So we just have a lot of stuff at home, and so these are just some examples of bracelets that we've always had for the kids. The pink and blue they say justice for Sarah and Jacob on them, always in our hearts.
The first time Beth Carris and I met Troy and his wife Stephanie in suburban Maryland, they were covered in Sarah and Jacob merch hats and shirts and buttons into their jackets.
We have match boxes that we bring to the candle light vigels that also say a voice for Sarah and Jacob. And we have flyers, you know, with Sarah and Jacob's pictures on them, asking for information from the public to help us in their recovery.
And can you tell me a little bit about the candlelight vigils.
They've been held annually and we up until two years ago, we would hold them in that parking lot of the restaurant where everything kind of just started.
Took Troy on that wild goose chase from daycare to daycare, always promising that the next one was where she had dropped off the kids. After hours of driving, Catherine asked Troy to stop off at a restaurant, so she could get a soda, and while he waited in the car, she took off.
So we held them in that parking lot up until two years ago. But they are on September seventh every year, rain or shine, no matter the weather, because that's the day that she took them. So in the last two years, we've done them at places that Sarah and Jacob used to like to go. We've kept them a bit more private and had them at locations that the kids enjoyed being at.
I've seen this before with the families of missing children, pictures of a kid frozen in time about to blow out the candles at a fourth birthday party maybe, and that picture gets transformed into a million T shirts and posters and ball caps, wristbands are made, and hashtags are created with the flyers.
Still like if someone happened to see something they didn't realize they saw, and as things keep developing it rings a bell, then hopefully we'll hear something.
Yea.
Do people ever come up to you when you're wearing the shirts, when you have any of the sort of stuff that you've put together on or with you and ask what the story is? Yes? Yes, And.
We have people that message the social media that have some of the stuff and they say, oh, people were asking can I get some more, you know, wrisbeyans flyers, I'd like to hand them out. So the community has also engaged in trying to, you know, keep their names out there.
These items are a way to raise awareness, for sure, but it's also a version of keeping your missing kid alive, of not letting anyone forget about them. It's a terrible cliche, but in this case it really is true. Sarah and
Jacob disappeared without a trace. There have been no credible sightings of the two kids since the night of September seventh, twenty fourteen, and their mother, Catherine Hoggle, believed to be the last person to see them, has refused to share any details of what happened that night, and with the charges against her now dismissed, Troy is doubtful that she'll ever help. Ambiguous loss is a kind of grief without closure.
It means living in a permanent fog of not knowing what happened to the person you love, where they are.
Even if Catherine revealed all today, even if the kid's bodies were found, no one believes that their father, Troy would be able to cheerfully move on with his life, but still it would close one very particular type of wound, the not knowing, the rational acceptance that the kids are most likely dead after so many years, but the inability to completely quiet the tug that theirs still out there, still waiting for their dad to pick them up and
bring them home. The loss of Sarah and Jacob, the lack of answers nine years later, has created a huge amount of emotional collateral damage, and not just for Troy. Everyone who comes into contact with this family with this
story seems tainted by it. It's unshakable, and the deep grief and near obsession the haunting that has become an everyday part of life have been shaped by two divergent ways of looking at this case at what likely happened to Sarah and Jacob, either staring at the grim Fax head on or disappearing into a fantasy to avoid just how awful the truth really is. I'm Sarah Trelevin and this is Unrestorable, an original podcast from Anonymous content and iHeartRadio.
Nice to meet you guys.
Sarah's and Halifax and I'm in New York City.
Okay, Yeah, thank you again for taking the time.
You do homicides right.
It took months for Beth and I to get Detective Dmitri Ruven to talk to us. He's a homicide detective with the Montgomery County Police Department, and he took the lead on Sarah and Jacob's case, and he wasn't what I expected. Dmitri has shoulder length, light brown hair with day's old stubble, a whole hipster Jesus surfer kind of vibe. Around the same time it became Troy's full time job to search for his children, it also became Dmitri Ruven's.
My sergeant at the time. There, I was like, hey, we just got a call. There's a missing lady with two of her children.
There was a lot of confusion when Catherine first disappeared along with the kids. She hadn't been well. It felt like a rescue effort for a family in disarray. But things took a turn when Catherine was found later without Sarah and Jacob. The police mobilized resources quickly.
We had volunteers and dogs, and we were searching those five six seven days.
We were probably working eighteen twenty hour.
Days, searches, tips, sidings, and I think I've preceived like over three hundred tips for months.
The police searched houses and fields, they used dogs and volunteers. Dmitri thinks they searched more than thirty thousand acres. They found nothing, and almost immediately there were indications that something really bad had happened.
She had a conversation right before anybody even knew that the kids were missing.
Dmitri is talking about a conversation that Catherine had the morning of September eighth, when Troy thought the kids were in daycare.
