Lindsay Clancy's Judge Just Got Reversed, Latarsha Sanders's Conviction Vacated, a 78-Year-Old Killed Waiting for a Bus

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Shark Media powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Monday, August tenth, twenty twenty six. There is a courtroom in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where a judge named William Sullivan is presiding over the murder trial of Lindsey Clancy. The only real question in that trial is whether a mother who admits she killed her three children can be held criminally responsible for it. That is the whole case, not who did it, whether her mind belonged to her when she did. On Thursday afternoon, while that trial was in recess, the highest court in Massachusetts handed down a ruling about a different mother in a different case, convicted in the same county, sentenced by the same judge, and the ruling said Judge Sullivan got it wrong that he kept that thousands of pages of psychiatric records away from a jury that was being asked to decide the exact same question criminal responsibility. That conviction is now vacated. Latarsha Sanders, who stabbed her two little boys to death in Brockton in twenty eighteen, is entitled to a new trial, so on Friday morning, Judge Sullivan walked back into a courtroom where a defense attorney is fighting to put three medical experts in front of a jury, and the appellate court had just finished explaining to him in writing what happens when a judge gets that call wrong. Look, I'm gonna be

1:36 honest with you. I have covered a lot of coincidences on this show. This is not a coincidence. This is the system talking to itself out loud in public, in real time, and everybody in that building heard it. We're going to walk through both cases today and then we're going to go to East Saint Louis, Illinois, where a seventy eight year old man named John Wesley Allen Senior was waiting for a bus, and the Internet decided the story was the costume. It wasn't, it was him. This is Daily Crime and Justice. The prosecution's best witnesses say she was a wonderful mother. Let's start where we always start, with the children. Cora Clancy was five years old, Dawson Clancy was three, Callen Clancy was eight months old. On the evening of January twenty fourth, twenty twenty three, in the basement of their home on Summer Street in Duxbury, Massachusetts.

2:33 Their mothers strangled all three of them with exercise resistance bands. Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead that night. Callen held on for three days at Boston Children's Hospital before he died. Lindsey Clancy does not dispute any of that. She never has. Her attorney has said from the beginning that she did it. What she has pleaded is not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility, which is what Massachusetts calls the the insanity defense. Her position is that she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis, made worse by a stack of psychiatric medications, and that she could not appreciate what she was doing or conform her conduct to the law.

3:13 She is presumed innocent of first degree murder until a jury says otherwise. That presumption is real, and it applies here even though the killing is not in dispute, because the thing she is charged with is not the act, it's the mind behind the act. Now week three of this trial, and the prosecution has been building something very specific, and it is worth understanding how it works because it is counterintuitive. The Commonwealth has spent days calling witnesses who love Lindsay Clancy. Her nanny testified she was a wonderful mom who never showed a sign of being dangerous to her kids. Her children's pediatrician took the stand, so did their preschool teachers, and every one of them described a loving, attentive, present mother. On Thursday, prosecutors called her former father in law.

4:03 Christopher Clancy is Patrick Clancy's father. He is the grandfather of those three children, and he told that jury that Lindsay was a loving and caring mother. He said he and his wife had been invited to dinner at that house on the night of January twenty fourth, they had other plans. They said they'd come Friday instead. There was no Friday. He also testified that he knew over the Christmas holidays in twenty twenty two that she was struggling, that she seemed distracted and quiet around Thanksgiving. Then a family friend testified about a dinner on January twenty second, two days before. He said it was a nice day out. He said Lindsay was quieter than normal, and then he said her behavior and demeanor appeared normal and he had no trouble talking with her. That is the prosecution's whole architecture right there in one sentence from a friend at a dinner party. She was quiet and she was normal.

4:57 Because here is what the Commonwealth is arguing, and I want to be fair to it. If a woman is functioning, if she's having beach dinners and holiday visits and conversations that nobody flags is alarming. Then when she sends her husband out on a twenty five minute errand and locks in on what comes next, that is not psychosis. That is a decision, and a decision is what first degree murder is made of. The defense answer, and you're going to hear this from Kevin Reddington for weeks, is that postpartum psychosis does not look like a woman raving in the street. It is episodic, It comes in waves, It hides behind competence. A person can plan and speak and appear organized and still be operating inside a delusion. A forensic psychiatrist called by the prosecution actually conceded that point on cross examination last week. She agreed that someone can communicate and make plans while still in a state of psychosis.

