theater which he was allowed to visit on Saturdays. His parents told him not to see her, but he married her and had two children with her. She later left him because of the domestic violence she suffered at his hands. Joseph Kallinger was hospitalized at St. Mary's on September 4, 1957 due to severe headaches and loss of appetite which doctors believed was a result of stress surrounding his divorce. Kallinger remarried on April 20, 1958 and had five children with his second wife. He was extremely abusive towards his wife and his children, and often inflicted the same punishments on them that he had suffered from his adoptive parents.