JURORS are reviewing harrowing pieces of evidence and emotional testimony to determine whether Lindsay Clancy is guilty of murdering her three young children.
Deliberations continued into Friday where the nine women and three men asked to see the prescription pills prescribed to Lindsay and the bloody knife she used to try to end her life as they weigh her fate.
Lindsay, 36, has not denied strangling her children on January 24, 2023, and has instead sought an insanity defense.
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington has argued that Lindsay was suffering from undiagnosed postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings and could not appreciate the “wrongfulness” of her actions.
In his opening statements, Reddington told jurors Lindsay is “living in her own hell” after strangling her kids.
“This is a woman that did not get the medication, did not get the medical treatment that she so deserved. This was a woman who was suffering from psychosis at the time that she went down to that basement.
“She had no motive, she loved her children.”
The prosecution has brought forth witnesses and evidence in an attempt to prove that Lindsay did not lack criminal responsibility.
The 12 jurors have five options in determining Lindsay’s fate: they could either acquit her, find her not guilty by reason of insanity, or find her guilty of first-degree murder, second-degree murder or manslaughter.
Here are four key pieces of evidence the prosecution has argued:
1. The autopsy reports
Several medical examiners were called to the stand to detail what they found in the autopsies of five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan.
During the testimony, Lindsay could be seen crying, and at one point became inconsolable as she sobbed “I can’t do it,” forcing the judge to call a recess.
Dr. Barbara Olson, who performed an autopsy on Cora, said she had head and neck injuries consistent with “ligature strangulation,” which leads to death caused by lack of oxygen to the brain.
Dr. Renee Stonebridge, a medical examiner with the Chief Medical Examiner’s office in Boston, reviewed autopsies of the three children, and said she found brain swelling and other symptoms caused by a lack of sufficient flow of blood and oxygen in Callan.
Stonebridge noted the brain will start to die after around six to eight minutes without the flow of oxygen.
Medical examiner Dr. Kimberley Springer performed an autopsy on Callan, who died three days after the fateful night, once he was taken off life support.
Springer found his injuries to indicate ligature strangulation and concluded his cause of death was from complications of mechanical asphyxia.
Medical examiners found that Dawson died of asphyxia, and revealed some evidence in the autopsy suggested he struggled against the ligature.
Psychologist and attorney Jean Cirillo told The U.S. Sun that “The prosecution won with the medical examiner’s testimony.”
She said the evidence was “devastating” for the defense as the autopsy reports revealed “it wasn’t a quick death.”
“The worst thing they could let the jury hear is how long it took, how she would have had time to stop, she would have had time to get help,” she continued.
“The youngest was still alive, although they died later, and that she could have at any point changed her behavior. And she didn’t. And that shows premeditation, even if it’s only for a few minutes.”
Cirillo also discussed Reddington’s body language during the medical examiners’ time on the stand.
“You could see his legs crossed. You could see him lean over, and he did the right thing for a defense attorney. That’s what any good lawyer would do.”
“You know you’re not going to score any points for your side with this witness. Get them on the stand, get them off the stand.”
2. The voice Lindsay heard
Lindsay claims she heard a persistent male voice before she killed her children, telling her, “This is your last chance. Kill the children so you can kill yourself.”
Psychiatrists and psychologists who evaluated Lindsay after she killed her kids gave insight into the voice she heard, and one revealed there were inconsistencies in her accounts.
“She only experienced it for the 18 minutes or so that it took to kill the children,” forensic psychologist Kirk Heilbrun said.
“And to put it mildly, that would be a very, very unusual pattern or manifestation of how this kind of thing comes about.”
Heilbrun said Lindsay told him she thought her children would suffer without her and that killing them would allow them to be “together in heaven.”
Forensic psychiatrist Gregory Saathoff, who evaluated Lindsay in 2026 soon before she went to trial, testified that she killed Dawson first, then Cora and then her youngest Callan.
Saathoff told the jury that Lindsay claimed she heard the voice right after she got off the phone with her then-husband Patrick Clancy at 5:34pm on January 24, 2023, while he was getting medicine for Cora at CVS.
