On January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy told her husband, Patrick, that she was worn out after spending the day caring for their three young children. Too tired to make dinner, she asked if he would run a quick errand: pick up children’s medicine and collect a takeout order.
Patrick Clancy, 36, who worked in software sales for Microsoft, agreed without hesitation. But when he came back to the family’s home in Duxbury, an affluent coastal suburb south of Boston, less than an hour later at around 6pm, the life he knew had been shattered by an act of horrific violence.
Believing his wife was upstairs bathing the children, he went to look for her. Instead, he found the couple’s second-floor bedroom door locked. After forcing it open, he saw blood on the floor, a bloodied knife on the nightstand and a room left cold by an open window.
Patrick rushed back downstairs and found Lindsay outside, barely conscious. She had cut her wrists and neck before jumping from the window, plunging roughly 20ft onto the frozen ground below. She told him she had tried to take her own life and, when he asked where the children were, said they were in the basement.
After calling 911, Pat remained beside her for about 10 minutes, fearing she might die before emergency responders could reach the Duxbury home.
Only after paramedics arrived did he race inside to search for the children: five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan. He found them in the basement, where all three had been strangled with exercise resistance bands.
Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead that night. Callan, the baby of the family, was airlifted to a hospital but died days later.
Now Lindsay Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse who has been confined to a wheelchair since the fall left her paralyzed, is on trial in connection with the deaths of her three children — a case that has stunned Massachusetts and remains almost impossible for many to comprehend.
Lindsay Clancy is facing three counts of murder for strangling her three children
Patrick Clancy was out running an errand for the family and came home to discover that their happy family existence had been snuffed out in an act of almost unimaginable violence
She is accused of strangling their three children – Cora, five, Dawson, three, and eight-month-old Callan – with exercise resistance bands
As a result, although both the prosecution and defense agree she killed her children, two radically different explanations for the tragedy will be presented at Plymouth County Superior Court after jury selection is completed this week.
The battle will not be over whether she did or did not commit the crime, but over her mental state at the time – and specifically whether she had been driven insane by a rare psychological condition known as ‘postpartum psychosis,’ or instead acted with calm and murderous deliberation after tiring of bringing up three youngsters while still working as a nurse.
On one side of court, prosecutors will outline how Clancy carefully planned the killings, arranging for her husband to be out of the house. They say she was sufficiently compos mentis that day that she managed to take her daughter to a pediatric appointment in the morning.
They also say that she’d looked up the takeout restaurant’s location online to calculate how long her husband would be gone, so she would have ‘the time and privacy needed to commit these murders.’
They alleged she had previously Googled the phrase ‘ways to kill.’ Four days before the children died, their mother allegedly had searched the phrase ‘can you treat a sociopath’ on her phone.
At an earlier hearing, the prosecution claimed that Clancy’s suicide attempt was only half-hearted and may have been staged.
They called the cuts on her neck and wrists ‘minor scratches’ and have argued she ‘slid down’ the side of the house rather than jumped to slow her descent. She only ended up paralyzed, having suffered traumatic spinal cord injuries in the fall, because she hadn’t taken into account that the ground would be frozen hard.
Prosecutors say she acted with ‘deliberate, premeditated and extreme atrocity and cruelty.’
As for motive – a particularly challenging issue for prosecutors given all the evidence that Clancy was a loving and devoted mother – Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague has portrayed the accused as selfish and disillusioned with motherhood.
Sprague has read out a note in court at an earlier hearing that Clancy wrote herself five months before Callan’s birth, in which Lindsay said: ‘I think I sort of resent my other children because they prevent me from treating Cal like my first baby… I want to feel love and connection with all of my kids.’
Critics of Clancy have also pointed to a post on an online parenting forum in which Clancy described her middle child Dawson as ‘the most difficult human I have ever encountered.’
But does this amount to proof of murderous intentions?
Clancy, who worked at Massachusetts General Hospital, has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first degree murder and faces a penalty of life imprisonment without parole if convicted.
Her defense lawyers – and her husband, who says he has forgiven her – counter that she was not responsible for her actions by virtue of insanity. They say her behavior was contaminated by more than a dozen medications – some of them, such as Ambien, Prozac, Klonopin and Valium, very powerful – that she’d been prescribed over several months as she’d experienced depression, insomnia and intense anxiety.
Patrick, who says he has forgiven her, said that she was not responsible for her actions by virtue of insanity
Clancy has pleaded not guilty, arguing she had been suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time
Her team filed lawsuits earlier this year accusing her medical providers of failing to properly diagnose, treat and monitor her for a ‘severe postpartum psychiatric condition.’
In a legal action against a psychiatrist who prescribed her myriad medications, her husband Patrick said that experts had simply kept throwing drugs at her, failing to monitor what effect they had or ‘attend to her worsening psychiatric condition.’
The lawsuit claimed that by the month before the killings, Clancy was reporting alarming symptoms such as panic attacks, racing thoughts, suicidal urges and a growing fear that ‘something awful might happen.’
After admitting herself to a day program for women with postpartum depression, a severe mood disorder occurring after childbirth, she even spent five days – at her instigation – at a psychiatric hospital weeks before the killings.
‘Lindsay Clancy did everything a mother in her situation could do,’ said her lawyers in their legal suit.
‘She recognized something was wrong with her. She sought medical treatment. She went to emergency rooms. She called crisis hotlines. She admitted herself to hospitals. She took the medication prescribed to her. She communicated her worsening symptoms to her providers. She told them the medications were making her worse.’
