A US mother who has been charged with murdering her two youngest children attended group therapy hours after committing the atrocities and joked about strangling them, prosecutors are now alleging.
According to the Daily Mail, Catherine Hoggle was last week arrested and charged with the murders of her three-year-old daughter Sarah and two-year-old son Jacob in 2014.
Earlier this week, a court heard prosecutors claim that they have new evidence to suggest Hoggle confessed to the murders. This comes three years after a judge had dismissed an earlier indictment charging her with the same crimes, with it deemed that she was unfit to stand trial due to her mental health.
On Tuesday, Montgomery County State Attorney John McCarthy told the court that Hoggle had attended a group therapy session hours after the deaths of her two children.
“At that point in time, she made a comment to a woman that was in those therapy sessions with her that she had strangled her children,” McCarthy explained.
He alleged that Hoggle made a “strangling” motion with her hands before insisting that she was joking.
Authorities claim Hoggle was last seen with her youngest son, two-year-old Jacob, on September 7, 2014. It’s alleged she returned home and told family members that she had left him at a friend’s house for a sleepover.
That same night, police say Hoggle then secretly smuggled her three-year-old daughter, Sarah, from the home.
A new warrant describes how investigators met with a criminal profiler with the FBI who noted: “It was their belief that the children were murdered, likely by strangulation and their bodies were disposed of via an outside trash container.”
It’s also alleged that Hoggle had planned to abduct the children’s older sibling, then five, from his school bus, but wasn’t able to due to an intervention by the boy’s father.
Hoggle was ultimately arrested and charged with neglect and abduction. She was thereafter sent to a state-run psychiatric hospital for treatment. In 2017, she was indicted on murder chargers, though a judge ruled that she was incompetent to stand trial.
Under Maryland state law, authorities had a five-year window in which to declare her competent to stand trial before the criminal charges would be dismissed. At the end of those five years – in 2022 – a Montgomery County judge dropped the charges against her.
Hoggle was then ordered to remain involuntarily committed for psychiatric treatment because she was still considered a danger to herself or others.
Montgomery County State Attorney John McCarthy has previously promised that he would charge her again with murder were she ever released after being deemed to no longer be a threat.
According to reports, Hoggle has a history of severe mental illness, including schizophrenia, and was treated with antipsychotic medications after her arrest.
