Testimony by Patrick Clancy on Wednesday in Plymouth Superior Court may give prosecutors their clearest framework yet to argue that Lindsay Clancy was lucid and criminally responsible when her three children died, attorney Shari Karney told Fox News Digital.
Patrick Clancy walked jurors through the minutes he was away from the family’s Duxbury, Massachusetts, home on Jan. 24, 2023, saying he went to a CVS for a child’s stool softener and stopped to pick up dinner. He testified that Lindsay called him while he was inside CVS, understood why he was there and calmly approved a generic substitute.
When he returned home, Patrick Clancy testified, he found an unusually quiet house, blood inside the couple’s locked bedroom and Lindsay Clancy injured beneath an open second-story window. He said she had deep cuts on her wrists and a red line across her neck. He said she told him, “I tried to kill myself,” and when he asked about the children she said, “They’re in the basement.” He said she did not tell him the children were injured or in need of help.
Karney told Fox News Digital that the text messages, phone call, dinner order and the timing of Patrick Clancy’s drive could prove critical as prosecutors try to show Clancy understood her actions when the children were strangled with exercise bands. “I call this case murder versus madness,” Karney said. She added that the state is attempting to “squeeze that timeline” around the precise moment the killings occurred. Defense attorneys say competence during routine tasks does not establish criminal responsibility and contend Clancy suffered severe mental illness, including postpartum psychosis, and was impaired by changing psychiatric medications.
Patrick Clancy also testified that Lindsay Clancy later told him she heard a man’s voice saying she would “lose her chance” if she did not act, and that she had never previously told him she was hearing voices. Prosecutors played Patrick Clancy’s 911 call for jurors; the recording was barred from broadcast under a court order and the pool camera remained trained on Lindsay Clancy as she sobbed. Judge William Sullivan warned jurors not to be swayed by “sympathy, anger, passion or prejudice or pity.” Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, has pleaded not guilty to three counts each of murder and strangulation.
Jon Ross Myers is the executive editor and publisher of the Mississippi News Network, Mississippi's largest digital only media company. He can be reached at editor@tippahnews.com
