Episode 1 – Crisis

How about your name?

Happened? Ashley Hockle? Thank you?

How old are you?

Thirty six?

What's your birthday?

Eleven thirteen eighty six.

Standing before Judge James Bonavent is Catherine Hockle. It's November twenty twenty two, and she's here in a Montgomery County, Maryland courtroom because Judge Bonavent has to decide if the thirty six year old mother of three might finally be fit enough to stand trial for the murder of two of her children.

Do you know what evidence is? Yes, sir, mat don't want you to tell me anything about circumstances in this case, but generally, what is evidence?

Something that makes things, something that's used for a case, good or bad.

Today Catherine calls the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center in Jessup, Maryland, a psychiatric hospital home. She's been there, locked up for nearly a decade, charged with the first degree murders of two year old Jacob and three year old Sarah, but yet to stand trial because for the past eight years, Catherine has been deemed incompetent.

Do you know what attorneys do? Yes, Anna, tell me what attorneys do?

A pass q or defend.

What should an attorney know.

What happened at the alleged crime.

Being incompetent to stand trial is not the same as being found insane or not criminally responsible. Competency deals with Catherine's state of mind since her arrest. In order for Catherine to receive a fair trial, she has to understand the proceedings, the role of the judge and jury, and her lawyer and the prosecutor, the whole process.

Is there anything else that they should know?

I can't think of anything right now. I'm not very good at pope speaking.

As Catherine sits in that Marilyn courtroom, she does know where she is, she understands what's happening to her and why. But for the last eight years, psychiatrists have regularly determined that she's not well enough to assist her lawyer in her own defense, and that this is what makes her incompetent.

Have you ever heard of the phrase attorney client privilege? Yes, sir, what do you think that means?

It's a private conversation with you and your attorney.

Thank you very much, Matt.

She left with Jacob to go get pizza right up the street and came back three and a half hours without him.

September seventh, twenty fourteen, would be the last Dey Troy Turner would ever see his kids again, because not only did Catherine fail to bring two year old Jacob back home after a supposed pizza run, she also took her three year old daughter, Sarah sometime that night or early morning. She never came home with her either. To this day, their bodies have not been found. It's not clear where Catherine took the kids or why, and she continues to insist that her children have not come to any harm.

They were great kids. They both had very sweet souls. I used to call Sarah my tomboy princess. She loved to play fight with me and the boys. She would come to defend her brothers because I would be, you know, slamming them around stuff, and she would punch me in spell MC and I would be like, okay, play time's over.

Oh.

She was just a sweetheart, and.

You know, she didn't take any stuff from her brothers. And then Jacob was just super sweet. He always smiled, he was just always happy.

And.

He would hate for any of his older siblings to be in trouble.

I found out about this story when I received a Facebook message on January twenty third, twenty twenty two. It was from a family member close to Sarah and Jacob's father, Troy, pleading with me to help them. My name is Sarah Treleven. I'm a journalist and I had recently appeared on an episode of the news program twenty twenty about another podcast I made, this one about a woman recently convicted of

I spent some time working bars, nightclubs, cleaning them up, things like that, and that'd be in between, you know, times when I was in college, or during different parts of my career, you know, day jobs or whatever.

Sometimes that was my career.

Troy and I talked for months over zoom, and I soon got a sense of his warmth, his sly sense of humor, his determination and tenacity. He's a classic tough on the outside, teddy bear on the inside kind of guy. But the camera concealed one thing. The true depth of troy sorrow, the impossible sense of grief he wakes up with every morning and carries with him until he falls asleep every night. That I saw clearly the moment we met in person, the second I looked in his eyes.

Nice to meet you in person today.

Troy sells insurance, but at more than six feet tall, he certainly looks like the former high school football player and bouncer that he used to be. We start by talking about how he and Catherine first met.

She was wasting going to junior college, and let me see, I mean, we didn't probably talk the first three or four months that I was there.

In pictures, Catherine is pretty and wholesome looking. She has shoulder length, medium brown hair, a sun kiss complexion, and a shy smile. It looks like someone it would be easy to have a crush on. When she and Troy met, she was twenty two, he was thirty six.

We wound up talking more, and then we wound up basically connecting. She got pregnant, and at that point it's like, well we should probably, you know, see if this will work or whatever.

What was she like back then?

She was a pretty fun person.

