Warning: Graphic content.
Lindsay Clancy ‘s murder trial zeroed in Friday on her psychiatric care before she killed her three children, with testimony tracing a monthslong path to a final appointment the day before the tragedy.
In that virtual visit on Jan. 23, 2023, the Massachusetts mother appeared depressed, said she felt no motivation and reported bouts of heart-racing anxiety, psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Tufts told jurors. But she said Clancy gave no indication of hearing voices that, according her defence, commanded her the next day to take her children’s lives so she could end her own.
“Did she tell you that she was planning to kill the children?” prosecutor Jennifer Sprague asked.
“No,” Tufts replied. “Absolutely not.”
Clancy’s psychiatric treatment is a key chapter in both the prosecution and defence narratives about her mental state when she strangled the children in their suburban home and then jumped out a second-storey window.
In questioning Tufts and a different psychiatrist who treated Clancy during a five-day hospital stay in early January 2023, prosecutors underscored that the defendant denied wanting to hurt anyone else or planning to kill herself. Clancy’s lawyer, meanwhile, aimed to flesh out the defence’s claim that various providers didn’t properly diagnose her and put her on a series of medications that left her worse off.
Clancy has pleaded not guilty to murder charges in the strangling deaths of Callan, Dawson and Cora Clancy, who ranged from eight months to five years old. They were found in the basement of the family’s home in coastal Duxbury, Massachusetts, and their mother was lying, badly injured, in the yard. She remains paralyzed from the waist down.
Prosecutors argue that Lindsay Clancy, a 35-year-old former labour and delivery nurse, was an intentional killer who attacked her children after getting her husband out of the house by asking him to run errands. The defence doesn’t dispute that she killed the children but says she was so mentally ill that she shouldn’t be held criminally responsible.
In the criminal trial and a medical malpractice lawsuit, Clancy’s attorneys say she had bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis -- a break with reality that a small fraction of women have after childbirth.
When Clancy first sought care
Tufts first saw Clancy in September 2022. Consulting her notes on the witness stand Friday, she recalled that Clancy reported feeling anxious, “overwhelmed” by caring for the three children and worried about infant Callan’s refusal to bottle-feed. Her maternity leave was set to end, though she would go on to extend it.
Tufts diagnosed generalized anxiety disorder and an adjustment disorder with depressed mood, and she recommended therapy and an antidepressant. It became the first in a constantly-remixed cocktail of drugs that Tufts and others prescribed as Clancy reported increasing symptoms, complained of side effects and questioned whether the pills were making her worse.
Clancy’s malpractice suit argues that her mounting anxiety and sleeplessness after that first antidepressant were a reaction that signalled bipolar illness. Tufts said she considered such a diagnosis in December 2022 but that Clancy didn’t meet the criteria.
Another provider, a nurse-practitioner, did consider bipolar disorder and prescribed an antipsychotic that’s often used to treat it, as well as insomnia. Clancy’s condition continued declining.
Clancy’s stay in a psychiatric hospital
By New Year’s Day 2023, Clancy checked herself into McLean Hospital, a prominent psychiatric facility. Clancy said she felt numb and expressed concerns about depending on the antipsychotic to sleep, hospital psychiatrist Dr. Alia Goodheart testified Friday. She diagnosed Clancy with insomnia with a mental health condition and tapered down the drug.
Clancy then reported she could sleep, was eager to go home in time for a long-planned belated birthday party for Cora, and booked herself follow-up outpatient care, the psychiatrist testified. The hospital discharged her that Jan. 5 with prescriptions for an anti-anxiety drug and a sleep aid.
“She had never stated that she had any thoughts of harming anybody else,” Goodheart told jurors. And although Clancy said she’d had suicidal thoughts, she denied having them in the moment and indeed said she had reasons not to take her own life: “her children and her family, her mother,” Goodheart recalled.
Clancy saw Tufts, her original outpatient psychiatrist, by video four more times that January. At their last appointment, Tufts adjusted her medication dosages. She saw no reason to order Clancy to be hospitalized, she said.
Defence lawyer Kevin Reddington hasn’t yet had his turn to question Tufts. But in questioning Goodheart, he emphasized that the hospital care team didn’t do various tests -- Goodheart said they weren’t necessary -- or learn that Clancy had called a suicide hotline that fall. Nor did the providers talk to her outpatient clinicians.
“She was very sick, wasn’t she?” Reddington asked at one point.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Goodheart responded.
If convicted of murder, Clancy 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.
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Michael Casey and Jennifer Peltz, The Associated Press
Peltz reported from New York.
If you or someone you know is in crisis or struggling with mental illness, here are some resources that are available.
Canada Suicide Crisis Helpline (Call or text 988 or visit 988.ca)
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (1-800-463-2338)
Kids Help Phone (1-800-668-6868)
If you need immediate assistance call 911 or go to the nearest hospital.
