Why did a Wellesley mother allegedly kill her two children? Experts see similarities to other cases.

The article below is from the 4/28/26 edition of the Boston Globe.

If you find yourself suffering from profound feelings of despair and failure please reach out for help and support.

"Horror stories of parents who kill their children are at least as old as the Greek myth of Medea, the scorned wife who killed her sons in a jealous rage.

These stories make tragedies like the one that unfolded over the weekend in Wellesley, where a mother is accused of killing her two children, unthinkable and yet familiar.

“It makes sense that the stories that have persisted for this long resonate in some way with what has happened with people,” said Laura Schwab-Reese, associate professor of public health at Purdue University and founder of the Violence Intervention, Support, Technology, + Action research group.

It’s far too soon to make any conclusions about why Janette MacAusland allegedly killed Ella and Kai MacAusland, ages 7 and 6, in their Wellesley home.

But the few details revealed so far align with patterns experts have observed in similar cases.

MacAusland and her husband, Samuel MacAusland, were in the midst of a contentious divorce that included fights over child custody and property.

Divorces can lead to profound feelings of despair and failure.

“There’s often quite a bit of grief around what it means to lose a marriage,” Connors-Kellgren said. “There can be a lot of shame around it.”

Rage at the other partner can, in rare cases, also lead to violence against a child.

“We’re all familiar with children being used as pawns in high-conflict divorces,” said Alice Connors-Kellgren, a clinical psychologist, trauma expert, and director of psychology at Tufts Medical Center. “Sometimes children can be hurt or killed as a means to punish the other parent.”

While it’s about as common for fathers to slay their children as mothers, it’s far more likely that fathers will then attempt suicide, Schwab-Reese said. Those murder-suicides are often driven by rage and can be the tragic conclusion of a long pattern of child abuse. When it’s a mother who is responsible, the dominant emotion is frequently despair. Those feelings can be tied to a financial, child custody, or relationship crisis.

In the aftermath of her children’s deaths, MacAusland allegedly told a relative she tried to kill herself, according to court documents.

It is often the case that a mother believes she is in some way protecting her children by killing them.

“I wanted the [three] of us to go to God together but it didn’t work,” MacAusland said, according to a police report.

In many cases, the parent may feel killing the children spares them from living without their mother, Schwab-Reese said.

“They think the situation as it is is worse for their children than if their children are dead with them,” she said.

That belief is almost always tied to mental illness, she said. Parents who believe they are protecting their children by killing them may suffer from depression. Others have delusions that a child would suffer a fate worse than death due to psychosis or schizophrenia. In some cases, parents claim voices told them to kill a child, or they believed the children were demons who threatened mankind, Tufts’ Connors-Kellgren said.

Nationally, just 2.5 percent of all homicide arrests involve parents killing their children, according to a 2016 study.

The Wellesley case is one of a string of high-profile New England tragedies.

In August, New Hampshire mother Emily Long fatally shot herself, her husband and two of their young children at home. Her husband had recently been diagnosed with brain cancer.

In September 2024 Danielle D. Dauphinais of New Hampshire pleaded guilty to killing her 5-year-old son Elijah Lewis, who was found dead in a wooded area of Abington, MA in 2021.

And inJanuary 2023, Lindsay Clancy, who had sought help for postpartum depression, is alleged to have strangled her three children to death before jumping out of her bedroom window in Duxbury, leaving her paralyzed.

Infants are more likely to be murdered by their mothers, experts said, with postpartum depression or an unwanted birth both causing some of those killings.

Older children are more likely to be killed by fathers. In cases involving both fathers and mothers, the death can come amid an escalation of a pattern of abuse.

“There’s such a wide range of different things that could have been going on with the parent prior to the murder,” said said Dr. Susan Hatters Friedman, a professor of forensic psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University.

Understanding what drives parents to murder is complicated, she said. Determining the parent’s state of mind can involve interviews with close friends and family, reviewing police reports, medical and mental health records, and a psychiatric evaluation delving into the parent’s history, including determining whether addiction, stress, past trauma, or a history of mental illness were factors.

Hatters Friedman did not guess at what might have caused MacAusland’s actions, but said if she were reviewing the case, there are important questions she’d want answered.

“I would want to know more about what exactly is happening in the divorce, has there been this escalating pattern of it becoming more contentious?” she said. “I would want to know about any significant behavior changes among the mom.”

She would ask if MacAusland had become withdrawn or erratic, or if there were signs of child mistreatment.

The Department of Children and Families and the Office of the Child Advocate, the state’s watchdog for children, do not disclose whether or not a family has had contact with child protective services.

There are usually signs that a parent is in crisis, said Schwab-Reese, of Purdue. It’s rare that a crisis will culminate in a child’s death, but family and friends of that parent should not respond to concerns by withdrawing.

“There really is very little harm in continuing to be supportive of people,” Schwab-Reese said, “and I think there can be a lot of harm that can happen when we cut people off.”