A haunting 911 call, handwritten notes and murder scene visit: All the evidence from week 1 of Lindsay Clancy’s trial
Jurors in Lindsay Clancy’s trial endured days of haunting testimony as they heard her husband’s frantic 911 call, viewed the exercise bands she used to strangle her three young children, then retraced her steps on the day she killed them.
On Friday, the jury visited the Massachusetts home where she killed her three children, Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months, including the basement where they died. It was a rare jury visit that let them see firsthand the place where an outwardly ordinary family life unraveled into tragedy.
Lindsay Clancy did not visit the home with the jury, and she hasn’t seen it since the day of the killings. She has admitted to killing the children but her lawyers argue she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis, a rare mental illness linked to the stress, sleep deprivation and hormonal changes that follow childbirth.
Before visiting the home, jurors retraced the route her then-husband, Patrick Clancy, took after she asked him to pick up takeout food and medicine for Cora on the night of the killings. He returned to find the children dead and his then-wife badly injured and bleeding in the yard.
Prosecutors say the errands were a ruse to get her husband out of the house and that Lindsay Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, acted intentionally and is criminally responsible for the deaths of children.
Her lawyers say she had bipolar disorder and her condition worsened while she was on antidepressants prescribed after the birth of her third child. They say on the day of the killings, Lindsay Clancy said she heard a voice telling her, “This is your last chance. Kill the children so you can kill yourself.”
Lindsay Clancy remains paralyzed from the waist down after using multiple methods to try to end her life that night.
When police rushed to the scene on Jan. 24, 2023, two officers initially focused on Lindsay, who was drifting in and out of consciousness in the snow after jumping from a second-floor window of her home. Minutes later, the officers heard her husband screaming and ran into the basement.
A fire department supervisor described glimpsing through a basement window as Patrick Clancy unwrapped an exercise band from his child’s neck.
The first responders’ testimony came after jurors spent two days hearing from Patrick Clancy and listening to his emotional 911 call.
He said he arrived to an unusually quiet home. After calling out to his family, he began looking in the kids’ bedrooms and bathroom and found a trail of blood throughout the main bedroom and a window open. Patrick Clancy found his then-wife badly injured on the lawn, bleeding in their yard.
“Lindsay, what did you do?” Patrick Clancy is heard saying in the 911 call. “Where are the kids, Lindsay?”
“Look at me,” he said, “Say my name.”
Wounded but conscious, she told him that the kids were in the basement, without saying they were dead.
