Eleven Years in a Psychiatric Hospital, Still No Answer: Sarah and Jacob Hoggle

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

December 11, 2025

Sarah Grace Hoggle was three years old, her brother Jacob Gabriel Hoggle just two, when the two of them were last seen on September 7, 2014, in Montgomery County, Maryland, in the company of their non-custodial mother, Catherine Ashley Hoggle. Sarah stood 3'6" and weighed about 40 pounds, biracial with brown hair and brown eyes, last seen in a pink tank top and blue shorts. Jacob was smaller still, a toddler with curly hair barely out of infancy. More than eleven years later, neither child has ever been found, and the case has spent most of that time trapped not in a courtroom but in a prolonged, repeatedly interrupted argument over whether their mother was mentally fit to ever answer for what happened to them.

A Story That Fell Apart Immediately

Catherine had taken Sarah and Jacob from their father, Troy Turner, and when questioned about their whereabouts in the days that followed, she told investigators she had dropped both children off at a day care center in nearby Germantown, Maryland. That story did not hold up. When police caught up with Catherine four days later, they found her alone, without either child, and her account had already shifted. She told them, in this new version, that she had left Sarah and Jacob at a playground instead. Investigators searched the playground she described and found nothing there either, no witnesses, no trace of either child having been left in that location at all. When later questioned further, Catherine told at least one investigator that the children were safe and being cared for somewhere, but she refused, then and in every year that has followed, to say where that somewhere actually was.

A Mental Illness the System Had Already Flagged

Catherine's mental health history predated the disappearance by years. She had experienced symptoms of mental illness dating back to childhood and had eventually received a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. In August 2013, roughly a year before Sarah and Jacob vanished, Catherine had been involuntarily hospitalized and placed on medication to manage her symptoms. After her release, she moved first into a group home before eventually returning to live with Troy Turner and the children, and by the time of the disappearance she was enrolled in a day treatment program that included specific restrictions barring her from having unsupervised contact with Sarah and Jacob, restrictions that were, in practice, not enough to prevent her from taking them anyway on September 7.

Charges That Could Never Quite Proceed

In the immediate aftermath, Catherine was charged with a set of misdemeanor offenses, including parental abduction, neglect, and obstructing the investigation into her children's whereabouts. As investigators grew more convinced over the following months and years that Sarah and Jacob were dead rather than simply hidden somewhere safe, prosecutors escalated the case considerably, indicting Catherine on two counts of first degree murder in September 2017, three years after the children disappeared.

What followed was not a trial but a long, repeating cycle of competency evaluations. Montgomery County judges found Catherine incompetent to stand trial again and again over the years that followed, a legal determination centered on whether she possessed a sufficient rational understanding of the proceedings against her and the ability to meaningfully assist in her own defense. Maryland law places a limit on how long felony charges can remain pending against a defendant found repeatedly incompetent, generally five years, and by November 2022, with Catherine still deemed unable to stand trial, Circuit Court Judge James Bonifant dismissed the murder charges entirely on those legal grounds. The dismissal was not an acquittal and did not reflect any judgment about her actual guilt or innocence. It reflected only the expiration of the legal window Maryland law allowed prosecutors to keep pursuing the felony counts while she remained incompetent. Catherine did not go free. She remained under civil commitment, continuing psychiatric treatment at Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center, Maryland's maximum security state psychiatric facility.

Released, Then Arrested Again

Catherine remained committed at Perkins for years after the 2022 dismissal, until she was ultimately discharged from the hospital on July 23, 2025. Her release did not last long. On August 1, 2025, just over a week later, Montgomery County police arrested her in Kent County, Maryland, and prosecutors moved immediately to re-indict her on two new counts of first degree murder in connection with Sarah and Jacob's deaths, the same underlying allegation that had been dismissed on procedural grounds three years earlier, now refiled now that Catherine's psychiatric status had apparently changed enough for the state to try again. Montgomery County State's Attorney John McCarthy had previously said publicly that he hoped Catherine would eventually become competent enough for the case to move forward, a hope that appeared, by the summer of 2025, to finally be within reach.

Found Competent, Eleven Years Later

That question reached a formal resolution on December 10, 2025, when a Montgomery County Circuit Court judge ruled that Catherine Hoggle was now competent to stand trial on the murder charges. The judge determined she possessed a factual and rational understanding of the court proceedings against her and had the present ability to assist her own attorney in mounting a defense, the same legal standard that had repeatedly gone unmet for the better part of a decade. The ruling does not resolve what actually happened to Sarah and Jacob. It only clears the legal obstacle that had kept the murder case frozen in place since 2017, opening the door, more than eleven years after the children disappeared, to an actual trial addressing the murder allegations directly.

A Father Still Waiting

Troy Turner, the children's father, has remained a constant presence through every stage of this unusually long legal process, consistently telling reporters that his priority has never been punishment for its own sake but simply learning what happened to his children and giving them, in his words, a proper place to rest. He has acknowledged the strange emotional toll of over a decade spent in this particular kind of limbo, neither closure nor active hope, telling one interviewer it was amazing how much a person could get used to, even something like this. Sarah and Jacob's case remains open with Montgomery County police, and a ten thousand dollar reward continues to be offered for information leading to their location. Investigators have periodically released updated age progressed images over the years, imagining Sarah as a teenager and Jacob as a boy well into elementary school and beyond, the same practice used in so many long unresolved missing children's cases, offering the public an evolving picture of two children who, if found today, would look nothing like the toddlers in their last known photographs.

Still Missing, Finally Headed to Trial

More than eleven years after Sarah and Jacob Hoggle disappeared from Montgomery County, no bodies have ever been recovered, and Catherine Hoggle has never offered investigators, prosecutors, or her children's own father any account of where they actually are. What has changed, as of December 2025, is that the legal machinery keeping her case suspended in an endless loop of competency hearings has finally produced a different outcome, a formal finding that she is fit to face the murder charges against her directly. Whether that finally produces answers for a father who has spent more than a decade waiting for them remains, for now, still an open question.

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