She appeared to kind of have you know, some animosity with her family at times, things like that. But it was like, you know, it's kind of normal stuff when you're talking to and when you're here, you know, I mean, just overall fairly normal.

This pregnancy was not Sarah or Jacob. This child was their first kid. Sarah was their second, and Jacob was her third. This child, the eldest, is still alive, and we won't be naming him. Everyone agrees his privacy is more important. Did you feel like, because she got pregnant so soon after you started dating obviously, were you like, oh, this is a person I have a genuine connection with, or were you like, well, we've got to make the best of this situation.

I felt like that I liked her.

I enjoyed being around her, So there was, you know, maybe some kind of connection, but a lot of it was we should probably.

See if this should work. I mean, she's pregnant with my child.

The first baby was hard in the way that all babies are hard, but there was so much excitement and a lot of support. Catherine was the first of her four siblings to have a kid, so everyone wanted to play with the new baby, to take pictures of him, to make him laugh. Over the next few years, the family continued to grow. Fewer than six years into the relationship, Catherine and Troy had three children under the age of five.

There were some things here or there where I was kind of like, okay, that's you know, off or something, but nothing major.

We had some fun together.

We you know, we went to the beach or whatever, did things like that, took the kids to see the dolphins down off was at Yorktown or whatever, you know, stuff like that. So I mean like we had like some decent times. We did some cool things. But it was just with each child things seemed to progress differently.

When Troy says that things progressed differently, what he means is that Catherine was different. She was acting weird. But Troy told me he put it out of his mind. He figured that it was a lot to be pregnant three times in five years.

I'm obviously not a doctor. I can't say what happened or what didn't. I know that she had told me that she was on medication for ADHD and things like that when we met and when she got pregnant. Initially, I know she had quit smoking and drinking, you know, right away, so she it could be that she was on medication at that point and quit taking that too right away without saying anything. I don't know, but there was definitely kind of a change there. I think, very

But as time went on, Catherine became more and more erratic, doing things that Troy couldn't explain away. Sometimes she would just disappear when she was supposed to be taking care of the kids, leaving them alone. Other Times she seemed confused.

So I'm on my way home from work and I get a call from her that she's in DC and running out of gas and she needs me to come into DC to get gas in my car. So I go in and she appears to be from an area that's not, you know, a great neighborhood necessarily, and I'm going with, are you even.

Doing now here?

It's ridiculous and you don't even have a license. So she said that she was trying to do something.

Christmas shopping west or something like that. You know, well, let's get gas. You're gonna follow me home.

I pull out, we hit a red light, I make a left, she goes right, it goes off the other way. She's supposed to be following me home because she doesn't even her way out of there, So like, oh, I go, what are you doing?

She goes, oh, well, you know I'm going to different.

With It happened again just a couple nights.

Later, she's calling me saying that she has no gas or she needs gas, and she's asking me.

I said, okay, well I'll come meet you.

She's like, no, can you just drop twenty in cash off with the cashier and I'll get.

It from him.

I'm going what So she's trying to get me to drop cash off at different gas stations with the person working to register.

Catherine also became increasingly paranoid. She kept insisting she was being followed. At one she asked Troy to buy a staple gun and shoot her with it. Troy couldn't ignore things anymore.

And Mike clin, there's been a progression here, like this isn't the same as it was when she was pregnant with my first child. This has gotten worse. Our relationship was non existent pretty much. You get towards the end of twenty twelve, we're sleeping in different places.

It might have taken a few years for Troy to figure out that Catherine had serious mental health issues, but Catherine's mother, Lindsay Hoggle, says her daughter's problems started a long time ago.

She struggled in middle school and high school just with a variety of different anxieties and mental health issues.

Signs of real serious issues started to show up when Catherine was a young teenager.

I had known that she was struggling, and Time magazine had a front page article on bipolar and teens, and so once I went through that, I just went I've got to do something. I mean, these symptoms are this, you know the same, and so that's when I decided that, you know, I was going to take her to a psychiatrist.

Lindsay says that Catherine's issues affected the whole family, that Catherine would often not leave her room, that her oldest daughter was in constant conflict with her siblings and completely disengaged from school. It seemed like Catherine was falling apart.

It finally became a situation where, you know, she broke the rules. Her father and I were divorced at that time, and I just said, well, you know, you've broken the rules. You need to find somewhere else to live, you know, And so she went to live with her dad.

