Jury selection began on July 20. Testimony ended on August 26. In between, a Plymouth County jury heard roughly seventy witnesses across twenty-one trial days, and at no point during any of it did anyone dispute that Lindsay Clancy killed Cora, Dawson, and Callan.
That is the strange shape of this trial, and the reason it has been so hard to follow from the outside. The facts everyone argues about on the internet were never in contention. What the jury has been asked to decide is something narrower and considerably harder.
Here is the whole case, in order.
The night
January 24, 2023, in Duxbury. Lindsay Clancy, a labor and delivery nurse, was home with her three children. Her husband Patrick would testify that it had been one of her better days.
In the late afternoon she ordered takeout from a restaurant in Plymouth. At roughly 5:15 she texted Patrick asking him to also stop at a CVS in Kingston for children’s medicine, which added time to his trip. He was gone somewhere in the neighborhood of forty-five minutes.
He came back to a locked bedroom door, blood, and an open window. He found his wife on the ground outside, injured, saying she had tried to kill herself. Then he went to the basement and found the children, with exercise bands around their necks, and began CPR.
Clancy survived a fall from a second-story window and has been paralyzed from the waist down since. She has attended every day of her trial in a wheelchair.
What the Commonwealth built
Prosecutors Jennifer Sprague and Shanan Buckingham opened on July 27 by describing a classic overachiever who killed deliberately and meticulously. Their theory was never that Clancy was faking illness. It was that she was in control.
They built it out of ordinary things. The timing of the errand. A search on her phone four days earlier reading “Can you treat a sociopath?” A CVS manager and a restaurant employee who dealt with her that evening and noticed nothing unusual. A treating psychiatrist who saw her by telehealth and never observed psychosis, and a nurse practitioner who testified the same. A hospital chaplain who met with Clancy more than two hundred times after the killings and whose contemporaneous notes never once recorded that she had described a commanding voice.
The jury also heard about six minutes of Patrick Clancy’s 911 call.
The Commonwealth rested on August 17.
What the defense built
Kevin Reddington’s case ran four days and moved from the family outward.
Clancy’s mother, Paula Musgrove, testified about a conversation in December 2022, a month before the killings, in which her daughter said she was having thoughts of harming her children. Her mother quoted her: this isn’t me, I just want to feel better and enjoy my kids again. Her sister described her seeming off at Thanksgiving. Her former mother-in-law, herself a labor and delivery nurse, testified that Clancy had been begging for help and had been turned away when she sought it.
Then the chaplain, Sheila Cavanaugh, who described a persistent male voice. Then Dr. Paul Zeizel, a forensic psychologist who met with Clancy roughly sixty times, who told jurors that psychosis comes and goes like waves at the beach, that she believed strangers could hear her thoughts, and that testing showed no sign of faking.
He finished with Dr. Phillip Resnick, the forensic psychiatrist who evaluated Andrea Yates, and rested immediately after. Resnick diagnosed postpartum psychosis with command hallucinations and told the jury she was clearly psychotic that day, that it was almost as though she were a puppet with someone else pulling the strings.
Underneath all of it ran the medication argument: roughly ten psychiatric drugs cycled through in her final months, an admission to McLean Hospital about a month before the killings, and a telehealth prescriber who had been independently credentialed for roughly a month when she took the case, who saw Clancy in short video visits and never obtained her perinatal records.
The rebuttal, and the trial’s worst moment for the prosecution
The Commonwealth came back with three experts. Dr. Avram Mack diagnosed a major depressive episode and told jurors there is no reason psychosis by itself prevents a person from knowing right from wrong. Dr. Kirk Heilbrun diagnosed bipolar II and delivered the sentence the defense has been answering ever since: she retained an awareness of the illegality of killing people, including killing her children.
Heilbrun also offered the alternative story that lets a jury convict without calling Clancy a liar. She was not psychotic, in his account. She was suicidal, and she took her children with her because she loved them and believed they would be better off dead than motherless.
On August 24 that testimony went sideways. Heilbrun described asking Clancy whether suicide was a mortal sin, and about her belief that she and her children would be together in heaven. It was the second time the Commonwealth’s questioning had put her Catholic faith before the jury; a prosecutor had earlier asked her former mother-in-law whether she was aware that murder is considered a mortal sin.
Reddington moved for a mistrial with prejudice, alleging intentional misconduct. Judge William Sullivan denied it, but struck the testimony, called it an absolutely inappropriate area of testimony, instructed the jury it could not be considered, and sent them home early.
That sequence now sits in the record, preserved, in a case that will receive automatic Supreme Judicial Court review if she is convicted.
The last witness
Dr. Gregory Saathoff, of the University of Virginia and the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, testified last. He fixed on a detail: the voice Clancy described stopped the moment the killings ended. Committing the act, he said, is not curative of the voice, and he had never seen it.
Sprague walked him through whether the voice had told Clancy where to kill her children, how, with what, in what order, or how to kill herself. No each time. His conclusion was that executing all of those decisions without instruction was surprising, and that she had control of the sequence throughout.
On cross, Reddington established that Saathoff’s recent work runs to terrorism and extremism, that his treatment of postpartum psychosis patients belongs largely to the 1980s and 1990s, and that he interviewed Clancy over Zoom three years after the fact. He asked whether Saathoff had heard the 911 call, and whether he had heard Clancy respond to anything on it other than what could be called guttural grunts. Saathoff said no.
Then Reddington read the prosecution’s own opening statement aloud and asked whether it captured what Clancy had been going through. The government’s final witness said it really minimized what she was going through.
Testimony ended there.
The question, stated plainly
Six experts. Zero who said she was well.
Massachusetts law does not ask whether Lindsay Clancy was ill. Under the standard from Commonwealth v. McHoul, decided in 1967, a person is not criminally responsible if, as a result of mental disease or defect, she lacked substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the requirements of law.
Two prongs, and only one is needed. A juror who concludes she knew it was illegal can still acquit on the second.
And the burden runs the direction almost nobody expects. Clancy never had to prove she was insane. Once the defense raised it, the Commonwealth took on the obligation to prove she was criminally responsible, beyond a reasonable doubt. That single allocation is why experienced Massachusetts defense lawyers have rated this case as far more open than public opinion has.
Where each verdict leads
First-degree murder carries a mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole, and automatic plenary review by the Supreme Judicial Court under G.L. c. 278, § 33E, which can order a new trial or reduce the verdict outright. That review is not theoretical; three weeks ago the SJC used it to order a new trial for another Massachusetts mother whose case turned on the same question.
Second-degree murder is life with parole eligibility, the minimum set by the judge between fifteen and twenty-five years.
Not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility does not send her home. It begins civil commitment under G.L. c. 123, § 16, with an evaluation, a hearing the district attorney can contest, an initial six-month commitment, and annual reviews for as long as she remains mentally ill and dangerous. It can run decades. Andrea Yates has been in Texas psychiatric custody since 2006.
And if the twelve cannot agree, Sullivan declares a mistrial and the district attorney decides whether to do all of this again.
Closing arguments are Thursday.
A complete day-by-day record is in our trial timeline. Related: the defense strategy reviewed, the evidence both ways, and what a guilty verdict would mean.