PLYMOUTH, Mass. — Following a first week marked by emotional testimony and a jury visit to the house where prosecutors say Lindsay Clancy strangled her three young children, the Massachusetts murder trial resumed Monday with a closer look at her private journal entries from the months before the 2023 killings.
In those writings, Clancy described being consumed by anxiety and the demands of motherhood. She wrote about struggling to get her infant son, Callan, to sleep, fearing he might be ill, worrying about returning to her job as a labor and delivery nurse, and feeling distressed that she could not breastfeed. She also wrote that she felt emotionally distant from her children and from her then-husband.
“I’m so desperate to get a mental break from taking care of everyone that my mind is trying to find something physically wrong with me,” she wrote in a Nov. 18, 2022, journal entry.
Her defense team has portrayed Clancy as a devoted mother overtaken by postpartum psychosis, a rare but severe mental health condition that can emerge after childbirth and distort a person’s sense of reality.
Prosecutors argue the killings were deliberate and that Clancy should be found criminally responsible for the deaths of her children, Callan, Dawson and Cora Clancy, who were between 8 months and 5 years old.
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