If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or use the Crisis Text Line by texting “Home” to 741741. More resources are available at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.
Closing arguments have wrapped up in the high-profile trial of Lindsay Clancy. Prosecutors and defense attorneys offered sharply different accounts of what was happening in Clancy’s mind when she strangled her three children at their Duxbury home three and a half years ago.
Both sides agree that Clancy killed her children. But the question is whether she was in a state of mind where she can be held criminally responsible for her actions.
Kevin Reddington, who’s defending Clancy, showed the jury a photo of the happy Clancy family, and then a photo of Clancy in the hospital, hooked up to multiple machines. He blamed her doctors for failing to help her.
“How does this turn into this?” Reddington asked. “How? Because of the damn medicine and the lousy medical care that she got.”
He also called the investigation into the killings “lousy” and suggested the prosecution and mental health experts were distorting the evidence to deny the depth of her mental illness.
But the prosecution told the jury that Clancy showed she was in control of her behavior, walking through the events leading up to the moment of the killings. They argued that every step showed she was in control and not, as the defense had argued during the trial, controlled by a voice she’d heard commanding her to kill the children and then herself.
Jennifer Sprague, assistant district attorney for Plymouth County, said the sequence in which she killed the children showed “ordered thinking.”
Sprague said Clancy knew her behavior was wrong, and disputed the idea that the health care “system” failed her.
“In fact, she had more access to treatment and care and support than a lot of people do,” Sprague said.
Instead, the attorney added, Clancy wasn’t compliant with her medication and lied to her doctors about what she was taking and how she was feeling.
“Defense wants you to believe that this is a woman who’s begging for help and willing to do anything and everything her providers tell her to do to get better,” she said.
After weeks of testimony, the case is now in the hands of the jury, which must now decide whether Clancy was criminally responsible for the killings.
Clancy admitted to killing her young children: Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and 8-month-old Callan. She has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder by reason of lack of criminal responsibility.
Under Massachusetts law, the question is not just whether Clancy was mentally ill. Jurors must determine whether that illness left her without the capacity to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of her behavior. The prosecution has the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that she was criminally responsible because she knew what she was doing.
Both sides used medical experts to argue that she did — or did not — understand that her actions were wrong. Whether Clancy heard voices commanding her to kill her children and then herself was key to the defense.
The prosecution argued Clancy deliberately planned the killings, including sending her husband to pick up takeout food and prescriptions so she’d be alone with the children. They said she strangled the children with exercise bands in the basement and later jumped from a second-story window in an attempt to kill herself.
They challenged claims she was acting on hallucinations, with medical experts noting she didn’t report hearing voices until after the killings and that the hallucinations stopped afterward, which they said was atypical.
Clancy’s attorney Reddington argued his client was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis and other serious mental illness at the time. Defense witnesses testified Clancy said she’d heard voices ordering her to kill the children and then herself.
Clancy herself never took the stand. But jurors heard from Patrick Clancy, the children’s father and Lindsay Clancy’s husband at the time of the killings, as well as her mother and former mother-in-law. They spoke to her mental health struggles after the birth of her children, and the deterioration they saw after her youngest son Callan was born.
Patrick Clancy and Lindsay’s mother described her suicidal thoughts, as well as fears about harming herself and her children. They also talked of the many medications she was prescribed, which did not seem to work. Still, they told the court they set aside concerns because she was seeking medical help and continued to be a devoted mother.
Earlier this month, Patrick Clancy testified he came home on Jan. 24, 2023, after picking up dinner and prescriptions. He found his then-wife outside semi-conscious on the ground after she had jumped from a second-story window. He called 911 and then found the three children in the basement with exercise resistance bands around their necks.
The fall left Lindsay Clancy paralyzed from the waist down.
Patrick Clancy publicly defended his wife days after the killings. He wrote in a GoFundMe appeal that people who had never known her were portraying her unfairly and that she had been a loving and dedicated mother.
“I want to ask all of you that you find it deep within yourselves to forgive Lindsay, as I have,” he wrote.
Lindsay Clancy and her former husband have filed separate civil lawsuits against her medical providers.
Clancy’s trial has captivated people across the country, drawing varying degrees of sympathy, conspiracy theories and debate over postpartum mental health issues.
If convicted of first-degree murder, Clancy faces life in prison without parole. If found not guilty by lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility for an indefinite period, potentially for life unless future reviews show she is healthy and no longer a threat.
