The judge overseeing Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial said he plans to declare a mistrial, while giving her defense lawyer one hour to ask the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to temporarily block that declaration.
The development came on the 28th day of proceedings, after the judge disclosed that jurors had sent a note to the court saying, “with a heavy heart,” they were “unable to come to a unanimous decision,” according to courtroom footage.
Throughout the trial, which stretched for more than a month, prosecutors and Clancy’s defense team argued sharply over the central question in the case: whether she should be held criminally responsible for her actions.
What Was Lindsay Clancy Accused Of?
The Lindsay Clancy murder trial focused on the devastating events of Jan. 24, 2023, when she has acknowledged killing her and Patrick Clancy’s three children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan — inside the family’s home in Duxbury, Massachusetts.
Patrick testified that, earlier that evening, Lindsay asked him to go to a local CVS pharmacy to pick up medication and then stop at a nearby restaurant for takeout. When he came back, he found her in the backyard after she had jumped from a second-story window in an apparent suicide attempt. In the basement, he discovered Cora, Dawson and Callan strangled with exercise bands. All three children died from the attack.
In their opening statement, the prosecution argued that during the time frame that Patrick was out of the house, Lindsay executed the children’s killings with “deliberate premeditation and extreme atrocity and cruelty.”
“This was not a woman in the throes of psychosis on Jan. 24, 2023,” Plymouth County Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham told jurors. “This was a woman who acted intentionally, rationally and swiftly to accomplish a very specific goal: to kill.”
“This was a woman who no longer liked the life she thought she wanted,” she added. “It was getting harder and harder to control, and when she saw the opportunity to escape, she made the selfish choice to take it, and to take Cora, Dawson and Callan first before attempting to take her own life.”
What Was Lindsay Clancy’s Defense?
Lindsay’s defense attorney Kevin Reddington did not dispute she killed the children, but he argued that her actions were driven by postpartum psychosis, not malice, and that she was therefore unable to understand the wrongfulness of them.
“This is a woman that was suffering from psychosis at the time that she went down to that basement,” he told jurors during his opening statement. “She had no motive. She loved her children. She intended to kill herself. She didn’t fake that.”
Who Testified in Lindsay Clancy’s Trial?
During Lindsay’s trial, many family members took the stand, with Patrick, Patrick’s mother Susan Clancy, Lindsay’s sister Allison Ozga and Linsday’s mother Paula Musgrove all testifying to her declining mental health and her efforts to get well.
“I’m really sick,” Lindsay texted Paula in October 2022, per evidence presented in court. “Something is wrong.”
Several medical professionals who worked with Lindsay in the months leading up to the killings also testified, describing the symptoms she reported and the various medications she was prescribed.
Jurors additionally heard gut-wrenching audio of the 911 call Patrick made after discovering Lindsay in the backyard, as well as photos of her in the hospital following her suicide attempt. They also were read passages from her diary, where she described feeling “completely overwhelmed” trying to care for her kids.
“I’m so desperate to get a mental break from taking care of everyone that my mind is trying to make something physically wrong with me,” she wrote in a November 2022 entry, evidence admitted in court showed.
A forensic psychologist and expert witness for the defense who evaluated Lindsay after the killings, diagnosing her with bipolar II disorder with severe depression, testified that he believes she experienced a “delusion of influence” when she killed the kids.
“She felt that her body was taken over by an external force, where she was in a dream state and did not have control of her own body,” Dr. Phillip Resnick asserted on the stand. “It was almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings.”
Meanwhile, a psychologist testifying for the defense who evaluated her in April shared his clinical opinion that Clancy knew what she was doing was wrong and should be held criminally responsible.
“[My] opinion is that she retained an awareness of the illegality of killing others, including killing her children,” Dr. Kirk Heilbrun said on day 20 of the murder trial. “Her moral awareness of the wrongfulness of this killing was influenced by her strong desire to die, and if she were dead, not to leave her children behind.”
“Her awareness of the illegality and moral wrongfulness of such killing,” he explained, “is best appraised by understanding these acts as a serious suicide attempt combined with altruistic filicide—killing her children out of love—rather than as a response to command hallucinations [telling her to kill herself and the children].”