She was at a day program where they helped people with mental illnesses, and she spoke to somebody and that person was going to a class and it was like stress management class.
And again, nobody even knows that the kids are missing at that time. And she's walking in.
The hallway and that person says, Hey, Katherine, I'm going to stress management.
Do you want to come with me?
And she was like, yeah, I could use some stress management because I just and she kind of motions with that hand.
She's like, I just strangled my kids.
That person kind of stops, and then Catherine's kind of stoke and she goes, I'm just joking.
If it's true that she made this damning admission about strangling her children, it may be a critical piece of the state's evidence. This seems to be the only time that Catherine reference killing her children when asked. She's always said that they're fine, that they're safe. But that's not what the police or the FBI believe.
A lot of times with these you know, these kinds of they call them authoristic.
Mothers, altruistic mothers. Can you explain what that is and also how Catherine Hobble fits that profile.
It's basically the view that kids as possessions. You know, a lot they don't view those children as, you know, like kids and I'm a mom and I love them. They kind of view them as possessions that you can just get rid of.
If they're no longer convenience to you, you can just put them in trash, like, which is what you would do with an object, right, Like, if you don't need an object anymore, you would just trash it. And I think it's probably applicable in her case.
No one but Catherine really knows.
That could have been a million places she could have done it. Like, I think it's very possible that she could have just you.
Know, buried them.
When we first got it, she had all this dirt under her fingernails, like it.
Looks like she was in the woods.
So there's still a part of me that thinks, hey, they're still out there and maybe we just miss them.
The idea that the kids are still out there, dead or alive serves as both the hope and the haunting of this family of one detective who almost a decade later, still talks with Troy on the phone, and he still wonders if there's something he could have done differently.
Yeah, there's two kids involved, and you're supposed to, you know, have some kind of resolution, whether you you know, find them, find their bodies, at least tell Troy, like what happened.
But like to this day, we really can't.
The case is still on my desk because I'm like, what if we get a call tomorrow while I'm still here and you know, somebody finds them, like they're building condoms or something, and somebody finds them in the woods.
You know, we don't have.
That many cases that you know that's a known body case, right, Like, it's pretty rare, and it's even more rare when his kids, So like, yeah, definitely effective.
Only can you comment a little bit about what you see in terms of Troy's situation and his sense of failed justice in this case.
He's a very like goal oriented matter of fact, like I'm going to find my kids. I think a lot of people in his situation would have just kind of just wanted the world to like stop and just leave them alone and let him read. But he just he just goes and he's like one hundred miles an hour
and that's like his mission in life. But yeah, I mean I do feel like, you know, as a police department, as you know, society kind of failed him, like he never got any closure and she knows what happened and she's the only person, like we couldn't get her to tell us whether we didn't ask the right questions then use the right themes. I don't know.
I don't think that's easy to accept as a dad. And I get it, you know, I get it. We never gave Troy like a definite answer like what happened? And I mean he deserves it, you know, these days kids and we never found them, And.
It sounds like the person that did it is going to get away with it.
While Dmitri Ruven still ruminates over the possibility of finding Sarah and Jacob's bodies of delivering the worst possible news to Troy as a form of consolation prize, Catherine's mother, Lindsay, has channeled all of this ambiguity into a different kind of purpose. She spent the last nine years developing her own theories of this case, walking the tightrope of what it means to support her daughter and advocate for her grandchildren.
Well, I think it very quickly became you know, she's got mental illness. You know she probably harmed them, which there's no data for that kind of belief.
Lindsay thinks the police jumped to conclusions about Catherine because she's schizophrenic. They assumed that Catherine must have killed her kids and declared the case a likely homicide within days. That they operated under biases about mental illness, convincing themselves that Catherine must be dangerous, even though Lindsay says she's only ever been a danger to herself. What do you think happened to the children. What do you think happened that night?
I think I think she had had somebody help her plan an escape. She had been unhappy for a while, and you know, a lot of it was just family tension, family dysfunction that happens in every family, but this was a little bit different, and I think she saw that as her only escape is just to disappear with the children.
Lindsey insists that Sarah and Jacob are still out there, still alive, that Catherine was actually dropping the kids off with someone for safe keeping, just as Catherine has always insisted. I mean, the idea that the kids are alive somewhere and being sheltered by someone, it's it's challenging to accept because, you know, because the logistics of it, like what are these kids, you know, living under false identities? You know, who would be willing to take this risk? You know,
all of this stuff. It's just it is really when you think I understand it, yeah yeah, I mean, so, so what is the narrative there for you? What makes sense to you?
I think she was put in touch with the right people, and I understand when people this is just too wild to believe. And that's the whole story. I mean, every single twist and turn of the story is just you know, you kind of get to the point where it's like someone could write something so bizarre. It's there are things that I know about people she might have been in touch with that make me believe, yes, this could happen.
