Lindsay Clancy's murder trial ground to a halt Wednesday when the paralyzed 36-year-old mother sobbed "I can't do this" as a medical examiner described how her five-year-old daughter died, but the day's testimony also revealed a mental health system that turned Clancy away repeatedly in the weeks before she killed all three of her children.
Massachusetts medical examiner Barbara Olson told the jury that Cora Clancy, age five, died of asphyxiation after her mother strangled her with exercise bands on Jan. 24, 2023. Olson testified that the child would have experienced pain before losing consciousness, a window she placed at 10 to 30 seconds.
That testimony broke Clancy. She began hyperventilating and crying audibly from her wheelchair, then told the courtroom she could not continue. Judge William Sullivan called a break and dismissed the jury from the room. It was the second time Sullivan had paused proceedings that afternoon because of Clancy's reactions.
Before Olson took the stand, a second medical examiner, Renee Stonebridge, testified that she had examined body parts belonging to all three Clancy children. Stonebridge's testimony alone was enough to trigger audible crying from the defendant. Olson then followed with the autopsy findings for both Cora and three-year-old Dawson Clancy, who also died of asphyxiation. The youngest child, Callan, was eight months old; another medical examiner had testified about that baby's autopsy the previous week.
Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, is not contesting that she killed her three children. Her defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, is pursuing a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity defense, arguing that Clancy was hearing voices that told her to commit the acts and that she had been dangerously overmedicated by her psychiatric providers.
The prosecution, led by Shanan Buckingham, is making its own case with physical evidence. During testimony from State Trooper Daniel Lawlor, who had been posted outside Clancy's hospital room after the killings, Buckingham held up bloodied clothes that had been cut from Clancy's body at the hospital. Clancy had sliced her own wrists and neck and thrown herself from a second-floor bedroom window immediately after strangling the children, paralyzing herself in the fall.
Wednesday's testimony was not limited to the autopsy findings. Counselor Latiesha Dukes told the jury about a woman unraveling in plain sight in the month before the killings, and a system that watched it happen.
Dukes saw Clancy on four occasions in December 2022. By that point, Clancy had lost 10 pounds, was sleeping only two to four hours a night, and was experiencing suicidal thoughts. At a Dec. 5, 2022, appointment, Dukes testified, Clancy told her directly about what she was going through:
"She had a difficult weekend, having intrusive thoughts that she wanted to die."
Dukes repeatedly recommended that Clancy check into an outpatient postpartum program at Women and Infants Hospital in Rhode Island. But the jury had already learned, from testimony the day before, that Women and Infants turned Clancy away. Defense attorney Reddington alleged Tuesday that the hospital refused to treat Clancy because it believed she was overmedicated. Women and Infants instead directed her to McLean Hospital, a mental health facility in Belmont, Massachusetts.
Clancy also reached out to the ASPIRE crisis hotline, twice, in December 2022. Both times, she was told she did not qualify for inpatient treatment. Dukes testified that after one of those calls, Clancy met with a clinician virtually and received a specific answer:
"She met with the clinician virtually and was told she did not meet the criteria for in-patient treatment due to not having a suicidal ideation plan."
Reddington pressed Dukes on this point during cross-examination:
"Two times she contacted ASPIRE, not once. Both times they told her there was nothing they could do for her?"
Dukes answered: "Correct."
On Dec. 15, 2022, Clancy went to the emergency room at Massachusetts General Hospital because of her suicidal thoughts. She did not spend the night. The reason: she did not have a specific plan to act on those thoughts, the same standard the ASPIRE hotline had applied.
By New Year's Day 2023, Clancy checked herself into McLean Hospital. She stayed five days. Less than three weeks later, on Jan. 24, all three of her children were dead.
The defense has built its case around the volume of psychiatric medication Clancy was receiving. Various providers wrote her 30 prescriptions for 13 powerful psychiatric drugs in the four months before the killings. Both Lindsay Clancy and her ex-husband, Patrick Clancy, who has since remarried, have filed separate lawsuits against her psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Tufts, and other providers, alleging misdiagnosis and overmedication.
One of Wednesday's more revealing exchanges involved what happened after the killings, while Clancy was recovering at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Reddington had won a court order allowing psychiatrist Dr. Paul Zeizel to visit Clancy in her hospital room, which was guarded by police. During that visit, Zeizel let Clancy use his cell phone to call Patrick Clancy. On that call, Lindsay told her then-husband that she had heard voices telling her to kill the children.
Trooper Lawlor, who was posted outside the room, testified that he did not hear the conversation between Zeizel and Clancy. But he acknowledged that he and lead investigator State Trooper Joshua McKelligan had speculated between themselves that Zeizel may have coached Clancy to tell Patrick about the voices as a defense strategy.
Lawlor admitted on the stand that neither he nor McKelligan had any evidence to support that theory.
After Olson completed her testimony about both Cora and Dawson, Judge Sullivan dismissed the jury for the day.
The insanity defense will rise or fall on whether the jury believes Clancy was too mentally ill to understand what she was doing. That is a high legal bar, and the prosecution clearly intends to make the jury confront every physical detail of what happened to three small children.
But the testimony about what happened before Jan. 24, 2023, raises a different question, one that no verdict will fully answer. A woman told a counselor she wanted to die. She called a crisis hotline twice and was told she did not qualify for help. She went to an emergency room and was sent home. She was turned away from a postpartum treatment program. She checked herself into a mental hospital for five days. She was prescribed 30 rounds of 13 different psychiatric medications in four months. And then she killed her children.
Every one of those institutions followed its own protocol. Every one of them checked its own box. And three children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy, are dead.
Accountability does not always mean someone broke a rule. Sometimes it means the rules were never built to protect the people who needed them most.