Lindsay Clancy's Defense Concedes the State's Evidence, a Death Sentence in Theresa Green's Killing, Russian Roulette in Cincinnati

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, this is Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Thursday, August sixth, twenty twenty six. Before we get into it, a word about today's show. We are going to talk about the deaths of three young children, a suicide attempt, a strangling, and a young woman shot in the chest in her own living room. If that is not where you are today, skip this one. We will be here tomorrow. Three stories today, and once you line them up next to each other, they turn out to be about the same thing, what a person says about themselves and what the record says about them.

0:45 In Plymouth, Massachusetts, the Lindsey Clancy murder trial reached its seventh day of testimony, and something happened this week that got almost no attention outside that courtroom. Her own attorney stood up on the record and told the judge the defense is not contested, the government's case, not the blood, not the DNA, not the bands, none of it. Let me walk you through what that actually means, because it changes the shape of everything that comes after it. In Orlando, a judge sentenced a man to death for a murder committed twenty four years ago. When his lawyer stood up and said his client wish to address the court. She told him no, he had already had that chance back in June, and he used it to tell her he was innocent. And in Cincinnati, a twenty three year old man is going to prison for killing a twenty three year old woman during what everybody involved keeps calling a game.

1:37 Her parents stood up in that courtroom and forgave him. I want to spend some time on what that costs them. I'm Garrett Fisher. This is Daily Crime and Justice. Clancy Trial Day seven. The defense stops arguing about the facts. We have been with this trial since jury selection, and if you have been riding along with us all week, you already know the shape of it. But let me set the table for anyone joining today, because the details matter. January twenty fourth, twenty twenty three, Duxbury, Massachusetts. A house on a quiet street. Lindsey Clancy, a labor and delivery nurse thirty two years old at the time, strangled her three children in the basement with exercise bands. Cora was five, Dawson was three, Callen was eight months old. Then she cut her wrists in her neck and went out a second story window. She survived. She is paralyzed from the waist down. She has been held without bail at Tewkesbury State Hospital, where she continues to receive treatment. She is now thirty five, and she is charged with three counts of first degree murder. Here's the part people keep getting wrong when they talk about this case at work or in the comments. She is not claiming she did not do it. She has never claimed that. Her defense is that she cannot be held criminally responsible because she was in the grip of hostpartum psychosis when it happened in Massachusetts.

3:03 That is the standard, not whether she did it, whether she was capable of knowing what she was doing and conforming her conduct to the law. So this trial was never going to be a hoo done it. And on Tuesday, her lawyer said so out loud. Kevin Reddington stood up outside the presence of the jury and told Judge William Sullivan that he wanted it on the record again that the defense has not been contesting the government's case in chief. Then he agreed to a stipulation covering chain of custody, the blood, the bodily fluids, the bands, the DNA all of it conceded. Reddington told the court the alternative was dozens of witnesses, maybe more, testifying for days about who handled which evidence bag and when Lindsey Clancy herself spoke, briefly telling the judge she agreed with her attorney's decision.

3:55 That is not nothing a defendant in a first degree murder trial personally confirming on the record that she is not fighting the state's physical evidence. That stipulation could shorten this trial significantly. But it does something else, and this is the part I want you to hold on to. It strips the case down to one question and one question only, not what happened. Everyone in that room agrees on what happened. The only thing left is what was going on inside her head when it happened, and that will be decided by dueling psychiatrists weeks from now, Which makes what the prosecution spent Tuesday and Wednesday doing very interesting because they are not building towards the psychiatrists. They are trying to get out in front of them. Let me walk you through this. On Tuesday, prosecutors called eight witnesses.