5:54 I am explaining that argument. I am not endorsing it. Twelve people in Plymouth gets to die whether it holds. But the prosecution has also been putting cracks in its own wall, and I don't think it has a choice, because the people who loved her also told the jury what she told them. A friend testified that in the days before January twenty fourth, Lindsay said she'd been on a medication that was giving her dark thoughts, that she was tapering off it and trying new ones. The friend said Lindsay never specified what those thoughts were. Another friend testified Lindsay told her she felt like a zombie. A coworker said she reported negative side effects from her medication. Nurses she'd worked with at mass General for years testified she told them she was in a difficult mental place, tired and anxious and getting psychiatric care, and a month before the killings in early January, she had been an impatient at McClain Hospital. When police searched that kitchen after the deaths, they found her discharge paperwork, a list of her prescriptions, a directory of community mental health resources and information she'd on postpartum depression and anxiety, and a the book called Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts. Her own journal was read aloud in that courtroom. One entry. I feel like I'm drowning every day. So the state's case is that she was fine, and the state's own evidence is that everybody around her knew she wasn't. One procedural note that matters more than it sounds. The defense has stipulated to a set of facts in this case, which is a lawyer's way of saying, we're not going to make

7:26 you prove what nobody disputes. That's why this trial is running ahead of schedule. It's also a signal about where Reddington is spending his ammunition. He is not fighting about the resistance bands or the timeline or who was in that basement. Every hour he saves is an hour he gets to spend on her mind. Thursday was also the day the jury saw the autopsy photographs of Callan Clancy. The state medical examiner who performed that autopsy, was the first witness of the morning. Lindsey Clancy sat at the defense table with her head down, shaking, and at one point a court officer wheeled her out of the room while she sobbed. I want to say something careful here. Her crying is not evidence. The prosecution has already made a point of showing this jury a friend who visited her in the rehab hospital in March of twenty twenty three and testified that Lindsay never once brought up her children, never broke down about them. The defense got that witness to clarify that she'd been told in advance not to raise the subject, and that she assumed that came from Lindsay's doctors. So both sides are now using this woman's emotions as an exhibit. Her tears count when they're inconvenient and don't count when they're not. That's how this works, and neither side is above it. After the jury went home Thursday, the fight that actually matters started. Kevin Reddington wants to call three doctors as medical experts. He described them in his brief as central to her defense. Part of what they testify about is the legitimacy of Lindsey

8:56 Clancy's suicide attempt, because the prosecution has been quietly suggesting she wasn't really trying to die when she cut her wrist and went out that second story window. Two different physicians have now called those cuts superficial. She hit the ground and severed function below her thoracic spine. She is paralyzed from the waist down. She has been held without bail at Tewkesbury State Hospital since her arrest, and she came into that courtroom in a wheelchair. Reddington's argument on that point was blunt. He compared the injury to the fall that paralyzed Christopher Reeve. Judge Sullivan heard the arguments Thursday afternoon and took the motion under advisement, meaning he had not ruled when we recorded this. Friday was scheduled to be a full day, and Reddington indicated the psychiatrists who actually treated Lindsay Clancy before the killings were expected to take the stand. Those are the doctors who prescribed the medications. Those are the people who saw her at McLean.

9:57 If you want to know where this trial turns, that's wh where we recorded before that session finished. We'll have Friday's testimony and everything that comes next. And if a judge deciding whether to let a jury hear from three defense medical experts, sounds like a small procedural question to you. Hold that thought, because on Thursday, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts published an opinion about exactly that. About this judge and about another mother. Their names were Edson Brido and Lasonbrido. Edson went by Marlin he was eight years old, Lawson was five. In February of twenty eighteen, in an apartment on Prospect Street in Brockton, Massachusetts, their mother stabbed both of them to death. Latarsha Sanders admitted it. The Plymouth County District attorney said the boys died in what he described as a ritualistic incident and that Sanders practice voodoo.

11:03 That word did a lot of work in the coverage of this case in twenty eighteen, and I want to be careful with it because voodoo is a real religion practiced by millions of people who have never heard anybody. And the version of it that made headlines here came out of the mouth of a woman whose own doctors would later determine she had been living with untreated paranoid schizophrenia for decades. Those are two different things. Only one of them killed those boys. Sanders went to trial in December of twenty twenty two. Her defense was insanity. Her lawyer argued she lacked criminal responsibility. The jury deliberated for about four hours and convicted her on two counts of first degree murder, which in Massachusetts carries one sentence and only one life without the possibility of parole. She has been in a state prison ever since. Here is what that jury never saw. While Sanders was awaiting trial, held in custody, and then in a state psychiatric hospital, evaluated her.