The gathering storm came to a head on the day before the killings, when Clancy claimed she heard a ‘compelling and unrecognizable singular male voice’ telling her that ‘she should die, that this is her last chance and that her children would suffer if she was gone.’
Just a few days after the killings, Patrick appealed to others to follow his example and forgive his wife – even though he simultaneously described his family as ‘the best thing that ever happened to me’ and said of his children: ‘They gave me purpose… There is now a massive void where that purpose once was.’
He insisted that his marriage had been strong and ‘grew diametrically stronger as her condition rapidly worsened.’
The ‘real Lindsay,’ he said, was ‘generously loving and caring towards everyone… the very fibers of her soul are loving.’
In an interview with the New Yorker magazine, he said his wife told him that she’d never planned to kill the children and hadn’t sent him out on an errand as a pretext so she could do it, but it instead happened ‘like a snap of the fingers’ – like a bolt of lightning out of the blue.
He said she also told him that she’d only looked up online how long it would take him to collect the food because she was worried he’d get stuck in rush hour traffic. As for Googling ‘ways to kill,’ she did it only because she’d been suicidal for two months, she said.
Some might be unconvinced by those explanations and Mr Clancy conceded that he might want to believe her. ‘I think it’s a lot more hurtful if she did plan it and tricked me into believing she was having a great day,’ he told the New Yorker.
Maternal infanticide – Clancy’s alleged offense – seems such an unnatural and monstrous crime that it’s not difficult to see why, for much of history, it has been treated as a capital offense.
However, that attitude started to shift in the 19th and 20th centuries as the medical community began to better understand postpartum depression. As a result, juries became reluctant to sentence women to death, often acquitting them or only convicting them of a lesser offense.
Some have questioned whether the pendulum might now have swung too far in the other direction, with people automatically assuming that no mother – least of all a maternity nurse like Lindsay Clancy who colleagues described as ‘born to be a mother’ – would ever in her right mind contemplate killing her children.
That being the case – so the argument goes – there must always be compelling, mitigating circumstances, thereby making the killer as much a victim as the dead children.
Many clearly believe Clancy is a victim. Almost as soon as prosecutors said they were charging Clancy with murder, a group of her fellow nurses set up an online group called LAOL, for ‘Lindsay’s Army of Love,’ to coordinate support for her.
Nearly 100 local women wrote to the judge, pledging to stand by her, vowing to stand by her ‘in her darkest hour as we wish any other mother would do for us.’ Other women who’ve struggled with postpartum depression have also expressed support.
However, legal experts told the Daily Mail that the defense will have extreme difficulty arguing insanity.
Under Massachusetts law, the burden is on the defense to persuade jurors that, because of a severe mental disease or defect, Lindsay Clancy lacked criminal responsibility at the precise moment the children were killed.
And that, said attorney and victims’ rights advocate Shari Karney, will be a challenge for Clancy’s lawyers.
According to Karney, such harrowing cases are usually decided on emotion and so another big hurdle for the defense will be ‘overcoming the natural bias many people have when a mother is accused of killing her own children.’
She went on: ‘This case ultimately turns on one invisible piece of evidence — the defendant’s state of mind. No one can see it. Jurors have to reconstruct it through competing psychiatric experts, medical records and her conduct before, during and after the alleged killings.’
‘Mental illness and legal insanity are not the same thing. That distinction may ultimately decide this case.’
Duncan Levin, a former federal prosecutor and criminal defense attorney whose clients have included Harvey Weinstein and con-woman Anna Delvey, said the prosecution will point to any evidence of planning, preparation or purposeful action.
Clancy embraces her youngest child. She faces a penalty of life imprisonment without parole if convicted
Just a few days after the killings, Patrick appealed to others to follow his example and forgive his wife
After admitting herself to a day program for women with postpartum depression, Clancy spent five days – at her instigation – at a psychiatric hospital weeks before the killings
However, he said: ‘Planning is not necessarily the opposite of psychosis. A person can act methodically while still operating within a profoundly delusional reality.’
Another key issue for the defense will be educating the jury about the distinction between the relatively common postpartum depression and the little-known postpartum psychosis – the latter sufficiently rare that it’s estimated to affect only two women out of 1,000 births. And even then, research suggests that, if untreated, there is only a four to five percent chance of a mother killing herself or a child.
The condition usually strikes within the first few weeks following childbirth and symptoms – reflecting the sufferer’s drastic break with reality – included hallucinations, delusions, extreme confusion and paranoia. Experts say it requires immediate medical intervention and hospitalization.
Dr Susan Hatters Friedman, a forensic and reproductive psychiatrist and expert in postpartum psychosis and depression, told the Daily Mail it was ‘one of the most serious mental disorders there is.’
She said it can develop ‘very quickly,’ which sets it apart from schizophrenia, which has similar symptoms. Lindsay Clancy, of course, hadn’t just had a baby – her youngest was eight months – but Dr Hatters Friedman said it can be triggered later, for example by a mother cutting down on breastfeeding, thereby going through hormonal changes.
And even postpartum depression, she said, can lead to homicidal tendencies when a suicidal mother becomes convinced that she has to take her offspring with her.
The expert also said that, as with schizophrenia, some postpartum psychosis sufferers would be perfectly able to plan to kill herself and her children, adding: ‘That doesn’t negate the idea of insanity.’
Kevin Reddington, the defense attorney representing Clancy, has called her case ‘probably the most emotionally disturbing and challenging’ of his long career.
It will be his task to ensure that jurors can separate the same feelings likely to afflict them from the evidence he’ll present that his client was not responsible for what she did.
