Lindsay Clancy Trial: the Jury Tours the House, Nick Reiner Disciplined in Jail, Mayra Velasquez Out on Bond in the Chavez Cold Case

0:03 Caaloroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is Daily Crime Injustice from Calaroga Shark Media. I'm Garrett Fisher, and it is Friday, July thirty first, twenty twenty six. Before we start a word about what's in today's show, we're going to talk about the deaths of three small children and about a woman who tried to take her own life. If that is not something you can sit with this morning, skip this one and come back tomorrow. No hard feelings. Sometime today, if the schedule holds. A bus pulls up in front of a house on Summer Street in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and eighteen people get off it and walk inside. They are not detectives, they are not reporters. They are the jury in a triple murder trial. And a judge has ordered them to look at the outside of the house, then the first floor, then the second floor, and then the basement.

0:58 They cannot open a closet, they cannot pick anything up. They can stand there and look. Somebody else owns that house. Now. A couple bought it after all of this happened, and they went to court to try to keep the jury off their property, and they lost. And the woman accused of killing three children in that basement is going with them in a wheelchair. Also today, a leak out of a Los Angeles jail about a man who has not been tried for anything concerning something he said outside a shower three months ago. We're going to talk about why that became a story and whether it should have. And in Texas, a real estate agent charged with capital murder in a fourteen year old cold case walked out of the Terran County jail this week on bond. Her lawyers say the DNA conclusion is wrong, the police say it isn't.

1:46 And Irasaima Chavez is still dead and has been for fourteen years. This is daily crime and justice. Let's get into it. The jury goes to the house. You know this case, We've been on it since January when the civil suits landed, and we've been on it every day this week since opening statements. So I am not going to rebuild it from the foundation. Here is where we are. Lindsey Clancy, thirty five years old, a labor and delivery nurse, is on trial in Plymouth Superior Court on three counts of first degree murder. On the evening of January twenty fourth, twenty twenty three, in the basement of the family home in Duxbury. She strangled her three children with exercise bands.

2:29 Cora was five years old, Dawson was three years old, Callen was eight months old. She then tried to end her own life and went out a second story window. She survived. She is paralyzed from the waist down. She comes to court in a wheelchair. Her defense does not dispute that she killed them. Attorney Kevin Reddington told the jury that his client was over medicated by a system that routinely fails women with postpartum illness, and that on that night she experienced a command hallucination, a male voice telling her this was her only chance. He is asking for a verdict of not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility, which is what Massachusetts calls the insanity. Defense.

3:13 Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague told the jury the opposite, that this was a woman who acted intentionally, rationally, and swiftly toward a specific goal. We covered Wednesday yesterday, so I'll be quick about it. Patrick Clancy finished two days on the stand. He walked the jury through the errands, the pharmacy, the phone, call where his wife sounded like she was busy giving baths. He described coming home to a house that was too quiet, a log bedroom door, and then a room where the blood looked, in his words, like it had been sprayed with a hose. He found her in the backyard. She told him she had tried to kill herself. He asked where the children were, and she said the basement. Then the jury heard the nine one one call he made while he was down there finding them. Judge William Sullivan had already ordered that recording kept from the public at Patrick Clancy's request, so the media in the room could not record it. Lindsay Clancy put her head in her hands and sobbed. Jurors were crying. The judge called a recess, and that is where the second day ended. Yesterday was the third day of testimony, and the state moved on to first responders, the people who walked into that house after the call. As I'm recording this, that testimony has not finished, so I'm gonna leave it there rather than guess at it, which brings us to today, and today is not testimony at all. Judge Sullivan signed an order this week directing the current owners of forty seven Summer Street in Duxbury to open their home. Eighteen jurors, six of whom will become alternates when deliberations start. The lawyers,

4:47 court staff, the judge, Lindsay Clancy, nobody else, Duxbury Police and the Massachusetts State Police secure the property before anyone arrives and keep everybody else off it. Jurors get the outside the house, all the rooms on the first floor, all the rooms on the second floor, and the basement. They are instructed not to open closet doors and not to touch or disturb anything in a house that now belongs to strangers. A jury view is one of the oldest instruments in the common law, and it exists because photographs flat in a space. A picture of a staircase does not tell you how long the staircase is or what you can hear from the top of it. Jurys have been walking through crime scenes since long before anybody thoughts a photograph one. But let me walk you through what makes this one strange, because it is strange. In most murder trials, the view is about what happened. Sitelines distances, whether a witness could have seen what a witness says they saw here. Both sides agree on what happened. Nobody in that courtroom is arguing about who killed Cora, Dawson and Callen. The entire trial is a fight over what was happening inside one woman's head for the twenty five minutes her husband was out of the house, and you can you cannot see that from a doorway. So what is it for the state? I would expect wants twelve people to feel the geography of the thing, the stairs, the distance from the basement to the second floor bedroom, the number of separate decisions a person has to make to get from one end of that house to the other.

