Janette MacAusland, 49, drove 140 miles from her family home on Edgemoor Avenue in Wellesley, Massachusetts, to her aunt's house in Bennington, Vermont, with a bloody gash on her neck and a confession on her lips. Seven-year-old Kai and six-year-old Ella were still in the house she left behind.
They were already dead.
According to an arrest affidavit, MacAusland told her aunt she wanted "the three of us to go to God together but it didn't work." When police arrived, she was more direct. "I strangled them and then I tried to kill myself," she told the responding officer. Investigators found blood spatter documented at the crime scene inside the Wellesley home. MacAusland was arrested, waived extradition back to Massachusetts, and was charged with two counts of first-degree murder. She pleaded not guilty.
That was April. On Thursday, her defense attorney Joseph Krowski walked into court and asked the judge to do two things — release MacAusland on bail and dismiss the murder charges entirely.
The judge denied both requests. MacAusland remains held without bail, with the next court date scheduled for late October. The case is awaiting the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner's official determination of cause and manner of death before a grand jury reconvenes.
But the legal argument Krowski deployed is worth examining, because it tells you exactly where this defense is headed. Krowski told the court there's been "a discussion about whether or not we want to criminalize mental illness." He also argued against treating his client as "Lindsay Clancy 2.0" — a reference to the other Massachusetts mother whose murder trial ended in a mistrial just days before this hearing.
That framing — "criminalizing mental illness" — does a lot of heavy lifting. It takes a woman who confessed to strangling two children, a seven-year-old and a six-year-old, and repositions her as a patient rather than a defendant. It skips past the blood spatter, past the confession, past the 140-mile drive to Vermont, and lands on a medical diagnosis as the exit ramp from accountability.
The custody context matters here, and not the way Krowski wants it to. MacAusland's estranged husband Samuel MacAusland had filed for divorce after nine years of marriage. He was seeking custody of Kai and Ella. Just three days before the children were killed, a guardian had been appointed to investigate the custody arrangement. Three days. The timeline doesn't suggest a woman who snapped under the weight of untreated illness. It suggests a woman who saw custody slipping away and made a decision.
Krowski's "Lindsay Clancy 2.0" line is a tell. He's not just distancing his client from Clancy — he's borrowing the public sympathy that case generated. Clancy's trial ended in a mistrial, which defense attorneys across the country watched very carefully. The playbook is forming in real time: invoke mental health, invoke motherhood, invoke the idea that prosecution itself is the cruelty, and hope the jury arithmetic works.
The judge in this case so far isn't buying it. MacAusland stays behind bars while the medical examiner finishes the work.
But the "criminalizing mental illness" argument isn't going away after one rejected motion. It's a preview of the trial defense. And the reason it's dangerous isn't because mental illness is irrelevant to criminal cases — it's because the framing erases the victims entirely. Kai and Ella MacAusland become a footnote in a policy debate about how we treat defendants. The seven-year-old and six-year-old who were strangled in their own home become props in a larger argument about the justice system's relationship with mental health.
Samuel MacAusland filed for divorce. He asked for custody. A court appointed a guardian to look into it. Seventy-two hours later, his children were dead and their mother was in Vermont with a self-inflicted wound and a confession.
The court has the confession. It has the crime scene. It has the timeline. What it apparently also has is a defense attorney who thinks the right move is to ask that none of it count.
