Lindsay Clancy Murder Case: Ex-Husband Timeline in Focus

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Patrick Clancy’s detailed testimony about the night his three young children died could give prosecutors one of their strongest road maps for arguing that Lindsay Clancy was clearheaded, intentional and legally responsible when the killings occurred, according to a legal analyst.

Taking the stand Wednesday in Plymouth Superior Court, Patrick described for jurors, step by step, the errands that pulled him away from the family’s home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, on Jan. 24, 2023. He said he first went to CVS to buy a stool softener for one of the children, then planned to pick up dinner before returning home.

While he was inside the pharmacy, Patrick testified, Lindsay called him back, appeared to understand why he was there and calmly agreed to a generic alternative. But when he got back to the house, he found it disturbingly silent. Inside, he discovered blood in the couple’s locked bedroom and then saw Lindsay injured beneath an open second-floor window.

Patrick told the court that when he found Lindsay Clancy lying on her back below their bedroom window, she had severe cuts to her wrists and a red mark running across her neck.

“What happened?” he recalled asking her.

“I tried to kill myself,” Lindsay replied, according to Patrick’s testimony.

He then asked, “Where are the kids?”

“They’re in the basement,” Lindsay told him.

Patrick testified that she did not say the children were injured, in danger or needed help.

Attorney Shari Karney said those seemingly mundane details, the text messages, phone call, dinner order and timing of Patrick’s drive, may become critical as prosecutors try to prove Lindsay understood her actions when the children were strangled with exercise bands.

“I call this case murder versus madness,” Karney told INC News.

Karney said Patrick’s testimony largely helped the prosecution because it portrayed Lindsay as responsive and organized shortly before the killings. The state, she said, is attempting to “squeeze that timeline” as tightly as possible around the precise moment the children were killed.

“That’s fairly lucid,” Karney said of Lindsay’s ability to discuss the CVS purchase and coordinate the takeout order.

But the defense is expected to argue that competence during routine tasks does not establish criminal responsibility during the killings. Lindsay’s attorneys contend she suffered from severe mental illness, including postpartum psychosis, and was impaired by a shifting regimen of psychiatric medications.

Patrick testified that Lindsay later told him she heard a man’s voice telling her that if she did not act then, she would “lose her chance.” He also said she had never previously told him she was hearing voices or experiencing psychosis.

Karney said the case will likely turn on whether jurors view the killings as a calculated act or “a catastrophic collapse” caused by severe psychological illness.

The emotional stakes were on display when prosecutors played Patrick’s 911 call for the jury. The recording was barred from broadcast or reproduction under a court order, and the pool camera remained trained on Lindsay.

She sobbed and buried her face in her hands as the call played.

Karney said that reaction could help both sides.

For the defense, she said, it humanized Lindsay as a “shattered, broken” mother confronting the consequences of the worst night of her life. For prosecutors, the same reaction captured the horror of the killings.

Before the recording was played, Judge William Sullivan warned jurors not to allow sympathy, anger, passion or pity to influence their verdict.

“You must not be influenced in any way by the unpleasant nature of some of the evidence,” Sullivan said, reminding jurors that their verdict must not be based on “sympathy, anger, passion or prejudice or pity.”

Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, has pleaded not guilty to three counts each of murder and strangulation.