Chester County man who abused and tortured his daughter, killing her, pleads guilty to murder and is sentenced to life in prison
Prosecutors say Rendell Hoagland and his fiancé inflicted punishments on the 12-year-old that no child should ever endure.
By all accounts, Malinda Hoagland was the kind of 12-year-old girl that would make any parent proud.
She received A’s in school, loved unicorns and going to Wawa with her older sisters, and wrote her lunch ladies notes thanking them for stocking the cafeteria with applesauce and milk.
But Hoagland’s father, Rendell, clearly didn’t see that little girl, prosecutors said in Chester County court Friday.
Instead, Rendell Hoagland and his fiancé, Cindy Marie Warren, tortured Hoagland’s daughter for months in their West Caln home, depriving her of food and medical care.
They chained her to furniture and forced her into stress positions for hours, beating her if she moved or displeased them.
Once when the girl forgot her jacket at school, they forced her to do push ups in the kitchen late at night, striking her with a belt. Other times, the beatings came with a metal spatula.
The lack of care ultimately killed Malinda in May 2024.
Medical examiners found the girl died from severe malnutrition, her organs atrophied from starvation. More than 70 bruises, ulcers, and sores riddled her body, which by then weighed just 50 pounds.
It was the rare type of crime that brought tears even to a judge’s eye.
On Friday, that judge, Anne Marie Wheatcraft accepted a guilty plea from Hoagland on one count of first-degree murder and related crimes. The 54-year-old will be confined in prison for life without the possibility of parole.
“This was calculated, sustained cruelty inflicted on an innocent child,” said Malinda Hoagland’s maternal aunt, Christine Mayrhauser, as the girl’s family read tearful victim impact statements.
Rendell Hoagland, a bald man whose size tested the limits of a red prison jumpsuit, gazed on.
“A quick execution is too good for him,” Mayrhauser said.
Warren is also charged with first-degree murder and related crimes. Her trial, scheduled for early January, has been delayed and she will receive a pretrial hearing in May.
Lead prosecutor Erin O’Brien described Malinda Hoagland’s final years as a period of abuse no child should ever endure.
After Hoagland separated from his wife, he received custody of Malinda Hoagland in 2020 and moved with the girl from Monroe County to West Caln.
He enrolled the girl as school, but she soon began missing day after day of class. By 2023, Hoagland had pulled Malinda Hoagland out of school entirely, and she was completing school online under his and Warren’s near-constant supervision.
After the girl’s death in 2024, investigators recovered photos, videos, and text messages from both Hoagland and Warren that detailed the girl’s horrific life at home.
She was often chained to an air hockey table or other pieces of furniture, even sleeping there, O’Brien said, or made to run in place or do jump squats at Hoagland and Warren’s command.
They punished her with scalding showers and ice baths, forced her to hold books over her head for hours and poured hot sauce down her throat. The couple monitored the girl through security cameras they had installed throughout the home.
They also kept locks on the fridge and snack cabinet, and the girl lost more than a third of her body weight in the last two years of her life. She was often sleep deprived or suffering open wounds; by the end of her life, she struggled to do her homework because of her eye injures, O’Brien said
The abuse ended only with death, prosecutors said.
On May 3, 2024, Hoagland called 911 claiming that Malinda had fallen off her bike and had lost consciousness at a campground in Quarryville.
But prosecutors say the girl had been unconscious for hours, and that Hoagland had driven to CVS the night before looking for smelling salts in an attempt to wake her up. He propped up the girl’s body so that she did not raise the suspicions of passersby.
It was a common pattern of attempted cover ups, O’Brien said, and Hoagland and Warren were also known to use makeup to cover up the girl’s bruises for the few people they allowed to see her.
One of the last people to see Malinda Hoagland alive was William Delmedico, an emergency medical responder who wrapped the barely conscious girl in his sweatshirt as he rushed her to a hospital, where she died after surgery.
“I kept telling her she’s not alone, she’s loved, and that we’re doing everything possible to help her,” Delmedico told the court, his voice breaking.
Hoagland and Warren managed to keep the abuse hidden from Malinda Hoagland’s extended family, prosecutors said, including her three older sisters, his biological children. The women were not living in southeastern Pennsylvania during the time of the abuse, they said.
In addition to murder, “You should also be facing several counts of robbery,” said Emily Lee, Malinda Hoagland’s older sister, addressing her father. “You robbed my baby sister’s future. You took a life she deserved.”
Jamie Hoagland, another sister, said she begged he father for access to Malinda, sending her sister cards and gifts and playing Minecraft with her online when possible.
“I fought for every inch of communication,” Jamie Hoagland said. She later lamented: “Instead of taking her to the movies, I visit her grave.”
When given the chance to speak, Rendell Hoagland told Wheatcraft he had “nothing to say at this time.”
Wheatcraft said she wasn’t surprised that Hoagland did not express remorse.