On March 8, 1954, Carl Fisher returned to his home in Waterville, Maine, and stepped into a scene no parent could imagine: his three young children were dead, killed by his wife. Nearly seven decades later, Patrick Clancy would face a hauntingly similar tragedy in Massachusetts.
The murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, Patrick’s wife, has drawn national attention, with true crime followers and reporters closely watching to see whether the mother of three will be found guilty of first-degree murder in the 2023 deaths of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan, who prosecutors say were strangled.
As Lindsay Clancy, now paraplegic, and her estranged husband Patrick remain at the center of a highly publicized courtroom drama, some observers have noted unsettling similarities between her case and that of Constance Fisher.
Constance was 24 when she drowned her three children — Richard, 6, Daniel, 4, and 11-month-old Deborah — in a bathtub in 1954. Like Clancy, she later said she had heard a voice instructing her to act in order to protect her children from evil, according to a 1966 Kennebec Journal newspaper clipping.
“God told me to do it,” Constance told prosecutors at the time. “They are in heaven, safe from evil.”
Lindsay Clancy has also said she heard a man’s voice for 18 minutes during the killings in 2023. She has acknowledged strangling her children, but her defense argues she was legally insane because of postpartum psychosis at the time. She has pleaded not guilty to murder.
Jurors are now weighing Clancy’s future. In the Fisher case decades ago, Constance was found insane and committed to a psychiatric facility, from which she later escaped.
Our News Outlet examines the parallels between the 1954 Fisher case and the case against Lindsay Clancy.
Lindsay Clancy killed her three children in 2023 while suffering from postpartum depression
Nearly 70 years earlier, Constance Fisher also killed her three kids before spending years in a mental hospital. After being released and restarting her family, she killed again
The Constance Fisher Case
When Carl Fisher returned home from his Maine Central Railroad job in March 1954, the family’s house was eerily silent, and his wife was nowhere to be found.
The father walked through the home and spotted what he believed were his two youngest apparently asleep in their beds. It wasn’t until he reached the bathroom and found eldest son Richard floating face-down in the bathtub that he realized the truth.
In a panic, he called for help as he searched for Constance, whom he found wrapped tightly in a blanket under their bed. She was next to an empty bottle of Selsun shampoo.
In a suicide note, prosecutors said the then-mother-of-three had confessed to the killings to Carl, and asked for him to forgive her.
‘Maybe you don’t think I loved them. I did, oh, I did; my heart is breaking. I loved you, and I loved them,’ Constance wrote, a 1954 Bangor Daily News article said.
Constance, who was described as a ‘slender, brown-haired housewife,’ wished to be buried with Deborah and have her two boys together.
However, the mother survived the suicide attempt. And it was later revealed by the family’s physician, Dr Richard Chasse, that the 24-year-old had sought a psychiatrist for help just two months before about feeling depressed, the Bangor Daily News said at the time.
Constance Fisher is seen after her initial arrest. Her case has drawn comparisons to that of Lindsay Clancy
Constance, who was schizophrenic, spent years inside the Augusta State Hospital until her husband, Carl, petitioned for her release in 1955. She was released in 1959 after years with signs of psychosis
This was confirmed by the chaplain at the Augusta State Hospital, the psychiatric facility she was taken to. The chaplain said the mother had suffered ‘mental disturbances’ before killing her children, but she wasn’t given help quickly enough.
Despite her mental woes, locals described the woman as a good mother who loved her kids.
‘She was giving her children – [three] of them then – proper attention, bringing them up very nicely. The kids were happy, she was happy, and her husband was contented,’ the chaplain said in 1966.
After killing her children, Constance was diagnosed with psychosis and as a paranoid schizophrenic.
She was deemed too mentally unwell to stand trial and went to live at the Augusta State Hospital until her husband petitioned to get her out in 1955.
In 1957, at her first hearing, her doctors said no. A year later, they admitted she had shown no sign of psychosis for years, and her release could be considered.
She was finally released in May 1959 after experts decided that she posed no threat to society.
Within a year, Carl and Constance would start a new family and go on to have three more children – Kathleen, Michael, and Nathalie. They relocated to Fairfield.
Similarly to Constance, Lindsay also said she heard a voice telling her to kill her children
For years, Constance was a happy housewife and mother, but history repeated itself in the most horrific way in June 1966 when the young woman drowned her other three children in a bathtub.
Carl, once again, entered a silent home and found Nathalie, nine months, dead in the bathtub. Kathleen, six, and Michael, four, were also found dead in the home.