4:45 One of them was Sherry Crook, who works for the Massachusetts State Police. Crime lab, and she testified about the blood in the master bedroom. Patrick Clancy, the children's father, had described that room as covered in blood when he came home. Krook told the jury there is no evidence that blood ever sprayed into that room. The drips and the puddles she examined were more consistent, she said, with someone standing still and letting blood run down onto the floor than with someone opening an artery. Then came doctor Christina Carpio, a surgeon at South Shore Hospital who treated Clancy after the jump. She described the neck and wrist injuries as superficial. She said there were no deep cuts on the wrists. She also testified that Clancy suffered complex fractures in her spine. And on Wednesday, Day seven, a half day, the jury out by one o'clock. The state kept going. Aton Negri, who was working as a physician assistant at Brigham and Women's Hospital in twenty twenty three, testified that he treated Clancy in Boston. Multiple lacerations on the wrists, superficial lacerations on the neck. You see what they are building. The prosecution has argued from the beginning that the self inflicted injuries were not as serious as they could have been, and that Clancy never truly intended to die. Three separate witnesses in two days, from a crime lab and from two different hospitals, all pointing the same direction. Shallow, not arterial, not the wounds of a person committed to the outcome. I want to be careful

6:18 here because this is exactly the kind of moment where a show like this one can get sloppy. That is the state's argument. It is not a finding, and it sits uncomfortably next to the undisputed fact that this woman went out a second story window hard enough to break her spine in multiple places and will never walk again. The jury is going to have to hold both of those things at the same time, and I do not envy them. The other thing prosecutors did this week was count pills. On the night of the killings, a Massachusetts State Police officer named Joseph Rabbit recovered four pill bottles from the kitchen of the Clancy home. Detectives testified they found a kitchen cabinet full of them. Then, on February sixth, twenty twenty three, about two weeks later, Patrick Clancy brought investigators nine more bottles in a pharmacy bag. He came with his lawyer thirteen bottles prescriptions for lazapam, sertralene, Busperoni, hydroxyzine, and clonazepam, all of them prescribed in the months before her children died. Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague walked rabbit through them, one at a time. How many pills were in each bottle when the prescription was filled, how many were left when it was handed over. That is a very deliberate piece of theater, and both sides want it. Prosecutors have suggested Lindsay Clancy stop taking a number of her prescriptions, which would cut against the argument that the medication did this to her. Patrick Clancy testified earlier that her prescriptions

7:48 were constantly being adjusted or terminated depending on how she reacted to them, which cuts the other way. Kevin Reddington's position has been consistent from opening statements. His client tried to get help, She went and asked for it, and the people she asked responded by medicating her instead of treating her. Then, on Wednesday, the state called a forensic toxicologist named Justin Brower from NMS Laboratories, and this is where it got quietly significant Brower testified that his lab was asked to test Clancy's blood samples for four specific prescription drugs. He gave the jury the concentrations he found. He described the four by what they do. One is normally an anti seizure medication that can also treat bipolar disorder.

8:31 One is an antidepressant, One is an antipsychotic that can also be used for insomnia, and the fourth is another antidepressant. And then he said that only one of the four appeared to be, in his words, a little elevated beyond normal therapeutic levels. A little elevated. That is the state saying to this jury in the driest possible language, that the chemistry does not explain it, that she was not swimming in these drugs, that whatever happened in that basement, the blood work is not going to hand you. In answer, the defense will have something to say about that. And here is what I expect it to be. The question was never whether any single drug was above the line on a lab report. The question is what happens to a specific human being with a specific underlying illness when you stack five prescriptions on top of each other and adjust them over and over across a matter of months while she is not sleeping. A toxicology screen measures concentration, It does not measure what that combination did to a mind.

9:29 That argument is coming, It is not here yet. This trial is expected to run several more weeks. One more thing, and I think it is the single most misunderstood fact about this case. If this jury acquits Lindsey Clancy, she does not walk out of that courthouse. She goes to a state psychiatric hospital, and she comes up for periodic review to determine whether she can ever safely live in the community. That is what an acquittal means here, not freedom, a different kind of cust for an undetermined length of time, decided by doctors and judges instead of a jury. And I keep coming back to something that has been circling this trial from the outside. Illinois is the only state in this country that has a law giving specific legal consideration to mothers suffering postpart of mental illness who kill their children, and even that one only applies at sentencing after a guilty finding. Massachusetts has considered something similar, so have other states. None of them have done it. So this jury is going to answer a twenty first century medical question using a legal framework that predates almost everything we know about perinatal mental illness. That is not a criticism of the jury, That is a description of the tools we handed them. Cora Clancy was five years old, Dawson Clancy was three. Callan Clancy was eight months old and had been alive for less than a year. Whatever this jury decides about the woman who is on trial, those are the three people who are not here. Kora would be starting fourth grade this fall. Someone has to

