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00:00Patrick Clancy says losing his children has been unimaginably painful. The oldest,
00:04just five years old. But he also spoke of Lindsay's deteriorating condition
00:08and said nothing matched the intense love the real Lindsay had for her kids.
00:14January 24th, 2023. A quiet street in Duxbury, Massachusetts. A father leaves the house to pick
00:21up dinner and medicine for one of his children. He tells his wife he will not be long. Inside,
00:27she is alone with their three children. When Patrick Clancy walks back through his own front
00:33door less than an hour later, nothing about his family will ever be the same again. Lindsay Clancy
00:39does not dispute what happened inside that house that night. That much, the record is clear on.
00:44What she will spend the next three years fighting to prove is that she was not fully in control of
00:50what happened. But to understand what happened on January 24th, 2023, the story has to begin years
01:00earlier, with an entirely different version of Lindsay Clancy. Lindsay Clancy was born Lindsay
01:07Marie Musgrove, raised in Wallingford, Connecticut. She trained as a nurse through an accelerated nursing
01:14program at the MGH Institute of Health Professions, then spent nine years on the labor and delivery
01:22floor at Massachusetts General Hospital. Colleagues would later describe a woman devoted to the work,
01:28someone who seemed to find real meaning in it. In December 2016, she married Patrick Clancy.
01:34They settled in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in a house on a quiet street called Summer Street,
01:39and built the kind of life that looked, from the outside, like an ordinary success story.
01:44Their own family grew fast. Cora was born in December 2017. Dawson followed in September 2019.
01:52Callan arrived in May 2022. Three children in under five years, layered on top of hospital shifts
01:59that could run 12 hours or more. Lindsay was, in effect, catching other people's babies for a living
02:06while raising three of her own. To those closest to them, none of it looked like strain. Patrick's
02:12mother would later tell a grand jury that Lindsay was warm and affectionate with her children, a wife
02:17and mother who smiled easily and seemed, in every visible way, exactly like herself. By every visible
02:24measure, this was simply a young family building the life it had set out to build. Inside the house,
02:29however, something had already begun to change. Lindsay Clancy had experienced postpartum anxiety
02:35before. After Cora was born, and again after Dawson, she managed it in ways that worked. Exercise,
02:43meditation, and therapy. It was, by every account, a known and manageable part of who she was as a new
02:50mother, not a crisis. After Callan was born in May 2022, something was different. Family members would
02:58later describe a period of unusually high energy and mood, followed by a crash into what witnesses called
03:04debilitating anxiety and near-total insomnia. The tools that had worked twice before stopped working.
03:12Investigators would later recover entries from her phone. In one note, she wrote, in part,
03:18it was the kind of thing new mothers sometimes feel and rarely write down, let alone say out loud.
03:24Over the months that followed, Lindsay's medication regimen changed repeatedly. Her attorney would later
03:30argue in court that a combination of drugs, including Valium, Prozac, Klonopin, and Zoloft,
03:37did more to mask her symptoms than treat them. Prosecutors, for their part, have pointed out that
03:42she was never formally diagnosed with postpartum depression at all. Even the basic diagnosis was
03:48something the two sides of this case could never agree on. In early December, Patrick sat in on an
03:54appointment with a psychiatric nurse practitioner named Rebecca Gelata. According to Gelata's later
03:59testimony, she raised the possibility that Lindsay could be dealing with bipolar disorder. Patrick's
04:05response, she said, was immediate. His wife was not bipolar. A phone call between the three of them
04:11followed, covering Lindsay's sleep, her panic symptoms, and thoughts she had been having about
04:16wanting to die. On New Year's Eve, weeks before the deaths of their children, Patrick brought Lindsay
04:22to the hospital. She told him she had been thinking about wanting to die, that she felt numb, and that
04:28she had been having intrusive thoughts about harming the children. She was admitted to McLean
04:32Hospital outside Boston for inpatient psychiatric care. Days into her stay, she texted Patrick that she
04:38did not belong there. Five days after admission, she was discharged, telling her doctors the intrusive
04:44thoughts were gone. She left with a new prescription for an antidepressant. Two days later, she and
04:50Patrick threw Cora a fifth birthday party at a trampoline park. For the first time in months, Patrick
04:56allowed himself something close to hope. What exactly was recorded in her medical file during that
05:01hospitalization, and what it should have told the people reading it, would later become one of the
05:06most contested questions of the entire trial. By the third week of January 2023, to the people around
05:13her, Lindsay Clancy looked like she was getting better. She was sleeping again. She was smiling in
05:19photographs. On the morning of January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy took her daughter Cora to a scheduled
05:27appointment for a routine physical. The pediatrician who examined Cora would later testify it was, in her
05:33recollection, an entirely normal visit, and that nothing about Lindsay's behavior as a parent stood out.
