On Thursday, her defense team has asked a court to dismiss the murder case against her or release her on bail, just days after the high-profile Lindsay Clancy murder trial ended in a mistrial. Janette MacAusland is a Massachusetts mother accused of killing her two young children, Kai, 7, and Ella, 6, and then tried to take her own life.
MacAusland faces two counts of first-degree murder. The children were found dead inside the family’s home in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in April after police conducted a welfare check. Joseph Krowski, Janette MacAusland’s attorney, told a judge that there was insufficient evidence to hold the 49-year-old Wellesley mother in jail.
Wellesley police discovered the children’s deaths inside a bedroom after her worried aunt called the police, according to terrifying dispatch audio. They also observed that there was “blood spatter everywhere.”
The case returned to Dedham District Court less than a week after a Massachusetts jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict in the Lindsay Clancy trial. Three days prior to the killings, on April 21, a guardian was appointed after the parents filed a motion to have a third party make custody recommendations, seemingly bringing the heated legal struggle to a close. Because of postpartum psychosis, clancy, who was charged with killing her three children in 2023, argued she was not criminally responsible for the killings.
MacAusland worked for New England Integrated Health as an acupuncturist, according to WCVB . Samuel MacAusland, the father of the children, was requesting custody of the couple’s home and children, according to court documents.
After her husband filed for divorce in October of last year, after nine years of marriage, she had been fighting for custody of the kids.
