Katie 
Catherine Hoggle, indicted in the murder of her two children, Jacob 2, and Sarah 3, in 2014. Their bodies have never been located.
UPDATE: August 13th, 2019.
A second doctor has now weighed in on Hoggle's condition, saying that she is "unfit" to stand trial and "dangerous." Dr. Telfsen however, is optimistic that the new medication that Hoggle is taking, Clozapine, which is used to treat people with schizophrenia, seems to be working. As a result of this information, the Montgomery State’s Attorney’s Office wants to delay in her competency hearing until December.
Ultimately, the Judge has the final say in whether or not Hoggle will face trial. If he determined that she is still unfit, the charges against her will potentially be dropped.
“It’s infuriating whenever I feel like she has more rights than my children do. She has more rights than my children, who she’s taken from us,” Troy Turner, the father of the children said.
Maryland law requires that charges be dropped after varying amounts of time should the defendant be found incompetent to stand trial. Initially charged with three misdemeanors including child neglect, abduction, and hindering a police investigation, investigators leveled a new charge against her in 2017 due to the fast approaching deadline- murder.
Despite the fact that nothing has ever been found to indicate what happened to the two missing children, investigators are basically being forced into a corner and doing what they must to keep someone that they have deemed as a threat to society as well as her ex-boyfriend and father of the children, Troy Turner off of the streets.
The misdemeanors carried a maximum allowable time of three years for prosecutors to treat and deem Hoggle as competent to stand trial. Indicting her for murder bought them more time. At this time, she has been deemed through evaluations over the last four and a half years to be incompetent to stand trial. These findings do not match with the sworn affidavits on record with the court by members of her own family, including her mother, and the father of the children, Turner, stating that she is merely faking mental illness and is in fact, completely cogent. Her mother, Lindsey Hoggle even included in her statement that her daughter's IQ was once tested at 135.
According to court records though, Hoggle had a history of mental illness before the children ever went missing, including a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia according to one CBS affiliate. In the year before the two children went missing, Hoggle came to believe that “someone was trying to perform an exorcism on her and planned to cut her limbs off,” according to court records. She was also twice involuntarily admitted to hospitals in Montgomery County where she was successful in escaping on one occasion after stealing another patient's shoes.
It hasn't been any different since Hoggle has been held in Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center in Jessup, a maximum security psychiatric hospital. According to court records, Hoggle has on no less than eight separate occasions, grabbed a staff member's security badge and ran for the locked doors of her unit. On several occasions, she has actually succeeded in making it past that first set of doors.
Throughout her incarceration, Hoggle has continued to attest that her children are safe and that she's merely doing her job as a mother. "I’ve done everything for them every day of my life.” In 2014 she told police that she had placed the children in the care of someone by the name of "Erin," but never gave more information.
On Wednesday July 3rd, the Judge granted the prosecutions request to have another psychologist sent to Perkins to evaluate Hoggle in hopes of being able to do something with this case before the looming September deadline. If the findings continue to point to Hoggle being incompetent to stand trial, prosecution will, in accordance with Maryland law, drop the charges and she could walk free.
Contributor
