Nobody disputes that Lindsay Clancy killed her three children.
Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. She strangled them inside their home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, then tried to take her own life by jumping from a second-story window. Her lawyers aren’t claiming someone else was in that house. So you might wonder why there’s a trial at all.
The reason is that the question in front of this jury isn’t whether she killed her children. It’s whether she was legally responsible when she did. The defense says she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and couldn’t appreciate the criminality of her actions or conform her behavior to the law. Prosecutors agree she was mentally ill — but say she wasn’t psychotic, and knew exactly what she was doing. Under the law, that distinction is everything.
I spent twenty years as a cop. I’ve dealt with people in mental-health crises and people who’ve done horrific things, and one thing you learn fast is that figuring out what someone did isn’t the same as figuring out why. Here we know what happened. The hard question is what was happening inside her mind when it did.
On January 24, 2023, Lindsay was home with the kids when her husband, Patrick, left to pick up dinner and medication. When he came back, he found her outside, then found the children. All three eventually died. Lindsay survived, paralyzed. Under Massachusetts law, once criminal responsibility is properly raised, prosecutors have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was responsible — because being mentally ill doesn’t automatically make you legally insane. You can be severely depressed, or suicidal, or carry a psychiatric diagnosis and still understand what you’re doing and that it’s wrong. The question is whether Lindsay crossed that much higher legal line.
There’s a lot for the jury to weigh, and it cuts both ways.
For months beforehand, she was telling people something was wrong. Debilitating insomnia. Intrusive thoughts. Suicidal thoughts. She sought therapy, went to emergency rooms twice, attended a day program, entered a residential psychiatric program, called a suicide hotline. According to the Times, she was given 30 prescriptions involving 13 medications. At one point she messaged her psychiatric nurse practitioner three words that are hard to read now: “I really need help.” Patrick testified that months earlier, she had disclosed thoughts about harming the children. None of that proves she was legally insane on January 24th. But as an investigator, you can’t ignore it — this isn’t a case where a perfectly healthy woman suddenly killed her kids out of nowhere. There’s a documented trail of a woman repeatedly telling people something was seriously wrong.
Then there’s the prosecution’s case, and it’s substantial. They argue she deliberately created the chance to be alone with the children — sending Patrick out for food and medicine. People who spoke with her around that time didn’t describe someone obviously detached from reality. Prosecutors introduced digital evidence — phone activity, searches, Apple Watch data — to reconstruct what she was doing in the house. Patrick testified he spoke with her from the pharmacy and thought she sounded like she might be in the middle of something but otherwise normal; prosecutors say that call happened during the window the children were being killed. Their argument is simple: she could communicate, she could plan, she waited until he left, she moved through the house, she interacted normally. Those facts matter.
But they don’t necessarily settle the question — and this is where a lot of people watching go wrong. We carry a Hollywood picture of psychosis: someone screaming at the walls, incoherent, incapable of ordering dinner. That’s not always how it works. Defense experts testified that a person in psychosis can still perform ordinary tasks. Psychologist Paul Zeizel testified she suffered from bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis and wasn’t criminally responsible; forensic psychiatrist Phillip Resnick reportedly described her as “frankly psychotic.” The prosecution’s psychiatrist, Avram Mack, testified he believed she had major depression but wasn’t psychotic and retained criminal responsibility. Qualified experts, same woman, opposite conclusions. Welcome to an insanity case.
And there’s something I can’t get past. Lindsay Clancy repeatedly asked for help. That doesn’t absolve her, and it doesn’t prove she was psychotic — and three dead children should never become footnotes in a conversation about their mother. But we can hold two things at once. Cora, Dawson, and Callan were the victims of a horrific act. And before that act, their mother moved through a mental-health system telling people something was badly wrong — hospitals, treatment, a suicide hotline, intrusive thoughts, I need help — and no one diagnosed postpartum psychosis before those children died. From a public-safety standpoint, that should scare the hell out of us. Cops usually arrive at the end of these stories: something terrible has already happened, someone calls 911, and we show up to piece together what occurred. But work backward through a tragedy like this and you often find warning after warning — and the real question becomes how many chances there were to keep anyone from ever making that call.
This has since become a culture war. Hundreds of women in pink have gathered outside the courthouse in support; others are furious that anyone could sympathize with a woman who killed her children. I understand both reactions, but neither one tells you whether she’s criminally responsible. She doesn’t need to become a feminist symbol, or a symbol of everything wrong with modern medicine, or a monster. She’s a defendant, and that’s how a jury has to see her. Criminal trials aren’t decided by online polls for a reason.
We’ve been here before. In 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children in a Texas bathtub. She had a history of severe psychiatric illness and psychosis; she was convicted, the conviction was overturned, and at her second trial she was found not guilty by reason of insanity. One of the psychiatrists who supported the Yates insanity defense, Dr. Phillip Resnick, is now testifying for Clancy. Cases like these force an almost impossible question: is an act this horrific proof someone deserves the harshest punishment possible — or can an act become so incomprehensible that severe mental illness becomes part of how it happened at all? The law doesn’t ask you to answer that philosophically. It hands twelve people a standard and tells them to apply the evidence.
With my law-enforcement hat on, I’d be looking for intent, planning, concealment, awareness, cognition — why Patrick left, what she did before he did, what she searched, what she said to people, what she did afterward, whether her statements matched the physical and digital evidence. But here’s the thing planning can’t do by itself: it doesn’t disprove psychosis. A person in the grip of a delusion can plan and carry out a series of steps. The question is what they believed those steps were accomplishing. That’s what makes this so hard.
I’m not going to tell twelve jurors what verdict to reach before they’ve heard the case — that’s their job. But this trial exposes something our debates are terrible at holding: two things can be true at once. We have to take mental illness seriously without turning it into an excuse for every crime, and we have to face the horror of a crime without pretending mental illness doesn’t exist.
Three children were killed. No diagnosis and no verdict changes that. Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. They should be alive. The jury’s question isn’t whether what happened to them was horrific — everyone knows it was. It’s whether their mother committed murder in the legal sense, or was so profoundly ill that the law says she can’t be held responsible. And after the verdict, the rest of us are left with another one: how does a person tell the people treating her, over and over, that something is terribly wrong — and no one understands how wrong until three children are dead?
Because by the time cops are called to a scene like that, prevention is already over. All that’s left is figuring out what happened, and living with it.
This piece discusses suicide and severe mental illness. If you or someone you know is struggling, you can reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988 in the U.S. For pregnancy- and postpartum-related mental health, Postpartum Support International’s helpline is 1-800-944-4773.
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