11:02 say your name when we come back. A man who spent twenty four years avoiding accountability for a murder in Orlando finally ran out of road, and when he asked for one more chance to talk, the judge said, no. Let me tell you about Teresa an Green. She was thirty eight years old. She lived in an apartment building in the College Park section of Orlando, where a lot of her neighbors worked at the same hospital. She had a son, Octavius, who was thirteen at the time and staying with her. Memorial Day weekend two thousand and two, Octavia spent a night at a friend's house. When he came home on May twenty seventh, there were holes in the wall the place was a wreck. The contents of his mother's purse were dumped out across her bed. His mother did not show up for work. Police took a missing person report that evening. Officers in Sandford found her car in a Walgreens parking lot. Her body was in the trunk, wrapped in fabric. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide by manual strangulation. Someone put their hands around Teresa Green's throat and squeezed until she was dead, and then folded her into the trunk of her own car and left it in a parking lot like an abandoned shopping cart. The last person seen with her was a man from her building. He had been at the same party she had been at, hosted by neighbors. Witnesses saw the two of them tumble down a flight of stairs

12:33 on the way out, get up, and go into her apartment. Hours later, that man came back to the neighbor's door and asked the husband for a favor. Drive this van behind me. He drove Green's car to the Walgreens, left it and got in the van. When the neighbor asked why they were leaving the car, he said he had done something really bad. The neighbor said he did not want to hear any more about it, and that was the end of the conversation. The man's name was Demorris Andy Hunter. Everybody in that building knew him by a different name. He had told Teresa Green a different name too, along with a different past. The real past was this.

13:14 In January of nineteen eighty five, when Hunter was eighteen years old, he shot and killed an eighteen year old named Cesar Guzman in California. For that killing and for two other shootings, he was convicted and sentenced to twenty four years. He was paroled in nineteen ninety seven. Five years after that parole, a woman in Oakland was dead, and roughly two months after that, Teresa Green was dead in Orlando, killed by a man who was already running. He was picked up in Houston. California got him first, tried him for the Oakland killing, and sentenced him to one hundred and ten years. That is where he sat until twenty fifteen, when Florida finally extradited him to face charges for Teresa Green, and then Florida took another eleven years to get him to trial. There were delays for the pandemic. There was a heart attack. Twenty four years total between the day Octavius Hayes walked into that ruined apartment and the day a jury heard the case. That jury convicted Hunter a first degree murder and theft in April.

14:13 Days later, the same jury came back for the penalty phase and voted unanimously to recommend death. In June, at what Florida calls a Spencer hearing, the defense got its final opportunity to present anything that might save his life. Hunter took the floor himself. He used it to declare he was innocent. He said the case had not been investigated properly because he was already a wanted man in California. He said prosecutors had put forged documents in front of the court and that witnesses had changed their stories. On Tuesday morning, he came back before Judge Lisa Munyon for formal sentencing. His attorney stood up and said his client wish to speak. Monyon said no, that was done at the Spencer hearing, she told him and she would not take further evidence. And I want to sit with that for a second because I know exactly how that sounds.

15:05 A judge refusing to let a man speak before she sentences him to die is a heavy image. But this is not a case where somebody got silenced. He got his turn in June, in open court with his lawyers beside him. He used that tern to tell a judge who had presided over his entire trial that the whole thing was fabricated. She heard him out, then she was not going to hear it. Twice, she told him he had forfeited not only his right to live among us as a freeman, but under Florida law and by his own actions, his right to live at all. And then she said, may God have mercy on your soul, and sentenced him to death. Now, this show is not going to tell you what to think about capital punishment. Reasonable people have been arguing about it for two hundred years, and they are going to keep arguing about it long after this episode is in your feed. What I will tell you is what happens next. Mechanically, because people ask in Florida, a death sentence goes to the State Supreme Court on automatic review. That is not optional, and it is not something Hunter has to request. This case is not over. It is just no longer in Judge Munyon's courtroom.

16:16 What I will editorialize about is the twenty four years, because here's what I keep turning over. A jury of Teresa Green's neighbors heard this case in twenty twenty six. Her son was thirteen when she died. He is a grown man now. He wrote a victim impact letter that had to be read into the record by somebody else. Everyone who loved this woman spent more than two decades in a holding pattern, waiting on a system that had the defendant in custody the entire time. He never got away. He was sitting in a California prison cell for thirteen years before Florida even brought him over. The delay was not because he was hiding. The delay was the delay. There is a playbook for this, and Hunter ran it well.

