PHILADELPHIA — A northeast Pennsylvania woman will plead and be sentenced today on charges she killed five babies born after hidden pregnancies — and kept their remains in a locked closet.

DNA tests show Michele Kalina, 45, of Reading conceived most, if not all, of the babies through an affair with a co-worker. Neither he nor Kalina’s husband knew about the pregnancies.

Court records show Kalina, a home-health aide, is set for a combined plea and sentencing hearing today. She is charged with one count of criminal homicide and multiple counts of abuse of corpse and concealing the death of a child. A gag order prevents lawyers from discussing the plea, or whether Kalina’s mental health is at issue.

Her teenage daughter found the remains last year and called police. One set of bones had been entombed in cement and the others in a cooler, a plastic tub and a cardboard box.

“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 who wrote the book, “Why Mothers Kill.”

Women who kill newborns are usually young, first-time mothers who are afraid to reveal their pregnancies, he said. Kalina doesn’t fit that demographic, but may share a similar motivation, given the on-again, off-again affair, which continued for more than a decade.

Such women are rarely found to be mentally ill, he said.

“There are some who are,” McKee told The Associated Press. “But often it’s not a contributing cause to the neonaticide. More often, it’s (the death) designed to avoid being detected as pregnant.”

Kalina started dating the co-worker in 1997 and soon appeared to be gaining weight. She told him she had a cyst, which she later said had been drained, according to police affidavits.

The “cyst” recurred three or four more times over the years, the boyfriend, whose identity has not been disclosed, told police.

Kalina, a petite woman, had no prenatal care during the five pregnancies.