"It's hard to even really put into words. I mean, you realize how long it's been and then you realize how little has really happened."
The last decade of Troy Turner's life has been filled with unimaginable pain.
"You look at it and think about what would Sarah and Jacob be now? You know, who would they be?" he asks.
Sarah and Jacob Hoggle are Troy's son and daughter.
"Sarah, she was— she was tough as nails and just amazing," he says. "Then Jacob, he was— he was probably the sweetest out of, you know, all my kids, just in terms of, he only wanted to spend time with his brother and sister."
They were 2 and 3 the last time he saw them, just over ten years ago.
"I remember we had.. a good day overall," he recalls of September 6th, 2014. "You know Catherine was actually at what seemed to be, at the time, the most ordinary level she had been in a long time."
Catherine, the children's mother, struggled with mental health issues in the past and the family had put together a plan so she wouldn't be left alone with the kids.
"Everything seemed to be going really well," says Troy. "We had some family events that we did early on in the day, so I was going to work later... kissed the kids goodbye, told them I loved them."
The plan was for the kids to go to Catherine's parents' house, with at least one of them there to supervise.
Turner went to work, so what happened next he's gotten from other people's accounts.
Catherine's father, Randy, had been there when Troy left, but at some point Catherine left alone with Jacob, presumably to get pizza.
"When she got back, she came back without Jacob," Troy says. "Then later that evening, and the story that I gathered, was she told them that my two-year-old was going for a sleepover with my older child's friend, who, his mom just had a baby."
It didn't make sense to him.
"Two-year-olds don't do sleepovers," he says.
But he was still at work while this was happening. And no one called to let him know.
"No one calls me when she comes back without my child," he says. "Had I received that call, then Sarah would still be with us, because the second I got that call, I would have called the police."
He gets home later, not knowing that there's anything wrong.
"When I get home, and I say this with great regret, it's the one that I didn't go in, when I got back later, to kiss my kids and you know, kneel by the bed," he says. "I was tired and perhaps it was selfish, I said if I wake them up, I'm up too. So I went to sleep."
When he wakes up the next morning, Catherine and Sarah are gone. As are his keys, wallet and car.
He calls Catherine's parents, to see if they are there, which they weren't, and then calls 911.
"I'm on the phone with the dispatch operator and she pulls up," he recalls. "The kids are not in the car."
She told Troy that the kids were at daycare, which they'd been looking into for the kids at the time.
He believed her because the process had sounded similar to what they'd done before and they went about their days.
"Going through all that, I didn't know, you know, that my kids were actually missing, not at a daycare. So then I took her [Catherine] to her day program, and I ran a couple of errands or whatever," he says. "Things seemed off to me."
He remembers Catherine's mom seeming stressed, and that also put him on alert.
So, whenever I pick Catherine up from her day program, I was like, let's just go get the kids," Troy says.
Which turned into a wild goose chase.
Catherine couldn't remember the name, address or location of the daycare where she had said she'd dropped off her kids.
She took Troy to one part of Montgomery County and then another.
"I said, well give me the phone number and I'll call. She said, I don't have the number. And I just kind of looked at her, I said, time out. I said, let me get this straight, so you drop my kids off at daycare, you don't know where it is.. you don't know how to get there, you don't know the address, you don't have a phone number, don't know the name and you dropped our kids off there? I said, you don't even have a phone number," he recalls. "And she looked at me and said, well they have my number."
At this point, Troy calls Catherine's mom, Lindsay, who had been searching daycares that day too.
Still no one has told Troy that Jacob hadn't made it home the night before.
Catherine gives Troy one more daycare to go to, which they try and no one has seen or heard of their kids.
Troy drives away from the daycare, Catherine still in the car.
"She goes, where are we going? I'm still driving. Finally, she asked me like, two or three times and then I just looked at her I said, we're going to a police station," Troy says. "She said, well for what? I said, because my kids are missing. So she goes, they're not missing, they're at daycare."
She tells Troy about another daycare but asks to stop at Chick-fil-A first. And because of the medication she's on, requiring her to have caffeine and sugar in her system, they stop.
They go back to the car, but Catherine returns to go to the bathroom.
And never comes back to the car.
When Troy realizes she's run off, he goes to the police station.
Lindsay gets there too and as they talk to police to explain the situation that's when Troy learns that Jacob wasn't home the night before.
Police eventually find Catherine, but to this day Sarah and Jacob remain missing.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children marked the 10 years since the kids went missing with new age progressions for Sarah and Jacob.
At one point, Catherine was charged with murder in the kids' case but was found not competent to stand trial, and the charges were eventually dropped because of state law.
Something Troy is also working to change.
"We've been begging them [Maryland lawmakers] to just fix what's broken," he says about the state's competency laws.
The current law says that if, after five years, a defendant is still not found competent to stand trial, the charges must be dropped.
"It's all the same bar in Maryland right now, it's all five years," he says. "Whenever they had capital punishment in place, it was 10 years up to what could be your max sentence. We're not even asking to go that far, to where we're warehousing people, holding them for life, because we also believe that the mental health system needs to be fixed in Maryland. But at the same time, that 10 year mark, we think is more fair, and it gives people time to be brought to competency whenever there is severe mental illness and also it keeps victims safer that way as well."
Troy was also very clear that mental illness is not the cause of whatever Catherine did with the kids.
"Her illness did not cause it," he states unequivocally. "Maybe it made it possible, but she made a choice and she did what she did."
He adds, "To my knowledge, less than 3% of people who have what she's diagnosed with are ever violent, which is a lower percentage, probably than your quote, unquote normal population."
As for the fate of his children, WMAR-2 News' Jack Watson asked Troy, "This is a tough question to ask, but do you believe Sarah and Jacob are still with us?"
"Well, it depends on who you're asking," he says. "If you're asking the logical side of my brain that looks at the facts, talks to the police and things like that, then I believe she probably killed them. If you're asking Sarah and Jacob's father, my job is to believe in my kids and try to find them."
"Logically, they're probably dead, but I'm their father and it's my job to look on both ends until we find them, one way or another."
If you have any information that can help locate the Hoggle children or help police solve this case, please call NCMEC at 1-800-843-5688 or Montgomery County Police at 301-279-8000.
