A stark illustration sits at the center of a $2 million fundraising campaign: a woman slumped in a wheelchair, her face hidden in her hands, while a ring of women closes around her in apparent protection.
The image appears unmistakably designed to call to mind Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother now on trial over the January 2023 killings of her three young children.
Yet the campaign is not raising money for Clancy herself.
The online fundraiser is instead directed toward her parents, Michael and Paula Musgrove, a deeply private Connecticut couple who lost all three of their grandchildren at the hands of their daughter and have still continued to stand by her throughout the aftermath.
The Musgrove Family Fund has brought in more than $830,000 from thousands of contributors as it works toward a $2 million goal. According to organizers, the money is meant to help restore savings the couple has spent over more than three years while supporting Clancy through her recovery and ongoing criminal proceedings.
For most of that period, Michael and Paula have offered their support out of public view.
They have avoided interviews, made few public comments about their daughter and remained largely shielded from attention by friends and neighbors who have declined to speak about them.
But as Clancy’s murder trial moves forward, expressions of support for the family have become more visible — and increasingly are coming from people who have never met them.
Michael and Paula Musgrove have been in court every day since Clancy’s trial began. They relocated from Connecticut to Massachusetts to be nearer to her, living out of hotels
The Musgrove Family Fund has already raised more than $830,000 from thousands of donors toward its $2million target
On any given day, roughly 30 to 40 members of the public have arrived to support Clancy inside Plymouth Superior Court, the overwhelming majority women.
Many have told Our News Outlet that the prosecution’s effort to portray Clancy as a calculating killer has had the opposite effect: weeks of testimony about her psychiatric treatment, repeated attempts to seek help and worsening mental state has instead reinforced their belief that she was failed by the very system she turned to for help.
For Michael and Paula, much of what is now being laid bare in court was already painfully familiar to them.
By January 2023, they had become closely involved as their daughter’s mental health noticeably deteriorated, court testimony has shown, staying with Clancy and her then-husband Patrick to help care for their children Cora, Dawson and Callan while she repeatedly sought psychiatric treatment.
They visited again the weekend before the children’s deaths, leaving on January 22.
Afterward, Paula messaged her daughter to say how good it had been to see her seeming more like herself, according to court testimony.
Two days later, Cora, five, Dawson, three, and eight-month-old Callan were dead.
Clancy strangled the children with exercise bands before cutting her neck and wrists and jumping from a second-story window. She survived the jump but severed her spinal cord, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down.
In the three-and-a-half years since, Michael and Paula have spent much of their time in Massachusetts, away from their home in Wallingford, Connecticut, living out of hotels as they supported Clancy through her recovery and the case against her.
They have attended all of her court hearings and have been inside Plymouth Superior Court every day since her trial began late last month.
Before Paula Musgrove took the stand on Monday, Clancy’s parents had remained largely silent, declining interviews but attending each court hearing
Lindsay and Patrick Clancy pictured with their children Cora, five, Dawson, three, and eight-month-old Callan
On Monday, Paula took the stand to defend her daughter.
But before then, the Musgroves had largely remained silent about the case. On the rare occasions they did agree to speak, they shared only warm remarks about their daughter.
‘She’s a loving mother, she always will be,’ Paula said after a court hearing earlier this year.
‘We love our daughter very much and we’re here to support her in any way we can,’ Michael added.
Away from the courthouse, remarkably little is known about the couple or how they have dealt with the loss of their grandchildren.
They have lived for decades in Wallingford, in the same quiet neighborhood where they raised Lindsay and her sister, Allison.
Michael has worked in school portrait photography and sales for Lifetouch, while Paula previously worked for Weight Watchers and is now retired.
They have owned their $480,000, three-bedroom family home in Wallingford since 1996, records show.
Longtime neighbor and retired firefighter John Roarke described them to the Record-Journal as ‘good, hard-working, regular, middle-class people’ who ‘took good care of their kids.’
An emotional Clancy fought back tears when her mother took the stand on Monday, breathing deeply and visibly trembling
However, as the attention on Clancy has intensified, the community where she grew up has largely closed ranks around her parents.
Friends, relatives and neighbors have declined to speak about the couple or the circumstances they have endured. Even a woman whose husband had been good friends with Michael through the Wallingford Girls Softball League where he once served said he would not discuss the Musgroves.
On Monday, however, Paula broke the family’s long public silence, taking the witness stand for the defense to describe watching her daughter deteriorate in the months before the killings.
‘I loved my grandchildren with all my heart,’ she began, her voice cracking. ‘And you’ll never know what it’s like to love your grandchildren until you become a grandmother. And it is the most beautiful thing.’
Clancy put her head in her hands and began to quietly sob as her mother spoke.
Paula testified that she first noticed a pronounced change in her daughter in the second week of October 2022, when Clancy became intensely anxious about returning to work as a labor and delivery nurse.
Then, on October 20, Paula received a desperate text.
‘Mom, will you please come up and stay with me for a bit,’ Clancy wrote. ‘I’m really sick. Something is wrong. I had horrible insomnia last night and I don’t know how I’m going to get through the day.
