PLYMOUTH, Mass. (AP) — A mistrial was declared in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial on Friday after jurors failed to reach a verdict on whether she was criminally responsible for killing her three young children at her Massachusetts home.
Judge William Sullivan declared the mistrial on the seventh day of deliberations after jurors sent a note saying: “It is with a heavy heart that we report we are unable to come to a unanimous decision and will not be able to.”
The emotionally charged case has sharply divided many Americans and generated intense interest for over a month as it's drawn attention to issues around maternal mental health after childbirth.
Clancy, 36, never disputed that she killed her children. But her attorney said she had a rare condition called postpartum psychosis when she strangled her kids, the youngest just 8 months old, then tried to take her own life in 2023. Prosecutors said Clancy knew what she was doing.
Here are some key moments from the trial:
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.
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Clancy’s former husband, Patrick Clancy, was first to take the stand.
In emotional testimony, he described the day he found his wife after she tried to kill herself.
Lindsay Clancy had sent him out to get takeout food and medication for their daughter, which prosecutors argue was an excuse to get him out of the house.
He came home to find the house unusually silent, before finding blood throughout the main bedroom and a window open.
Jurors listened to the 911 call he made after finding his wife outside in the snow. She had jumped from a second-story window. Clancy can be heard speaking with his wife, then telling the dispatcher he’s going to check on the children.
Moments later, he howls and cries after finding his children in the basement. The confused dispatcher repeatedly asks what happened.
“She killed the kids!” he yells.
Clancy’s mother, mother-in-law, sister, friends and co-workers testified that Clancy struggled with her mental health after giving birth to Callan, the youngest of her three children.
Clancy’s mother-in-law, Susan Clancy, said she and her former daughter-in-law were close. Both worked as labor and delivery nurses. She described Lindsay as a wonderful mother.
But she testified that Lindsay had become anxious, paranoid and suicidal, and that the psychiatric care she was getting wasn’t helping.
“She felt unwell. She had insomnia. She was losing her appetite. She was very anxious and sad,” Susan Clancy said. “She was begging for help.”
Lindsay Clancy’s mother, Paula Musgrove, testified that her daughter was scared to sleep alone, became paranoid and believed the medications she was taking “were destroying her mind.”
Clancy saw several doctors about her declining mental health, and eventually checked herself into a psychiatric hospital.
Her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, argued that she was misdiagnosed and overmedicated.
As he cross-examined one of her psychiatrists, Dr. Jennifer Tufts, Reddington questioned her expertise, decisions about prescriptions and use of 25-minute video appointments with limited time for talk therapy.
At one point, Reddington implied that Tufts was a box-checking “robot.”
“What did you do?” he asked as they discussed an appointment about two months before the killings. “You had a woman who was telling you she felt hopeless.”
“I told her that this was something we could address, that there was hope, that there are treatments, that there are different types of programs,” Tufts said, “so she knew that she still had options and a reason to hope.”
Paul Zeizel, a clinical and forensic psychologist who visited Lindsay Clancy in the hospital after she killed the children, testified that he overheard her saying that a disembodied male voice had told her she had no choice but to kill her children and then herself. Zeizel said he believed Clancy wasn’t responsible for her actions because of her deep mental illness.
Prosecutors called a rebuttal witness, forensic psychologist Kirk Heilbrun, who said he didn’t believe Clancy had hallucinated voices.
“One of the things that she said when I asked about what happened, is that in the course of strangling each child, she said, ‘Go to God, baby. Go to God,’” he testified. “That was part of her expectation — that she and the children would be together in heaven with God.”
Dr. Gregory Saathoff, a senior psychiatrist for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, testified for prosecutors that Clancy “had the capacity to know right from wrong.”
After testimony was complete, each side got about an hour to make their closing argument to the jury.
Reddington showed the jury a photograph of the Clancy family, looking happy, and a second one of Lindsay Clancy in the hospital.
“How does this turn into this?” Reddington asked. “How? Because of the damn medicine and the lousy medical care that she got.”
Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague said criticizing the mental health system was “a distraction.” She said Clancy chose to kill her children because doing so would make it easier to kill herself.
“She was depressed. She was exhausted. She was done. She didn’t want to try anymore. She felt damaged,” Sprague said. “But those kids, those kids were her protective factor. Those kids were keeping her from ending her misery.”
Starting Tuesday, the fourth day of deliberations, jurors said they couldn't unanimously agree. The judge asked them to keep deliberating. On Wednesday, they told him they were still at an impasse. He told them again to keep trying.
Then, on Thursday, the jury’s foreperson told the judge that a single juror wouldn’t follow the court’s instructions about reasonable doubt.
The judge brought in each juror individually and questioned them in private. He then reread his instructions on reasonable doubt before sending them back to continue deliberating.
Jurors returned Friday for their seventh day of deliberations, but not long after resuming they told the judge again they were unable to agree.
The judge said he didn’t feel he had any choice but to declare a mistrial. That prompted an audible gasp in the courtroom.
But after several minutes, Reddington requested he be allowed to file an emergency appeal to the state’s highest court. Sullivan told Reddington he’d give him an hour.
Less than three hours later, the judge confirmed Reddington’s high court appeal had been denied and formally declared a mistrial.
Outside the courthouse, Reddington blasted the sole juror who he believed stood in the others’ way of an acquittal.
“They know they were robbed by one man, for whatever his agenda was, who stole seven weeks of the life of these other jurors that were so attentive, so beautiful, so wonderful,” he said.
The prosecutor who originally decided to charge Clancy said there would not be an immediate decision about a second trial.