6:19 The defense would tell you something close to the reverse, that a person in psychosis is not measuring distances at all. Reddington flagged the visit in his own opening statement and made a point of telling the jury that the place does not look anything like it did when a family lived there. That's the argument, and I'm not going to hand you a verdict on it, because it is a jury's job and they are doing it today in a stranger's basement. Then those owners get their house back and everybody drives away. The trial is expected to run six to eight weeks. The heavy part, the dueling psychiatric experts hasn't even started. Core Clancy was five years old. Dawson Clancy was three years old. Callen Clancy was eight months old.

7:04 Core should be nine now and going into fourth grade. Dawson should be seven. Callen should be turning four twelve. People are going to stand in the room where that stopped, and then they're going to get back on the bus. Cora, Dawson, Callen. Someone has to say your names when we come back. A leaked jail right up, an anonymous source and a man who has not been convicted of anything. Welcome back to Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher. You know this case too. December fourteenth of last year, Rob Reiner, seventy eight years old and Michelle Singer Reiner, seventy years old, were found stabbed to death inside their Brentwood home. Rob Reiner made the princess bride stand by me when Harry met Sally. A few good men, misery. This is spinal tap.

8:06 Michelle Singer Reiner was a photographer and a producer, married to him for thirty six years, and a co founder of a fund that put first generation kids through college. Their son, Nick, thirty two years old, was arrested within hours. In February, he pleaded not guilty to two counts of first degree murder with special circumstances. He has not been tried. He is presumed innocent, and I want that sitting in your ear for the next four minutes. Here is the news, such as it is. On Wednesday, people reported sourced to people who would not attach their names to it that on the morning of April twenty seventh, Nick Reiner was written up inside the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles. He is housed alone in a medical observation unit where inmates with serious mental health needs are kept separate from everybody else, and escorted individually to a locked shower.

8:57 He finished, changed into a clean uniform, and then waited and waited. The deputies who were supposed to walk him back to his cell were delayed because another inmate in the unit had apparently overdosed. He got impatient. According to the source, he got loud, yelling profanity, refusing instructions, aimed at a deputy and a sergeant until more staff came down. It never turned physical. Nobody was touched. He got a write up and lost commissary phone calls and visitation for five days, and an officer came to his cell afterward to talk to him about it. That's it. That is the entire story. Let me walk you through why I have a problem with it. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has not confirmed a word of this on the record.

9:45 The District Attorney's office declined to comment every detail. And it comes from someone who will not sign their name to it, describing an incident inside a locked facility three months ago about a man who is a pre trial detainee. Which is a praise that gets thrown around. So let's be plain about what it means. It means that legally, this morning, Nick Reiner is an innocent man being held in a cage. He is being held in the mental health unit of the largest jail in America, which is also by volume, the largest mental health institution in America. That is not a joke. That is what Twin Towers is reporting. Says he was being treated for schizophrenia before his parents died. But that reporting is also anonymous, and nothing about his medical condition has been established in a courtroom.

10:33 So hold it loosely. So here's what actually happened. A man with serious mental illness, locked alone in a cell for seven months, got frustrated waiting outside a shower and yelled at the guards. And that is running today on every entertainment site in the English speaking world. Men yel in jails. It happens every hour of every day in every facility in this country, and nobody writes it down and nobody sells it. The reason this one is a story is not that it happened. It's that his father was Rob Reiner. I spent years covering the entertainment industry, and I know exactly how that call gets made. Fame usually operates as a shield. It buys you the crisis firm, the statement of support, the sympathetic profile, the delay. Here it is working as a magnifying glass instead, and I want to be honest with you, I don't think that's better.

11:23 A man does not stop being a person with an illness because his last name is famous, none of which is a defense of him. And I want to be very clear about that. Two people are dead. Rob and Michelle Reiner were stabbed in their own home four days before Christmas. If the state proves what it says it can prove. That is about as bad as it gets. And District Attorney Nathan Hoffman has said publicly he is weighing whether to seek the death penalty in a state that has had a moratorium on execution since twenty nineteen. But we are seven months in and the case has barely moved. As of the spring, prosecutors were still waiting on autopsy reports and the defense was still waiting on discovery.

12:04 Judge sam Otta has him back in court on September fifteenth, and I want to be precise about that date because a lot of coverage has been sloppy with it. September fifteenth is not the preliminary hearing. It is the day the court expects to set a date for the preliminary hearing. That is how far away. This is months of nothing, And into that vacuum goes a story about a shower. Rob Reiner was seventy eight years old. He spent fifty years making films about how Americans actually talk to each other. And if you have ever quoted a movie at a dinner table, you have probably quoted him. Michelle Singer. Reiner was seventy years old. Photographer, producer, thirty six years of marriage and a fund that is still right now sending kids to college who would not otherwise get there. They were the parents of four children. Rob Michelle, someone has to say, your name's still ahead, A single drop of blood, fourteen years of nothing, and the phone call that finally came.

