Sarah and Jacob Hoggle

Case background and investigation

Sarah Hoggle, 3, and Jacob Hoggle, 2, lived in Clarksburg, Maryland, with their mother, Catherine Hoggle, and their father, Troy Turner. According to a Montgomery County Police release of September 9, 2014, Turner called police on the evening of September 8, 2014, after Catherine Hoggle, then 27, left a restaurant near the Germantown Transit Center without telling him. Police said she had given conflicting accounts of leaving the children at a daycare, and that she had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

A later police release said the children were last seen with their mother on September 8, 2014; subsequent news coverage, including WJLA, gives the date as September 7. Police located and arrested Catherine Hoggle on September 12, 2014, without the children, and she refused to say where they were, according to the department. She was charged with offenses including neglect and obstruction, and a grand jury indicted her for murder in 2017, according to CBS News and the MoCo Show.

Hoggle was repeatedly found incompetent to stand trial and held at the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center. According to WTOP, the murder indictment was dismissed in 2022 because of those incompetency findings. The children's bodies have never been found.

After Hoggle was released from the psychiatric hospital on July 9, 2025, a Montgomery County grand jury indicted her on July 31, 2025, on two counts of first-degree murder, according to WJLA, and she was arrested on August 1. At an August 5 hearing, a judge denied bond, finding her a flight risk and a danger to the community, WTOP reported. Prosecutors cited statements she allegedly made during therapy; these allegations have not been tested at trial.

A judge found Hoggle competent to stand trial in 2025. In August 2026 her defense sought to enter a plea of not criminally responsible, Maryland's insanity defense, and the court ordered a mental evaluation, according to CBS News. On September 23, 2026, the trial, originally set for October 2026, was rescheduled for October 4 to November 5, 2027, according to the MoCo Show and CBS News. Hoggle has not been convicted and is presumed innocent.