The schizophrenic mother of two young children who vanished in 2014 has finally been charged with their murders after years of suspicion.
Catherine Hoggle, 30, has been in a psychiatric facility since shortly after her daughter, Sarah, three, and son Jacob, two, went missing with her in Maryland in September 2014.
Police found her walking down the street days after the trio were reported missing by the children’s father but they have never been seen again.
She refuses to tell authorities where they are and despite being long suspected of killing them, had never been charged.
On Thursday, she was indicted on two murder charges and was moved from her psychiatric unit to the Montgomery County Jail. She will appear in court on Friday.
Catherine Hoggle, 30, has been charged with the murders of her two-year-old son Jacob and three-year-old daughter Sarah who vanished in 2014
The development came as the result of a legal time limit on the three misdemeanor charges she initially faced immediately after the children’s disappearance.
In 2014, police charged Hoggle with misdemeanor child neglect, abduction and hinderance in order to put her behind bars while they built a homicide case against her.
Misdemeanor charges, if not pursued for three years after they are first brought, are dismissed in Maryland.
With this in mind, the woman’s lawyer filed a motion recently to have those charges dismissed. Prosecutors filed the murder charges in response.
The children’s bodies have never been found.
Jacob and Sarah were last seen alive on September 7.
Hoggle and the two children vanished on September 8, 2014. They were last seen alive on September 7, 2014
After telling her boyfriend she had dropped the children at a day care on September 8, Hoggle asked him to drive her to a Chick-fil-A in Germantown, Maryland, so that she could get a drink. Surveillance cameras show her slipping out a side door in the restaurant
Police immediately feared the children were in danger given their mother’s history of mental illness
For four days, a huge missing persons appeal was underway. Troy Turner, the children’s father and Hoggle’s long-term boyfriend, led it
On September 8, their father, Hoggle’s boyfriend Troy Turner woke up to find all three of them were not in the apartment they shared.
Hoggle returned in their mini-van and claimed she had taken the two children to a new day care center where she’d left them.
Four days after vanishing, Hoggle was seen walking down the street and was arrested. She has never told police where the children are
She and her boyfriend then went back out in their car and she asked him to stop at a Chick-fil-A restaurant for her to get a drink.
She went into the fast food restaurant but slipped out a different exit, leaving her boyfriend in the car.
He went to police shortly afterwards to report all three of them missing.
Four days later and after an intense manhunt and media appeal, a person who recognized Hoggle’s face saw her walking down a street in Germantown and called police.
When police arrested her, she was holding a missing persons flier with her children’s names and faces on it.
She was questioned but would not say where the children were and was taken to the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center in Jessup.
Hoggle was taken to The Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center in Jessup, Maryland, where she has been for the last three years. She has tried to escape several times. On Thursday, she was moved to the Montgomery County Jail
Later, she told officials she would take them to the children but a judge refused to allow her out of custody.
Since 2014, she has tried to escape from the facility several times by grabbing guards’ security cards and running for the doors.
Staff say she had referred to the children as still being alive and has told them she wants to go to see them.
Whether or not Hoggle will ever stand trial will be determined by a judge.
Her long history of mental illness poses the possibility that she may not be fit to. She was previously found unfit to stand trial for the misdemeanor charges originally brought against her.
Jacob and Sarah were two and three when they went missing in September 2014
Artists’ impressions show what the children wold look like aged five and six if they were alive