‘I started taking the medicine my doctor prescribed for anxiety and I think it’s made things worse. It’s just really scary, and I don’t want to be alone.’
Paula Musgrove testified Monday about watching her daughter deteriorate in the months before the killings
A text message Clancy sent her mother in October 2022 was shown in court, in which she wrote: ‘I’m really sick. Something is wrong…I don’t want to be alone’
Paula went to see her daughter in Duxbury, Massachusetts, that same day.
As her mother recounted those moments, Clancy looked down, breathing heavily and visibly trembling.
Paula said her daughter did not improve through November and December despite seeing doctors and taking prescribed medication. She lost weight, became fearful and paranoid and repeatedly told her mother something was wrong with her mind.
‘This isn’t me. I’ve never been like this before,’ Paula recalled her saying.
Clancy also complained that medication was ‘destroying her mind’ and said she wanted to feel better and enjoy her children again. At one point, Paula said, Clancy became so afraid of being alone that she asked to sleep beside her.
Paula stayed with the family for much of December. During that month, Clancy allegedly made an even more disturbing disclosure.
Standing in the kitchen one day, she appeared nervous and told her mother and husband: ‘I have to tell you guys something.’
She had been having thoughts of harming the children, Paula testified.
It was on that disclosure that court broke for lunch.
During the trial so far, the jury has been shown traumatic photographs of the crime scene and the children’s autopsy photos
For some of the strangers watching from the public gallery, testimony like Paula’s has only strengthened a conclusion they had already reached.
They see Clancy as a profoundly ill woman who repeatedly asked for help and was failed by the healthcare system before committing an unimaginable act.
Sue Blair came to Plymouth Superior Court specifically to support Clancy and said weeks of evidence had only ‘solidified’ a belief she had held for much of the past three years.
‘She was failed on every level,’ Blair told Our News Outlet. ‘I can’t believe that the DA’s office brought these charges.’
Nancy Hubble, 52, drove four hours from Burlington, Connecticut, despite having no connection to Clancy or her family.
Hubble, whose own daughter has experienced mental health problems, said she hopes the case might ultimately force changes in psychiatric medication and women’s healthcare.
She also believes Clancy, having lost her children and family and been left paralyzed by her suicide attempt, is already experiencing a severe enough punishment.
‘I’m actually praying that she doesn’t go to jail,’ Hubble said. ‘No matter where she ends up, her life is going to be hell.’
Jurors were shown surveillance footage from a family outing to a science museum just weeks before the children were killed, on January 8, 2023
Clancy is accused of murdering her three children, Cora, five, Dawson, three, and eight-month-old Callan, at her home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in 2023
Lisa Costa, 57, came to her sympathy from a more conflicted place.
She said she was unexpectedly overcome while listening to Patrick Clancy’s harrowing 911 call and felt deeply for the father who returned home to find his wife critically injured and his three children dead.
But after following testimony about Lindsay’s deteriorating mental health and treatment, Costa said she believed postpartum illness had overwhelmed her.
‘Nobody wins in this,’ she said. ‘Nobody won.’
As the trial has worn on, those individual expressions of sympathy have begun to coalesce into a community.
Several women interviewed by Our News Outlet said they arrived at court alone and made friends while waiting in line.
Among them were mothers and daughters, a law student and women who had never previously followed a criminal trial.
Some have taken to collectively referring to themselves as ‘Camp Lindsay.’
This week, that spontaneous support is set to become more organized.
A gathering advertised for outside Plymouth County Superior Court on Thursday is calling on supporters to wear pink and stand together in silence.
‘We will gather. We will join hands. We will be silent,’ a flyer declares, instructing participants that there should be no protesting, rallying, signs or shouting.
‘Our silence is our support.’
On Monday, Clancy’s mother testified that in December 2022 Clancy confessed to having troubling thoughts about harming her children
The Clancy family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, where Lindsay is alleged to have carried out the murders the following month
But the sympathy building around Clancy is far from universal.
Prosecutors argue that her psychiatric struggles did not prevent her from understanding what she was doing when she killed Cora, Dawson and Callan.
None of the psychiatric providers who treated her before the killings diagnosed her with psychosis, jurors have heard, while prosecutors have sought to portray Clancy as organized and deliberate – arguing that she intentionally sent Patrick out to pick up medication and dinner on the night of the murders, leaving her alone with the children.
Prosecutors have also introduced evidence that days earlier she searched online for terms including ‘hallucinations,’ ‘psychosis,’ ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘can you treat a sociopath.’
The prosecution has argued those searches show awareness and intent.
Clancy’s defense, meanwhile, argues they tell a very different story: of a woman frightened by her deteriorating mind who repeatedly sought help but was never properly diagnosed.
Clancy’s father Michael is also expected to testify for the defense.
Her sister Allison also testified Monday, telling the court she had seen a marked deterioration in Clancy by late 2022, including weight loss, low energy and suicidal thoughts.
The trial is expected to last another two to four weeks.
