SARAH and JACOB HOGGLE - 3 and 2 yo (9/14) - Germantown, MD

Maryland mom suffering from paranoid schizophrenia who went missing is found, but her two children remain missing

Catherine Hoggle, who went missing along with two of her three children, was taken into custody on Friday night, but her kids are still missing.

BY David Harding, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Saturday, September 13, 2014, 7:42 AM

  
Catherine Hoggle was found by authorities on Friday after she was missing all week.  

A Maryland mom suffering from paranoid schizophrenia who went missing with two of her three children was taken into custody on Friday night, but her kids are still missing.

Catherine Hoggle was picked up by police in Germantown, just a block away from where she had disappeared on Monday.

Montgomery County Police tweeted they had found her but not the children.

Police say they "remain concerned for the children's welfare."

Hoggle faces two child neglect charges. Authorities say she had stopped taking her medication at the time of her disappearance.

           
Sarah, 3, and 2-year-old Jacob remain missing.


She had disappeared after being pressed by her common-law husband Troy Turner about the whereabouts of three-year-old Sarah and two-year-old Jacob.

Sarah had not been seen since early Monday and Jacob was last spotted on Sunday after his mother said she was taking him for pizza.

Security cameras showed Hoggle had slipped out of the restaurant she was in with Turner and boarded a bus.

Friends and family were set to hold a candlelight vigil for Hoggle and children in Germantown Center on Saturday evening, reported NBC in Washington.

Turner said he did not think Hoggle would hurt the children.

"Whatever she's doing, she has a skewed version of reality. She believes she's protecting our children," he told NBC.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/troubled-maryland-mom-missing-found-article-1.1938340#ixzz3DH1cGUII

Attorneys Address Media After Hoggle’s Bond Review Hearing

by Sonya Burke

Catherine Hoggle, the Clarksburg mom of Sarah (3) and Jacob (2), made her first appearance at a bond review hearing today.

Hoggle was arrested by Montgomery County Police on Friday night and police say she has refused to share the whereabouts of her missing young children.

Right now, Hoggle is being held on a $1-million plus bond for two counts of child neglect, and obstruction and hindering charges. State’s Attorney John McCarthy said parental abduction charges are also going to be filed.

Judge Margaret Schweitzer pushed back today’s hearing until Sept. 30 after learning that more charges are expected to be filed in this case. She also ordered a psychiatric evaluation.

Rockville defense attorney David Felsen said he is representing Hoggle. Both Felsen and McCarthy addressed the media after the hearing along with Troy Turner, the father of the missing children.

You can watch that briefing here:


http://www.mymcmedia.org/attorneys-address-media-after-hoggles-bond-review-hearing-video/

Police Release New Details in Hoggle Toddlers' Disappearance

Tuesday, Sep 23, 2014
Updated at 9:09 AM EDT



Montgomery County police are asking local business owners to check their surveillance videos in an effort to locate two young children missing for more than two weeks.

Two-year-old Jacob Hoggle was last seen Sept. 7. His 3-year-old sister, Sarah, went missing the following day. Their mother, Catherine Hoggle, has yet to reveal the exact location of her two children, telling police she gave them to a friend before changing her story.

Hoggle said the two were "alive and safe," but police have transitioned to a homicide investigation based on the amount of time the children have been gone and their 15-hour interrogation of the Montgomery County mom.

On Monday, as police entered the third week of searching for the children, officials released images of the following two cars Catherine Hoggle is known to have driven, in an effort to get surveillance footage from area businesses.

http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Police-Release-New-Details-in-Hoggle-Toddlers-Disappearance-276396861.html

Dad of 2 missing Montgomery County children pleads for Amber Alert
Associated Press
11:35 AM, Sep 29, 2014

ROCKVILLE, Md. - The father of two suburban Maryland children missing for more than three weeks is appealing to Gov. Martin O'Malley for help.

