By Nate Raymond
July 27 (Reuters) – A Massachusetts jury heard dueling accounts on Monday for why a mother killed her three young children in 2023, a tragedy that a defense lawyer said was due to her suffering from postpartum mental illness and that a prosecutor called a planned murder.
Lindsay Clancy admits that she strangled her three children in January 2023 with exercise bands in the basement of her home in the Boston suburb of Duxbury. She then cut herself with a knife and jumped from a second-story window in a failed attempt to end her own life that left her paralyzed.
During his opening statement in Plymouth County Superior Court, defense attorney Kevin Reddington told jurors that Clancy, now 35, had struggled for months with postpartum mental health issues following the birth of her third child.
“This is a woman that was suffering from psychosis at the time that she went down to that basement,” Reddington said.
He portrayed her as a loving mother who was plagued with suicidal thoughts and postpartum mental health issues before the killings, leading her to repeatedly seek treatment from multiple healthcare providers who had prescribed her a myriad of drugs that did not help.
“She’s living her own hell,” he said. “She knows what happened with those kids.”
Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham did not dispute that Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, had been dealing with mental health issues before she killed her children, Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and 8-month-old Callan.
But Buckingham said, “This is not a public debate about women’s mental health and how the medical system treats women,” and that instead the case turned on the question of whether Clancy appreciated the wrongfulness of killing her children but chose to do so anyway.
She said the evidence showed Clancy sent her husband at the time, Patrick, out to pick up a food order after mapping on her phone the time it would take for him to return home so she could work “swiftly to accomplish a very specific goal: to kill.”
Called as the trial’s first witness, Patrick Clancy, who is now divorced from Lindsay, said his wife had been discharged from a psychiatric hospital less than two weeks earlier but showed no signs she planned to hurt herself or her kids in the days that followed. She had a “normal” demeanor when he left to pick up dinner.
“I came upstairs,” he said. “I took Callan for a minute, and I rocked him by my knees, kissed Cora on the head, and I said I’ll be right back.”
The trial ended for the day before he could speak about what happened upon his return. Buckingham had told jurors that when Patrick got back, he discovered his wife in the backyard. He called 911, and after first responders arrived, Patrick Clancy found the children in the basement and screamed that they had been killed, she said.
“This was a woman who no longer liked the life she thought she wanted; it was getting harder and harder to control,” she said. “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.”
Clancy faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison if she is convicted on any of the first-degree murder charges she faces. The trial is expected to last six to eight weeks.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
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