Finding Sarah and Jacob Hoggle

Murder Charges Dropped Against Mother of Two Missing Children

One of the last stories I wrote before I left PEOPLE magazine five years ago was about Troy Turner’s relentless quest to find his two missing children, Sarah and Jacob.

Turner woke up in his Maryland home on September 8, 2014 and discovered his two youngest children were missing. He was just about to call 911 when Catherine Hoggle, his girlfriend and the mother of their three children, drove up in a van alone, claiming she’d dropped them off at a new daycare. But when it came time to pick them up later in the day, Hoggle took him from place to place with no sign of the children. He was just about to head to a police station when she asked him to stop at a local fast-food restaurant - and vanished. She was found several days later and taken into custody but has refused to say where their children are. Turner spent months searching for them.

Sadly, missing children cases are far too common but the most egregious part of this one is that there is someone who can answer that question - Hoggle, the last known person to see them alive - and she’s being protected by the system in Maryland.

Hoggle has been declared incompetent over and over again over the past eight years but now, after a series of hearings where the judge heard directly from her, on Wednesday he, too, ruled that she was incompetent. And just like that, the murder charges against Hoggle were dropped - the result of a bizarre law in Maryland that states the charges must be dropped in five years if a suspect is still incompetent - and she was sent back to the psychiatric hospital where she’s resided for the last eight years. but under a civil commitment, not a criminal one.

Prosecutors have vowed to charge her with their murders again if she is ever found competent, but for now, Hoggle has won yet another round of this tortuous case. Turner, convinced that she continues to game the system and is mentally fit enough to participate in her own trial, is furious, which is understandable.

It’s a travesty of justice of mammoth proportions.