Troy Turner of Clarksburg sent a letter to O'Malley on Monday morning saying he's seen no evidence ruling out that his children may be alive and believes an Amber Alert would help find them. He asks the governor to intercede with Maryland State Police and have the agency issue an Amber Alert for 3-year-old Sarah Hoggle and 2-year-old Jacob Hoggle.

Montgomery County police have said they believe the children are dead and were pursuing a homicide case against their mother, 27-year-old Catherine Hoggle. Hoggle is being held on charges related to her children's disappearance. Police say she has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

http://www.abc2news.com/news/state/dad-of-2-missing-montgomery-county-children-pleads-for-amber-alert

I pray these children are alive but... sadly it looks bleak. 

It's too late now for an Amber Alert, but IMO one should have been issued at the beginning of this tragedy.

My heartfelt prayers go out to this dad who is living an unimaginable nightmare.

Search continues, community hopes for safe return of Hoggle children

Surae Chinn, WUSA
8:06 p.m. EDT September 28, 2014

GERMANTOWN, Md. (WUSA9) -- It's been three weeks since anyone has seen missing Montgomery County children Jacob and Sarah Hoggle, but many are holding out hope they will return home safe as the search continues.

On Sunday, the children's father, Troy Turner, and a slew of volunteers focused their search effort on businesses in Germantown.

Volunteers went door to door asking business owners to put up fliers with crucial information: Pictures of the children and two vehicles including the family minivan.

As important as it is to display the flier, volunteers want surveillance video.

They're asking business owners in the Germantown area to go through video on certain times of the day on September 7th and 8th that may have captured two family vehicles.

Catherine Hoggle's father's gray, 2007 Nissan Rogue with Md. tag number 3 A/I 8778 and a minivan with Md. tag number 48598.

Turner feels putting together a timeline is critical: "we feel like this is probably one of the most important things to do to figure out where my kids are" Turner said it "the timeline and where they went and that could help us figure out where they are."

It's been three weeks since anyone has seen the toddlers. Their mother and Turner's common-law wife Catherine Hoggle is in custody in a mental health facility. Police say she is the last known person who was seen with the Sarah and Jacob.

Turner tried to visit his wife this weekend but was turned away, only adding to the frustration.

Turner, "She can end this search right now if she can tell me where my kids are and I believe that 100 percent."

Turner still holds on to hope. So do volunteers armed with yellow ribbon. They just want to bring the children safely back home.

Turner, "it's a matter of keeping their names out there. It's keeping our eyes and ears on this thing and bring my kids home."

Police have not issued an Amber Alert because they say it requires a vehicle and plate number, which they already recovered for Catherine Hoggle. But Turner and volunteers wonder if the search would have been further along had one been issued.

Catherine Hoggle is due back in court in Montgomery County on Tuesday.

http://www.wusa9.com/story/news/local/maryland/2014/09/28/sarah-jacob-hoggle-missing-children/16398161/

What makes mothers kill their own children?

By Fredrick Kunkle
September 27

Soon after Catherine Hoggle disappeared with her two young children, law enforcement officials feared the worst — that the severely mentally ill young woman might harm the children and herself.

More than a week after an intense search, and with no sign of 2-year-old Jacob or 3-year-old Sarah, investigators announced that they had begun preparing a homicide case against the Montgomery County woman, believing she may have committed one of the rarest and most repugnant of crimes.

And yet it’s the third time in a matter of weeks in the Washington region that a mother has been suspected of harming her offspring.

The act of killing one’s child is unthinkable for any parent, but owing to long-standing cultural, emotional and biological factors, a mother who kills her offspring has the power to inspire special shock and revulsion.

“Momma is the loving person, the giving person, the sacrifice person — for them to do something like that is like denying God or something,” said Bobby Hicks, former Union County deputy sheriff who was the first to interview Susan V. Smith, a South Carolina woman who killed her two children in 1994 by letting her car roll into a lake with the toddlers inside. “How could a mother do that to her children?”

uch a mother is seen as someone who is not only guilty of a crime but has violated a law of nature and rebelled against instinct.