It is unfortunate that we've not spent more time looking for the possibility of that they could be out there. But you know, I have enough information that I believe that I'm not going to stop until I find out what the answer is. And Catherine knows that.
Lindsay was careful and a bit vague when Beth and I sat down with her at her townhouse in Gaithersburg, but she's elaborated in other conversations and in posts she's created online where she poores over the details of Sarah
and Jacob's case. Lindsay believes it's possible that Catherine took Sarah and Jacob to some kind of underground safehouse for women and their children, that Catherine was worried she would lose custody and wanted to get them away from Troy, And for the last nine years, Lindsay has been trying to get Catherine to confirm her theory, to provide her with the kind of lead she needs to go out and find her grandchildren. Jacob, who would now be eleven
years old and Sarah twelve. She also wants the reassurance that her daughter isn't capable of doing the really awful thing that everyone says she did.
Wait, i'd say what happened to Sarah and Jacob, She's like, nothing happened to them. And so I've been persistent in that path with her, and she knows how I stand. I'm you know, I'm again. I've had advice that I should just cut her off, and I said, you know, I I'm the only one that can approach her from the standpoint being a mother. You can't sub anybody else in. And I've seen and know enough of the players in this tragedy to know what you've been through or what
she's been through. And so I did what I thought was the best for her and for the children, because I figured if anybody could get the answers out of her, I should be able to. And I wasn't. I wasn't able to get that answer.
She'd given you a narrative for what happened that night and morning that Sarah and Jacob disappeared. Has she like sort of accounted for that time or given you her her version of events.
Not really.
At the end of the day, Lindsay says, there are no bodies, no actual proof that Catherine killed her kids.
Whatever people think, you know, it's been well, you're just a distraught grandmother, and like I'm more than a distract grandmother. I mean, you know, and there are ways you grieve, even though I believe they're alive. But my body and my brain still grieve and I've been through that, and so I know exactly what people may think. And it doesn't matter.
Do you expect one day that you will be reunited with Sarah Jacob?
You know that's that's difficult, just due to the dynamics at hand. You know, I may not be right, but I feel like I'm the only one right now with enough information to say I think they're alive and.
Hopes that.
We can put aside some of the pain of this and bring those three children together. But yeah, I've not given up.
Is there anything else you can tell us about the leads you're following and where you think Sarah Jacob might be.
There's not anything I'm gonna say on the record.
No.
I mean, like I said, I have information, but until you can, you know, prove probable cause it's not something that police are, the authorities or National Center for Missing Exploited Children can follow up on.
And you alluded before to Catherine having help from someone. Do you think that's from someone you know or from a stranger both? It could be both.
You know, their goal is not to find my children.
Troy has limited patients for the alternative reality. He says, both of Catherine's parents live in their inability to accept the truth and push Catherine to cooperate with authorities and admit what she did.
They don't care about my children.
They care about painting their white big events and coddling their little monster or whatever.
I don't know know.
For Detective Dmitri Ruven too, Lindsay's wishful thinking doesn't really add up.
So yeah, I mean, of course she's a mom and she has to, like I don't know, I don't know how I would feel that, like.
My kids charged something like that. Of course I would hold out hope, but like to me, it's just not logical.
I mean, she's been sitting in a mental institution, she was getting ready to be prosecuted for double murder. Right, kids are somewhere with a friend, whoever they are you don't even have to, like Graham to port, just have a picture of them and then the charges that dismissed.
I was going to ask, have you seen this in other cases with family members where there's this real struggle to grapple with what's in front of them.
Of course happens all the time, especially with moms.
Happens all the time, with murderers, with rapists, you know, happens all the time. Troy and maybe lindsay they don't have to be logical about it, like we can stay back and be logical, But for them, I think it's not a logical thing.
Troy has tried his best to live in reality. He spent nine years mired in the truth of what likely happen into his kids, observing every piece of bad news, every failed lead, like having one bucket of cold water after another dumped over his head. When the kids first disappeared, Troy didn't go to work for six months. He barely slept. He spent all of his days and most of his nights looking for Sarah and Jacob, driving around and handing
out flyers. He went on TV news programs and announced that he kept his door unlocked in case anyone wanted to drop off his kids, no questions asked. But months passed and Sarah and Jacob didn't come home. Troy still had another kid to raise, and at some point he had to go back to work find a way to move on but without forgetting, and he found help to do that.
I was new to the area, so I was looking for I just had one child, she was getting older, and I was like, I need some probably need some ad friends. So I think that we initially met online, but then he was down close to the area where I worked at and ended up meeting up in person there and we just kind of, I don't know, we just sort of clicked.