05:39After the appointment, Lindsay took Cora and Dawson outside and built a snowman with them in the yard.
05:45She texted photos of the children playing in the snow to her mother and to Patrick, who was working
05:50from their basement office downstairs. By mid-afternoon, Lindsay had searched her phone for children's
05:57Miralax, then for takeout from a Plymouth restaurant called 3V. She texted Patrick,
06:03I didn't cook anything, it's been a long day, and asked him to pick up dinner, along with a stop
06:08at
06:08CVS for stool softener for Cora. He agreed. A little after 5, she called the restaurant herself
06:14to place their order. Patrick left the house around 5.15 that evening. While he was at the pharmacy,
06:21he called Lindsay to confirm which medication to buy. She did not answer. When she called back a minute
06:27later, the conversation lasted 14 seconds. Patrick would later tell police she sounded quiet,
06:33like she was in the middle of something. Prosecutors, reviewing the same call, have described it as
06:39entirely unremarkable. He picked up the food and drove home, a 10-minute drive. When he came through
06:46the door, the house was quiet. He set the CVS bag and the takeout on the kitchen island and called
06:52Lindsay's phone again. No answer. Thinking the children might be in the bath, he went upstairs and
06:58checked the bathrooms and bedrooms one by one, finding no one. When he reached his own bedroom,
07:04the door was locked. That, he later testified, was when he knew something was wrong.
07:09He got the door open. The window was open and the room was in disarray. He took a step or
07:15two inside,
07:16then turned and went back out instead. In the backyard, beneath the open window, he found Lindsay
07:23on the ground, badly hurt and barely conscious. She had cut her wrists and neck and jumped from their
07:29bedroom on the second floor. She told him she had tried to kill herself. When he asked where the
07:35children were, she told him, the basement. He called 911. The basement door was shut when he reached it.
07:41He opened it and found Cora first, face down, an exercise band around her neck. Dawson and Callan
07:49were nearby, strangled the same way. Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead that day. Callan,
07:55the youngest, was kept alive for several more days at Boston Children's Hospital before he, too, died.
08:02Patrick would later tell police that earlier that same day, before any of this happened, his wife had
08:09seemed to be having one of her best days in a long time. She had been smiling. She had seemed
08:14happy.
08:15Whatever was about to happen inside that house, nothing about the hours leading up to it had
08:20prepared him for it. In the days that followed, investigators reconstructed that evening in minute
08:26detail. The texts, the phone calls, the internet searches, even a call Lindsay made to a CVS pharmacist
08:34to check whether a specific medication was in stock. The pharmacy employee who spoke with her that
08:38evening would later describe the exchange as entirely ordinary. The physical evidence left little doubt
08:45about what had happened inside the house. Medical examiners determined that all three children died
08:50of strangulation caused by exercise resistance bands. The question that mattered, to investigators,
08:56and later to prosecutors, was different. Investigators who examined Lindsay's phone found that four days
09:03before the killings, at around 8.30 in the evening, on January 20, 2023, she had searched. Ten minutes later,
09:12she searched for information about psychosis. To prosecutors, the sociopath search in particular
09:19was significant. It suggested, they argued, a woman capable of stepping outside herself and assessing
09:26her own actions rather than one lost inside a break from reality. Prosecutors also pointed to the
09:33sequence of that afternoon. It was Lindsay who suggested ordering dinner, who asked Patrick to stop at CVS,
09:40and who sent him out of the house for the better part of an hour, deliberately, they argued,
09:45removing the person who might have intervened. Patrick later testified that nothing about the call,
09:51or the hours before it, struck him as urgent enough to turn around and go home.
