Episode 3 – Incompetent

Good morning.

I'd be remiss if I didn't start, ladies and gentlemen by thanking Montgomery County Police Department. They have worked tirelessly. There are so many people trying to help, and we just appreciate that from Mendocile.

Now.

I don't usually cry, so I apologize.

Randy Hoggle is standing in front of electron with a bunch of microphones capturing every word on either side. He's flanked by police officers. His words and his presence seem desperate.

Ladies and gentlemen, if I could, I really am saying this for my daughter, and this is a plea of my daughter to come home and have help.

Randy looks like he hasn't slept. His crisp blue and white shirt is a contrast to his drawn face and the bags under his eyes.

Many people deal with mental illness, Many families deal with mental illness. It's always a judgment about medication and the delicate balance of medication being taken.

Randy's daughter, Katherine Hoggle, has been missing on the run for three days now, and it's been four days since anyone besides Catherine has seen her two youngest children, Sarah and Jacob.

We know she's probably not been on medication for two weeks, and thus we know, Katherine, this is not you, and this is not who you're about and what you do.

For years, Catherine's mental health had been deteriorating. This last year. In particular, her family, her dad Randy, her mom Lindsay, and her partner Troy, had run themselves ragged trying to get Catherine the help she needed. Not only did they get her committed to a mental health facility for a time when she was at home, Catherine had to follow

Everyone here is committed to if you just come and get help, we'll all help you. And for that, I just want to say, please come home. We miss you, and we miss the kids.

I'm Beth Carris and this is Unrestorable, an original podcast from Anonymous content and iHeartRadio. This press conference gave the family one small win. The very next evening, Catherine was spotted and police were notified.

When she was picked up, she was over there with her purse full of flyers and she was pulling them down when she was seen by the people who called the police to say they.

Saw Catherine was finally in custody and police began to interrogate her. Troy, father of the missing children, breathed a sigh of relief.

The next morning, I get a call and they're asking myself and Randy to come in and saying, look, she won't tell us where the kids are. Maybe she'll tell you guys, come ask her.

This was the moment Troy had put all his hope into.

When I first walked into the room, she looks at me and she goes, oh, what are you doing here? You know, kind of like it's a Saturday and I show up at a bowling alley and she had like a tournament or something. I said, well, I'm here to say, you can tell me what the kids are so I can go pick up our children, and she was like, they're safe. I said, where are they? She said, they're fine. I gave them someone. They're being watched. They're fine. I said, Katherine, where are my kids?

It became clear pretty quickly that Catherine's arrest would not be the end of Troy's nightmare. In many ways, it marked a new beginning. At this point, Catherine had only been charged with child neglect and detaining a child misdemeanors. Murder charges would not come for another three years, but the capture and arrest of Catherine would kick off a legal and personal odyssey that would raise questions about mental illness and how it intersects with policing and the court system.

Was day in September when in she had been interviewed by the police. I believe for several hours. They had brought in some people to talk with her, other people other than the police to talk with her. In an attempt to gain information.

David Felson is Catherine's attorney.

I then went in to see her. She was in a very small room. She was in a plastic smock type of clothing because the police had taken her clothing. It was obvious to me, without disclosing anything confidential, that there were profound mental health issues for Catherine, clearly and profoundly not Well.

What did you observe about her physically or what was coming out of her mouth that made you conclude she was profound mentally ill.

Well, I'm not a doctor. I can't. It would be wrong for me to say that I made that conclusion. I had the suspicion it was profoundly obvious that when you would talk to her there were significant deficits and significant disconnects between the circumstances that she found herself in and the way she would react to people. But my job was to represent her. There were a variety of

Well, Catherine's lawyer might have been concerned about her level of competency. The police had other concerns.

We had authorities providing a fair amount of pressure on us concerning the children.

Obviously there are some mental health concerns. Our concern is the investigation and bringing those two children home.

Montgomery County Police Assistant Chief Darren Frank was a captain in twenty fourteen. He spoke to the media when the kids first went missing.

We are running down every single lead. We are collecting data from phones, We're collecting data from sightings, We're collecting data from just interviews with people that knew Catherine, and we're chasing down every single possibility to figure out where she is. There's at least fifty officers involved with that effort.

Missing people are a concern for the police, but missing children, they are everyone's nightmare. And sometimes, in their desperate effort to find missing kids, police will push the envelope on what is permissible.