But the motives behind maternal filicide, as it is known, are much more complex, even counterintuitive — and troubling, even for those professionals who have devoted their careers to trying to understand them.

“It’s just such a delicate subject,” said Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California at Davis who has conducted pioneering research on the evolutionary, psychological and historical factors in infanticide.

The work of Hrdy [pronounced HURDY] has created controversy by demonstrating that under certain circumstances, infanticide could serve as an evolutionary adaptation, not necessarily a pa­thol­ogy, in the human struggle for existence.

In an interview and in her book “Mother Nature,” Hrdy said that infanticide is extraordinarily rare among primates, whose offspring are among nature’s most costly to raise because of their long path to maturity. It is more common among other mammals, such as lions, that cull their litters.

But nature, over eons, has instilled hard calculations in primates and humans, too: A mother faced with inadequate resources to ensure survival of herself, the child or other offspring might feel compelled to abandon or kill it.

Hrdy’s work also suggests, paradoxically, that those pressures may be greatest in patriarchal cultures where a woman’s role as mother is idealized and she is under intense pressure to give birth to children and nurture them with self-denying devotion.

“[I]n societies where women have a lot of social support and also have access to birth control and education about birth control and the freedom to use it — in those societies, rates of child abandonment and infanticide are going to be very low,” Hrdy said in an interview. “It is in the societies where you don’t have those ­choices where the rate goes up.”

Phillip J. Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University’s Medical School who is considered to be an expert in the study of filicide, distinguishes between neonaticide, a term he coined to describe the killing of an infant by its parents within the first 24 hours of birth; infanticide, which involves a parent’s killing of a child less than 1 year old; and filicide, which is the killing of a child up to 18 years old by a parent, stepparent or guardian.

Resnick also categorized five basic motives. There is “altruistic filicide,” when a mother kills in the belief she is saving her child from a fate worse than death; “acutely psychotic filicide,” in which a mother obeys voices or hallucinations commanding her to do so; “fatal maltreatment filicide,” in which a child dies from abuse or neglect; and “unwanted child filicide,” in which a mother rids herself of a child perceived as a hindrance. The rarest motive involves a mother seeking revenge against her spouse — like Medea, a figure in Greek myth who killed her children to avenge herself against their father after he had abandoned her for another woman.

“In reality there are both rational and irrational reasons,” Resnick said in an interview.

A statistical analysis by Brown University researchers of more than 15,000 homicide arrests over 32 years found that about 500 parental filicides occur annually, or about 2.5 percent of homicide arrests.

Just this month, Prince George’s County authorities charged Sonya Spoon, 24, with killing her two toddlers — Ayden Spoon, 1, and Kayla Thompson, 3 — in their Cheverly home on Sept. 7. On Sept. 16, District police filed murder charges against Frances Lyles, 25, in the fatal beating of her son, Xavier, 3, in June. Earlier this year, Montgomery County police brought murder charges against a Germantown woman who allegedly killed her two toddlers because she believed they were possessed by demonic spirits. None of the defendants has entered a formal plea, online court records show.

Filicide goes back to the earliest days of human existence, its enduring grip on the psyche still preserved in myths and fairy tales. Even in the Bible, the stories of two key figures — Isaac and Jesus — evoke themes of sacrificial filicide.

In practice, the most common reasons for infanticide include disability, illegitimacy, lack of resources and cultural preferences for males. When twins were born among the Inuit, for example, the indigenous Arctic people sent one off on an ice floe because providing for two was too daunting, Resnik said. Hrdy cites a letter from a Roman soldier to his pregnant wife in the first century BCE with some blunt instructions: “If it is a boy keep it, if a girl discard it.”

