Lindsay Clancy sobbed in court as she faced her ex-husband on Monday during the opening of her trial for killing her three children in January 2023 — as jurors saw haunting video of the former family of five enjoying a blissful vacation just days before unspeakable tragedy.
Clancy, who is paralyzed in a wheelchair after a suicide attempt, is arguing that she was suffering postpartum psychosis and had been prescribed 15 different medications in a ham-fisted attempt to treat her before she strangled 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan with exercise bands. Her lawyers are putting up the insanity defense, arguing she was not legally in control of her actions, and is not guilty of murder.
Chilling surveillance footage from the family’s Jan. 15, 2023, trip to the Cape Codder indoor water park near the family home outside Boston showed Clancy playfully riding a waterslide with little Cora, as her ex-husband, Patrick Clancy, took the witness stand.
“Lindsay was always able to interact with our kids,” Patrick testified in support of his ex-wife.
Patrick – who has moved to New York City and remarried since finding his kids dead in their home on Jan. 24, 2023 – said Clancy “seemed to be doing a lot better” during the vacation, despite being hospitalized twice for suicidal thoughts the month before.
He remained mostly stoic through hours of testimony — only becoming emotional when prosecutors displayed a photo of Cora smiling and posing in a shirt emblazoned with the word “Love,” a red skirt and matching bow in her hair.
Clancy, meanwhile, visibly sobbed as jurors were shown the heart-wrenching family photos and video.
Details of the 35-year-old’s worsening mental state leading up to the killings also emerged in court Monday, when attorneys on both sides revealed she had been prescribed at least 15 psychiatric medications from November 2022 to a day before the murders.
Patrick said his ex-wife’s anxiety stemmed from the idea of returning to work and leaving her children after her 18 weeks of maternity leave expired that fall.
He said Clancy revealed she started taking Zoloft, a popular antidepressant, in September 2022, but “kept getting worse and worse” — despite the family hiring a nanny to help her with the kids and chores.
By December 2022, Clancy had devolved into a “big spiral” after starting to take the unusual antipsychotic medication Seroquel, Patrick recalled.
“She started to say she was suicidal” and “described thoughts of hurting the kids or them having some sort of ailment,” the father said, though he noted she promised that she did not have a plan to harm the children.
Patrick recalled rushing Clancy to the emergency room after she told her father she wanted to kill herself on Dec. 15, 2022. One doctor recommended inpatient medical treatment at McLean Hospital while two others suggested a day program called “Women and Infants” in Providence, Rhode Island.
The ex-husband dropped Lindsay off at the day program and later picked her up, when they decided it “wasn’t the right fit” for her, he said.
By New Year’s Eve, she was back in the hospital with more suicidal thoughts.
“I was exhausted,” Patrick told the jury. “I said, I think it’s time to go to McLean. We didn’t have a diagnosis so we just didn’t really know what was wrong.”
Jurors were then shown selfies Clancy took during the hospitalization — one of her wearing a medical mask in the hospital room and another of her legs underneath a blanket on the bed — that Patrick said he had never seen.
Clancy spent less than a week at McLean before requesting to be discharged so she could go to her daughter’s birthday party on Jan. 5, 2023 — also unbeknownst to Patrick, he admitted on the stand.
Earlier Monday, defense attorney Kevin Reddington argued that Clancy desperately sought help for postpartum psychosis 19 times in the months before the killings, and was prescribed medications by five separate doctors between September 2022 and the day before the murders.
The defense also showed jurors photos of Clancy with a bloodied neck and attached to a breathing tube in the hospital, after she jumped from a second-story window in a botched suicide attempt that left her paraplegic.
Grisly crime scene photos showing a bloodied kitchen knife beside a cup emblazoned with the message, “Because kids,” as well as pools of blood covering a bedroom floor, were also shown to the jury.
“This is a woman who dedicated her life to nothing other than helping others, being the best nurse and best mom,” Reddington argued — and added: “This is not a righteous prosecution.”
Prosecutor Shanan Buckingham, on the other hand, insisted Clancy was “not psychotic” when she killed her children, and argued that her actions before the killings were deliberate and showed premeditation.
“This case is about the Lindsay Clancy on Jan. 24, 2023 — at the time of the crimes. This was not a woman in the throes of psychosis … this is a woman who acted intentionally, rationally and swiftly with a very specific goal — to kill,” Buckingham told jurors Monday.
The trial is expected to last up to two months and feature testimonies of up to 200 witnesses.