THE VOICE TOLD HER TO DO IT — LINDSAY CLANCY’S DEFENSE REVEALS CHI-LLING ACCOUNT OF A MALE VOICE BEFORE THE TRA-GEDY, LEAVING COURTROOM STUNNED
killed at the family’s home in January 2023. According to her defense, a male voice started after her husband left the house, telling her “this is your last chance. Kill the children so you can kill yourself.”
She told the kids “go to God, baby” as she strangled them, her lawyer said, and then tried to kill herself. She survived, paralyzed. Cora was 5, Dawson was 3, Callan was 8 months.
Prosecutors say Clancy, a labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General for roughly eight years, methodically planned the killings at the family’s Duxbury, Massachusetts home, sending her husband out for takeout and a pediatric laxative before strangling the three children with exercise bands.
Her defense argues she lacked criminal responsibility because severe postpartum illness produced command hallucinations telling her to kill the kids and herself. She has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder and faces life without parole if convicted. Strangulation counts were dropped before trial as redundant.
More than 50 witnesses have testified in the first two weeks. The trial is expected to run up to six weeks before an 18-person jury.
The jury heard the 911 call this week. Patrick Clancy, 38, is heard arriving home, finding his wife on the ground outside after she’d cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window, then going to the basement, where he found Cora, Dawson and Callan face down with exercise bands tied tight around their necks. He screams and sobs for more than 30 seconds before telling the operator, “she killed the kids.” Lindsay, in a wheelchair and paralyzed from the waist down, sobbed in court as the jury was excused.
Patrick testified that Lindsay’s mental health began worsening in September 2022, four months after Callan was born. She saw a psychiatrist, then additional perinatal providers who added anti-anxiety meds, antidepressants and benzodiazepines.
Medical records show she was prescribed 13 different psychiatric medications, more than 30 prescriptions in all, from multiple uncoordinated providers between September 2022 and January 2023, including Zoloft, Prozac, Ativan, Klonopin, the antipsychotic Seroquel and the mood stabilizer Lamictal. Prosecutors have pushed back that she was rarely on more than two to four at once and that leftover pills suggest she wasn’t taking them consistently.
In November she went to an ER after not sleeping for 48 hours. In December she was admitted to Mass General for suicidal thoughts and told Patrick she had “intrusive thoughts” about harming the children but said she didn’t plan to.
On New Year’s Eve she was admitted to McLean, a psychiatric hospital, and asked to be discharged on Jan. 5 before their daughter’s birthday party. Both Patrick and Lindsay have since sued her providers, including psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Tufts, alleging they failed to diagnose bipolar disorder with postpartum onset and that the drug regimen precipitated a psychotic break. Patrick testified that no one ever advised him not to leave his wife alone with the children.
Her diary was read aloud in court. “I’m completely overwhelmed trying to take care of the kids. I feel like I’m drowning every day,” one entry said. Another read: “I feel disconnected from myself, time, reality.”
The family’s former nanny, Elaine Rossi, called Lindsay “a wonderful mom” and said she’d never had concerns about her with the children. Patrick’s father described the family as the “all-American family.”
On Jan. 24, 2023, Lindsay took Cora to a checkup and built a snowman in the yard with the kids. Patrick said she “seemed happy” and was “having one of her best days.” He left to pick up food and medicine and called her from the pharmacy around 5:30 p.m. to confirm the right medication. She “sounded like she was busy,” he said.
Patrick since remarried and moved to New York. In a phone call from the hospital after the killings, he testified, Lindsay never mentioned the children, only “what she went through.” Lindsay is being held at Tewksbury State Hospital.