By the 16th century, some European countries enacted laws making filicide a capital offense. But in 1922, Britain reduced penalties for maternal filicide, based on the presumption that a woman who killed her child must be imbalanced from the effects of giving birth — a stance that caused feminists to criticize lawmakers for treating childbirth as a pathology and assuming women were less able to govern their behavior than men.

“On the one hand, the mother is a nurturer and a protector, and if they violate that role the public feels they deserve the harshest punishment,” Resnick said. “And yet on the other hand, mothers unconditionally love their children, and there must be something very wrong, and so they deserve leniency.”

The British law reflected the sense that mothers who kill their children must be in the grip of a force strong enough to overpower the deep psychological, biological and cultural traits that normally bind them to their children, beginning in pregnancy. When a woman breastfeeds, her body undergoes changes that deepen the attachment further. Stress-related chemicals subside, and her body releases oxytocin, a potent hormone that promotes emotional bonding. The chemical reaction is so powerful that women who nurse their newborns are less likely to harm them in those first few days when infanticide risk is at its height.

To prevent maternal filicide, Resnick urged psychiatrists to be alert to the potential in mothers suffering from mental illness. Mothers who appear to be in the throes of severe depression, substance abuse or personality disorders should be queried about their child-rearing practices and parenting problems. Mothers who voice suicidal thoughts should be identified early, and perhaps asked about the fate of their children if the mother were to die. Resnick also urged a lower threshold for psychiatric hospitalization.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/what-makes-mothers-kill-their-children/2014/09/27/f599f0b4-4018-11e4-b03f-de718edeb92f_story.html

Montgomery County man extends search effort for missing children into Frederick County



Associated Press file photo

Troy Turner stands near his friend’s pickup in September in a shopping area parking lot in Germantown. The truck serves as a center for his search for his children, ages 2 and 3, who disappeared in suburban Maryland. Turner, of Clarksburg, has recently extended his search into Frederick County.


Courtesy photo
Sarah Hoggle


Courtesy photo
Jacob Hoggle


Details
Anyone who can provide information on the whereabouts of Jacob or Sarah is asked to call the Montgomery County police tip line, 240-733-5070, or the NCMEC at 1-800-843-5678.

Anyone who thinks they have seen Jacob or Sarah is asked to immediately call 911 to report the sighting to the nearest police agency. 


Posted: Thursday, October 9, 2014 2:00 am
By Jeremy Arias News-Post Staff



A Clarksburg man whose two children have been missing for a month recently expanded search efforts into Frederick County.

Troy Turner and an army of volunteers have been searching wooded areas and other terrain across Montgomery County since Jacob, 2, and Sarah, 3, disappeared. 

The children were last reported seen Sept. 7 with their mother, Catherine Hoggle, who is diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Montgomery County police arrested her Sept. 12, but neither child was with her, and she has refused to disclose their location, police said.

Turner began organizing volunteer searches when police shifted from a rescue to a recovery effort after detectives said Sept. 15 that Jacob and Sarah might be dead.

He covered much of the area around his Clarksburg home, then moved farther afield.

Searches moved north to Damascus and Urbana, he said. “We’ve actually had some people go out into the Ballenger Creek area and conduct some searches there.”

Jacob and Sarah were last seen in the Clarksburg and Gaithersburg areas, but Turner thinks Frederick County residents can help.
“The majority of people I know in the Frederick area still work in Montgomery County,” he said. “They could easily see something and report it to police.

“Most of this stuff isn’t solved by some great detective who had a huge break or something. Most of the time it’s somebody who saw the alert, saw something in their area and called in the information.”

National helpers
Robert Lowery, vice president of the Missing Children Division of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said police are devoting plenty of resources to finding Jacob and Sarah.

“Montgomery County has been extremely aggressive in this search,” Lowery said. “They’ve put a lot of effort and a lot of manpower into trying to find these children, and that continues to this day.”


NCMEC helped with its own search teams in the first three weeks and has offered police the use of its resources, Lowery said. The center can also help organize dog search teams or helicopter sweeps as needed.

