Testimony ended in Lindsay Clancy’s triple-murder trial, and the machinery of the court is now set to hand the case to a jury Thursday for closing arguments, jury instructions and deliberations. The final witness, FBI psychiatrist Dr. Gregory Saathoff, told the court Clancy could still appreciate right from wrong and control her behavior when she killed her three children. That’s the state’s favorite question in cases like this: not what broke, but whether the law can still pin blame on the person left standing in the wreckage.
Who Gets to Define Responsibility
Clancy, a 36-year-old former nurse, has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder in the killings of her children Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months. The jury will be able to consider first-degree murder, second-degree murder or manslaughter charges. Both prosecutors and the defense agree Clancy fatally strangled her children with exercise bands, then cut her wrists and neck and jumped out of a window at their Duxbury, Massachusetts, home on Jan. 24, 2023. The legal system now turns that horror into categories, labels and penalties, as if the right box can explain the damage.
The key question for the jury is whether she is criminally responsible, meaning she appreciated the wrongfulness of her actions and was able to follow the law. Prosecutors called over 70 witnesses and argued Clancy acted intentionally, rationally and swiftly when she killed her children. They said she sent her husband out to run errands before killing the children and, upon waking in a hospital, was horrified and asked for an attorney. The state’s case leans hard on intent, control and planning. That’s the language of punishment.
What the Experts Said
Dr. Gregory Saathoff pointed to what he called Clancy’s “preparatory planning,” including searches on her phone, mapping the distance from their home to a restaurant and committing the killings while her husband was out of the home. Saathoff said, “The fact that this was done without any witness present during a time where she had asked a potential witness to go on a longer errand – also I thought was significant.” The court heard that as evidence of control. The defense heard it as something else entirely.
Her defense attorney called 10 witnesses and argued she was a good mother who suffered from postpartum psychosis. In the months leading up to January 2023, she had been prescribed over a dozen psychiatric medications and several times checked herself into a hospital to treat her depression, anxiety, insomnia and suicidal thoughts. Clancy did not testify. The trial has become a contest between two institutional stories: one built for conviction, the other built for insanity.
Psychiatric experts for both sides described the killings as altruistic filicide, meaning a parent kills a child out of love. Dr. Phillip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist, testified for the defense that she was “frankly psychotic” during the killings and described the voice she heard as an auditory hallucination. He said, “Not only did she hear a command, but 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. It was almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings.”
Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, a psychologist testifying for the prosecution, said she knew right from wrong and was in control of her actions during the killings. He said he was skeptical of the auditory hallucination because Clancy did not report hearing a voice before or after the killings. Heilbrun said, “To put it mildly, that would be a very, very unusual pattern or manifestation of how this kind of thing comes about.” He also said the killings were motivated by love and that Clancy remains a suicide risk and still takes multiple medications for her mental health. He said, “She is still grieving. She is still in mourning,” and added, “She used language like, ‘I have lost everything and I don’t want to be here.’”
The Family, the Hospital, the Court
The trial began with testimony from Clancy’s former husband, Patrick Clancy, who described her downward spiral, hospital visits and about a dozen medications for insomnia, anxiety and depression. He said her struggles began in September 2022 as she prepared to leave her children and return to work as a labor and delivery nurse. He testified, “She just had a really hard time being separated from them.” He said she postponed her return to work as her mental health issues intensified in late 2022, particularly after she took Zoloft in October, and that she experienced intrusive thoughts and checked herself into a hospital in December and another over New Year’s.
Clancy wrote on her phone, “Medication stole my motherhood and my life.” Doctors testified that she did not have a suicide plan, did not have thoughts of harming others and did not show signs of psychosis. Dr. Jennifer Tufts testified that the day before the killings, Clancy met her psychiatrist and “said she was doing all right.” Those are the fragments the court gets to sort through. The rest is gone.
On Jan. 24, 2023, Clancy asked her husband to pick up takeout food and medicine, leaving her and the children at the house. He came home to find his bloody wife lying in the backyard and his children in the basement with exercise resistance bands around their necks. A first responder quoted him as saying, “She killed the f**king kids!” About a week later, Clancy called her husband from a hospital and said she had heard a voice, Patrick Clancy testified. He said, “She didn’t talk about our kids, she talked about what she went through,” and added, “She said she heard a man’s voice telling her that if she didn’t do it now, she would lose her chance – or something like that.”
Clancy is now partially paralyzed because of her suicide attempt and is being held at Tewksbury hospital. She faces life in prison if found guilty of murder. If the jury finds her not guilty by reason of insanity, the court would begin the process of committing her to a mental health facility. The apparatus has its options ready: prison, commitment, verdict, control.