In May 1961, Greece was shaken by a harrowing case of infanticide, one of the most shocking in the country’s history. The tragedy involved a modern-day “Medea of Kalamaki,” who killed her three young children to exact revenge on her husband.
The perpetrator was 28-year-old American Nita Baker, who had been living in Greece since 1960 with her husband Joel Baker, and their three children. The crime occurred on May 27, 1961, and the gruesome details reported by the newspapers in the following days horrified the entire nation.
This crime is one of the cases detailed in the book “100 Crimes in Greece,” which was recently released with THEMA on Sunday.
Background
The couple met when Nita was 18, and they married shortly thereafter. Over time, their relationship deteriorated. Nita became increasingly absorbed in reading the Bible and religious books, while Joel, a young sergeant, grew emotionally distant, with the couple eventually sleeping in separate beds. Disillusioned, Joel began an affair with a young Greek woman, Venetia Sitara, who worked at the American base.
Their affair became evident to Nita when she discovered photos of Joel and Venetia during one of their trips. This discovery pushed Nita over the edge, leading her to believe that neither she nor her children should continue living under these circumstances.
The Crime
According to the police report, Sergeant Joel Baker returned to their home in Kalamaki that evening to a horrifying scene. He found his wife in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor, while their three children, Joe, Susanna, and Kitty, were dead. An open Bible with passages about adultery underlined lay on the kitchen table.
Nita later confessed to strangling her children in their sleep with a cord, with only her son Joe offering any resistance. The newspapers at the time detailed her shocking first statements, where she claimed she committed the murders because she could not bear her husband’s infidelity. She had told the children they would be going somewhere far away the next day, put them to bed, and then began her horrific act.
Nita left a note explaining that she was tired of living with the nightmare of her husband’s infidelity and believed she was providing a peaceful and Christian sanctuary for her children, away from their father’s moral decay. She then attempted to kill herself by stabbing her throat but was interrupted by her husband’s return, allowing her to survive.
Legal Proceedings
Amid widespread public outrage, the court initially accepted that Nita was suffering from severe mental illness and sent her to a mental hospital. In a second trial in 1962, she claimed her husband was violent and that she killed her children to protect them from leaving him.
Nita showed no remorse for her actions. She was sentenced to 16 years in prison, with the mitigating factor of committing the crime in a state of emotional turmoil. She was pardoned and returned to America in 1963, leaving behind a case that remains a notorious reference in the history of child murders in Greece.
This tragic tale, along with others such as the “old mother-in-law” who killed her son-in-law with parathion in Messolonghi, Giannis from Ilia who murdered his unfaithful wife, the satanic mother-in-law in Leonidio, and the 19-year-old “pharmacist” in Zakynthos, forms part of Greece’s dark history of familial crimes.
