Lindsay Clancy’s chilling messages to a nurse practitioner in the weeks before she strangled her three young kids and tried to kill herself were revealed this week during her murder trial.
Clancy, then 32, sent nurse practitioner Rebecca Jollotta a string of messages in early December, describing that she was overwhelmed by intrusive thoughts, concerned she could be addicted to an anxiety medication, and disturbed that she was “completely numb.”
“I feel like I’m going to die and I don’t care,” the Massachusetts mother of three messaged Jollotta, who works at South Shore Hospital’s Perinatal Behavioral Clinic, on MyChart on Dec. 2, 2022.
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“I have never felt anything like this before,” Clancy added, the Daily Mail reported.
Jollotta responded, telling Clancy that intrusive thoughts were “quite common” in women suffering from postpartum depression.
“They mean nothing about you as a mother,” Jollotta maintained.
Just over a month later, on Jan. 24, 2023, Clancy murdered her kids Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, who was 8 months old, with exercise bands before she slit her wrists and throat and threw herself from the second story of her Duxbury, Mass., home, leaving her partially paralyzed.
Jollotta treated Clancy from Nov. 29, 2022 to Dec. 13, 2022, after a colleague left the clinic and transferred her to her care. During that time, Jollotta prescribed her a slew of powerful psychiatric medications.
A day after starting treatment with Jollotta, on Nov. 30, Clancy messaged the healthcare provider stating, “What I’m really feeling is I cannot go on this way,” the outlet reported.
Later that day, Clancy asked Jollotta if they could call, but the nurse practitioner testified at her murder trial that she was too busy seeing other patients and had a more junior member of her staff call her instead.
Over the next two days, Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, started describing her intrusive thoughts and concerns about her overall treatment plan and medications.
“It’s just a very scary stressful time for me, and starting new meds with side effects is very scary to me,” she wrote.
Clancy continued on Dec. 2, writing, “I took the Remeron,” referring to an antidepressant used for insomnia.
“I woke up at 12:15 and had intrusive thoughts – of wanting it all to be over.”
Clancy then pressed Jollotta about whether she could be addicted to the anxiety drug Ativan — stating she did not feel she was “being heard that that is a possibility.”
“I really need to explore the option that I am addicted to Ativan,” Clancy said. “I feel addicted to it, and I feel like I’m not being heard that that is a possibility,” she wrote, per the outlet.
“I feel like we are throwing all these different meds at my insomnia when the root cause is Ativan dependence. I don’t feel any of the anxious thoughts I had before.”
“I feel completely numb,” she said. “I feel like I’m going to die, and I don’t care. What do I do about this?”
Jollotta testified in court that she did not believe the mom was addicted to the medications and that the string of comments showed she was experiencing suicidal ideation.
Clancy, now 36, called Jollotta on Dec. 15, 2022, with her then-husband, Patrick Clancy, to report she was having such dark thoughts and that they would likely go to the emergency department of Mass General Hospital — with the pair referring to it as the “worst day for Lindsay.”
She was having “persistent and intrusive thoughts of suicide,” but she had “no active plan” to harm herself, Jollotta said, reading from her notes about the phone call.
Clancy did go to the emergency room that day and ended up opting out of checking into mental institution McLean Hospital, deciding instead to join an outpatient program at Women and Infants Hospital in Rhode Island, Jollotta said.
The nurse practitioner had “strongly, strongly” recommended that Clancy check into Women and Infants in a Dec. 12, 2022 MyChart message to the struggling postpartum mom, the jury learned.
But when Clancy went to the Rhode Island facility on Dec. 20, 2022, they turned her away because they thought she might have been taking too many prescription medications, according to Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington.
