Jurors in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial made a rare trip on Friday to the former family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, where the three children were killed in January 2023.
The panel was escorted in groups of six to view the inside of the house, including the basement where five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan died. The roughly 40-minute visit also took in the yard where Clancy was found after jumping from a second-floor window.
Clancy, who has not seen the home since the day of the killings, did not attend the visit. The property now has a new owner. Journalists were held behind a police barricade, while court officers could be seen through the trees escorting jurors to and from the bus on the former driveway.
Route retraced
Before reaching the house, jurors were driven past two locations relevant to the case: the restaurant about 5.5 miles from the family's former home in Duxbury, a suburb south of Boston, and the pharmacy about a mile away. The route matched the errand run by Clancy's ex-husband, Patrick Clancy, after she asked him to pick up takeout food and medicine for their five-year-old daughter Cora on the night of the killings. He returned to find the children dead and Clancy badly injured and bleeding in the yard.
Prosecutors say the errands were a ruse to get Patrick Clancy out of the house. They argue that Lindsay Clancy, a former labour and delivery nurse, acted intentionally and is criminally responsible for the deaths.
Defence case
Her lawyers do not dispute that she killed the children, but say she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis, a rare mental illness linked to stress, sleep deprivation and hormonal changes after childbirth. They also say she had bipolar disorder that worsened when she took antidepressants prescribed after the birth of her third child. According to her lawyers, Clancy believed a voice was telling her to 'kill the children so you can kill yourself'.
Clancy has been paralysed from the waist down since trying to kill herself that night. If convicted of murder, she faces life in prison without parole. If found not guilty due to a lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility.
Jury excursions in high-profile cases
Jurors in US criminal cases are often told not to visit the scene of the events in question, partly because the site may have changed between the alleged crime and the trial. But courts sometimes allow supervised group excursions, for reasons that can include assessing distances or features not fully captured in photos.
Such visits have occurred in the trials of Alex Murdaugh, Aaron Hernandez and OJ Simpson, as well as the sentencing hearing of Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz.
For support in the US, call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In Australia, Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines are available at befrienders.org.
