Closing arguments in the case against Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother accused of strangling her three children to death in 2023, were delivered on Thursday, the 22nd day of trial.
Clancy is facing three counts of first-degree murder in connection
with the deaths of her three children — Cora, five; Dawson, three; and eight-month-old Callan — in January 2023. She has pleaded not guilty. While Clancy has not denied killing the children, the trial is expected to determine whether she was legally responsible for her actions. Clancy jumped out of a window after strangling the children to death and was paralyzed in the fall. She now uses a wheelchair and has been held at a state hospital since the incident.
Clancy’s mental health treatment has been a prominent focus of the trial. She did not testify. On Thursday, closing arguments began in a courtroom packed with Clancy supporters, the Associated Press reported. Hundreds more supporters gathered outside, many wearing pink. Clancy’s veteran defense lawyer, Kevin Reddington, told jurors his client suffered from postpartum psychosis — a relatively rare diagnosis that can cause women to develop delusions and even hallucinations, according to the National Institutes of Health.
In his folksy, booming style that’s earned him a fandom on social media, Reddington blasted prosecutors for presenting what he called a “repulsive” case built on “manipulation.” He argued the evidence showed Clancy was a devoted mother whose postpartum depression spiraled into postpartum psychosis amid heavy medication.
Holding up a colorful chart, Reddington walked jurors through more than a dozen prescriptions written by Clancy’s psychiatrist, including Ativan, Zoloft, Valium, trazodone and buspirone. Clancy also saw other medical professionals, obsessively googled treatments, called suicide hotlines, and checked herself into a hospital that released her three weeks before the killings, he said.
“She was reaching out for help, and she was not getting it,” he said. At various points, he slammed quarters down on a table like a pool-hall challenge to make sense of the prosecution’s case. “This is a prosecution that has ripped the soul out of this girl,” he argued, pointing to Clancy, who was seated in her wheelchair. He showed jurors enlarged photos of the smiling Clancy family before the killings, then contrasted them with an image of Clancy in a hospital bed.
“How does this turn into this? How?” he asked. “Because of the damn medicine and the lousy medical care she got.”
He faulted the American psychiatric community’s diagnostic system for using a four-week cutoff to classify a disorder as having peripartum onset. He contrasted that with the World Health Organization’s longer window and said many experts believe postpartum psychiatric conditions can emerge months after childbirth, even within the first year, and require specialized treatment.
“This young lady did nothing wrong in her life,” Reddington said. “She was a nurse, a daughter, a wife and a darn good mother. You can see from the objective evidence.”
When it was the prosecution’s turn, Jennifer Sprague stated the case isn’t about the “mental health system or how it treats women.” She added: “That’s a distraction to get you angry and passionate about an important issue, but an issue that’s not on trial here.”
Instead, Sprague said, the case is about whether Clancy was acting rationally and understood what she was doing was wrong. She noted Clancy had more medical support than most do. “This wasn’t a woman suffering from a lack of care, a lack of resources,” she said. Clancy had “an abundance of care” and sometimes refused options, she argued.
Sprague argued Clancy was not always forthcoming about her symptoms with her providers and was impatient when prescriptions didn’t work immediately. “She wanted to get better, but she wanted to get better on her own terms,” Sprague argued. “And as a nurse, she knew that’s not the right way to approach it.” Sprague argued Clancy’s doctors were “doing the best they could with her level of cooperation and compliance with the plan.”
The prosecutor said Clancy’s decision to withhold her thoughts about harming her children in December 2022 from her mental health providers was proof she knew those thoughts were wrong. While she told her then-husband about those thoughts, she withheld them from her doctors because she worried her children might be taken away, Sprague said.
“That’s a rational thought,” Sprague argued. “It also shows you that she knew it was a bad thought, a wrong thought.”
Sprague argued Clancy planned the killings and sent Patrick, her then-husband, to pick up takeout from a location farther away than usual, giving her time to kill their children. When she realized she would need more time to act, she asked Patrick to also pick up medication for one of their kids at a pharmacy, Sprague argued.
“She was depressed. She was exhausted. She was done. She didn’t want to try anymore. She felt damaged,” Sprague alleged. “But those kids were her protective factor. Those kids were keeping her from ending her misery.” So, Sprague claimed, Clancy removed the “protective factor.” Sprague asserted that Clancy had other choices, such as moving to her mother’s home for added support or only killing herself.
“It was a choice to take them with her. It was a horrible choice,” Sprague said. “It is a choice that we don’t want to think about that a mother could make, because that doesn’t make us feel safe or comfortable in this world. But it’s a choice she made.”
Sprague closed by saying, “She left them discarded on the basement floor like broken toys because she was done playing the game,” Sprague says. “You know to a moral certainty she is guilty.”
Clancy’s ex-husband, Patrick Clancy, supported her claim that she was not responsible for her actions. He was the first witness called to testify at the trial, which began on July 27. He spoke of her deteriorating mental health at the time of the incident, saying she “kept getting worse and worse.”