The KlaasKids Foundation, another national group, sent several specialists last week to meet with police and help train volunteers in advanced search and mapping strategies, Turner said.

Along with organizing a weekend search from Germantown, KlaasKids taught volunteers how to use programs like Google Earth to map out their efforts and track previously searched areas, said KlaasKids spokesman Brad Dennis.

“We try to bridge the gap between law enforcement efforts and the family and community efforts,” Dennis said. “The biggest thing that we offer the family is a management system in how to not only organize their volunteers, but also to document all that they’re doing so that it becomes a valuable resource to law enforcement’s search efforts.”

No Amber Alert
Turner is frustrated that Maryland State Police have refused to issue an Amber Alert for Jacob and Sarah.

“We started calling for an Amber Alert from day one, but from day one, we were told because there wasn’t a vehicle or license plate attached to my children, they couldn’t issue one,” he said. “Here we are, four weeks in, and frankly, I could have walked the kids farther away than people have heard about the case.”

Amber Alerts are issued through the U.S. Department of Justice at the request of law enforcement agencies when a minor or minors may have been abducted.

Lowery described the program’s criteria as pretty universal.

“One is, it involves the abduction of a child; the second criteria is that the child’s life must be in imminent danger of serious physical injury or death; and the third criteria is, there has to be enough information to share with the public to aid in the recovery of the child.”

The Hoggle children were last seen with their mother, who was found without them, state police spokesman Greg Shipley said. Both vehicles Catherine Hoggle was known to drive were also accounted for, so police did not have a license plate number or vehicle descriptions, or a suspect description, Shipley said.

“It’s a tragic situation, and we understand the frustration on the part of the father, but there needs to be an abduction and we have to have a suspect to look for, and it needs to be an immediate notification,” he said.

Amber Alert criteria are strict to maintain the program’s effectiveness, Shipley said; of the 121 requests for Amber Alerts since the program began in Maryland in 2002, only 34 alerts have been issued. If an Amber Alert were issued for every one of the 10,000 to 12,000 missing children reported every year in Maryland, the program would be less effective, Shipley said.

“People would very quickly become immune to notifications of missing children if the highway signs lit up for every child that went missing.”

An Amber Alert is about the only step that wasn’t taken.

Social media lit up almost immediately after the children were reported missing, and media outlets were quickly briefed and given photos, Shipley said; county police notified jurisdictions in the area and even out of the state.

Reaching out
Tuesday marked one month since Jacob and Sarah vanished, but closure remains as elusive as when police announced charges of child neglect and obstructing and hindering against Catherine Hoggle.

Turner “has been tireless in searching for these kids,” Lowery said. “Every moment he’s been awake he’s been searching for these kids, and he’s really doing everything he can.”

Lowery believes the children could be moving around in Frederick County. “We just don’t know where they are,” he said. “For all we know, they could be in other states or other regions.”

Neither the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office nor the Frederick Police Department have joined the search for Jacob and Sarah, but Officer Nicole Gamard, a Montgomery County police spokeswoman, said the family was encouraged to carry on search efforts in whatever way they felt necessary.

“We are not providing any coordination, but we are providing guidance for efforts within Montgomery County, and we’ve suggested that the family reach out to agencies within any jurisdictions that they are searching in,” Gamard said.

Turner said he was considering reaching out to Frederick County agencies this weekend.

“The last thing I want to do is step on the toes of law enforcement who are trying to find my children,” he said. “I want to do things the right way, and the detectives working the case are working as hard as they possibly can, and they are definitely emotionally invested in the case.”


http://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/crime_and_justice/crime/montgomery-county-man-extends-search-effort-for-missing-children-into/article_2c9c482d-bad8-5944-b454-f7678b4fd8e7.html

This poor man is going through hell.  I am sad to say I think he has lost his children forever.  I think she murdered them.  I pray I am wrong.

