Father testifies to ex-wife's mental decline before children's deaths in murder trial

Patrick Clancy sat in the witness box on Monday and began to describe the months before his three children died. He was methodical, controlled, his voice steady as he recounted watching his then-wife deteriorate in ways he could see but perhaps did not fully understand. The jury in the trial of Lindsay Clancy needed to hear from him—needed to know what a father had witnessed before Cora, five years old, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months old, were found strangled in their Duxbury home on January 24, 2023.

Patrick testified that the decline began after Lindsay started taking Seroquel, a psychiatric medication. She lost weight rapidly. Her mood darkened into something he described as severe depression. She began talking about wanting to hurt herself. And then came the intrusive thoughts—unwanted, disturbing ideas that she should harm the children. She told him about them. She also told him they frightened her, that she had no plan to act on them. In the moments after these conversations, he watched her make lunch for the kids, play with them, tuck them into bed. He did not believe the children were in immediate danger.

But as the months wore on, Patrick grew increasingly alarmed. Lindsay was prescribed thirteen psychiatric medications in rapid succession. Most of her treatment was happening through telehealth—brief video appointments that felt, to him, inadequate for the severity of what she was experiencing. He pushed for in-person evaluation. He took her to emergency departments. He helped admit her to McLean Hospital when her suicidal thoughts persisted. He would have paid anything, he testified, to keep her hospitalized if insurance had stood in the way. He was trying to help. He was trying to protect her and the children. What he could not do was predict what would happen next.

The prosecution's case rests on a different reading of those same facts. Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham told jurors that Lindsay Clancy did not suffer a sudden break from reality. Instead, she acted with deliberate intent. She sent Patrick out of the house to pick up medication and food—giving herself a window of time. Then she strangled each child methodically, one after another, using an exercise band. The act of strangulation takes time and physical effort. It requires a conscious choice to continue three separate times. The prosecution wants jurors to see calculation, not crisis.

The defense concedes the killings but argues about everything else. Lindsay Clancy killed her children, her attorney Kevin Reddington told jurors plainly. The question is not whether she did it. The question is what was happening inside her mind when she did. He presented hospital photographs showing her with injuries to her neck and wrists—evidence, he argued, of a suicide attempt, the final act of a woman experiencing complete postpartum psychotic break. She had no motive to kill children she loved and had nurtured. The woman who killed them was not the woman who had mothered them.

This is where the case turns on something invisible and contested. Judge William Sullivan instructed jurors that the Commonwealth must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Clancy was criminally responsible at the moment of the killings. Criminal responsibility is not the same as guilt. It is a question about capacity, about whether the mind was functioning in a way that allowed for the kind of deliberate choice the law requires. For some jurors, the answer may be clear. For others, it will exist in a gray space where two truths seem to coexist: that a mother killed her children, and that severe mental illness may have stripped away her ability to choose otherwise. Margaret McLean, a former prosecutor who teaches law at Boston College, called it one of the hardest questions any jury will ever have to decide.