Lindsay was standing near the fridge, getting dinner ready for the kids when she heard the voice, according to Saathoff.
The voice was then constantly until it stopped suddenly after she finished strangling Callan.
In Patrick’s testimony, he recalled Dawson was eating chicken nuggets on the couch when he left to run errands at 5:15pm, sparking a debate about what was in the bowl the middle child was eating at the time.
Lindsay told another doctor evaluating her that the voice began around 5:15 when Patrick left.
“In this case the widely divergent reports … raise questions about what she is telling me and how things are happening,” Saathoff said.
“It’s markedly inconsistent. Ms. Clancy was very clear with me about the time the voice started and that it was constant until the children were killed and then it stopped.
“We are talking about a significant difference in time and those two [accounts] they don’t match so it’s hard to know which version is the one that I should consider.”
Several other testimonies in court revealed Lindsay did not report hearing voices to the medical professionals treating her in the months before the killings.
Reddington’s expert witness forensic psychiatrist Dr. Phillip Resnick told jurors that he believes Lindsay tended to minimize her symptoms.
3. Lindsay’s prescription pills
Lindsay was prescribed 13 different psychiatric medications in the months before she killed her children, including antipsychotics like Seroquel, antidepressants like Zoloft and benzodiazepines like Valium and Klonopin.
She was given different medications and had dosages adjusted after telling her providers she didn’t feel like she was getting better and had trouble sleeping.
Jurors were instructed by Judge William Sullivan on Thursday that they were allowed to consider the impact the prescription pills had on Lindsay at the time of the killings.
Her medications have been one of the central points in the trial, where Reddington has argued she was overmedicated. Patrick and Lindsay also have lawsuits against her medical providers over her treatment.
Investigators seized several prescription pill bottles from the Clancy home after the killings, and Patrick later brought additional bottles to the police that he found in the console of his car.
During the trial Reddington also brought forth more bottles he found in one of Lindsay’s bedside drawers, claiming it had not been recovered by police during their search.
Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague showed jurors Ziploc bags of pill bottles, where she said most only had a few pills missing from them.
Six of the 30 prescribed Zoloft and Ativan pills were taken, she argued.
Two of the 30 pills were missing from the buspirone bottle and three were taken from the hydroxyzine, which were prescribed to Lindsay along with the Ativan in October 2022.
Two of the bottles still had the entire 30-day supply, she said.
“I wasn’t keeping track of the number of pills taken out of each bottle,” Patrick said in his testimony when questioned by the prosecution.
4. Lindsay sent Patrick out of the house so ‘she’s not interrupted’
One of the points the prosecution has been trying to argue was that Lindsay deliberately sent Patrick out of the house so she could have the time and privacy to kill their children.
On January 24, 2023, Lindsay asked Patrick if he wanted to get food from ThreeV, a local restaurant in Plymouth that the family had been to a few times.
“Any chance you want to do takeout from ThreeV … I didn’t cook … anything … It’s been a long day,” she texted him at 4:53pm.
Lindsay later called in an order and asked Patrick to pick it up. Before he left the house, she asked Patrick to stop by CVS to pick up a laxative for Cora.
On the morning of January 24, 2023, Lindsay took Cora to a scheduled appointment with her pediatrician, who recommended the five-year-old take a laxative to help with her reported stomach troubles.
Earlier in the day, Lindsay called the CVS in Kingston, Massachusetts, that Patrick went to, to see if they had a children’s laxative in stock.
She also searched ThreeV, and looked at the restaurant on Apple Maps, which the prosecution says she did to see how long it would take to drive there from their home in Duxbury.
Prosecutors have alleged the timeline proved Lindsay planned to kill her children by creating a window of time when Patrick would be out of the house.
The defense has argued that routine errands do not show she calculated a plot to kill her children, and has had experts testify that a person experiencing psychosis could still carry out tasks in between or before periods of delusional thinking.
In her closing arguments, which cannot be viewed as evidence by the jury, Sprague said Lindsay checking Apple Maps was because “she needed to know was how long specifically on that night it would take to get there.”
Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/16912857/lindsay-clancy-trial-most-damning-evidence/
