New information is coming out about the night when Massachusetts mom Lindsay Clancy strangled her three kids to death, including harrowing images that showed the scene after she attempted to kill herself.
The high-profile trial resumed on Monday, as 18 jurors (12 jurors and six alternates) heard from an emergency room doctor who treated Clancy and her two children(Image: CJ Gunther/Pool The Boston Heral)
New information is coming out about the night when Massachusetts mom Lindsay Clancy strangled her three kids to death, including harrowing images that showed the scene after she attempted to kill herself.
The high-profile trial resumed on Monday, as 18 jurors (12 jurors and six alternates) heard from an emergency room doctor who treated Clancy and her two , as well as excerpts from diary entries in which the 35-year-old mother chronicled her downward mental spiral in the months leading to the killings.
In the diaries, Clancy describes being “completely overwhelmed” and “desperate to get a mental break from taking care of everyone” as she handled “horrible insomnia and anxiety.” In 2023, killed her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, by strangling them, and then attempted to kill herself.
Recently released images of the crime scene show the window from which Clancy threw herself after committing the chilling killings. Clancy’s ex-husband, previously testified that when he arrived home the night of the murders, he encountered pools of blood in their bedroom, an open window, and his wife on the ground below it.
Clancy reportedly jumped from the second-floor window of their bedroom. Patrick is said to have found her with “deep cuts on her wrists… and a red line across her neck.”
Recently released images of the crime scene show the window from which Clancy threw herself after committing the chilling killings(Image: Greg Derr/Pool The Patriot Ledge)
Post-partum psychosis
Clancy does not contend that she killed her children in January 24, 2023. However, her defense alleges that she committed the killings because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, a rare psychiatric condition that occurs after childbirth that often affects women’s hold of reality. They argue she was a loving mother who fell ill.
“She had no motive. She loved her children,” defense attorney Kevin Reddington said in his opening statement.
Meanwhile, prosecutors say she acted intentionally and should be held criminally responsible for the deaths of the children. In opening statements, prosecutors say she “deliberately and meticulously” killed the children and “acted intentionally, rationally, and swiftly to accomplish every specific goal.”
In the criminal trial and a medical malpractice lawsuit, her attorneys say the 35-year-old had bipolar disorder that wasn’t fully diagnosed until after the killings. Her attorneys say her condition seemed to worsen on an ever-shifting lineup of psychiatric prescriptions, some of them problematic for bipolar patients.
Clancy does not contend that she killed her children in January 24, 2023(Image: Facebook/)
In the three months before the killings, various clinicians prescribed a range of antidepressants, sleep aids, an antipsychotic, and other medications while she reported increasingly profound insomnia, anxiety, despair, and confusion about what was real, according to her lawsuit.
Both the prosecution and her defense attorney read pages from her journal on Monday as she chronicled those difficult months.
“I want help. I want to be well,” Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, read from one journal entry.
She also wrote of feeling “incredibly sad and guilty” about not breastfeeding and was “obsessed” with Callan’s sleep and nap schedule.
“I have crazy brain fog. I feel like I can’t make a plan,” she wrote in another, undated entry. “I live moment to moment waiting for the next nap time. I’m terrified of Cal getting overtired now because I feel can’t help him.”
In separate lawsuits, Lindsay and ex-husband Patrick Clancy allege that various providers failed her, and should have recognized she was a risk to herself and the children. The providers, at least those who have responded to date, deny the allegations and dispute that she clearly told them she intended to harm the kids.
In separate lawsuits, Lindsay and ex-husband Patrick Clancy allege that various providers failed her, and should have recognized she was a risk to herself and the children(Image: @Lindsay Marie Clancy/Facebook)
Lindsay Clancy was seeking help before the killings
When she sought care at a postpartum depression program in late December 2022, providers noted that her symptoms might be due to medication, according to her lawsuit. It says those clinicians told her to taper off the antipsychotic drug and then discharged her after a day.
Clancy checked herself into a psychiatric hospital that New Year’s Eve and spent several days there. Once home, she resumed appointments with her psychiatrist, who last saw her for 17 minutes on Jan. 23, 2023, according to her lawsuit.
The next day, she believed a commanding voice was telling her to “kill the children so you can kill yourself,” according to her lawyers.
That evening, she asked her then-husband to run some errands, a request that prosecutors cast as a ploy to get him out of the house.
Lindsay Clancy wept at the defense table last week as Patrick Clancy and other witnesses testified(Image: Greg Derr/Pool The Patriot Ledge)
Father returns home to a shocking scene
Lindsay Clancy wept at the defense table last week as Patrick Clancy and other witnesses testified.
He told jurors about returning to a horrible scene at their house: a bloodied bedroom, an open window, his wife on the ground below it, the children in the basement, throttled with exercise bands.
“She killed the kids!” he told a 911 dispatcher on a call played in court.
Lindsay Clancy remains paralyzed from the waist down because of the fall.
In the hospital two days later, when a forensic psychologist asked Clancy how she felt, she responded: “horrified.” She also asked if she had a lawyer and whether her body and legs were broken. She was intubated and could only communicate through written messages on a whiteboard, the psychologist testified.
“She then asked, can she have visitors, and where her family is,” Dr. Jhilam Biswas of Brigham and Women’s Hospital recalled.
Doctors testified Monday that 8-month-old Callan was in cardiac arrest when he arrived at a hospital in nearby Plymouth. He needed a ventilator at Boston Children’s Hospital to help him breathe, but he did have a heartbeat. He died after three days.