Christopher Clancy, the father of Patrick Clancy, said the family made plans to go to Mass on Christmas Day, and he and his wife went to the Clancy home in Duxbury that morning for breakfast.
“It was good, she looked beautiful, she had a beautiful dress on,” he said of Lindsay Clancy, adding that the children were well behaved in church.
After Mass, Lindsay Clancy was “quiet” but said she liked the service and “was really happy that she went,” he said.
He described her as “very mothering” to her youngest, Callan, and protective “like any mother would be. … I would say that she was very protective of him.”
He said the same was true when her older children were born.
“I think that’s like any other mother, though,” he said.
During Thanksgiving dinner 2022, he had told jurors under questioning by prosecutors, he saw Lindsay Clancy “getting a little frustrated” with their 3-year-old son, Dawson, when she was trying to get him to sit down. He said Dawson was “a handful, but he was a good boy.” He stepped in to help. But, he told jurors under cross-examination, he did not believe she was being abusive toward Dawson when she helped him to his seat for dinner.
In January, 2023, Christopher Clancy said, he and his wife offered to take the children overnight to give their parents a break, but Patrick Clancy declined. Then, on the night of the deaths, he and his wife were invited to dinner at the Clancys’ house, but he said they couldn’t make it because they already had plans and they were planning to have dinner together a few days later.
He received a call from Patrick Clancy that night, alerting him that Lindsay Clancy had strangled 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and Callan, 8 months, with exercise bands in the basement of their Duxbury home. “It was terrible,” Christopher Clancy said.
Christopher Clancy, the father of Lindsay Clancy’s former husband, Patrick, testified in Plymouth Superior Court. NBC 10 WJAR
Lindsay Clancy had sent Patrick Clancy out to pick up over-the-counter medication at a local pharmacy and takeout for dinner, and she killed the kids before she slashed her neck and wrists and jumped out a second-story window in what prosecutors acknowledge was a suicide attempt. She is left paralyzed from the waist down.
Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer alleges she desperately sought help but was misdiagnosed and overmedicated by numerous medical providers. Her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, has presented what is known as an insanity defense, arguing that she was in the throes of postpartum psychosis at the time, and that she should not be held criminally responsible.
Prosecutors allege that the murders were premeditated, that Lindsay Clancy was unhappy with her life and wanted to kill herself and take the children with her because she didn’t trust anyone else to care for them as she did.
On Thursday, a Facebook post that she made in May 2021 describing then 19-month-old Dawson as “the most difficult human I have ever encountered,” was read to jurors by Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague. “I mean that with all of the love in my heart but I honestly cannot make it through a day without getting so frustrated with him,” Lindsay Clancy wrote in the post to a group called Parenting for Littles, seeking advice from other parents.
She wrote that her son battled with her over “every. single. thing,” including eating, dressing, sleeping and getting out of his crib.
Massachusetts State Police Sergeant Andrew Chiachio, who testified that he found the Facebook post, agreed during cross-examination that police searched for evidence of whether Lindsay Clancy was ever abusive to Dawson.
“You found nothing, right?” Reddington asked.
“That’s correct,” Chiachio said.
In some of the most emotional testimony to date in the trial, which has included 56 witnesses over eight days, the state medical examiner who conducted the autopsy on Callan took the stand and described the child’s injuries.
Lindsay Clancy trembled and wept at the defense table with her head down as Dr. Kimberley Springer spoke. Two jurors wiped tears from their eyes as they looked at the photos.
Springer stepped down without cross-examination after telling the jury the infant’s cause of death was “complications of mechanical asphyxia.”
Jurors also heard from some of Clancy’s former co-workers and closest friends, who were called by prosecutors and described her struggling mental health, how she felt “tired and anxious,” and was in a “difficult mental place.” They also testified about her devotion to her children.
LiBethany DeCollibus, a family therapist who was friends with Lindsay Clancy, said she had postponed going back to work after Callan was born in May 2022 because she still wasn’t sleeping well.
DeCollibus said it was her belief that Clancy “loved” her job as a nurse. Lindsay and Patrick Clancy “seemed to be getting along great.” And she said Clancy appeared hopeful because she was seeing medical providers to address her issues. But she said Clancy told her the medications didn’t appear to be working.
Andrea Hennigan, another friend, a registered nurse who worked in the Massachusetts General Hospital labor and delivery unit with Lindsay Clancy for seven years, told Reddington that Clancy was a “loving, caring mother” who “wanted a big family” and was happy to have three children close in age.
But she also heard of Clancy’s mental health struggles, agreeing with Reddington that Clancy was in a “brain fog.”
“She definitely said that she was in a difficult mental place,” Hennigan said.
Asked if Clancy ever said she wanted to leave the life she had, Hennigan said “oh no,” adding that she “very much” wanted to be a mother and start a family.
The day before the children’s deaths, Hennigan said, she texted Clancy that she had been thinking of her and asked about her mental health treatment.
She said Clancy mentioned experiencing negative side effects with medication she had been taking, prompting changes in her prescriptions.
Hennigan said the interaction appeared normal.
She told Reddington, it was “my impression” that Clancy was always trying to get help for her issues.
Amy Bevins, another friend, told jurors that Clancy told her she was having “dark thoughts” toward the end of January 2023.
She also told jurors on cross-examination that Clancy was “a good person, a good friend, a good mom.”
Two months after the deaths, she visited Clancy at Spaulding Hospital.
She said she knew at the time that Clancy had killed her children, and that discussing that would have been “awkward” for anyone.
”I remember also being told not to bring that up specifically” by Clancy’s sister, adding that she assumed that was also the advice of mental health providers.
Shelley Murphy can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @shelleymurph. Travis Andersen can be reached at [email protected].