Pleading with mentally ill mom: ‘Tell us where the children are’

                               




© Matt McClain/ The Washington Post/Getty Images Lindsey Hoggle poses for a portrait at her home on Thursday October 23, 2014 in Darnestown, Maryland. Lindsey is the mother of Catherine Hoggle. Catherine is a suspect in the disappearance of…  For more than a decade, Lindsey Hoggle has tried to sort through her daughter’s tangled mind. Never has it been so heartbreaking.

Their conversations these days last 20 minutes at the most. They are over the phone.

“I’m asking you as a mother,” Lindsey implored her daughter earlier this month. “Tell us where the children are.”

Catherine Hoggle, locked in a Maryland psychiatric hospital, sidestepped the question. She has done this for two months — with detectives, with a therapist, with her family. The 27-year-old Montgomery County woman is the last person known to have been with her youngest children: Jacob, 2, and Sarah, 3. Police fear that the toddlers are dead and are building a homicide case against Catherine.

Every day across the county, extended families of young parents with mental illness face the challenge of trying to help them and their children. They walk the narrow line of trying to show confidence while maintaining vigilant monitoring. They often fashion workable, if imperfect, solutions.

© The Washington Post   Catherine’s boyfriend and relatives had forged such a network — reordering their lives to try to always have another adult around the woman’s three children. She seemed to be getting better; her children appeared to be thriving.

Lindsey can’t bear to think of her grandchildren dead, can’t imagine that her daughter is a killer. It is hope that rests on the affection Catherine had shown for her children and the possibility that the young woman’s paranoid schizophrenia may have compelled her to do something inexplicable but not deadly — leaving the toddlers with people she’d just met, for example.

On the phone, there were no clear answers.

“I’m trying to do the right thing,” Catherine finally said.

Signs of trouble

The first signs of trouble came when Catherine, the oldest of four, was in middle school. She was bright, but increasingly struggled with her classwork.

She was diagnosed with a learning disability — problems with “executive functions” such as planning and organization. Then came doctors’ concerns about mood and bipolar disorder.

Complicating the search for answers was Catherine’s fear that she’d be stigmatized by mental illness. She could be vague and evasive, perhaps trying to avoid a specific label.

After high school, Catherine enrolled at a community college in Montgomery and, by 2007, had started waiting tables at the Greene Turtle, a Germantown sports bar, where she fell in love with a bouncer named Troy Turner. “It was a like a fairy tale,” she’d later say.

In the fall of 2008, Catherine gave birth to their first child, a son, and the family began a life in Harrisonburg, Va., with Troy starting a career selling timeshares. To give the young couple a break, Lindsey planned to watch the baby for two days. As Lindsey was leaving with her grandson, Catherine stuffed index cards into her mom’s back pocket: How to mix the formula, when to feed him, a reminder to keep pillows out of the crib.

That level of attentiveness aside, Troy began to notice something troubling: Catherine started to imagine that people were out to break up their family. He attributed it to postpartum depression, an explanation that seemed plausible as the behavior abated.

The couple had a girl, Sarah, in 2010, and a boy, Jacob, in 2012. They moved into a three-bedroom apartment in Montgomery, walking distance to a swimming pool, parks and playgrounds for the children.

The children formed a tight bond, the way siblings close in age can. When Sarah played with Jacob, she liked to imitate her mother by getting a small blanket. “Here. Mommy will cover you up,” she’d tell her brother. (Family members have asked that the oldest child, who is 6, not be identified to protect his privacy.)

But Catherine’s problems returned. To Troy, Lindsey and others, she seemed to seek control by withholding basic information.

“Which 7-Eleven did you go to?” Troy asked one day.

“The one in Germantown,” Catherine answered, knowing there were several in the area.

“Which one?”

“I already told you.”

Confusion seemed to lead to paranoia. In 2013, Catherine became convinced that Troy’s sister was regularly breaking into their apartment. Catherine filed court papers claiming his sister had stolen a $12.09 pack of toddler undershirts and a $30 plastic toy with a lion image.