09:55He'd noticed she sounded distracted, but never thought, even for a moment, that his children were
10:01in danger. By the time prosecutors brought the case to a grand jury, they had assembled the phone
10:08records, the searches, the timeline, and the physical evidence into a single argument, that Lindsay Clancy
10:16had acted, in the words prosecutors would later use in court. She was indicted on three counts of first
10:22degree murder. To the people who had watched her decline over those eight months, that theory left
10:28an enormous amount unexplained. If this had truly been calculated, they asked, then what had the
10:34psychiatric visits, the medication changes, and the five-day hospitalization actually been about?
10:40That question is where the case would eventually split in two.
10:44Postpartum psychosis is not the same as postpartum depression or anxiety. It is rare, considered a
10:51psychiatric emergency, and can include delusions, hallucinations, and a break from reality severe
10:57enough that the person experiencing it may not fully understand what she is doing, or why. It is also,
11:04doctors say, treatable, and in most cases preventable, with proper recognition and care. Whether Lindsay
11:11Clancy actually had it, at the moment she killed her children, is the question this entire trial
11:16exists to answer. Her defense argued that beneath the anxiety, insomnia, and mood swings that followed
11:23Callan's birth, Lindsay had developed postpartum psychosis. Prosecutors argued the opposite, that
11:29whatever she was experiencing amounted to anxiety and depression, not psychosis or bipolar disorder,
11:35and that she remained fully aware of what she was doing. Records show a complicated medication history,
11:42antidepressants, an antipsychotic, and a rotating set of benzodiazepines, prescribed and changed by
11:49multiple providers throughout the months after Callan's birth. Her attorney argued the shifting
11:53regimen may have contributed to, rather than relieved, her deterioration. In a note found on her phone,
12:00written the night before the killings, Clancy described her own decline in her own words.
12:06After her psychiatrist told her to stop taking Zoloft and try Ativan and Benadryl instead,
12:12to help her sleep, she wrote, that's when everything started going downhill.
12:17That search, from four days before the killings, remained one of the most contested pieces of evidence
12:23in the case. One search seemed to point toward calculation, the next seemed to point toward fear.
12:30In an interview months after the killings, Patrick has said he asked Lindsay directly,
12:35whether she had planned it, whether that was the real reason she sent him out of the house that
12:40evening. She told him no. It was, she said, the case turned, in large part, on two competing expert
12:48witnesses. The defense called Dr. Philip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist who specializes in
12:55postpartum disorders and has evaluated defendants in roughly 80 cases involving parents accused of
13:00killing their children, including consultations on the Jeffrey Dahmer and Unabomber cases.
13:05He also testified for the defense in the 2006 retrial of Andrea Yates, the Houston mother who drowned
13:12her five children in 2001, who was later found not guilty by reason of insanity, a diagnosis Resnick
13:19supported at the time. Resnick evaluated Clancy in May 2023, four months after the killings, spending
13:26three hours interviewing her directly, interviewing her parents separately, and reviewing her medical
13:31records and the police investigation. He described her demeanor during the evaluation as
13:36matter-of-fact and muted, though nurses who cared for her told him she cried daily.
13:42Resnick did not believe the killings began with a plan. He believed they began with something
13:46happening inside Clancy's own mind. Her underlying condition, he concluded, was bipolar disorder,
13:53with major depression, and on January 24, 2023, that condition produced a discrete psychotic break,
14:00rather than a state of mind that had been psychotic for weeks. He testified she was not psychotic
14:06every minute that day. She had, after all, taken Cora to a checkup and built a snowman hours earlier.
