PLYMOUTH, Mass. (AP) — Lindsay Clancy sobbed uncontrollably Thursday as jurors viewed autopsy photos of the youngest of her three children who she strangled in 2023, until the court eventually had to take an unscheduled break.
In the second week of her Massachusetts murder trial, prosecutors brought more friends, a former work colleague and her former father-in-law to testify about Clancy's mental and emotional state. For the most part, they said she was open about her postpregnancy mental health struggles but seemed like a loving mother who cared for her kids.
The prosecution wants to show the 35-year-old former labor and delivery nurse acted intentionally and should be held criminally responsible, while Clancy's defense says she had postpartum psychosis, a rare and dangerous psychiatric condition that affects women's hold on reality after childbirth.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.
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Clancy has pleaded not guilty to murder charges in the deaths of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, who she killed on Jan. 24, 2023 after sending her husband out on errands. Prosecutors say this was a ruse to get her husband out of the house. She remains paralyzed from the waist down after jumping from the home's second-story window that night.
None of the witnesses Thursday testified they heard Clancy express suicidal or homicidal thoughts. However, after the birth of her third child, she told them of trouble sleeping and harmful side effects from medications. She text-messaged one childhood friend to say medication had “caused her to have some dark thoughts.”
Amy Bevins visited Clancy in a rehabilitation facility after the killings. The two made small talk, she said, and played a game. When asked by prosecutors if Clancy brought up her children or cried about them, she said she had not.
But on cross-examination by Clancy's defense attorney, Bevins acknowledged the meeting was “awkward” and that Clancy's sister had said not to bring up the kids.
Christopher Clancy testified that he knew his then-daughter-in-law was having issues. At one point, he suggested the grandchildren stay with him and his wife, but his son declined.
“I knew she was having a hard time sleeping,” Christopher Clancy said. “I knew she just didn’t feel well. I knew she went to the emergency room where my wife was working. Those types of struggles.”
Clancy’s lawyers don’t dispute that she killed the children. But in the criminal trial and a medical malpractice lawsuit, her attorneys say she had bipolar disorder that wasn’t fully diagnosed until after the killings. Her attorneys say her condition seemed to worsen on the psychiatric medications, some of them problematic for bipolar patients.
If convicted of murder, Lindsay Clancy faces life in prison without parole. If found not guilty due to a lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility.
Meanwhile, the judge and the district attorney learned Thursday that they face a retrial in another case involving a mother’s mental state when she killed her two school-age children in 2018.
Massachusetts’ top court threw out Latarsha Sanders’ murder conviction in the stabbings of sons Edson “Marlon” Brito, 8, and La’son Brito, 5.
Sanders told police in a recorded interview that she stabbed the boys because “bad people” text-messaged her commands to carry out a “ritual” connected to “Voodoo stuff” and the Illuminati. The latter is a purported powerful secret society at the center of various conspiracy theories, and Sanders’ family said she had become obsessively fearful of it.
Like Clancy’s lawyers, Sanders’ defense argued she was mentally ill and shouldn’t be held criminally responsible, while prosecutors said she acted deliberately. Prosecutors noted that Sanders tried to clean up the bloody crime scene, initially denied killing the children, and had written, in a disjointed personal notebook, about wanting to write books and become famous.
A defense neuropsychologist diagnosed Sanders with schizophrenia spectrum disorder, among other conditions, and testified that she was “grossly psychotic” when she killed the children.
The neuropsychologist was allowed to mention that he’d reviewed her medical records. But the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court faulted the judge for not letting jurors hear many specifics from the records, in which clinicians at a prison and a psychiatric hospital suggested similar diagnoses after Sanders’ arrest.
The doctors also noted that Sanders said she’d heard voices for decades, reported ongoing delusional and paranoid thoughts, and displayed odd behavior, such as licking windows.
Withholding the records from jurors “impermissibly stripped” the defense of its medical foundation, Justice Frank M. Gaziano wrote in a unanimous decision.
A message seeking comment was sent to a spokesperson for Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz, and messages were left for the judge, Superior Court Justice William Sullivan, through the court system.
Sanders’ lawyer, Robert F. Shaw Jr., welcomed the opinion and said he looked forward to retrying the case.
“The hope is that those records and that evidence will be able to be viewed by a jury with fresh eyes,” he said by phone. Sanders is in prison, and he hadn’t yet been able to meet with her to discuss the court ruling.
Her relatives told the Boston Globe last year that they hoped Clancy’s trial would generate more public scrutiny of Sanders’ case.