Constance, once again, attempted to kill herself unsuccessfully with drugs, a pellet gun, and a kitchen knife.
‘I hope you understand,’ the religious woman wrote in a second suicide note. ‘It’s the only way I could be sure they would go to heaven.’
She would later tell Waterville Captain Albert Drost: ‘I drowned them.’
He testified that the mother-of-six expressed no remorse, telling him: ‘No, I am not [sorry]. The children would have had a hard life ahead of them. They are better where they are.’
Drost also testified that authorities had found Constance with a gun near her after drowning her children, but she told him she was unable to kill herself because the ‘gun didn’t work.’
‘She was going to use a knife, but she fell asleep before she could,’ he testified in 1967, the Lewiston Sun-Journal newspaper reported.
Nearly 70 years after Carl walked into his home in Maine to find his children dead, Patrick Clancy did the same in Massachusetts (pictured)
Patrick also found his wife after she attempted suicide
She was once again brought to the Augusta State Hospital, this time with no hope of being released after once again being deemed to insane to stand trial.
For seven years, Carl faithfully visited her, but he eventually couldn’t handle it anymore and stopped.
Shortly after, Constance escaped the confines of the asylum. For days, authorities and the hospital looked for her with no luck.
She was eventually found by a hunter, who discovered her bloated body in the Kennebec River, which was near the hospital. Fisher died at the age of 44.
Constance would go on to be laid to rest next to the graves of her six children. In 1990, her husband would join them.
Cora, five, and Dawson, three, were found dead in the basement of the Clancy house. Callan, eight months, was found alive, but died in the hospital days later
The Comparison
Nearly 70 years after Constance first took the lives of Richard, Daniel, and Deborah, Patrick Clancy would walk into his home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in January 2023 to find his three children killed.
Cora and Dawson had been strangled to death by exercise bands in the couple’s basement. Their youngest, Callan, was found alive and would die days later in the hospital.
Clancy, who was suffering from postpartum depression, tried to kill herself by jumping out of an upstairs window. She survived but was permanently paralyzed from the waist down.
Despite the similarities on paper, experts told Our News Outlet that there are substantial differences between the two cases.
Constance was schizophrenic, whereas Lindsay was suffering from postpartum depression.
‘[These are] very different cases in the sense of psychiatric diagnosis,’ Dr Blair Steel, a licensed clinical psychologist with Carrara Treatment, told Our News Outlet. ‘Constance had a long-standing psych illness of paranoid schizophrenia, so she had historical accounts of auditory hallucinations, delusional thinking, all of that.
‘Which is very different than, Lindsay’s postpartum depression. She had treatment around the time of the killing, she had all these medications around the time of the killing, so it was not this long-standing mental health [issue].’
Dr Blair Steel said Constance had a lifelong disease, whereas Clancy had postpartum depression and no history of psychiatric problems
Both women killed less than a year after the birth of the youngest child, with Dr Steel saying that timing may have been significant.
‘There’s the overlap of the hormone imbalance that takes place. If you think about around 11 months, a baby’s starting to wean, so the maternal hormones are completely changing,’ Steel said.
Clancy had been on multiple different types of medication prior to the killings. It is unclear what medication Constance was using, if any. Her first murder spree predated Thorazine, the first widely available antipsychotic, being approved by the FDA.
‘If Constance’s exhibited signs of psychosis, it’s likely that treatment with antipsychotics might not have been available to her at the time of the initial murders,’ Omotola Ajibade, a dual board-certified adult and forensic psychiatrist who has administered insanity defense evaluation tests, told Our News Outlet.
‘Constance was likely depressed at the time, and she also had psoriasis. In some extreme cases, psoriasis can lead to psychiatric symptoms,’ he said of the common skin condition that causes unsightly red blotches.
However, both Steel and Ajibade said the likelihood that Clancy would relapse and kill her children again, if she were to have more in the future, is very low.
‘With proper treatment, including medication and psychosocial support, it is unlikely that Clancy would suffer the same fate as Constance,’ Ajibade told Our News Outlet.
Omotola Ajibade, a dual board-certified adult and forensic psychiatrist, said Constance would not have had antipsychotics available to her at the time of the first murders
Steel said Constance’s diagnosis was a lifelong condition, whereas Clancy’s is ‘more episodic.’ Postpartum depression would eventually go away, whereas schizophrenia would not.
He said that no two mental health diagnoses are like one another and that new mothers need to be heavily-supported to keep tabs on any potential mental health issues.
If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts or actions, please call the National Suicide Hotline at 988.