During the trial, prosecutors reintroduced a theory that suggested Clancy faked a suicide attempt. Prosecutors brought up internet searches made on the family computer in the months leading up to the killings, which included looking for “suicide methods,” and searches for psychiatric medications, detox programs, psychosis, and more, as The Guardian reported.Her phone revealed searches on “Can you treat a sociopath?” and housed notes about depression, exhaustion, and more.
Amid the trial, a GoFundMe was launched to support Lindsay Clancy’s parents, Michael and Paula Musgrove, who moved from Connecticut to Massachusetts to attend her court proceedings. It seeks to raise $2 million to “help Mike and Paula rebuild the financial stability they have sacrificed over these past three years” per the campaign verified by GoFundMe, titled The Musgrave Family Fund.
The defense rested its case last Friday at the end of the trial’s fourth week. The week included several days of testimony regarding Clancy’s mental state leading up to the killings and afterward. Its final witness was forensic psychiatrist Dr. Phillip Resnick, who at the bequest of the defense, reviewed Clancy’s medical records and evaluated her for hours over four months after the killings.
Resnick testified that he believed she suffered from postpartum psychosis, saying she was “clearly psychotic” when she killed her children and was not in control of her actions per Associated Press via PBS.
“It was almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings,” said Resnick, who also testified for the defense in the 2006 trial of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children in 2001. He added that Clancy suffered from severe depression and exhibited behavior consistent with bipolar disorder, reporting hearing a voice that told her to kill her children.
Resnick said Clancy held a delusional belief that if social services took her children or if she died by suicide, her children would suffer without her, concluding that it would be better for them if they died with her and went to heaven. “She believed that she was doing what was right for her children,” he said.
Following the defense resting, prosecutors began calling rebuttal witnesses in the trial. On Monday, the prosecution pushed back on the defense’s claims that Clancy was in the throes of postpartum psychosis when she killed her children. They first called Dr. Avram Mack, who concluded that while Clancy probably suffered a depressive episode and anxiety, there was no evidence that she experienced a manic state, which is a determinant for a bipolar disorder diagnosis.
The state also called Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, a forensic psychologist, who spoke with Clancy prior to the trial for the prosecution. He told the jury that she only experienced anxiety during nursing school and associated anxiety with each of her pregnancies. He also testified that she did not experience major traumas, like abuse, during her childhood. Heilbrun also determined in his opinion that she suffers from bipolar II disorder, which is not associated with mania.
“She felt really close to them, her husband, and her kids,” he said. “But it’s also something that didn’t look like a manic episode so much as it looked like she was really feeling good and getting back into exercise and things like that,” he said, per NBC News. He also stated in court that Clancy had inconsistencies regarding her hearing voices that told her to kill her children and herself.
On the night of Jan. 24, 2023, according to Clancy’s account, she heard a voice repeatedly telling her, “This is your last chance. You have to kill the kids so you can kill yourself.”
But she would later say she also heard such things as “the children will suffer without you” or “you have to take the kids with you,” he said. She also did not tell her husband that she tried to kill herself or mention she had hallucinations, he noted, which led Heilbrun to believe this was not an instance of “altruistic filicide,” which is when a mother kills her children because she fears for their safety or well-being when she is gone.
On Monday, defense attorney Kevin Reddington submitted a motion to dismiss based on prosecution witness Heilbrun mentioning Clancy’s Catholic faith, saying it was “intentional misconduct” per NBC News. The judge denied the motion.
When the trial resumed on Tuesday, Aug. 25, Heilbrun was back on the stand. He testified that Clancy was aware that killing her children was illegal. “She retained an awareness of the illegality of killing others, including killing her children. Her moral awareness of the wrongfulness of this killing was influenced by her strong desire to die and, if she were dead, not to leave her children behind,” Heilbrun said, via NBC Boston.
The third and final rebuttal witness for the state was forensic psychologist Gregory Saathoff, who is the senior psychiatrist for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. His testimony attempted to cast doubt on the claims that Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis and that a voice told her to kill her children. On Tuesday, he testified that he interviewed Clancy twice for a total period of 11 hours, and also interviewed her ex-husband Patrick Clancy. Saathoff discussed Clancy’s auditory hallucinations, which she told him constantly repeated the phrase “‘This is your last chance, you have to kill your kids and kill yourself,'” but then he said she told him that “just as soon as it started, it stopped, when she had finished strangling, killing the children.”
When the trial resumed on Wednesday, its 21st day, Saathoff was back on the stand. According to Saathoff, she told him that the voice did not give her specific instructions, such as how to kill the children or where or in what manner to kill herself. “Having no instructions as to how to do of being able to execute those decisions including being able to get a phone call and return it to her husband in the process of all of this, certainly the phone call was not expected, that is surprising that she is able to accomplish this without, without any other kind of direction or plan,” he testified, per NBC Boston.
Saathoff also addressed if someone who is suffering from psychosis can distinguish right from wrong. “It’s possible and common for people to engage in behaviors to avoid to do what a command hallucination is saying,” he testified. Medication was also discussed, and he told the court that a person can have adverse affects from medication without being deemed overmedicated.
The state rested its case on Wednesday. After the jurors were dismissed, Reddington moved for a motion for a required finding of not guilty, which the prosecution opposed and the judge denied.
Click here to read the full article.
