On September 10, 2026, Dedham District Court became the latest stage in a case that has already stunned Mᴀssachusetts. Janette MacAusland, 49, of Wellesley, is charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her children, seven-year-old Kai and six-year-old Ella, who were found in the family’s Edgemoor Avenue home on April 24. She has pleaded not guilty. That morning her attorney, Joseph Krowski Jr., asked Judge Jeanmarie Carroll to dismiss the charges or release his client, arguing prosecutors still lacked the official medical findings needed to move the case and that MacAusland should not remain jailed indefinitely while the state waited. The request landed like a shock because it came after months of reporting that MacAusland had allegedly told a Vermont officer, while holding a family pH๏τograph, “I strangled them and then I tried to kill myself,” and had told her aunt she wanted the three of them “to go to God together but it didn’t work.” Prosecutors, led in court by ᴀssistant District Attorney Jennifer Hickman, said they were not ready for a full probable-cause presentation because the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had not yet determined cause and manner of death.

They asked for more time, said a grand jury seated in July had been dismissed and would have to be recalled, and argued there was already good cause to hold her, including body-camera video from Bennington Police. The judge denied dismissal and denied bail. MacAusland remains held without bond. The next probable-cause date is October 29. What made the hearing so closely watched was not only the horror of the underlying allegations but the legal collision it exposed: a defendant facing the most serious charges in the criminal code, statements attributed to her by police and family, and a prosecution still unable, four months later, to put a completed forensic ruling on the record. Krowski framed the delay as more than inconvenience.

He said his client had already spent months in custody in what he called an intermediate state in which the defense could not fully advance its position, and he asked the court not to treat prolonged detention as automatic while labs lagged. Prosecutors answered that the forensic determination is central to how a homicide case is presented to a grand jury and that they expected results within weeks. Judge Carroll granted the continuance over the defense objection and, according to reporters in the room, remarked that she hoped the medical examiner’s office treated the matter as a priority and that it would be disturbing if it did not. That exchange is now the public face of the case: a murder prosecution paused not because the investigation vanished, but because one official document has not arrived. For readers following the story from the April welfare check through the May arraignment, when MacAusland stood in court clasping her hands and weeping, the September hearing did not resolve guilt or innocence. It established something colder and more procedural. The state says it has enough to keep her locked up. The defense says the state does not have enough to keep the case moving.

The judge split the difference by refusing release and refusing dismissal, then pointing the calendar toward late October. Until the medical examiner speaks, the most explosive statements in the file remain allegations in police reports rather than findings tested at trial, and MacAusland remains, as the law requires until a verdict, a defendant presumed innocent and a mother charged with killing the two children whose names now define the case.