Lindsay Clancy trial resurfaces disturbing 1950s case of Maine mom who spent years in psychiatric hospital for drowning three of her kids… then murdered her next three upon release

It was March 8, 1954, when Carl Fisher walked into his Waterville, Maine, home to find his three beautiful children dead at the hands of his wife. Nearly 70 years later, Patrick Clancy would make an eerily similar discovery in Massachusetts. 

The trial of Patrick’s wife Lindsay Clancy has gripped the nation as true crime fanatics and journalists wait with bated breath to see if the mother-of-three will be convicted of first-degree murder for the 2023 strangulation of Cora, five; Dawson, three; and Callan, eight months. 

As the paraplegic mother and her ex-husband, Patrick remain in the spotlight, some are pointing out the parallels between Clancy and Constance Fisher.

Constance, then 24, drowned her children – Richard, six; Daniel, four; and Deborah, 11 months – in a bathtub in 1954. Like Clancy, Constance claimed she heard a voice telling her to do it to save her children from evil, an old 1966 newspaper clipping from the Kennebec Journal revealed. 

‘God told me to do it,’ the young woman told prosecutors. ‘They are in heaven, safe from evil.’  

Lindsay also claimed to have heard a man’s voice for 18 minutes while she killed her children in 2023. She admits strangling them but says she was insane due to post-partum psychosis when she killed the youngsters and denies murder. 

Jurors are currently deliberating Clancy’s fate. Decades earlier, Constance was ruled insane and sent to a psychiatric hospital, which she would later escape. 

The Daily Mail takes a look at how the 1954 case compares to Lindsay’s. 

The Constance Fisher Case  

When Carl Fisher returned home from his Maine Central Railroad job in March 1954, the family’s house was eerily silent, and his wife was nowhere to be found. 

The father walked through the home and spotted what he believed were his two youngest apparently asleep in their beds. It wasn’t until he reached the bathroom and found eldest son Richard floating face-down in the bathtub that he realized the truth. 

In a panic, he called for help as he searched for Constance, whom he found wrapped tightly in a blanket under their bed. She was next to an empty bottle of Selsun shampoo. 

In a suicide note, prosecutors said the then-mother-of-three had confessed to the killings to Carl, and asked for him to forgive her. 

‘Maybe you don’t think I loved them. I did, oh, I did; my heart is breaking. I loved you, and I loved them,’ Constance wrote, a 1954 Bangor Daily News article said.  

Constance, who was described as a ‘slender, brown-haired housewife,’ wished to be buried with Deborah and have her two boys together. 

However, the mother survived the suicide attempt. And it was later revealed by the family’s physician, Dr Richard Chasse, that the 24-year-old had sought a psychiatrist for help just two months before about feeling depressed, the Bangor Daily News said at the time. 

This was confirmed by the chaplain at the Augusta State Hospital, the psychiatric facility she was taken to. The chaplain said the mother had suffered ‘mental disturbances’ before killing her children, but she wasn’t given help quickly enough. 

Despite her mental woes, locals described the woman as a good mother who loved her kids. 

‘She was giving her children – [three] of them then – proper attention, bringing them up very nicely. The kids were happy, she was happy, and her husband was contented,’ the chaplain said in 1966.   

After killing her children, Constance was diagnosed with psychosis and as a paranoid schizophrenic. 

She was deemed too mentally unwell to stand trial and went to live at the Augusta State Hospital until her husband petitioned to get her out in 1955. 

In 1957, at her first hearing, her doctors said no. A year later, they admitted she had shown no sign of psychosis for years, and her release could be considered. 

She was finally released in May 1959 after experts decided that she posed no threat to society. 

Within a year, Carl and Constance would start a new family and go on to have three more children – Kathleen, Michael, and Nathalie. They relocated to Fairfield. 

For years, Constance was a happy housewife and mother, but history repeated itself in the most horrific way in June 1966 when the young woman drowned her other three children in a bathtub. 

Carl, once again, entered a silent home and found Nathalie, nine months, dead in the bathtub. Kathleen, six, and Michael, four, were also found dead in the home. 

