Joseph Kallinger - Early Life

Early Life

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 Stephen and Anna Kallinger. He was abused by both his foster parents so severely that, at age six, he suffered a hernia inflicted by his foster 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 foster parents. He dreamed of becoming a playwright, and had directed his school's performance of A Christmas Carol in the ninth grade. When Kallinger was 15, he began a sexual relationship with a schoolmate named Hilda Bergman. 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. Kallinger remarried in 1958, after he was released from a mental hospital, 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 foster parents.

Throughout the next decade, Kallinger would spend time in and out of mental institutions for attempting suicide and committing arson, after setting his house on fire three times.