Newly released police dispatch audio captured the harrowing moments officers realized two maimed children allegedly strangled by their own mother in their Massachusetts home could not be saved.
“There’s blood spatter everywhere,” an officer said Friday as he moved into the Wellesley home of Samuel and Janette R. MacAusland, where he’d found “a rear door unsecured” while conducting a welfare check.
The officer had been dispatched to the leafy suburban home after Janette, 49, turned up at a family member’s home 140 miles away in Vermont with a grisly slash across her throat and a terrifying message about her kids: “I strangled them and then I tried to kill myself.”
Kai and Ella were dead by April 22 – days before Wellesley police found their bodies in a bed inside their home, court docs reveal. Janette Reber / FacebookWellesley police rushed to the house after learning what Janette had said, and upon arriving, found the bodies of two kids – 7-year-old Ella and 6-year-old Kai.
EMS backup was quickly requested, but police on the scene soon canceled the call, according to the Boston Globe.
“It’s a police matter,” the dispatcher simply said.
But the horror was just beginning – neighbors watching the police search quickly called the children’s father, Samuel, who frantically called police.
“The father is on the phone now,” a dispatcher was heard telling the lead officer on the murder scene.
MacAusland once uploaded a sweet photo of her husband in bed with the kids, alongside the caption: “Happy Father’s Day to every dad that shows up. And this one shows up BIGTIME!” @rebervations/Instagram“Uncontrollable on the phone,” they added. “Really needs to know what’s going on.”
It remains unclear how long the children had been dead, but the roughly 140-mile drive from Wellesley to Bennington, Vermont – where Janette turned up — takes about three hours.
There, Janette was found knocking on her aunt’s window with slash marks across her neck.
The aunt, Sandra Mattison, said Janette was “hysterical” and allegedly saying she’d tried to kill herself after the kids “to go to God together but it didn’t work,” a police report obtained by the Globe said.
“Mattison advised that she did not recognize Janette at first, only seeing that a female was at her window who had a laceration to her neck,” the report added. “Mattison finally recognized her niece and brought her in the home.”
Janette’s mugshot shows a series of gnarly cuts across her throat.
MacAusland was previously an acupuncturist with New England Integrated Health. Janette Reber / FacebookThe MacAuslands appeared to be a happy family in photos online, with people who knew them describing Janette as a “doting mom.”
“Never did I enter the house and feel like there was anything that was extremely off,” a family babysitter told the Globe.
But in reality, the couple had been locked in a bitter divorce battle.
MacAusland now faces a fugitive of justice charge in Vermont, as well as two counts of first-degree murder in Massachusetts. CBS NewsThat appeared to have come to a head in April when the parents filed a motion to have a third party make recommendations on custody – with a guardian being appointed on April 21, just three days before the murders.
The children were in kindergarten and first grade, with the babysitter telling Boston 25 they were “full of life and laughter.”
“They were two beautiful children,” she said. “It pains me to think that the world should remember them only by the way their lives were tragically ended.”