“Matches our other yellow lion walker from the other kids,” Catherine wrote. “Except the missing one didn’t have a scratch on the eye from where the paint had worn from years of wear and tear and love.”

Catherine also asserted that the woman was following her.

“We go to the grocery store, she shows up there. We start going to a different grocery store, she starts showing up there,” Catherine told Montgomery County Judge Barry Hamilton. “I go to take my kids to the pediatrician, she shows up there. I go to my mom’s house, she shows up there.”

Hamilton declined Catherine’s request to issue a restraining order. As for the theft allegations, they were reviewed by the Montgomery State’s Attorney’s Citizen Complaint Bureau, which declined to pursue them.

Troy encouraged Catherine to go to therapy and take her medication. As things worsened, he couldn’t be sure she was doing either.

In the car one day, she began whispering, looking around as if the SUV was bugged. Troy pulled over so they could get out and talk on the side of the road. He told her no one could hear them, softening his message with humor.

“No one’s listening to us. We’re boring,” he said.

The former bouncer knew he could carry Catherine into a hospital. But what would she do once they arrived? Scream for the police? Start kicking and flailing?

Family members decided to seek a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation. On Aug. 13, 2013, sheriff’s deputies arrived at the apartment and took Catherine to a hospital.

Authorities were called to the apartment twice more. And by the end of the year, Catherine’s condition again worsened. She was involuntarily committed to the largest private psychiatric hospital in Maryland, Sheppard Pratt, just north of Baltimore.

“Do you remember when Daddy had to stay in the hospital for two days?” Troy told their children, recalling his hospitalization for asthma. “That’s what Mommy is doing. She just has to stay a little longer.”

Lindsey found herself following the story of Virginia state Sen. Creigh Deeds. He had been stabbed by his mentally ill son, who then fatally shot himself. Lindsey sent Deeds an e-mail to express her sympathy.

“While my daughter is closing in on three weeks of hospitalization,” Lindsey wrote, “she is still very fragile, and I only pray for the right direction.”

The goal of the U.S. mental health system is to get patients back into communities. By spring, Catherine was moving through transitional programs that allowed her to see her children.

Catherine took her medication and seemed to understand that she needed to keep her illness under control to be around the children.

Randy Hoggle, Catherine’s father, could see a return of the attentive parent he’d known. Catherine didn’t just read books to her children. She’d ask them why the story was funny or what it really meant.

But other times, Randy saw the fatigue and disconnection caused by Catherine’s medication. She would open the book and stare, leaving the children to turn the pages and figure out the story.

Troy observed Catherine’s overall progress and didn’t want to take the children away from their mother. Lindsey and Randy also wanted to keep the family together.

Troy didn’t think Catherine would intentionally hurt the children. Still, he knew her delusions could return without warning and he didn’t want her to be alone with their toddlers. Family members discussed a long-term strategy.

Troy set up a network — one that included Lindsey, Randy, Troy’s mother, his sister, Catherine’s siblings, Troy’s friends and a babysitter. They tried to always have a second adult near Catherine and the children.

The adults juggled their schedules to arrange care at two places: The Clarksburg apartment where Troy and Catherine lived and Lindsey’s home in Darnestown. Troy and Catherine discussed other options too: a day-care center, the hiring of an au pair.

The morning of Sept. 7, a Sunday, started off well. Troy and Catherine took Jacob and Sarah to their brother’s soccer game. Then everyone went to a park until it was time for Troy — who worked at night — to leave. He drove his family to Lindsey’s home. She was out, but Randy, who was divorced from Lindsey, had agreed to stay with Catherine and the children.

About 4 p.m., Catherine told her father she had a coupon for a pizza and asked to borrow his car to pick it up. Jacob was clinging to her.

“Let me just take him,” Catherine said.