14:13The break, in his account, began after Patrick left the house that evening, when Clancy experienced
14:20what Resnick called a command hallucination, alongside a delusion of influence, the sense that
14:26her own body had been taken over by an outside force. He told jurors. Resnick also testified that
14:34Clancy recalled telling her children to go to God, as she killed them, evidence, in his interpretation,
14:41of a religious delusion rather than premeditated cruelty. He said Clancy believed her children
14:47would suffer terribly if she left them behind after taking her own life, and that in her mind,
14:52taking them with her was an act of mercy, not violence. Asked about the possibility that Clancy
14:57had exaggerated her symptoms, Resnick pointed to a psychological test the government itself had
15:02administered roughly two years after the killings. The results, he testified, showed no sign of
15:08dishonesty, and if anything suggested she had a tendency to minimize what she had gone through,
15:13not overstate it. The prosecution's rebuttal witness, Dr. Avram Mack, evaluated Clancy through
15:19two interviews, the most recent in April 2026. He agreed that Clancy had experienced a major depressive
15:26episode. He disagreed with nearly everything else, testifying he found no evidence of the mania
15:32or hypomania that would support a bipolar diagnosis, and no evidence of psychosis, at any point leading up
15:39to the killings. Mack saw the same evidence differently. His strongest argument came from a small,
15:46specific moment, an occasion when Clancy asked her mother whether she could hear her own thoughts.
15:51To the defense, this looked like a woman losing her grip on reality. Mack argued the opposite,
15:56that the question itself was proof she had not lost touch with it. A person in genuine psychosis,
16:02he testified, does not typically question her own delusions. Clancy's willingness to ask,
16:08in effect, is this real, was a form of reality testing, evidence some part of her still recognized
16:15the difference between what was happening in her mind, and what was actually true.
16:19Her mental state, he said, while severely depressed, had remained relatively stable in the weeks before
16:26the killings. And on the day itself, she had acted methodically, and simply should have done more to
16:32stop herself. Both experts had access to substantially the same material, the same medical records and
16:39police reports. They reached opposite conclusions. That left the jury in Plymouth with the real question
16:45at the center of this case. Not what happened inside that house on January 24th, 2023. But what,
16:52exactly, had been happening inside Lindsay Clancy's mind. By the time the defense rested,
16:58in August 2026, Lindsay Clancy's trial had been underway for several weeks in a Plymouth County courtroom.
17:05She attended every day of it in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down since the injuries
17:10she inflicted on herself the night her children died. The jury heard from an unusually wide range of
17:17witnesses – family members, treating clinicians, first responders, forensic pathologists, and,
17:23eventually, the dueling psychiatric experts. Under Massachusetts law, prosecutors must prove,
17:30beyond a reasonable doubt, that Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible for what she did.
17:36A person is not criminally responsible if a mental disease or defect caused her to lack
17:41substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her
17:46conduct to the law. If convicted, she faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison. If the jury
17:53instead finds she was not criminally responsible, she does not simply go free. She would be committed to
17:59a secure psychiatric facility, and the state would then have to prove, at regular hearings, that she
18:04remains mentally ill and dangerous – a process that can continue for years.
18:09Neither outcome is simple. Neither outcome sends Lindsay Clancy home. The defense also called a second
18:16forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Donald Condie, whose testimony focused narrowly on how Clancy's shifting
18:22medications had affected her while she was actively seeking help. Patrick's mother testified
18:27separately that in the weeks before the killings, Lindsay had been begging for help. One of the
18:32more striking witnesses came from outside the medical system altogether. Sheila Cavanaugh,
18:38a chaplain at Brigham and Women's Hospital, testified that she had met with Clancy more than 200 times in
18:44the years since the killings. She told jurors Clancy had described the same commanding voice to her,
18:50one that warned neither she nor her children would be safe, unless she obeyed it. On cross-examination,
18:56prosecutors noted that Kavanaugh had never written any of this down in her own session notes – a
19:02gap they used to question how consistent her account really was. Prosecutors pushed harder still.
19:08When Resnick acknowledged that Clancy had not disclosed thoughts of harming her children to the
19:12providers who asked her directly, Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague pressed him on what that omission meant.
19:17She asked. The judge struck the question before Resnick could answer it, but the exchange captured
19:24the sharpest edge of the prosecution's argument – that a woman capable of concealment was a woman
19:29capable of choice. The defense, in turn, worked to undermine the prosecution's own expert.