We have two children out there that their client claims to be alive, and we're trying to locate them, and the Montgomery County Police will do everything within the bounds of the law to try and find out where those children are.

A few weeks after Catherine's arrest, detectives went to collect a DNA sample from her. Desperate for answers, the investigators ended up speaking to Catherine for a couple of hours without her attorney knowing about it. This is a sticky area where investigators have to balance a defendant's rights with the urgency of the situation.

He has to do his job. We run into this all the time with all kinds of cases that there are areas that defense attorneys don't like us acting.

Once her lawyer learned about this interaction between his client and the police, he filed a motion asking the judge to dismiss the charges. In court, there was also discussion about whether Catherine had communicated an offer to take the police to the children, something Catherine has denied. In the end, the judge did not dismiss the charges, but told the police that they couldn't speak to Catherine without her lawyer present.

I spoke with her, My investigators spoke with her, and she very clearly, very lucid, said yes, I want to take you to an address, and was trying to dictate terms to us on when she wanted to go, and she wanted to go immediately. But now I'm disappointed that she wasn't afforded the opportunity that day to go. But I certainly understand the judge's decision. As a law enforcement officer, I understand it.

I respect it.

As a father. If I wasn't a law enforce an officer, I'd be very upset, And I think Troyce expressed that, And I think if you go to most people when it's their children in that situation, they would feel the same frustrat that a system is standing in the way of finding out what happens.

From him, Troy was no doubt frustrated with the system.

Once she got locked up. I was calling hoping that she would say something. I was calling daily at first, and she would talk to me and she was like, you know, the kids are saying. I would try to talk to her maybe about like just some other things, you know, what's going there or whatever, and then come back to the kids to see if she would answer differently.

At the beginning of this whole saga, Troy believed he might actually find his kids alive. That a small part of what Catherine had told him was true that she had dropped them off at a friend's house. This isn't the first time I've heard about a mother who's accused of hurting her kids but tells the police that they are safe with friends. Lori Valo Dabel did that, and so did Casey Anthony.

So when it first happened, I'm thinking, Okay, within a day, we're gonna come back. Then after you know, Tuesday goes by, we do all the questions stuff on. When Wednesday goes by, and it's kind of like, all right, we're passing on flyers. Nobody's seeing nothing, all right, So within a week or two they're gonna be back home. Then from like two weeks out, I'm going, okay, within the next three weeks or so, they got to be back here. So after a month passes, I go, okay, Well, within it like

But we know that never happened. The children have now been missing for nine years.

My perspective started to shift. I felt like, as their father, though on, my job was to keep hope out there and continue to look, even though I didn't believe it anymore. And finally, I remember one of the first time I ever said of publica, I felt like I was betrayed, Sarah Jacob. You know, I got home and I broke down cry and I was like, I betrayed my kids.

Today, three years after she was arrested, Catherine was charged with the murder of her children, even though their bodies have never been found, But since being found incompetent to stand trial, she has never had to face those charges in court, and because of the limitations in the law in the state where she lives, she might never have to.

So people want to make sure that justice, the criminal side of things, are served, but also oftentimes they want to make sure that the human beings who are involved in that process are also treated like human beings. Sometimes human beings, you know, do really terrible things, but they're still human beings.

Test Neil is a forensic psychologist and associate professor at Iowa State University, and she studies the delicate intersection between the US justice system and the rights of the mentally ill.

Let's say the court has decided that somebody is incompetent to stand trial. Now, what that means is that based on the sixth Amendment to our Constitution, it guarantees that people who are accused of committeing a crime, they have the right to confront the witnesses against them, They have or the right to aid in their own defense. They have the right to help their attorney, you know, defend

Competency is a legal determination by a judge who considers what treating doctors and experts have to say. But in another state, using the same evidence, Catherine may well have been found competent to stantrial. Even a different judge in

Nobody thinks about someone would do this, especially in a way like this, where it would have had to have been playing net where it's not this psychotic break.

Since the kids have been gone, Troy has discovered more about the evening leading up to their disappearance. While Troy was at work, Catherine was with her father, Randy, and the children. And remember, Catherine was not allowed to be alone with the kids, nor was she allowed to drive. But Troy has discovered that that afternoon, Randy gave his daughter his car keys and let her leave.

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

Troy learned that when Catherine came back without Jacob, she told her father that she had dropped the two year old off at a friend's for a sleepover. A two year old at a sleepover, think about that.

