PLYMOUTH, Mass. – A Massachusetts mother accused of murdering her three young children broke down in tears Wednesday as prosecutors displayed the exercise bands and children’s pajamas linked to the killings, according to courtroom reports and video of the proceedings.
Lindsay Clancy, 35, sat in Plymouth Superior Court as her former husband, Patrick Clancy, described returning home on Jan. 24, 2023, to an unusually quiet house in Duxbury. He found her outside after she had cut her throat and wrists and jumped from a second-story window, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down.
“The house was really quiet,” Patrick Clancy testified. He said his then-wife told him the children were in the basement. There, he discovered 5-year-old Cora face down with an exercise band around her neck, 8-month-old Callan nearby in the same condition, and 3-year-old Dawson in another area of the basement.
“I saw Cora. She had a band around her neck,” he said. Of their middle child, he added, “I knew that he was gone.”After Patrick Clancy left the witness stand, prosecutors presented the children’s clothing from that night, including Cora’s pajamas and Dawson’s dinosaur underwear, along with the yellow, black and blue exercise bands recovered near the children. Lindsay Clancy sobbed as the items were shown to the jury.
Jurors later heard Patrick Clancy’s 911 call from the scene, in which he can be heard screaming that “she killed the kids.” Lindsay Clancy wept with her face in her hands as the recording played; the judge instructed the panel not to let emotional reactions override the evidence.
Clancy has pleaded not guilty to murder and related charges in the deaths of Cora, Dawson and Callan. Her defense argues she was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis and was overmedicated with multiple psychiatric drugs at the time. Prosecutors maintain the acts were deliberate.
The trial continues as the jury weighs the evidence in one of the most emotionally charged cases to come before a Massachusetts court in recent years.
