The most important document in the Janette MacAusland prosecution is the one that still does not exist in finished form. Prosecutors told the court on September 10 that Mᴀssachusetts’ Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had not determined the official cause and manner of death for Kai, 7, and Ella, 6, found deceased in a bedroom of the Wellesley home after police were alerted from Vermont. That gap is not a footnote. It is the reason a probable-cause hearing did not go forward as planned, the reason a grand jury that began hearing evidence in July was dismissed and must be reconvened, and the reason defense counsel argued the case should be dropped or the defendant released. In homicide practice, cause and manner are the forensic vocabulary that turns a death investigation into a chargeable theory: how the children died, whether the deaths are ruled homicide, and what the medical evidence will allow a grand jury and later a trial jury to hear from doctors. Without those conclusions, prosecutors said they could not complete the presentation they wanted.

Hickman told the judge the office should have a determination within weeks and that she would then coordinate a recalled grand jury so physicians could offer updated information before the case is “voted,” meaning presented for indictment. Defense attorney Joseph Krowski called the four-month wait a startling concession and said that, four months in, the Commonwealth still lacked the reports, documents, and testing needed to move the matter “across the street” to Norfolk Superior Court. He asked for dismissal or for bail, including discussion in some accounts of a cash figure with conditions. The court kept MacAusland held without bail. The legal meaning of the delay is easy to overstate and easy to understate. It does not erase the allegations, the welfare check, the scene described by Wellesley officers, or the statements attributed to MacAusland in Vermont.

It does mean the formal machinery of indictment has been waiting on a lab and a medical office that, in this case, have moved more slowly than the calendar of a district court probable-cause statute contemplates. Mᴀssachusetts practice generally expects a prompt probable-cause showing after a complaint issues; the defense argued the Commonwealth had already used its continuance and should not get another at the defendant’s expense. The judge found good cause to continue anyway, set October 29, and left detention in place. For the public, the delay has become a second story running beside the first.

The first story is the accusation that a mother strangled her son and daughter during a collapsing marriage and a custody fight, then drove about 140 miles to an aunt’s house in Bennington with a wound to her neck. The second story is insтιтutional: how long a state medical examiner’s office can take on pediatric deaths of this visibility, what “manner and means” actually control in a grand-jury presentation, and whether a defendant can be held for months while that work finishes. Judge Carroll’s reported comment that the office ought to treat the case as a priority captured the tension without resolving it. As of late September 2026, there has been no public announcement that the official rulings have been issued. Until they are, prosecutors cannot easily lock in the medical narrative they need, the defense cannot fully test that narrative, and the children remain, in the court’s file, deceased without a completed official explanation of how they died. That unfinished sentence is now the center of the MacAusland case, and October 29 is the date by which both sides expect the silence to break or the delay to be explained again.