17:00 False name, a new state, a new set of neighbors who thought he was a nice guy. His own cousin testified that he was kind like an older brother. A childhood friend said he was always laughing. His daughter took the stand and told the court she loves her father and wants him to live, and then blew him a kiss on her way off the witness stand. I believe every one of those people. I think they were describing someone real. That is what is so ugly about this. The version of Demores Hunter. Those people knew was not a lie. He told them. It was just not the whole man. The whole man put his hands around a woman's throat and then asked a neighbor for a ride.

17:40 Teresa Ann Green was thirty eight years old. She was somebody's mother. She would be sixty two now. She should have watched her son grow up. She should have been at whatever he did next. Instead, her son came home to holes in the wall. Sayesar Guzman was eighteen years old in January of nineteen eighty five, and almost nobody had set his name in forty one years. Someone has to say your name when we come back. A game of Russian Roulette in a living room in Cincinnati. A young woman who had just gotten married and had not told anybody yet, and two parents who did something in that courtroom that I am still thinking about. October fifth, twenty twenty five, Winton Hills Neighborhood, Cincinnati, A house on King's Run Court, A few friends sitting around playing cards on a Sunday night, around ten forty five Cincinnati police got a call for a person shot. When officers arrived, they found a twenty three year old woman named Rachel Counts.

18:47 She was pronounced dead at the scene. Here's what prosecutors say happen, and I want to walk through it slowly because the details are the whole story. A twenty three year old man named Omarian Horn, who was one of the people at that card game, pulled a revolver out of his pocket. He opened the cylinder. He removed every bullet except one, and he said, let's play Russian Roulette while pointing the gun at his own head. Then he turned the gun and pointed it at Rachel Count's and pulled the trigger. The one bullet in that cylinder fired. It hit her in the chest. She died there in that house. The next morning, police arrested Horn and charged him with murder. At his arraignment days later, prosecutors laid all of that out in open court, and Horn began to cry as they read it. His defense attorney asked the judge for a hundred thousand dollars bond and told the court this was not intentional, that Horn had no criminal record, no juvenile record, and real ties to the community.

19:45 The judge set it at a million and said Horn had used the firearm as if it were a toy. His words, it certainly isn't. On Friday of last week, July thirty first, that case ended, Omari and Horn pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter. In exchange, charges of felonious assault and reckless homicide were dropped. Judge sentenced him to ten to fourteen and a half years in prison. When he gets out, he will be under post release supervision for another two to five years. In pretrial filings, his lawyers argued that nothing in the evidence supported a theory of intentional or purposeful criminal conduct. And you know what, legally they have a point. That is what involuntary manslaughter is.

20:28 It is the charge for a death caused by recklessness rather than intent. Nobody in that courtroom, including the prosecutors, argued that Omari and Horn wanted Rachel Counts to die. But I have been doing this a long time and I want to be very precise about something. He took a revolver out of his pocket. He looked at the cylinder. He deliberately removed five rounds and deliberately left one. He announced the game. He aimed it at himself first, which I suspect was meant to make the whole thing feel like a bit, like a dare, like nothing. And then he turned a loaded firearm toward another human being's chest and pulled the trigger. Every single one of those is a decision, that is not a mistake, That is a choice followed by another choice, followed by another one, And the fact that he did not want the outcome does not undo the sequence that produced it. Hamilton County Prosecutor Connie Pillach put it about as plainly as it can be put. There is no safe way to play with a firearm. Now, let me tell you about Rachel Counts, because she is more than the last four seconds of her life. She was twenty three years old. She worked the drive through window at a McDonald's in Avon, Indiana.