13:22 Welcome back to Daily Crime in Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher, and this last one is new to the show. So let me start at the beginning. January twentieth, twenty twelve, Just before nine in the morning, at the Aspinwood Apartments on the twenty seven hundred block of South Collins Street in Arlington, Texas, a family member goes to check on a woman who isn't answering. The person who walks in and finds her is her niece, Linda Yesenia Valdez, and Linda is a teenager. She told the Fort Worth Star Telegram years later that everything in that apartment was soaked with blood that the white walls were covered, and then she saw her aunt, Ira Sima Chavez was thirty two years old. She had been stabbed approximately one hundred times.

14:06 There was no forced entry. Whoever did this came to her door and she opened it. Police had surveillance video of a figure in a ball cap and a hooded sweatshirt walking up to her apartment that night, but the video only caught them from behind and from the side, and it never produced a suspect. Police released it publicly in twenty twelve, nothing came back. What they did have was a single drop of blood on a television stand inside the apartment, fresh not hers. Investigators believe it came from whoever killed her, because that is what happens in a stabbing that goes on that long. The handslips and the person holding the knife cuts themselves. The lab determined it came from a Hispanic woman, and they ran it through the combined DNA index system, the FBI's national database, which is the entire reason that database exists. No match and that was it for fourteen years. That was it. Now.

15:05 I want to be fair to the Arlington Police Department here, because this is not a story about detectives who didn't care. They ran leads for more than a decade. Arlington does not have dedicated cold case detectives. Homicide investigators pick these files back up between the murders that are happening right now, which is how it works in most departments in this country, which is its own conversation for another day. In November of twenty twenty four, Arlington's homicide unit sat down with the FBI's Dallas Field office to ask whether this case might be a candidate for the bureau's Investigative Genetic genealogy program. That is, the technique that takes crime scene DNA, runs it against genealogical databases and public records, and works backward through family trees to a name it did not exist in twenty twelve. The FBI said yes. In April of this year, the the genealogy team came back with a name Mayra Velasquez, forty two years old, a licensed real estate agent living in Dallas and, according to Arlington police, at one time a close friend of Ira Sema Chavez, who lived a few miles from that apartment, moved in the same social circles and had been inside it before.

16:20 In May, detectives followed her, waited while she ate at a restaurant, and recovered a plastic fork she had used and thrown away. The lab said the DNA on that fork matched the drop of blood from twenty twelve in the middle of July, they arrested her. The charge's capital murder, and the reason it's capital rather than ordinary murder is that police alleged the killing happened during a robbery. A television was taken out of that apartment. Now Here is the part everybody has fixated on, and I want to handle it carefully because it only means anything if the state is right. In the fourteen years since Irasema Chaves died, Mayra of Velasquez posted her life publicly Coozamel, Dubai, Paris, London, Bolivia, Columbia, Jamaica, Disney World, New York. She got pregnant a little over a year after the killing and had a child. She won sales awards. A colleague who worked alongside her told the local public radio station that she was outgoing, family oriented, and kind, and that she is in shock. That contrast is why this story went everywhere, and I understand the pull of it. But a person's vacation photos are not evidence of anything. And if you find yourself convicting somebody because they went to Dubai, you are not doing the thing you think you're doing. Because her lawyers are fighting this hard and they are fighting it on the science.

17:44 Frank Sellers and Dustin Hoffman of the Seller's law firm in Fort Worth, say their client is innocent. Sellers has said publicly that he does not necessarily think the investigation is flawed. He thinks the conclusion is they have zeroed in on the arrest warrant Affidavid, and specifically on that drop of blood, which the affidavit describes as glistening, partially wet and fresh, roughly ten hours after the affidavit's own timeline says it got there. Their argument is that blood does not do that. Arlington Police spokesman Tim Chiesco told Kira that the department stands behind that detail, and police said the same thing at their news conference. Sellers has also said he intends to attack the surveillance video, arguing the person walking up to that door moves like a man.

18:33 Detective Tracy Dixon said at that news conference that investigators are certain they have the right person. Police have not offered a motive. They have never said why. And on Tuesday, Mara Velasquez walked out of jail. She was initially held with no bond at all by order of District Judge William Knight. Her attorneys filed a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that the order never explained which exception to the constitutional presumption of bail the court was relying going on, and that their client has no criminal history, is not a danger, and is not a flight risk because she intends to clear her name. She was released Tuesday on four hundred and fifty thousand dollars bond. I know how that sounds to a family that waited fourteen years, but bond is not a verdict, and the presumption of innocence is not a technicality that gets suspended when the crime is bad enough. It's the whole architecture. If it doesn't hold for someone the police are certain about, it doesn't hold for anybody. Here is what I actually want you to take out of this one, and it isn't about her at all. This case sat for fourteen years, not because anybody failed, but because the tool did not exist yet.