Can you tell me the story of how you learned that she was pregnant with your first Have you already heard that? I haven't heard it.

Okay, So Catherine had been dating Troy, and you know, and she would come over for dinner or something after. You know, she really looks like she's pregnant.

But Lindsay and her daughter's relationship was already strained, so Lindsay just let it go. She didn't ask. She was hoping she was wrong that her troubled daughter wasn't pregnant.

And so I got this phone call and so she goes, hi, Mom.

I'm like hi.

She goes, well, I have some news. I'm like okay. She goes, You're a grandmother.

Catherine wasn't calling to say, oh, hey, congratulations, you're going to be a grandmother in several months. Catherine was saying, surprise, I have a baby. At first, Lindsay wasn't even sure that she was serious, but it wasn't a joke. She had to break the news to Catherine's dad, Randy.

I could tell he was driving, so I said, pull over in the side of the road and call me back. And so he did, and so I told him. I said, you know, I knew that this would be a little bit of a shock, so I didn't want you to be driving a car while I was telling you.

So the whole family is reeling. Lindsay was in shock. What are you supposed to do with a reveal like this? But this was her first grandchild, a baby boy.

And so I got in the car, you know, with my middle daughter, and gave her money to go buy a baby blanket at a nearby store, you know. Where you get these ideas, And then we drove to Harrisonburg. Luckily for Catherine, she was close to a hospital, and so when I went in, one of the nurses took me aside and said, you know, you're really lucky to have both of them, the baby and Catherine, because she

Catherine was twenty two. She and Troy hadn't been dating for long, and neither of them really had a career. Lindsay knew it would be a rough start.

They had just gotten to Harrisonburg, didn't have a place to live. They were in temporary housing, and so I know helped find them somewhere to live and take care. I can't remember how many days they kept her. And he was less than five pounds when they left the hospital, which I was very worried about him, and I have eight pound babies, so five pound was just you know, is small, and so they had a lot to get done before they were ready to have a baby and take care of a baby.

That was the beginning of Catherine being a mom. It was chaotic, surprising, disorganized. But people have told me that Catherine was a good mom, that she loved her kids. It's not unexpected in a way. It just makes what would happen later so much more of a shock from.

The very beginning.

Yeah, she loved it. I think it helped because my youngest daughter is I guess about seven years difference between, and so Catherine had kind of grown up, you know, taking care of my youngest daughter.

Lindsay says, Catherine took to motherhood right away, like it was the only thing she ever wanted to do.

I remember this. I had said, you know, let me take him for a night or two on the weekend and give you guys a break. And so on the way out, she has index cards that she's stuffing in the back pockets on my jeans as I'm walking out, and of course I've been going, okay, I've raised children before, I've done this before, I should know everything. And she's laughing and she's like, but no, these are his like little you know, these are the things that you got

How is she doing over those years? How is she managing those stresses? How is she managing being a mother? Just you know, what is there of the narrative as they build their family? How does she weather those years?

Oh?

Gosh, sometimes better than others. Part of it, very much, was just not the right fit of everything that they were doing. I mean, Troy worked nights, which left her with the children a lot, and so, you know, her father and I tried to help a lot and picking up you know, the slack and everything.

But as Catherine became more erratic, it became clear that something had to be done. It all came to a head just before Christmas in twenty thirteen.

I grabbed Randy, her father, and Lindsay her mom, and I had them meet me at Lindsay's house and we had to talk in her driveway. I said, you know, we were coming up on Christmas. I said, look, so let's get through Christmas with the kids if we can. But at that point, I need you guys to be with me on this. We need to sit down and talk to her and say, hey, look, either you're going to get help or we're going to get you help.

The family desperately needed to get on the same page for Catherine, for the kids, for everyone, but the cracks were showing.

I remember her father, and Randy is easily her biggest enabler.

He was like, well, I don't know about this.

And I remember Lindsay going off on him and custom out in the driveway, pokeingon as chest, talking about how you know, he's always enabled in this and this and this is something that he needs to get on board with.

Despite her father's unease, the family decided that Catherine shouldn't ever be left alone with the kids. She wasn't reliable and she didn't seem to be making rational decisions. Lindsay's house, a big suburban home on a nice piece of property not far from Troy and Catherine's apartment, became central dispatch. Catherine and the kids would come there while Troy was at work. Family members rotated in and out, taking care

I'm going, Okay, she's their mom. I want her to be in their life.

