Janette MacAusland remains in custody without bail after a Dedham District Court judge rejected her attorney’s request on September 10 to dismiss two first-degree murder charges or release her while prosecutors wait for official medical findings that still have not arrived. The 49-year-old Wellesley acupuncturist is accused in the April 24 deaths of her son Kai, 7, and daughter Ella, 6, who were discovered inside the family’s Edgemoor Avenue home after she appeared that night at an aunt’s house in Bennington, Vermont, with a serious neck wound. According to police reports cited in court, she allegedly told officers she had killed the children and tried to take her own life because she wanted the three of them to go to God together. She has pleaded not guilty.

Defense attorney Joseph Krowski Jr. argued that more than four months had pᴀssed without an official determination from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner on cause and manner of death, leaving the Commonwealth without the reports needed to keep the case moving, and that his client should not remain locked up indefinitely on that incomplete record. Prosecutors told Judge Jeanmarie Carroll they expected the findings within weeks and asked for more time so a grand jury that had already been seated could be reconvened. The judge granted the continuance, denied both defense motions, and scheduled the next appearance for October 29.

The legal stall has become the defining feature of a case that began with a welfare check triggered from another state and has not yet produced an indictment. A grand jury heard evidence in July and was then dismissed pending the medical examiner’s work, a delay that has stretched well beyond the typical window many Mᴀssachusetts autopsy cases follow. Krowski told the court and later reporters that the absence of those documents made it unreasonable to continue holding MacAusland without bail and that the case was not ready to cross into Superior Court. Prosecutors countered that the investigation was still active and that the official rulings were necessary before they could present a complete picture to a grand jury. The judge sided with the Commonwealth on the schedule while keeping the no-bail order in place, leaving MacAusland detained on the two murder counts as the medical examiner’s office continues its work.

What happens next now depends almost entirely on when those findings are issued. Until they arrive, the probable-cause hearing cannot be completed, the grand jury cannot be called back, and the defense cannot fully test the strength of the evidence the state intends to use. The October 29 date is therefore less a trial milestone than a checkpoint to see whether the missing reports have finally landed. In the meantime MacAusland stays in jail, the children’s father and the Wellesley community remain without official answers about how Kai and Ella died, and a prosecution that began in the spring of 2026 is still waiting on paperwork that should have closed a basic investigative chapter months ago.

Source: https://nypost.com/2026/09/10/us-news/janette-macauslands-attorney-requests-child-murder-case-be-dismissed/?utm_campaign=nypost&utm_medium=referral