Constance, once again, attempted to kill herself unsuccessfully with drugs, a pellet gun, and a kitchen knife. 

‘I hope you understand,’ the religious woman wrote in a second suicide note. ‘It’s the only way I could be sure they would go to heaven.’ 

She would later tell Waterville Captain Albert Drost: ‘I drowned them.’ 

He testified that the mother-of-six expressed no remorse, telling him: ‘No, I am not [sorry]. The children would have had a hard life ahead of them. They are better where they are.’ 

Drost also testified that authorities had found Constance with a gun near her after drowning her children, but she told him she was unable to kill herself because the ‘gun didn’t work.’ 

‘She was going to use a knife, but she fell asleep before she could,’ he testified in 1967, the Lewiston Sun-Journal newspaper reported. 

She was once again brought to the Augusta State Hospital, this time with no hope of being released after once again being deemed to insane to stand trial. 

For seven years, Carl faithfully visited her, but he eventually couldn’t handle it anymore and stopped. 

Shortly after, Constance escaped the confines of the asylum. For days, authorities and the hospital looked for her with no luck. 

She was eventually found by a hunter, who discovered her bloated body in the Kennebec River, which was near the hospital. Fisher died at the age of 44.

Constance would go on to be laid to rest next to the graves of her six children. In 1990, her husband would join them. 

The Comparison 

Nearly 70 years after Constance first took the lives of Richard, Daniel, and Deborah, Patrick Clancy would walk into his home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in January 2023 to find his three children killed. 

Cora and Dawson had been strangled to death by exercise bands in the couple’s basement. Their youngest, Callan, was found alive and would die days later in the hospital. 

Clancy, who was suffering from postpartum depression, tried to kill herself by jumping out of an upstairs window. She survived but was permanently paralyzed from the waist down.

Despite the similarities on paper, experts told the Daily Mail that there are substantial differences between the two cases. 

Constance was schizophrenic, whereas Lindsay was suffering from postpartum depression. 

‘[These are] very different cases in the sense of psychiatric diagnosis,’ Dr Blair Steel, a licensed clinical psychologist with Carrara Treatment, told the Daily Mail.  ‘Constance had a long-standing psych illness of paranoid schizophrenia, so she had historical accounts of auditory hallucinations, delusional thinking, all of that. 

‘Which is very different than, Lindsay’s postpartum depression. She had treatment around the time of the killing, she had all these medications around the time of the killing, so it was not this long-standing mental health [issue].’ 

Both women killed less than a year after the birth of the youngest child, with Dr Steel saying that timing may have been significant.  

‘There’s the overlap of the hormone imbalance that takes place. If you think about around 11 months, a baby’s starting to wean, so the maternal hormones are completely changing,’ Steel said. 

Clancy had been on multiple different types of medication prior to the killings. It is unclear what medication Constance was using, if any. Her first murder spree predated Thorazine, the first widely available antipsychotic, being approved by the FDA. 

‘If Constance’s exhibited signs of psychosis, it’s likely that treatment with antipsychotics might not have been available to her at the time of the initial murders,’ Omotola Ajibade, a dual board-certified adult and forensic psychiatrist who has administered insanity defense evaluation tests, told the Daily Mail. 

‘Constance was likely depressed at the time, and she also had psoriasis. In some extreme cases, psoriasis can lead to psychiatric symptoms,’ he said of the common skin condition that causes unsightly red blotches. 

However, both Steel and Ajibade said the likelihood that Clancy would relapse and kill her children again, if she were to have more in the future, is very low. 

‘With proper treatment, including medication and psychosocial support, it is unlikely that Clancy would suffer the same fate as Constance,’ Ajibade told the Daily Mail. 

Steel said Constance’s diagnosis was a lifelong condition, whereas Clancy’s is ‘more episodic.’ Postpartum depression would eventually go away, whereas schizophrenia would not. 

He said that no two mental health diagnoses are like one another and that new mothers need to be heavily-supported to keep tabs on any potential mental health issues.  

If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts or actions, please call the National Suicide Hotline at 988.