I don't know any of this at the time. I'm at work.

It occurued to Troy now that Catherine had been capable enough that day to come up with a light about what she had done with their son. When Troy gets home later that night after stopping at a grocery store, he finds Catherine sitting outside their townhouse on the front steps.

I'm like, what are you doing down here? She's like, oh, I was going to help you, Cary the groceries up. I said, ah, that's cool.

Troy was tired, it had been a long day. He just wanted to kiss his kids and fall asleep. But Catherine didn't want to go in just yet. She wanted to go across the street to grab a soda.

So I said, yeah, it's fine. So we just went across the stree real quick. God it came back, carried the groceries up, put him away, and by then it's like one o'clock in the morning. I'm tired. Literally every other night in my life, whenever I got home my kids were in bed, I would walk in, pray by their bed, kiss him good night.

And go lay down.

That night, I was tired, and I was like, you know what if they wake up, I'm up yourself went to bed.

In the rear view mirror, Catherine's actions feel different, manipulative, like part of a plan.

Do you feel like Catherine took the kids to hurt you. Do you feel like that was her mind?

I feel like that was probably one, Like I believe that part of this is a revenge thing, and I think she felt like I had basically made her life almost a confinement or something. Because she had the day program, she couldn't be alone with the kids, you know, So I think it was a way of taking control. And I think that it was probably anger towards me because I'm the one who had her committed, because well, I mean,

We know what happens next. Later that afternoon, Catherine takes Troy on a wild goose chase. The kids are never found and Catherine takes off. Five days later, she's nabbed by the police and since then has been in custody. But Catherine's criminal case was halted soon after her arrest when her attorney asked for Catherine to be evaluated for competency. But Troy is skeptical about Catherine's incompetency, especially as time wore on and Catherine continued to hinder the search for the kids.

Why wouldn't you just bring them home? I said, bring them home, they'll drop the charges.

You're out, And she.

Said, they still want to put me in jo. I said, well they can't, So she says, well no, they still have all the misdemeanor charges, and she goes, well, they have the primer production, which is sixty days time served. She goes, there's the obstruction that's ninety days. That's time served. She goes, but they still have the two misdemeanor neglect charges. They carry five years each. She says, that's ten years that they can put on me.

Troy feels that Catherine's refusal to talk about the children and assist in her own defense is calculated that it could be a ploy to keep her out of prison, and he's not alone. The Catherine Hoggle that you saw in.

That courtroom, was she the same capenhoggle that you interviewed he did.

Early in the investigation, a local Maryland reporter spoke with police Captain Darren Frank about Catherine.

In what way was she different.

When we have spoken with her every time. She's very lucid. She knows exactly who's around her. I had ten minutes of interaction with her when she was originally arrested. She knew exactly who I was. When I came to see her at her request. That was one of the first things that I asked to see. How loocid she was and she remembered me instantly so, and she also remembers the investigators by name, and she makes requests of certain investigators by name completely different person in the courtroom.

It seems to some that Catherine might have a plan, knowing that in Maryland, the court must dismiss felony charges against anyone found incompetent for five years. Has this occurred to Catherine? Could she find a way to remain incompetent long enough to see the murder charges dismissed.

When I would ask her hering game, it was, I've been advised to remaining confident.

That's how she said it. I've justsed I've been.

Advised to remaining confident, And then I would say, well, who advised you?

Troy?

You know, I can't tell you that.

Even Catherine's mother, Lindsay, seems to agree with Troy. This is from an affidavit from twenty fifteen that Lindsay signed. Catherine has explained to me that her plan is to try to remain incompetent long enough to be found not to be a danger to herself or others, and therefore able to be released and either live with me or live in a community home for women she has identified.

We come from this very puritan kind of heritage in our culture, and we're very punitive, with just an extraordinarily high rate of incarceration in this country and a kind of political narrative that we are tough on crime and we want to make sure that people don't get away with things. We also have a still pretty stigmatizing view of mental illness.

Unrestorable is executive produced and hosted by me Beth Carris and Sarah Trelevin. Our story editor is Kathleen Goldhard mixing in sound design by Reza Daya for anonymous content, Jessica Grimshaw is our executive producer, Jennifer Sears is our executive in charge of production, and Nick Janyas is our legal counsel. For iHeart executive producer Christina Everett and supervising producer Abu Zafar