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Trial over three children
Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts woman accused of strangling her three young children to death, pleaded not guilty to three murder charges tied to the deaths of 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old son Dawson, and infant son Callan at her family's home in Duxbury, a Boston suburb, on Jan. 24, 2023.
“Lindsay Clancy has pleaded not guilty to three murder charges”
Prosecutors told the jury that Clancy is "criminally responsible" for the deaths, while her defense attorney Kevin Reddington argued in opening statements that Clancy was suffering from "psychosis" at the time and that she "did not get the medication, did not get the medical treatment that she so deserved."
ABC News reported that prosecutors said Clancy attempted suicide on the night of the killings, leaving her paralyzed and in a wheelchair, and that she is currently being held at a state hospital.
In the trial’s first witness testimony, Patrick Clancy told jurors he returned home from picking up takeout dinner on Jan. 24, 2023, found his then-wife on the ground outside a window of their two-story home, and later found the three children in the basement.
The case has focused on postpartum psychosis, with ABC News contrasting it against postpartum depression and citing that postpartum psychosis affects roughly 1 to 2 mothers per 1,000 childbirths, according to a 2017 systematic review in the journal BMC Psychiatry.
First responders describe scene
First responders testified in Plymouth Superior Court about what they found after Clancy killed her three children and tried to end her life, with officers describing Clancy drifting in and out of consciousness in the snow after jumping from her Massachusetts home’s second-floor window.
Officer Stephen Hall testified that Patrick Clancy shouted from behind the home, "I can't wake them up - I can't get them up!" and that Hall then went down to the basement where he initially discovered Dawson, 3, lying shirtless in just a diaper or underwear.
Within minutes, Hall and Officer Brian Josephine rushed Dawson outside to waiting EMTs, then returned to the basement and found "two children on the [basement] floor, motionless, and EMTs and paramedics were working on them," before learning they were Cora, 5, and Callan, 8 months.
WJAR reported that Josephine testified that when the officers followed the sound of Patrick Clancy’s screams downstairs, only 8-month-old Callan had a faint pulse, and that they began rendering aid with help from firefighters.
The Boston Globe also reported that Duxbury Fire Captain PJ Hussey told jurors, "It turned very chaotic very quickly," as more ambulances rushed to the house and firefighters and paramedics tried to save the children.
Diary entries and responsibility
As the trial continued in Plymouth Superior Court, jurors heard excerpts from Lindsay Clancy’s diary describing anxiety and insomnia in the days and weeks before the killings, with prosecutors reading entries that included her obsession with her infant son’s sleep schedule.
“"I feel like I'm drowning every day,"”
In one diary passage read in court, Clancy wrote, "I feel like I'm drowning every day," and in another entry she wrote, "I want help. I want to be well."
CBS News reported that prosecutors alleged Clancy made a calculated decision to strangle Cora, Dawson, and Callan on Jan. 24, 2023, while the defense argued she was overmedicated and committed the killings during an episode of extreme postpartum psychosis.
The diary evidence was introduced through the testimony of Massachusetts State Police Trooper Cory Melo, who helped execute the search warrant at the Clancy home after the January 2023 killings and later reviewed several journals recovered from the house.
NewsNation said Melo told jurors he reviewed entries in which Clancy wrote that hearing Callan cry "just about killed me," and that she became "obsessed" with his sleep schedule and felt "completely overwhelmed" caring for three children.
