Lindsay Clancy's lawyer argues the Massachusetts nurse, who has pleaded not guilty to murder charges, was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she killed her three young children in 2023.
On Jan. 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy killed her three children and then jumped out of a second-story window, a fall that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Now a jury will decide whether she was criminally responsible for her actions or not.
Her now ex-husband Patrick Clancy testified during her murder trial, which began July 27, that he left their home in Duxbury, Mass., to pick up dinner and medicine for their daughter. Less than an hour later, he returned to find "blood everywhere" in their bedroom and Lindsay lying in the backyard.
She had "deep cuts on her wrists," he recalled, "and a red line across her neck."
Patrick called 911. When he asked Lindsay what she had done, she said, "I tried to kill myself," according to Plymouth County Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague, who recounted the recorded call during Lindsay's Feb. 7 arraignment.Â
He asked where their kids—Cora, 5, and sons Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months—were, Sprague continued. Lindsay told him they were in the basement.
And then, the prosecutor said, Patrick could "be heard screaming in agony and shock as he found his children."
Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead at a Plymouth hospital, according to a D.A.'s Office news release, while Callan was airlifted to Boston Children's Hospital, where he died three days later.
Lindsay has pleaded not guilty to three counts each of murder and strangulation. Her lawyers maintain that the former labor-and-delivery nurse wasn't in her right mind due to postpartum psychosis. She has been a patient at Tewksbury Hospital, a state-run psychiatric facility, since she was remanded for care in 2023.
During his July 28 opening statement, defense attorney Kevin Reddington chronicled some of Lindsay's attempts to seek mental health care, starting with a psychiatrist appointment on Sept. 12, 2022, four months after Callan was born.
She went to a hospital emergency room on Nov. 16, Reddington continued, because she was "so depressed and messed up from lack of sleep, and so unable to emote, she couldn't laugh, she couldn't cry, she couldn't have any feelings. She was a robot."
Patrick, who has since remarried, said after the D.A.'s Office announced its intent to file murder charges that he had forgiven Lindsay.
"I took as much pride in being her husband as I did in being a father," he said in a Jan. 30, 2023, statement, "and felt persistently lucky to have her in my life."
He continued, "I want to ask all of you that you find it deep within yourselves to forgive Lindsay, as I have. The real Lindsay was generously loving and caring towards everyone—me, our kids, family, friends, and her patients. The very fibers of her soul are loving. All I wish for her now is that she can somehow find peace."
He reiterated the sentiment months later, telling the New Yorker, "I wasn’t married to a monster—I was married to someone who got sick."