12:01 They documented hallucinations. They diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia that the records described as undetected and untreated for decades. Thousands of pages of medical records, all of it generated after the killings, all of it going directly to the question of what was happening inside her head. The trial judge, William Sullivan, would not let the defense put those records in front of the jury. On Thursday, the Supreme Judicial Court vacated her conviction, and the language of that opinion is worth hearing because the court did not go soft on what she did. The justices wrote that there is no doubt the defendant committed these incomprehensible crimes. They said the sole issue in front of that jury was whether she lacked criminal responsibility, and they held that excluding her relevant medical records about the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness was prejudicial error, and that quote, the defendant is entitled to a new trial. That's not a technicality. A technicality is a form filed late. This is an appellate court saying that the single question the jury was impaneled to answer was decided without the evidence that answered it. Now some housekeeping, because there's been some loose reporting on this over the weekend.

13:14 The Plymouth County District Attorney's office has not announced a retrial. What it has said is that it is reviewing the opinion and determining next steps. A spokesperson said it is the office's duty to be a voice for victims of crime like Marlin and las Son Brito, and that they will continue to do so in their memory. So anybody telling you there's a new trial on the calendar, or predicting what she'll plead at it is guessing she's not going free. Nobody has suggested she's going free. And if a future jury does find her not criminally responsible, that doesn't open a door either. It means a locked psychiatric facility instead of a locked prison with periodic reviews for as long as it takes. That's what an insanity verdict actually is in this country. It is not a get out of jail card. It's a different building. And now the part that makes your neck prickle. Latarsha Sanders was convicted in December of twenty twenty two. Lindsey Clancy killed her three children in January of twenty twenty three, one month later, same county, same courthouse, same judge. I have no idea whether Lindsay Clancy knew about the Sanders verdict.

14:28 Nobody has testified to that, and I'm not going to invent it. But somebody in Massachusetts should be asking a bigger question, which is how many women in that state were sitting in a psychiatric crisis in the winter of twenty twenty two while a very public trial demonstrated exactly how little the system was willing to hear about it. There's a playbook for this. Mental illness gets treated as a story you tell after the fact, a thing the defense manufactures to explain away what somebody obviously did, And so the records get excluded and the he gets four hours, and life without parole is automatic, and everybody goes home. It took Latasha Sanders three and a half years in a state prison to get one appellate court to say that was wrong. And on Friday morning, the judge who made that call was back on the bench in Plymouth, sitting on a motion about whether Lindsey Clancy's jury gets to hear from three medical experts her lawyer calls central to her defense. I'm not going to tell you what he should do. I don't have the briefs, and I'm not a judge, but I will tell you the Supreme Judicial Court just published the answer to a very similar question with his name in it, and there is no world in which everybody in that courtroom isn't reading it.

15:42 Accountability doesn't have a legal department. Sometimes it just has a docket. The man at the bus stop, John Wesley Allen, Sr. Was seventy eight years old. On Monday night, August third, He was standing at a bus stop near North seventy sixth Street and State Street in East Saint Louis, Illinois. He was waiting for a bus. He was not in an argument, He was not in a dispute. He did not know the person who walked up to him. Around ten o'clock, East Saint Louis police got a call for a body in the roadway. They found him there. The Saint Clair County coroner identified him the next evening and said he died of multiple stab wounds. Illinois State Police say he was stabbed in a random attack by a suspect wearing a clown outfit. And I want to stop right there, because from the second that detail hit the internet, that's what this story became. Not a seventy eight year old man killed waiting for a bus, a clown, a viral doorbell clip, a meme with a body attached to it.

16:47 So let's do this properly. A fifteen year old was arrested and is now charged with first degree murder. He has not been publicly identified because he's a miner and we are not going to speculate about who he is. He is charged, he has not been convicted of anything. He is presumed innocent, and that presumption does not evaporate because a video is unsettling. The Saint Clair County State's Attorney's office has filed to move his case to adult court. An assistant state's attorney wrote that the teenager acted with the intent to kill or do great bodily harm and stabbed Allan about the body with a knife, causing his death. That's the charging language. That's an allegation. Now the video everybody's seen. Before the killing, a person in clown makeup and a costume went door to door in a neighborhood in East Saint Louis. Neighbors say he peered into windows.

17:41 He was carrying a large knife. A ring camera at one house caught him walking up to the door and leaning into the lens. The woman who lived there was home alone. Her son, Lee Palmer, told a local station his mother was by herself when the figure appeared on the porch, that it stayed on the property for several minutes, then walked around behind the house. He said his first thought was whether it was armed and whether his mother was about to get hurt. Another neighbor, Carin Spry, was on her back porch with her family. She says she watched him twirling the knife. She says he was up to no good. She says he circled back through the woods behind the houses because they could hear the sticks breaking, and she says he roamed that neighborhood for about forty five minutes before police arrived. Forty five minutes. There are people who called, There are people who watched from their own porches, and the distance from that doorbell camera to the intersection where John Wesley Allen Sr. Was found Is about a ten minute walk. That's the part I keep going back to. This is a neighborhood where multiple people saw a person with a knife and a mask checking doors, and the outcome was that a seventy eight year old man standing at a bus stop bled out in the road.

