The last question Kevin Reddington asked in the Lindsay Clancy trial was not about psychiatry. It was about the prosecution.
He had spent the better part of two days trying to dismantle Dr. Gregory Saathoff, the forensic psychiatrist the Commonwealth had saved for last, and near the end of it he picked up the transcript of the government’s own opening statement and began reading it aloud. Then he asked the witness whether what he had just read captured what Lindsay Clancy had been going through on the night of January 24, 2023.
Saathoff, the government’s witness, said it did not. The statement, he said, really minimizes what Lindsay Clancy was going through.
That is where the evidence in this case ended. The Commonwealth rested its rebuttal Wednesday afternoon, the defense offered nothing in surrebuttal, and Judge William Sullivan sent the jury home and called the lawyers back at half past two for a charge conference behind closed doors. Twenty-one trial days, roughly five weeks, and something like seventy witnesses are now finished. On Thursday both sides make their closing arguments, the judge instructs the jury on the law, and twelve people take the case.
The morning belonged to the prosecution
Before Reddington got his last turn, Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague ran a sequence of questions that will almost certainly resurface in the government’s closing. She asked Saathoff, one at a time, whether the voice Clancy has described told her where to kill her children. Whether it told her how. What to use. In what order. Whether it told her how to kill herself afterward, or by what method.
To each one, Saathoff answered no.
Then he drew the inference the sequence was built for. Having no instructions as to how to do it, he said, but being able to execute those decisions anyway, was surprising, because she accomplished all of it without any other kind of direction or plan.
That is the government’s theory reduced to a single exchange. Not that Clancy was well. Not that she invented her suffering. Rather, that whatever she experienced, the decisions on that evening were hers, made in sequence, under her own direction.
Saathoff then enumerated those decisions for the jury, and the list is long. Phone searches and mapping the distance from the house to the restaurant. Asking her husband to extend his errand, adding a pharmacy stop to the takeout run. Timing everything to the window when he was gone. Choosing the basement. Choosing the order of the children. Choosing what to say to keep them from panicking. Choosing the exercise bands. Choosing how, and in what sequence. Then turning to her own death.
She had control, he told them, control of the sequence of what she was doing throughout, and she executed it quickly and methodically in the time available.
He had already given the jury, a day earlier, the line that the defense will spend Thursday trying to defuse. Clancy reported that the commanding voice stopped the instant the killings were finished. Saathoff’s response was that committing the act is not curative of the voice, and that he has never seen such a thing.
He also worked the seams between the accounts Clancy gave to different examiners. By his interview, the voice began around 5:34 in the evening, after a phone call with her husband. By the account she gave to Dr. Margaret Spinelli for the defense, closer to 5:15. Small on its face. Not small when the entire question is whether a memory is a symptom or a construction.
What Reddington did with him
The cross went at foundation rather than conclusion, which has been Reddington’s approach to every expert in this trial.
He spent time on what Saathoff actually does now. The witness’s recent work runs heavily to terrorism and violent extremism, and his consulting relationships run to law enforcement, prisons, and the Justice Department. His hands-on treatment of postpartum psychosis patients, Reddington drew out, belongs mostly to the 1980s and 1990s. He pressed on the interviews themselves, conducted over Zoom, three years after the night in question.
Then came the exchange that reporters in the room flagged immediately.
Reddington asked whether he had heard the 911 call. Saathoff said he had. Reddington asked whether he had heard Clancy respond to anything on that call other than what could be described as guttural grunts.
No, the witness said.
It is a small answer with a large purpose. The Commonwealth’s case is built on a woman making orderly decisions in sequence. The 911 call is the only recording of her from that night, and on it she is not making decisions at all. She is not explaining, not directing, not negotiating. She is making sounds.
Reddington will use that Thursday. He has to, because the alternative account of the evening depends on the jury accepting that a person can appear organized from the outside while something else is running the machinery, and the recording is the closest thing he has to letting them hear it.
And then he read the prosecution’s opening back to their own last witness, and got him to say it minimized what she was going through.
The fight the jury never saw
The charge conference that followed is closed to the public, and it is where a meaningful part of this case gets decided.
