Massachusetts mom Lindsay Clancy sobbed repeatedly Wednesday as prosecutors showed the PJs that her three young children were wearing when she killed them — and then played the harrowing 911 call her husband made after coming home to tragedy, begging her at one point, “Where are the kids, Lindsay?”
The second day of the the murder trial included the end of husband Patrick Clancy’s testimony, as well as gut-wrenching evidence that stunned the courtroom into silence and had even a veteran journalist calling it, “truly one of the worst things I’ve heard in my 43 year career.”
Clancy is pleading insanity and arguing that she was suffering postpartum psychosis, for which she never got adequate treatment, when she killed her kids. Prosecutors say her actions betray a calculated killer.
Plymouth County Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague presented the tiny clothing as well as the three exercise bands Clancy used to fatally strangle 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan at their Boston area home in January 2023.
Clancy, meanwhile, appeared to turn her head away from the camera and dab her eyes with a tissue during the display.
Patrick Clancy’s frantic 911 call was also played for the jury — though only the people in the courtroom heard the harrowing recording after Judge William Sullivan approved Patrick’s request for it to not be broadcast to the public last week.
The father could be heart pleading with his wife to tell him what happened to their children.
“Where are the kids, Lindsay?” Patrick could be heard asking her during the call. “Did you fall out the window, Linds? Did you fall? Is there something on your neck, Lindsay?”
Patrick had come home from running errands to find the house deathly quiet. He discovered his wife, a labor and delivery nurse, on her back in their backyard, below the second-floor bedroom window she threw herself out of during a suicide attempt. Her wrists and neck were cut and bloodied.
He then ran inside to find the children strangled in the basement as first responders were arriving.
Patrick could then be heard screaming and saying that he needed help in the basement.
“She killed the kids!” he yelled during the call.
Lindsay Clancy was sobbing audibly as the call was played and continued to cry as she was wheeled out of the courtroom for a break.
Earlier during Patrick’s testimony, he described returning to eery silence after picking up a medication at CVS and takeout at a restaurant on the fateful Jan. 24, 2024, evening.
“The house was really quiet,” he said.
Patrick called down to the basement and no one answered, so he went upstairs thinking the kids were having a bath – but he still didn’t find anyone.
He went to his and Clancy’s bedroom but the door was locked, which was when “I knew something was wrong,” he testified.
The dad eventually unlocked the room with a key and saw “blood everywhere” and the window open.
He asked Clancy what happened and she responded, “I tried to kill myself,” he recalled from the witness stand.
Patrick then asked where the couple’s three children were.
“They are in the basement” was her response.
The father’s voice grew quiet as he testified about the gutting moment he found the children unresponsive with exercise bands around their necks.
“I saw Cora. She had a band around her neck,” Patrick said, adding that the girl was “face down” on the ground.
He said he took the band off her neck and then noticed Callan, also with a band around his neck, nearby. He eventually found Dawson, who suffered the same fate as his siblings, in Patrick’s basement office.
“I knew that he was gone,” Patrick told the jury about the moment he discovered the middle child.
He then ran back to Cora and tried to perform CPR on her and then ran back and forth between the kids trying to save them until help arrived, he explained.
Patrick admitted during cross-examination by Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington that she was a “very dedicated” mom.
“She did everything,” testified Patrick, who has moved to New York City and remarried since the murders.
The jury was shown a series of Clancy’s Facebook posts of her and her cheerful children but a photo of an eerie book found in the family’s kitchen painted a less rosy picture of Clancy’s journey with motherhood.
The book, titled “Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts,” was found tucked among other publications inside a kitchen cabinet, the jury learned.
Patrick said he didn’t recall ever seeing the book.
He was, however, aware that Clancy had developed severe insomnia after she was prescribed Zoloft in September 2022.
Her lack of sleep was “a huge problem,” Patrick said. “It was hard [for her] to function. I just wanted her to get sleep and feel better.”
Clancy – who had been prescribed at least 15 different psychiatric meds by five different doctors in the months leading up to the murders – meticulously wrote out the dosage of medications she took each day and her corresponding fragile mental health state, according to a journal page shown to jurors.
In one entry from Dec. 8, 2022, she wrote that she took 5 mg of Valium along with 75 mg of Seroquel and that she “slept well 9-5 few wake ups feeling very depressed & intrusive thoughts today.”
All the dates on the page noted troubled moods.
Reddington is asking the jury to find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity on the grounds that she was in the throes of severe postpartum psychosis, caused partly by all the prescription drugs she was on.
Patrick on Monday told the jury how Clancy had struggled with suicidal thoughts in the months leading up to the murders, and how she was hospitalized with such ideations on two separate occasions in December 2022.
He said Wednesday that Clancy had admitted to him and her mother even having thoughts of harming the kids.
The trial is scheduled to resume Thursday morning.
