More than three years after Lindsay Clancy strangled her three young children in Duxbury, Massachusetts, her ex-husband Patrick Clancy has testified about the day he returned home to discover the aftermath. The 35-year-old mother admits killing Dawson, five-year-old Cora and eight-month-old Callan in January 2023, but her lawyers argue she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis and cannot be held criminally responsible.
Patrick Clancy told the court on Monday that his wife had experienced suicidal thoughts and thoughts of harming their children in the months before the killings, and had been prescribed medication and spent time in a psychiatric hospital earlier that month. However, he said she appeared "normal" when he left to collect takeaway food and pick up stool softener for one of the children. His final image of three-year-old Dawson was his son on the couch eating chicken nuggets and green beans.
Surveillance footage from a pharmacy showed Patrick Clancy calling his wife to ask which medicine to buy. "She was pretty quiet. It sounded like she was busy," he testified. "I remember hanging up thinking she was probably in the middle of giving baths or something like that." He later found a large amount of blood in the main bedroom. Lindsay Clancy had attempted to take her own life by multiple means and remains paralysed from the waist down after jumping from a second-storey window. She told her husband the children were in the basement, without saying they were dead.
Jurors then listened to his 911 call, in which he discovers the children strangled with exercise bands. Sobbing and screaming, he tells the dispatcher: "She killed the kids." In the courtroom, Lindsay Clancy wept as the recording was played. Her lawyer argues that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, a rare mental illness linked to the stress, sleep deprivation and hormonal changes following childbirth, and that antidepressants prescribed after the birth of her third child worsened her underlying bipolar disorder.
Patrick Clancy described the day of the killings as one of his wife's "best days", saying she had taken Cora to a doctor's appointment, built a snowman with the children and worked on art projects. Lindsay Clancy had sought care from specialists in post-pregnancy mood disorders and checked into a psychiatric hospital, but killed the children 19 days after her discharge. If convicted of murder, she faces life without parole; if found not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility. Postpartum psychosis is estimated to affect only one or two mothers per 1,000.
