The first police officer to arrive at the Wellesley home on Friday night reported no cars in the driveway or garage, no lights on in the home.
But he found “a rear door unsecured,” the officer conducting a welfare check told a dispatcher.
He stepped inside the Edgemoor Avenue house and seconds later made a disturbing discovery.
“There’s blood splatter,” he told a dispatcher, according to police recordings posted by Broadcastify.
As more officers entered the home shortly before 10 p.m. Friday, they found the bodies of two children, 7 and 6, confirming what their mother, Janette R. MacAusland, had allegedly told police some 140 miles away in Bennington, Vt., when they asked where her children were.
“’I strangled them and then I tried to kill myself,’” she told investigators, according to a Vermont police report.
MacAusland, 49, remained in custody in Vermont Tuesday and is expected to be returned to Massachusetts in the near future to face two counts of murder in Dedham District Court, according to the Norfolk District Attorney’s office and court records.
The police report has been impounded at the request of Morrissey’s office until October.
When police discovered the children inside the Wellesley home, they immediately asked that an EMS crew be sent, according to the recordings. But before the ambulance arrived, the trip was canceled.
“It’s a police matter,” a dispatcher said.
A law enforcement official briefed on the investigation said the children’s bodies had been inside the house for some time before police arrived. Authorities are still trying to establish a definitive timeline on when the children — Ella MacAusland, 7, and Kai MacAusland, 6 — died, the official said.
The children’s cause and manner of death are pending, a spokesperson for the state medical examiner’s office said Tuesday. Autopsy cases are typically completed within 90 days, the spokesperson said.
The children’s father, Samuel S. MacAusland, was alerted by a neighbor that police were at the Edgemoor Avenue home, according to dispatch transmissions. He called the station and was told they could not share much information with him at that time.
Moments later, he called police a second time.
“The father is on the phone now,” the dispatcher told the police commander at the scene. “Uncontrollable on the phone. Really needs to know what’s going on.”
The commander said he was trying to connect Samuel MacAusland with law enforcement in New Hampshire, where he was at the time, according to the dispatch transmissions.
Police in Wellesley could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday.
Samuel MacAusland’s brother, Stephen, when reached by phone Tuesday, said the family is scattered geographically but will come together to hold a service for the children.
“We will get together and there will be a service sometime and somewhere,” he said, declining further comment.
After the killings, Janette R. MacAusland allegedly drove to Bennington and knocked on her aunt’s window. MacAusland then revealed that she’d killed her children, police said in a report. She said she tried to kill herself, too, because she wanted the three of them “to go to God together but it didn’t work,” police said.
She had a large cut across her throat, according to police.
Her aunt, Sandra Mattison, had requested assistance Friday night after MacAusland showed up acting “hysterical.”
“Mattison advised that she did not recognize MacAusland at first, only seeing that a female was at her window who had a laceration to her neck,” the report said. “Mattison finally recognized her niece and brought her in the home.”
Records show that she has been going through a contentious divorce with Samuel MacAusland, who hasn’t made any public statement about the case.
On Tuesday, defense attorney Joseph F. Krowski Jr. said he has tentatively agreed to accept an appointment from the Committee for Public Counsel Services to represent MacAusland if she needs a court-appointed attorney in Massachusetts.
The issue of her legal representation will be clarified when she appears in court, he said.
According to town records in Tuftonboro, N.H., Samuel S. MacAusland is the trustee of a waterfront home on Cow Island and a second home at Barber’s Pole Road in the Lakes Region community.
According to Norfolk Probate and Family Court records, Samuel MacAusland and another relative handled his mother’s estate after her death in 2015.
Among the assets she left her family, according to court records, was a Dedham home sold for $2.1 million in 2016 and the residential properties in Tuftonboro that she described in her will as her “summer homes.”
Mike Bello and Nick Stoico of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
John R. Ellement can be reached at john.ellement@globe.com. Follow him @JREbosglobe.