19:44 It exists now, and there are thousands of files sitting in evidence rooms across this country with usable DNA in them that has never been run through a genealogy database because the testing cost money and the analyst time cost money, and cold case units are the first thing cut when a budget gets tight. Arlington got this because the FBI agreed to take it on for free. Every department in America is not going to get that phone call. There is a woman named Linda who was a teenager when she walked into that apartment. She is a grown woman now. She has been waiting since twenty twelve for someone to be able to tell her what happened to her aunt. And the only reason she has any answer at all is that a federal team had room on the calendar.

20:28 That's not a system. That's luck. Do better. Irasema Chavez was thirty two years old. She lived alone on South Collin Street in Arlington, Texas. She opened her own front door on a January night to someone she is alleged to have trusted. For fourteen years. Nobody was paying attention to her, and now finally somebody is Irasema. Someone has to say your name before we go. One more thing on the docket today, this afternoon at one thirty Mountain time. In Park City, Utah, Corey Richins is due back in court not for a trial. She was convicted in March of aggravated murder for poisoning her husband Eric Richins with fentanyl, and in May, Judge Richard Morazik gave her life without the possibility of parole. Today is the restitution hearing. Summit County has asked the court to make her repay roughly one point four million dollars in life insurance money and roughly one point four million dollars in what it cost to prosecute and defend the case, and the judge decides how much, if any, of that she owes. Separately, at the beginning of this month, she filed asking for a whole new trial, claiming irregularities in the proceedings. We'll have all of it for you Monday closing. That is Daily Crime and Justice for Friday, July thirty, first, twenty twenty six.

21:53 A jury in Massachusetts spends this morning walking through the house where Cora Dawson and Callan Clancy died, with the woman accused of killing them in the room. A leaked jail rite up about Nick Reiner turns a five day loss of phone privileges into international news, while the actual case has not moved in seven months. And in Arlington, Texas, a fourteen year old cold case finally has a defendant who is now out on bond and a family that finally has a name. If this show is useful to you, the single best thing you can do is tell one person about it, not a repost, not a like an actual human being who would want to know this stuff. That is genuinely how this show grows. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment. I want to know what you think about the view. Twelve people are going to stand in that basement today. Does walking through a house help a jury understand what was happening in someone's mind?

22:49 Or does it just make it hurt more without telling them anything? I read those rest in peace, Cora Dawson, callin Rob Michelle, Irosima, do better. I'm Garrett fish Ure. This is Daily Crime and Justice. Legal and editorial disclaimer. A few things before we sign off, and please listen to this part. Nick Reiner and Mayor of Velasquez have each pleaded not guilty and neither has been tried. Everything alleged against them is an allegation and they are presumed innocence. Lindsey Clancy has also pleaded not guilty. Her defense does not contest that she caused her children's deaths, but the question of criminal responsibility is for the jury, and no verdict has been returned in that trial. The account of the April incident inside the Los Angeles County jail comes from anonymous sources, reported by people and repeated by other outlets.

23:41 The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has not confirmed it on the record, and the District Attorney's office declined to comment. Reporting that Nick Reiner was diagnosed with or treated for schizophrenia also rests on unnamed sources and has not been established in court. Some outlets have described September fifteenth as his preliminary hearing. Court reporting from April indicates it is a hearing at which a date for the preliminary hearing may be set. In the Arlington case, accounts differ. Arlington police have described the number of stab wounds as approximately one hundred, while the medical examiner's finding has been reported as more than one hundred. Accounts also differ on the exact date of arrest, on whether the drop of blood was recovered in the bedroom or the living room of the apartment, and on the victim's age, which most sources give as thirty two. Her name appears in some court records as Irisaima Chaves Sanchez police have not disclosed a motive.

24:37 Two threads in this episode were live at the time of recording. Thursday's testimony in the Clancy trial had not concluded when this script was written, and the jury view was scheduled for today and may not have gone forward as planned. This episode discussed the deaths of children, postpart of mental illness, serious mental illness and custody, and suicide. If any of that landed CLI to home, please talk to someone in the United States. You can call her text nine to eight eight the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at any hour. If you are a new or expecting parent and your thoughts are frightening you. Postpartum Support International runs a helpline staff by people who will not judge you for what you say to them. Postpartum psychosis is a medical emergency and it is treatable. You are not the first person to feel it, and you will not be the last.