19:36Kevin Reddington noted that,
19:37Dr. Avram Mack had been retained through a firm run by forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz,
19:42the same expert whose testimony in the 2001 Andrea Yates trial referenced a television episode
19:49that turned out not to exist – an error that later helped overturn her conviction.
19:54Reddington's point wasn't that the two cases were alike. It was that the pipeline of experts hired to
19:59evaluate defendants like Clancy had gotten something badly wrong before. Through all of it,
20:05Patrick Clancy's public position never wavered. In an interview months after the killings,
20:10he said plainly that he did not see her as a monster, but as someone who had become terribly sick.
20:16Closing arguments were delivered on August 27, 2026. Reddington told jurors Clancy had been a
20:22devoted mother let down by a medical system that over-medicated and misdiagnosed her. Prosecutors
20:28countered that she was a functioning mother who knew right from wrong, and had misled and moved
20:33between providers on her own terms. The case is now with a jury that has spent weeks hearing two
20:39entirely different accounts of the same eight months, the same phone, and the same woman.
20:45Outside the courtroom, in the meantime, a different kind of trial had already been running for years – in
20:51public. On Thursday, August 20, 2026, hundreds of women gathered outside Plymouth Superior Court,
20:58most of them dressed in pink, wearing shirts that read,
21:01Believe, She Needed Help, and Peace for Lindsay. They stood in silence for more than an hour before
21:07that day's proceedings began. When Reddington appeared, the crowd applauded. Toward the end,
21:12they formed a circle, recited the Lord's Prayer, and held up their arms in the shape of hearts.
21:18Some carried flags from other countries, a gesture meant to show the support reached beyond
21:23Massachusetts. The organizer, a woman with no personal connection to the Clancy family,
21:28insisted it was neither a protest nor a rally. For many who came, the reasons were personal – women
21:35who felt mental health struggles were too often dismissed, and who wanted the public to take
21:39Lindsay Clancy's illness seriously. That same sympathy has generated an equally intense backlash.
21:46Online, the trial has produced enormous volumes of commentary – much of it in direct opposition
21:51to the women outside the courthouse. Critics have argued that treating Clancy as a sympathetic figure
21:56risks excusing the killing of three children, and that the wave of public support says something troubling
22:02about how far sympathy can be stretched. The clearest expression of that divide is a fundraiser.
22:08A GoFundMe campaign called the Musgrove Family Fund, started by a woman in Wisconsin with no relation
22:14to the family, was created to help Lindsay's parents, Mike and Paula Musgrove, cover the costs they've
22:20absorbed over three years of supporting their daughter through the legal process. As the trial progressed,
22:26the fundraiser surpassed $1 million, with more than 30,000 donations, on its way to a $2 million goal.
22:33The fund's own description draws a careful line – it doesn't ask anyone to share a view of Lindsay
22:39or the case, only sympathy for two parents who haven't left their daughter's side. Not every donor reads it
22:45that narrowly, for some, giving has become a way of declaring which side of the larger argument they
22:51stand on. Patrick Clancy's own position has remained apart from all of it. He raised similar
22:56support himself in the weeks after the killings, when a separate fund set up in his name also passed
23:02$1 million, and he used that platform, even then, to ask the community to forgive his wife,
23:09describing her as someone whose illness had overtaken a naturally loving person.
23:13But the legal dispute before the jury was never whether the children died,
23:18or who caused their deaths. It was what Lindsay Clancy's mental state means for her criminal
23:23responsibility. Three years after that January night in Duxbury, a jury in Plymouth County has now
23:30heard all of it – the medication history, the dueling psychiatric experts, the phone searches from the
23:36days before the killings, and the same photographs that opened this story – a mother building a snowman with
23:42her children on an ordinary afternoon. None of that is the jury's question. The children died.
23:49Lindsay Clancy has never disputed causing their deaths. What remains is narrower. And harder.
23:55Whether, under Massachusetts law, Lindsay Clancy can be held criminally responsible for what happened on
24:01January 24th, 2023. That decision now belongs to 12 people in a courtroom in Plymouth. If you want to
24:09follow the outcome of this case, subscribe to Just Crime Talks. We'll cover what happens next.

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