PLYMOUTH, Mass. — In the weeks leading up to the tragic events of January 2023, Lindsay Clancy’s online activity revealed a chilling quest for information on hallucinations, psychosis, and the potential side effects of several medications she had been prescribed. This evidence was brought to light during her murder trial on Thursday in Massachusetts.
Towards the end of December 2022, Clancy delved into searches on suicide methods, bipolar disorder, and insomnia. By January, her focus had shifted to postpartum depression. In addition to her online searches, Clancy left behind a poignant note penned in October 2022. In it, she expressed anxiety over her parenting decisions, such as her choice to cease breastfeeding her 8-month-old and her uncertain plans about having a fourth child.
Clancy’s defense argues that she was suffering from bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis, the latter being a rare and severe condition that can distort a woman’s perception of reality following childbirth. This diagnosis was confirmed by a forensic psychiatrist after the incident.
In her October note, Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse, voiced a deep worry about her ability to provide her youngest child with the same level of care and attention she had given her older children, who were aged 3 and 5 at the time.
“I’m terrified of something happening to my kids or doing something wrong to mess up their development,” Clancy confessed in her note. “Our generation is inundated with information about every aspect of parenting. It’s overwhelming. For the last five years, I’ve just filled my mind with all things parenting, and it’s just unhealthy,” the note concluded, capturing her struggles with the relentless pressures of motherhood.
If you are experiencing suicidal, substance use or other mental health crises please call or text the new three digit code at 988. You will reach a trained crisis counselor for free, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can also go to 988lifeline.org or dial the current toll free number 800-273-8255
Clancy's livestreamed trial has generated intense public interest, with journalists and spectators packing the courtroom as online audiences pore over the details of the tragedy.
Clancy's attorneys do not dispute that she killed the children. But they say the jury should not hold her criminally responsible because she was mentally ill, believing she heard voices ordering her to take their lives and her own.
Prosecutors argue she was an intentional killer who contrived to get her husband out of the house by sending him to get takeout and to the pharmacy on Jan. 24, 2023, then strangled the children with exercise bands.
Prosecutor Shanan Buckingham has urged jurors not to view the trial as "a public debate about women's mental health and how the medical system treats women."
If convicted of murder, Clancy faces life in prison without parole. If found not guilty due to a lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility.
Her attorneys say Clancy did everything she could to seek help: She turned to multiple outpatient providers, tried various drugs they prescribed, called a suicide hotline, went to an emergency room, and approached but wasn't accepted into a hospital-based, full-day treatment program for women with postpregnancy mental health problems. Clancy even checked herself into a psychiatric hospital for several days.
Rather than improving, her condition worsened on the ever-remixed cocktail of psychiatric medications, some of them problematic for bipolar patients, her attorneys and family say.
Prosecutors aim to show that Clancy had access to a range of mental health services but sometimes ignored doctors' advice and stopped taking certain medications. They've brought several of her medical providers who testified she never talked about having a plan to harm herself or her children. They say she never showed signs of psychosis or mania, although she did say she was having suicidal thoughts.
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