We just have to figure out a safe, healthy way to do it at this point where and it wasn't a safe healthy way in terms of I thought she would be killing my kids or physically hurrying them. It was just the decision making process, wasn't there.

Despite all the attempts to help Catherine at home, eventually the family realized she needed more help. Catherine was committed involuntarily. She was placed in handcuffs and taken away, spending Christmas twenty thirteen in the psych ward the suburban Baltimore Hospital after being diagnosed with schizo effective disorder. Catherine and Troy's oldest son was four, Sarah was two, and Jacob was just one, a baby. A young family that should have

I think the main thing that her feelings throughout that time period were very much, my children could be taken from me if I admit to having serious mental illness.

Were you afraid that Catherine would hurt herself?

No?

Were you ever afraid she would hurt the kids?

No.

The family implemented new rules. Katherine couldn't be left alone with the kids, she couldn't drive, and she had to receive psychiatric treatment. Lindsay says that all of this just made Catherine increasingly fixated on the idea that her kids were going to be taken away from her.

So I had an office in my home and she would come and say, you know, they're trying to take the children from me, And so I just assumed that it was that part of paranoia that had arisen. Things started happening that I wasn't sure was true or not.

Troy says that during this time, as Katherine moved in and out of the hospital, staff would release her, assuring him that while his wife was definitely troubled, she was not dangerous. But Troy was starting to worry that the doctors were wrong.

In that timeframe, she says things and does things that show me she's definitely dangerous.

The family felt like Catherine wasn't getting better, that she she wasn't getting the help she needed. One time, after Catherine was released from a psychiatric facility, she approached a random stranger on the street and ended up spending the night at her house.

It gets to the point where you realize that someone's not making good judgment and that they're emotional and your expectations of how they should act are not the way they're acting. I mean, just upset over things, irrational thinking.

The family was coming apart and they couldn't keep limping along. Troy wanted Catherine committed for longer stretches of time.

So I took her up there one day and I said, you guys need to keep her. I just walked in and I said, you need to keep her. Here's why. And now I walked out and they kept her.

But it wouldn't last. Catherine would once again go through the revolving doors of the hospital and come back home, and while everyone around her kept trying to pull it all together, tragedy felt imminent. Tragedy struck on Sunday, September seventh, twenty fourteen. That night, as Troy got ready to go to work. He said goodbye to his kids, as he did every.

Night, So hugged and kissed the kids.

Sodim I loved them, said day guy got to work, but I'll be back later this evening, you know, And I left.

Troy never saw his two youngest kids again. Troy and his current wife, Stephanie, the one who sent me that letter and started this entire thing for me, have spent the last nine years tirelessly looking for the children, advocating for them, and hoping that Catherine would one day be brought to justice. After the kids went missing, Catherine took off that After five days on the run, she was caught and arrested. She never told anyone where Sarah and

How's it going, well, We just went pretty well.

I had an all Day Interview yesterday, right, I mean I got off at we like, Actually I was up since one am.

One of those experts who will help us throughout this podcast is my friend and colleague, Beth Carris. And here's the thing about Beth, She's a bit of a legend. Beth was a New York City prosecutor for years, and then she moved on to Core TV. She's now been an investigative journal list for decades and she's always popping

I'm thinking I'm going to the police station to basically have them, you know, do whatever they need to do to find out where my kids are. So I can get my kids, and I'm thinking that I need to get there before I lose control over my emotions. At this point, it's just too much. At this point, I'm like this, it's crazy. We're on the phone one night and he just kind of stopped me and he told me that his two kids were missing, and honestly, I don't think that I believed him.

There have been amendments to our mental health statutes throughout the years, and two thousand and six there were major amendments because they were concerned that people were just going to.

Be locked away.

People would forget about them, you know, no oversight somebody.

It was really kind of cynical looking at this whole eight year Saga would say that Katherine Hoggle has been a master manipulator his entire time right until now. She's avoiding this final hearing and she may prevail in getting her criminal charges dismissed and being civilly committed.

Unrestorable is executive produced and hosted by me, Sarah Trelevin, and Beth Carris. Our story editor is Kathleen Goldhar. Mixing and sound designed by Reza Daya for anonymous content. Jessica Grimshaw is our executive producer. Jennifer Sears is our executive in charge of production, and Nick Yanas is our legal council for iHeart executive producer Christina Everett and supervising producer Abu Zafar