Lindsay Clancy Murder Trial: Key Insights from the Opening Statements

Her attorney argues she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and extreme mental illness when she killed them.

• Opening statements are set to begin today in the triple-murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who has argued she is not criminally responsible for fatally strangling her three young children, Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and 8-month-old Callan.

• Clancy has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder and faces life in prison if convicted. Her attorney has argued she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and extreme mental illness when she killed them.

• The testimony is expected to focus heavily on dueling psychiatric and medical experts testifying about postpartum mental illness. The key witness in the case could be her husband Patrick Clancy, who has indicated he shares his wife’s perspective on mental illness. “I wasn’t married to a monster — I was married to someone who got sick,” he said in a 2024 interview.

• Editor’s note: Coverage of this story contains graphic descriptions of child killings, suicidal ideation, and an attempt to die by suicide.

Court is now in session in the triple-murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman who has argued she’s not criminally responsible for the killings of her three children.

Judge William F. Sullivan gaveled the case in at 9:30 a.m. ET.

Jurors will hear opening statements from both sides before the first witness is called.

One of the key witnesses in this case is expected to be Clancy’s ex-husband and the children’s father, Patrick Clancy, who in the past has expressed sympathy toward the plight of mental illness.

“I wasn’t married to a monster — I was married to someone who got sick,” he said in a 2024 interview.

After about three and a half days of jury selection, 18 jurors were empaneled last week for the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman who argues she’s not criminally responsible for fatally strangling her three children.

The jury is composed of 12 women and six men, according to a spokesperson for the Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office, which is prosecuting the case. Six of the panelists will be designated alternates.

Clancy has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder for the killings of her children Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8-months. Her attorney argues she is not responsible for her actions because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and extreme mental illness.

In a civil lawsuit against her medical providers, Lindsay Clancy said a voice in her head ordered her to kill her children and herself.

“I lost all control. My body started acting without any control on my part,” Clancy said in the lawsuit. “I was just following commands, ‘all action.’ This voice demanded action.”

But legal experts told CNN the “insanity defense” that Clancy’s attorneys will attempt is a difficult argument to make successfully.

“I think there’s an ongoing kind of perception that insanity pleas are kind of a get-out-of-jail-free card that attorneys throw on the table,” said Joni Johnston, an investigator and forensic psychiatrist who conducts psychological evaluations of criminal offenders. “It’s a pretty rare defense to use – and an even rarer one to be successful.”

Broadly, Clancy’s case is similar to the infamous trial of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children in their bathtub in 2001. She pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and after an initial murder conviction was overturned on appeal, a jury sided with her in a 2006 retrial. She remains institutionalized at a state hospital.

Perhaps the most well-known use of the insanity defense was in the trial of John Hinckley Jr., the man who shot President Ronald Reagan and three others in 1981 in what he said was an attempt to impress the actress Jodie Foster. The jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity. Hinckley spent nearly 30 years at a mental hospital before his release in 2016.

If jurors find Clancy cannot be held criminally responsible for the deaths of her children, the court would likely begin the legal process to have her committed to a state psychiatric hospital.

Lindsay Clancy — the Massachusetts mother who has argued she is not criminally responsible for fatally strangling her three young children — is on trial for murder in the deaths of her children Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and 8-month-old Callan.

The case will explore the controversial “insanity defense” and the severity of postpartum mental illness.

The core facts of the killings are not in dispute: On January 24, 2023, Clancy fatally strangled her three children in the basement of their Duxbury home using exercise resistance bands. She then cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window in a suicide attempt, leaving her partially paralyzed.

Instead, the key issue is her culpability.

Prosecutors say Clancy showed “deliberate premeditation, extreme atrocity or cruelty, and the state of mind of the defendant.” However, her attorney argues she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and extreme mental illness, so she was not responsible for her actions.

Opening statements are set to begin later this morning in the triple-murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who has argued she is not criminally responsible for fatally strangling her children.

Clancy, a 35-year-old former labor and delivery nurse at a hospital in Boston, has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder for the January 2023 killings of her children Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and 8-month-old Callan. She is being held at the public Tewksbury Hospital in Massachusetts.

While she did kill her children, she shouldn’t be found criminally responsible for murder, her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, has said in court proceedings as recently as June.

Clancy had long struggled with depression, even going so far as to voluntarily commit herself to a local psychiatric hospital less than a month before her children’s deaths, Reddington has said. Clancy’s doctors took her on and off medications to treat the depression, which her attorney has said worsened her symptoms.

“Our society fails miserably in treating women with postpartum depression or even postpartum psychosis,” Reddington said at a 2023 arraignment hearing. “This is a situation that clearly was a product of mental illness.”

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