18:53 State police found the fifteen year old at a nearby residence and took him into custody. Then they told the public there was no ongoing threat, which is the sentence law enforcement always reaches for, and which is always technically true and never actually comforting. The threat was over because the man at the bus stop was already dead. That's what ended it. Not a response, not an intervention, an outcome. The formal charge came down Thursday, four days after nobody was paying attention to him. He was just a guy waiting for a bus, and he happened to be the one out in the open. Let me be clear about something, because I've watched the comment sections on this. This is not a story about clowns. There is a whole genre of internet panic around this, and it has been recycled every few years since twenty sixteen, and every time it happens, the real event underneath it gets buried under costume discourse.

19:46 A costume is a costume. The knife did the killing, and it's not a story about doorbell cameras either, though I'll note that the family whose camera caught this has been telling neighbors to go get one fine, get a ring. Camera did not save John Wesley Allen, Sr. It gave the Internet forty seconds of footage to argue about. What it is is a story about a fifteen year old walking around a residential neighborhood for the better part of an hour with a large knife in a mask, testing doors, and about the fact that whatever was going on with that kid was going on long before Monday night. Nobody wakes up at fifteen and does this out of nowhere. Somewhere behind this there is a history, and there are people who saw pieces of it. The prosecution's move to send him to adult court is going to be the fight in this case. And I understand the instinct a man is dead and the manner of it is genuinely frightening, But a fifteen year old brain is not an adult brain.

20:44 And Illinois has spent twenty years and several appellate decisions relearning that lesson, and none of that means John Wesley Allen Senior's family owes anybody patience. Both of those things are true. That's the hard part. So say his name, John Wesley Alan, seventy eight years old, somebody's father, somebody's grandfather, going by the senior. On the end of it, he was waiting for a bus. That's the story, not the paint. That's Daily Crime and Justice for Monday, August tenth. The Lindsey Clancy trial is in session in Plymouth today and we are on it every single morning until there's a verdict. We'll have Friday's testimony from the doctors who treated her, and whatever Judge Sullivan decides about those three defense experts.

21:31 If this show is useful to you, the single best thing you can do is tell one person about it, not share it to a feed. Tell an actual human being who follows these cases. That's how this show grows, and it's the whole reason we're still here doing it daily. And if you're listening on Spotify, leave a comment on this episode I read them. Tell me what you think about the Sanders ruling, because I suspect some of you are going to disagree with me on that one, and I'd rather here at than not. I'm Garrett Fisher do better. Some notes on sourcing, and a few things you should know. Lindsey Clancy is presumed innocent of the charges against her.

22:11 She is pleaded not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. This episode was recorded before Friday's court session concluded, so Friday's testimony is not reflected here. As of Thursday's adjournment, Judge Sullivan had taken the defense motion regarding three medical expert witnesses under advisement and had not ruled. Testimony described in this episode is drawn from court coverage by Court TV, The Boston Globe, CBS, Boston CNN, and Boston dot Com. On Latarsha Sanders, the Supreme Judicial Court vacated her conviction on Thursday and ruled she is entitled to a new trial. As of this recording, the Plymouth County District Attorney's Office has said only that it is reviewing the opinion and determining next steps. No retryle has been scheduled, and no plea has been entered. Some outlets have reported specific stab wound counts for both boys, and have predicted that Sanders will again raise an insanity defense. Those details and predictions were not confirmed in the wire and broadcast reporting we reviewed, and we have left them out of the narration. The younger boy's name has been spelled both Layson and Layson across outlets. On the East Saint Louis case, the suspect is fifteen years old, has not been publicly identified, and is charged with first degree murder. He is presumed innocent.

23:35 Prosecutors have filed to move the case to adult court, and that has not been granted. Outlets have reported John Wesley Allen, Senior's residence as both Jennings, Missouri and Saint Louis, Missouri. Reporting also differs on when the arrest occurred, with some outlets placing it Monday night and others Tuesday afternoon. The words on the doorbell recording have been reported as both I have a gift for you and I've been looking for you. We have not independently verified that audio. This episode discusses child deaths, suicide, postpartum psychosis, and serious mental illness. If you are struggling, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available around the clock by calling or texting nine eight eight.

24:19 For postpartum and maternal mental health, the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is free and confidential at one eight three three tlcmama. This program is produced by Calarroga Shark Media Research, is AI assisted and reviewed before broadcast. Nothing in this program is legal advice or medical advice.