For years, Randy had seen Catherine respond well to expressions of confidence. He thought this might be just such a chance. He let her leave with Jacob.

Two hours later, Catherine returned alone. She said she’d left Jacob at a friend’s house for a planned sleepover. The slightly smaller crowd — Randy, Catherine, Catherine’s oldest son and Sarah — returned to the Clarksburg apartment.

Troy arrived from work about midnight. He noticed that Jacob wasn’t in his toddler bed in the master bedroom. That wasn’t unusual. The little boy often got up and crawled into bed with a sibling. Troy went to sleep.

The next morning, Randy left early. Soon after, Troy was awakened by his oldest son, eager to get to school. He realized that Catherine and the younger children weren’t there.

Troy quickly got his son dressed, put him on the school bus and called 911. He told the operator that his two youngest children and their mother were missing, along with the family’s car. During the call, Catherine drove up.

Troy asked the 911 operator to wait.

“I got up early so you could sleep in,” she said. “I took Sarah and Jacob to a day care that is having a trial program.”

She told Troy the day care was in Germantown and that he might want to take a tour when they picked up the children. Troy was upset that she had taken the toddlers without telling him, but her story rang true.

Troy went back to the 911 operator. False alarm, he said.

Troy took Catherine to her treatment program, picked her up at 2 p.m. and said he wanted to retrieve Sarah and Jacob. Catherine told Troy she couldn’t remember the name of the day-care center, but could direct him there if they got close. The more they drove, the more evasive she became.

Hours passed, and Troy told her they had to go to a police station. On the way, Catherine asked to stop at a fast-food restaurant to get a drink. She slipped out the back and vanished.

Nothing to go on

During a massive search for the mother and her two children, only Catherine was found — four days after her disappearance. Police questioned her for hours, learning nothing about the children’s whereabouts. They brought Troy into the room.

“What are you doing here?” Catherine asked when he walked in.

She seemed relaxed. Nothing like the year before, when Catherine thought the car was bugged or someone was breaking into their apartment.

“I’m here, hopefully, to find out where my kids are, and I’m here to see you, too,” Troy remembers saying.

Like the detectives before him, Troy returned again and again to the same question: Where are the children? Catherine spoke cryptically about leaving them with a woman named Erin. But she would not go any further.

These days, Catherine is being held at the maximum-security Clifton T. Perkins psychiatric hospital, where doctors are evaluating whether she is well enough to participate in court proceedings. She is charged with abduction, neglect and hindering a police investigation. She calls family members, who ask her to open up about Sarah and Jacob.

“They’re fine, Dad,” Catherine recently told Randy. “I promise you they’re alive.”

He asked her to be specific.

“I can’t talk about that where I am,” she said.

In conversations with Troy and Lindsey, Catherine offered some hope, saying she wanted to guide police to the children.

On Thursday — knowing that Montgomery prosecutors were about to act on Catherine’s offer — Troy and Lindsey took their seats in a courtroom. Catherine was brought in, a blank expression on her face. Lindsey tried to make eye contact, but Catherine only looked down.

State’s Attorney John McCarthy asked the judge to let Catherine leave for a few hours with the police. But her attorney, David Felsen, said Catherine had just told him that she didn’t want to talk to the police or go with them.

Judge Eugene Wolfe denied the request.

As the hearing ended, Lindsey walked toward Catherine. She wanted to tell her something: You are my daughter, and I love you.

A bailiff stepped between them. But it didn’t matter. Catherine had turned away and was walking out.

Montgomery police ask anyone with information about the Hoggle children or the case to call 240-773-5070.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/family-implores-mentally-ill-mother-to-tell-them-where-she-left-her-missing-children/2014/11/10/c6c3f3f4-5df8-11e4-91f7-5d89b5e8c251_story.html

She's sane enough to know if she tells where she dumped the bodies her conviction is a slam dunk.  She's sane enough to know without the bodies murder charges will be much more difficult.