21:42 After she died, more than a dozen customers reached out to her family, regular people who went through that drive through, who did not know her outside of a window in a paper bag, who felt her absence enough to find her mother and say something. Think about who you have to be for a dozen strangers to do that, And she had just gotten married. She did it quietly without telling anyone, and the family was planning a proper ceremony for later so everybody could be there. On the day she was killed, her mother, Rebecca Counts, sent her photographs of flowers she had been arranging for that wedding. Those flowers became her funeral flowers. Some of them were tucked into her daughter's hand. I do not have a clever line for that. I am not going to try to find one. At the sentencing, both of Rachel's parents stood up in read statements and they told that courtroom that they forgive Omari and Horn. Her mother said forgiveness is not a natural response and that it does not come easily. No, it does not. And I want to be clear about what those two people did because we talk a lot on this show about accountability and mercy is the other side of that coin, and it gets a lot less airtime.

22:53 Nobody required them to do that. No plea agreement was contingent on it. The sentence was not going to change either way. They stood up in the worst room they have ever been in. Ten months after a twenty three year old man made a series of choices that took their daughter off the face of the earth, and they gave him something he had no right to expect and no way to earn. That is not weakness, and it is not letting him off. He is going to prison for at least a decade, regardless. Forgiveness and consequences are not opposites. Those parents seem to understand that better than most of the Internet does. And here's what stays with me about putting these three stories in the same episode.

23:34 In Orlando on Tuesday, a man who has killed three people across two states asked a judge for one more chance to speak and was told no, and had no mercy coming to him because he never gave any. In Cincinnati last Friday, a young man who never meant to hurt anybody got mercy he never asked for from the two people on this earth with the most standing to withhold it. Rachel Counts was twenty three years old. She was newly married. She was somebody's daughter and somebody's wife, and a familiar face to a dozen people at a drive through window in Indiana who thought enough of her to call her mother. She should be planning a wedding right now. Someone has to say your name. That is daily crime. Injustice for Thursday, August sixth, twenty twenty six, The Clancy trial resumes in Plymouth and is expected to run several more weeks. We will be back with it tomorrow and every day until there is a verdict, because that is the deal we made with you. Demorris Hunter is on Florida's death Row and his sentence goes to the Florida Supreme Court on automatic review. Omarian Horn is in an Ohio prison for at least the next ten years.

24:45 If today's show gave you something, do me a favor and send it to one person, not a broadcast, just one person you think would actually listen to it. Word of mouth is the entire reason this show exists. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment. I want to know where you land on this one. The state's toxicologist told that jury only one of Lindsay Clancy's four medications was even slightly above normal levels. Does that settle anything for you? Or does the number of prescriptions matter more than the concentration of any one of them? That is the question. The whole trial is going to turn on and I am curious whether you got there before the psychiatrists do. I'm Garrett Fisher. Tomorrow we stay on Plymouth.

25:27 This is Daily Crime and Justice. This program covers active criminal proceedings and reports on allegations, testimony, and court records. Lindsay Clancy has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first degree murder and is presumed innocent of those charges. She does not dispute causing her children's deaths, and asserts that she lacked criminal responsibility due to postpartum psychosis. That question has not been decided. Testimony described in this episode reflects proceedings through Wednesday, August fifth, and the trial is ongoing. Decriptions of Lindsay Clancy's injuries as superficial and of the blood evidence reflect witness testimony and the prosecution's position. They are not findings of fact. The forensic toxicologists described four medications by their general drug class rather than by name, in reporting available at recording time. The medications identified separately in evidence testimony were lauraza pam, sertraline, buspyroni hydroxyzine, and clonazepam.

26:29 Outlets have reported to Morris Hunter's age as both fifty nine and sixty, and accounts of his California convictions differ across sources. Public records indicate a nineteen eighty five conviction following the killing of Caesar Guzman and a separate murder conviction in Alameda County resulting in a one hundred and ten year sentence. The name of the Oakland victim is not consistently reported, and this program has not named her. For that reason, Hunter's death sentence is subject to automatic review by the Florida Supreme Court. In the Cincinnati case, at least one outlet described Rachel Counts as Omarian Horn's girlfriend. Prosecutors and other reporting describe her as a friend, and her family has said she had recently married. This program has used the account given by the prosecutor's office and the victim's family. This episode discussed suicide, self harm, postpart of mental illness, and the deaths of children. If you or someone you know is struggling, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline can be reached by calling or texting nine eight eight.

27:32 For pregnancy and post part of mental health, the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is free, confidential and available around the clock at one eight three three. TLCMAMA. Postpartum Support International can be reached at one eight hundred nine four four four seven seven three