Judge Sullivan and the lawyers are settling the instructions. That means the language on criminal responsibility under Commonwealth v. McHoul, the allocation of the burden, and, most consequentially, the list of verdicts that will appear on the slip the jury carries into the room.
Some of those options are not in dispute. First-degree murder is charged. Second-degree murder, the traditional lesser included offense, is the compromise verdict available to jurors who accept an intentional killing but balk at premeditation. Not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility is the defense’s request.
The contested one is involuntary manslaughter. Reddington asked for that instruction on a theory of involuntary intoxication, the argument that the psychiatric medications Clancy had been prescribed produced the state she was in. Prosecutors opposed it. No ruling has been reported, and the jury will learn the answer at the same time everyone else does, when Sullivan reads the charge.
It matters more than a technical footnote. Every additional option on a verdict slip is another place a divided jury can land, and in a case where the only real dispute is a defendant’s mind, the number of doors in the room is close to determinative.
What Thursday looks like
The defense closes first in Massachusetts. That is the reverse of what most people expect from television, and it means Reddington must anticipate arguments the Commonwealth has not made yet, while prosecutors get the final word before the judge speaks.
After closings, Sullivan instructs. He will tell the jury that lack of criminal responsibility means a defendant who, because of mental disease or defect, lacked substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the requirements of law. Two prongs, and the defense needs only one of them.
He will also tell them where the burden sits, and this is the instruction that has quietly governed the entire trial. Clancy does not have to prove she was insane. Once the defense fairly raised the issue, the Commonwealth must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was criminally responsible. A juror who finds the expert testimony genuinely balanced has not reached a tie. Under the instruction that juror will receive, a real doubt about capacity means the Commonwealth has not carried its burden.
Then deliberations, Thursday or Friday, running as long as they run.
What the jury actually has to sort out
Six psychiatric experts testified. Not one of them told this jury that Lindsay Clancy was well.
The defense put on Dr. Paul Zeizel, who met with her roughly sixty times and described psychosis that came and went like waves at the beach, and Dr. Phillip Resnick, who evaluated Andrea Yates, who diagnosed postpartum psychosis with command hallucinations, and who told the jury it was almost as though she were a puppet with someone else pulling the strings. The Commonwealth answered with Dr. Avram Mack, who acknowledged she was in a serious psychiatric state and suffering while concluding psychosis alone does not prevent someone from knowing right from wrong; Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, who diagnosed bipolar II and said she retained an awareness of the illegality of killing her children; and Saathoff.
So the disagreement is not about illness. It is about capacity, which is a different thing, and it is the thing Massachusetts law actually asks about. A person can be genuinely, severely, documentably ill and still be criminally responsible, if the illness left those two specific capacities intact. That gap is the entire trial, and we walked through it in what all six experts agree and disagree about.
Around the courtroom the case has become something else entirely. Supporters gathered outside in pink. A New York Times guest essay argued this week that she deserves mercy. Rusty Yates, whose then-wife drowned their five children in 2001, went on television to defend Patrick Clancy against online theories. Vanity Fair pulled a freelance reporter’s credential this week after a clip circulated of her smiling and winking at the courtroom camera. None of it reaches the jury, which has been instructed to stay away from all of it.
What reaches the jury is twenty-one days of testimony, an instruction on a 1967 standard, and a burden that runs the opposite direction from what most people assume.
Common questions
Is testimony over in the Lindsay Clancy trial?
Yes. The Commonwealth rested its rebuttal case on Wednesday, August 26, 2026, and the defense offered no surrebuttal.
When are closing arguments?
Thursday, August 27, 2026, followed by the judge’s instructions and the start of deliberations.
Who closes first?
The defense. In Massachusetts the prosecution argues last.
What verdicts can the jury return?
First-degree murder, second-degree murder as a lesser included offense, and not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. The defense also asked for an involuntary manslaughter instruction on an involuntary intoxication theory; no ruling on that request has been reported.
Did Lindsay Clancy testify?
No. Her account reached the jury through the psychiatric experts who evaluated her and the family members and chaplain who described what she told them.
How long will the jury deliberate?
There is no time limit and no reliable way to predict it. We laid out the factors in this piece.
Reporting current as of Wednesday evening, August 26, 2026.