Troy's wife, Stephanie, is slim and tall, with glasses, and she typically wears her brown hair up in a ponytail. She's a nurse in her forties, and she both gives off a no nonsense vibe and has a discernible nervous energy. She met Troy at the oddest time, what would seem like the worst time. It was just six months after Sarah and Jacob were taken.
I think the first time we met we went to the mall, and I believe we were looking for shoes for one of his nephews, and I remember him kind of being flirtatious and kind of being shocked by that, just kind of like we were teenagers almost.
We were like in a shoe star.
We were in the mall and it was, yeah, is this.
Your signature move taking women to shoe stores?
No?
No, my nephew. He's what like six eight or something. He wears like a size whatever, like fifteen or seventeen something, So he was having trouble finding, like there was some shoes he wanted for basketball, and oh, I wanted to get him.
When is the first time that Troy tells you about Sarah and Jacob?
We were I.
Don't remember exactly when it was, but we were on the phone one night and he just kind of stopped me and he said, I just have to tell you something before we continue on. And I remember going, oh, my god, I mean we're older were and just the way he said it, I just I couldn't imagine what it could have been. And he told me that his two kids were missing, and honestly, I don't think that I believed him. I didn't know him very well, and
people say a lot of things. I mean, I don't know who would say that, but I was just maybe it was the shock of it. I didn't know the story. I had never seen it on the news. I didn't know anything of it. So I'm thinking, well, maybe this is just some kind of custody drama, you know, some kind of they don't get along anymore. I really had no idea the extent of what it really was.
Stephanie was falling for Troy, but she was wary and her family worried about her getting involved in all of this. But something shifted in her when she met Troy's son.
When it comes to the oldest child, I just had this loyalty.
It's like almost immediate. Yeah you felt like he was meant to be yours?
Yeah, yeah I did. We kind of almost just bonded in that way. It wasn't even neither of us had to. It wasn't like we tried. It just happened. It was just I just started doing the things for him that I would do that any child deserves.
Stephanie soon adopted Troy's mission to find the kids, and their life together has been overshadowed by that mission and by grief from the very beginning.
I mean, I think we had some fun in the very beginning, you know, when we were first getting to know each other, but it was still there. So I don't think in a situation like this you can ever really have that complete freedom.
I mean, we would have fun, but then I would like call Catherine, you know, and try to get information. It's like, you know, it's not that we've never had fun together, but it's like, you know that it's like you said, it's always there. We you know, we so we're having fun and then and then maybe we go to a concert and then come home and then there's five leads that we're looking at online, you know.
So it was definitely difficult.
I think it's still difficult.
All these years later, to build maybe what we couldn't have or didn't to maintain things.
It goes back and forth.
Our relationship definitely isn't the priority. But I also came into the picture as a mother. I came in as you know, having a full time career, so I understand priorities, and you know, our kids were our priorities.
Troy and Stephanie have created a blended family, which also includes Stephanie's daughter from a previous relationship. They live in a tidy home not far from DC, with lots of framed family photos, those decorative inspirational sayings, and the kind of overstuffed couches that are perfect for napping for family movie nights.
I mean, Troy takes our son to school every morning.
You know.
We have dogs and a home, and I do laundry and dinner's at six o'clock every night, and we go to church on Sundays, and we go to my parents' house and visit. You know, we have to regularly kind of weigh things, and I constantly feel like I'm choosing the two children at home over Sarah and Jacob or vice versa. It's a constant battle as parents that I
think that we deal with all the time. But I have a loyalty to Sarah and Jacob, and I have a loyalty to my son that these are his siblings, So we just have to keep going.
Stephanie runs the social media pages for Sarah and Jacob, posting their pictures on Facebook and Instagram, updating followers on developments and milestones, in the case celebrating their birthdays.
This is kind of also my way of making sure that they still have a voice that someone is speaking and advocating for them, that people don't forget that they're real children, that we're really here, and they deserve to never be forgotten, to not even just be remembered, but to be reminded of.
And be part of our daily lives. I saw a picture on Facebook of a portrait, a family portrait that you must have had commissioned. Troy did that Troy had commissioned?
Yes, that was my Christmas gift. Troy had a family portrait made of him and I and our oldest son, Sarah and Jacob, my daughter, and then our two dogs. So kind of our combined family, you know, all together in one place, even if everyone's not here.
And what did it mean to you to get that?
It's something that I would hope for.
Next time on Unrestorable.
There's no end of the road there, so we keep fighting, we keep looking if we never find them all by looking.
Unrestorable is executive produced and hosted by Me, Sarah Trelevin, and Beth Carris. Our story editor is Kathleen Goldheart. Mixing and sound designed by Mitchell Stewart for anonymous content. Jessica Grimshaw is our executive producer. Jennifer Sears is our executive in charge of production, and nick Yannas is our legal counsel for iHeart, executive producer Christina Everett and supervising producer Abu Zaphar.