PLYMOUTH, Mass. – Jurors in the trial of Lindsay Clancy have been working through deliberations as they consider whether she should be found criminally responsible for the 2023 deaths of her three young children inside the family’s Massachusetts home.
There is no dispute between prosecutors and the defense that Clancy killed the children. The central question is why. Her attorneys say she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis and that inadequate mental health care worsened her condition. Prosecutors contend the killings were intentional and planned.
During 21 days of testimony, jurors heard from a wide range of witnesses, including medical professionals, first responders, family members and Clancy’s former husband.
A conviction could lead to a sentence as severe as life in prison. If Clancy is found not guilty, she could either be released or continue to be held in a mental health facility. Should jurors remain deadlocked, the judge could declare a mistrial.
As deliberations continue, these are some of the key moments from the trial:
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.
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Judge declined to remove a juror
Before sending the deadlocked jury home Thursday, Judge William Sullivan declined a defense request to remove one of the jurors following heated discussions from both sides.
Earlier, the jury’s foreperson sent the judge a note saying a single juror won’t follow the court’s instructions about reasonable doubt.
Details of the jury room conflict weren’t revealed and only briefly discussed in open court, but it raised the possibility that a single holdout was standing in the way of a verdict.
Clancy’s attorney Kevin Reddington said the juror should have been dismissed from the case. Sullivan said removing a deliberating juror is a sensitive undertaking.
The judge questioned each juror individually in private, then reread his instructions about reasonable doubt in court.
Reddington said afterward outside the courthouse that the juror would be questioned again by the judge Friday.
Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague said in court that she believed Sullivan’s instruction was appropriate and no further action was necessary.
Jurors have struggled to agree on a verdict
Jurors have sent notes to the judge at least three times since they began deliberating Aug. 27.
On Tuesday, the fourth day of deliberations, jurors sent a note in the morning saying they could not unanimously agree.
The note did not elaborate, and there were no clues as to whether a majority of jurors were leaning toward a conviction or acquittal. It also did not provide any insight into the tone of deliberations or whether they had been cordial or acrimonious.
Sullivan asked jurors to keep deliberating.
On Wednesday they sent the court another short note saying they were still at an impasse. Sullivan again told them to keep trying.
Clancy’s former husband made anguished 911 call
Clancy’s former husband, Patrick Clancy, was first to take the stand.
In emotional testimony, he described the day he found his wife after she tried to kill herself.
Lindsay Clancy had sent him out to get takeout food and medication for their daughter, which prosecutors argue was an excuse to get him out of the house.
He came home to find the house unusually silent, before finding blood throughout the main bedroom and a window open.
Jurors listened to the 911 call Patrick Clancy made after finding his wife outside in the snow. Clancy can be heard speaking with his wife, then tells the dispatcher he’s going to check on the children.
Moments later, he howls and cries after finding his children in the basement. The confused dispatcher repeatedly asks what happened.
“She killed the kids!” he yells.
Everyone knew Clancy was struggling
Clancy’s mother, mother-in-law, sister, friends and co-workers testified that Clancy struggled with her mental health after giving birth to Callan, the youngest of her three children.
Clancy’s mother-in-law, Susan Clancy, said she and her former daughter-in-law were close. Both worked as labor and delivery nurses. She described Lindsay as a wonderful mother.
But Susan Clancy testified that Lindsay had become anxious, paranoid and suicidal, and that the psychiatric care she was getting wasn’t helping.
“She felt unwell. She had insomnia. She was losing her appetite. She was very anxious and sad,” Susan Clancy said. “She was begging for help.”
Lindsay Clancy’s mother, Paula Musgrove, testified that her daughter was scared of sleeping alone, became paranoid and believed the medications she was taking “were destroying her mind.”
“Mom, will you please come up and stay with me for a bit? I’m really sick. Something is wrong,” Clancy wrote in an October 2022 text message that Paula Musgrove read in court. “I had horrible insomnia all night, and I just don’t know how I am going to get through the day. … It’s just really scary, and I don’t want to be alone.”
The defense questioned the quality of Clancy’s medical care
Clancy saw several doctors about her declining mental health, and eventually checked herself in to a psychiatric hospital.
Her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, argued that she was misdiagnosed and overmedicated.
As he cross-examined one of her psychiatrists, Dr. Jennifer Tufts, Reddington questioned her expertise, prescribing decisions and use of 25-minute video appointments with limited time for talk therapy.
At one point, Reddington implied that Tufts was a box-checking “robot.”
“What did you do? You had a woman who was telling you she felt hopeless,” he asked as they discussed an appointment about two months before the killings.
“I told her that this was something we could address, that there was hope, that there are treatments, that there are different types of programs,” Tufts said, “so she knew that she still had options and a reason to hope.”
Clancy said she heard a voice telling her to kill
Paul Zeizel, a clinical and forensic psychologist who visited Lindsay Clancy in the hospital after she killed the children, testified that he overheard her saying that a disembodied male voice had told her she had no choice but to kill her children and then herself. Zeizel said he believed Clancy wasn’t responsible for her actions because of her deep mental illness.
Prosecutors called a rebuttal witness, forensic psychologist Kirk Heilbrun, who said he didn’t believe Clancy had hallucinated voices.
“One of the things that she said when I asked about what happened, is that in the course of strangling each child, she said, ‘Go to God, baby. Go to God,’” he said. “That was part of her expectation that she and the children would be together in heaven with God.”
Dr. Gregory Saathoff, a senior psychiatrist for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, testified for prosecutors that Clancy “had the capacity to know right from wrong.”
The lawyers got the last word
After testimony was complete, each side got about an hour to make their closing argument to the jury.
Reddington showed the jury a photograph of the Clancy family, looking happy, and a second one of Lindsay Clancy in the hospital.
“How does this turn into this?” Reddington asked. “How? Because of the damn medicine and the lousy medical care that she got.”
Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague said criticizing the mental health system was “a distraction.” She said Clancy chose to kill her children because doing so would make it easier to kill herself.
“She was depressed. She was exhausted. She was done. She didn’t want to try anymore. She felt damaged,” Sprague said. “But those kids, those kids were her protective factor. Those kids were keeping her from ending her misery.”
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