Lindsay Clancy's Nanny Testifies for the Prosecution, Rosa Kramer Went Home for Her Mother's Bowl, Gerhardt Konig Wants a New Trial

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Shark Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. Friday, August seventh, twenty twenty six. Three stories today, and two of them are the same story wearing different clothes. We start in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the woman who used to take care of Cora Dawson and Callan Clancy took the witness stand this week and told a jury that their mother was a wonderful mom who loved her kids. She was called by the prosecution think about that for a second.

0:44 The state put a witness up there to say the defendant was a good mother and then sat down. And yesterday the Medical Examiner's office was expected to take that same stand and walk the jury through exactly what happened to those three children's bodies. The distance between those two pieces of testimony is the entire trial. Then we go to Pensacola, Florida. Rosa Kramer was forty seven years old. She had left her husband two weeks earlier and moved into her father's house. On the morning of July twenty third, twenty twenty four, she went back to the home she used to live in to pick up her things. Her mother had died, and there were things of her mother still in that house, a bowl, a photo album, her own birth certificate. She timed the trip so she would be gone before her husband got home from his overnight shift.

1:33 He got off work early. He parked his truck behind the house, behind the privacy fence so she would not see it. Rosa Kramer was shot four times. Her husband's defense attorney told a jury this week that she left him with no other choice. And then we go to Honolulu, where a doctor who was convicted in April of trying to kill his wife on a cliff side hiking trail has decided that the problem was not the evidence. The problem was that the jury did not understand what it was doing. He wants a new trial. He has two arguments. One of them is a real legal question. The other one is a comment somebody left on YouTube under a picture of Bart Simpson. I'm not making that up. We'll get there. Look, I'm gonna be honest with you. Two of the three cases on this show today come down to the same fact pattern. A woman decided to leave and a man decided that was not going to be allowed everything after that is lawyers. We have been with this trial since jury selection, and we are going to stay with it until there is a verdict. Cora Clancy was five years old, Dawson Clancy was three, Callan Clancy was eight months old. They were killed in the basement of their home on Summer Street in Duxbury, Massachusetts, on January twenty fourth, twenty twenty three. Their mother, Lindsey Clancy, has admitted that she strangled them with exercise bands. She has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first two murder on the grounds that she was not criminally responsible for what she did because she was suffering from postpartum

3:05 psychosis at the time. That is the whole fight, not what happened why. Wednesday was day seven of testimony, and it was a half day. The jury heard from the prosecution's forty fifth witness in seven days, which tells you something about how methodically the state is building this Her name is Elaine Rossy. She was the last nanny the Clancy family ever hired. Rossi has worked as a nanny for fifteen years. She lives in Kingston. In the summer of twenty twenty two, she answered a Facebook post from a woman in Duxbury looking for part time help. That woman was Lindsey Clancy, who was on maternity leave with her third child and planning to go back to work as a labor and delivery nurse in November. Rossi started in September three days a week. She was hired mostly to look after the baby, but she got close to all three of them fast. So the prosecution asked her about the children. And here is what a jury in Plymouth count heard about Cora, Dawson and Callen Clancy. Cora was a girly girl. Rossi said. She loved her baby dolls, she loved arts and crafts, she had to pretend kitchen she played with. Dawson was full of energy, rambunctious, funny, silly, and Callen Rossi said was the happiest, sweetest, easiest baby.

4:22 Lindsey Clancy sobbed at the defense table while that testimony came in. Rossie also told the jury about a notebook. She and Clancy kept it on the kitchen counter and passed notes back and forth in it, nap schedules what the kids were going to do that day. Ordinary logistics of a household with three small children, in it. The jury was shown pages from that notebook. I want to sit with that for a minute, because that notebook is now an exhibit in a murder trial. Pages of a mother writing down when the baby sleeps now here is the part that matters legally, and it is the reason a lot of people watching this trial got confused. Wednesday, the prosecution called this witness. The state, which is trying to convict Lindsay Clancy of first degree murder, put a woman on the stand who described the defendant as a wonderful mom. That is not a mistake, That is a choice.

5:15 Remember what Assistant District Attorney shaneon Buckingham told this jury in her opening statement. She did not argue that Lindsay Clancy was a bad mother. She argued that Lindsay Clancy was extremely controlling, meticulous, manipulative, and that when her life started getting harder to control, she saw a way out and took it and took her children with her because she did not trust anyone else to have them. Under that theory, the notebook is not evidence of love. It is evidence of control. The detailed nap schedules, the documentation, the management of every hour, all of it goes into the same column. Prosecutors are using the picture of a devoted, organized, hands on mother to argue that this was a woman who was completely oriented to reality and completely in command of her household right up until the moment she decided.

6:03 Defense attorney Kevin Reddington got up on cross examination and worked the same witness from the other direction, and he got what he needed. Rossie acknowledged that Clancy had told her she was struggling with postpartum depression, that she was having trouble sleeping, that she had been spending nights down in the basement, that in the months before the killing, she had lost significant weight. And Rossi told the jury that she never once worried that Lindsey Clancy might be a danger to those children or to herself. Both sides will take that answer. The defense hears it as proof that this was an illness that hid itself until it exploded. The prosecution hears it as proof that there was nothing visibly wrong with this woman, because nothing was wrong with this woman. Rossie stopped working for the family in December of twenty twenty two, when Clancy decided not to return to her nursing job. She said nobody explained why she was gone one month before the children died. The rest of Wednesday moved move fast. Forensic analysts testified about DNA recovered from the house. Toxicologists testified about what was in lindsay clancy system. In January of twenty twenty three, a medical provider who treated her at a Boston hospital took the stand the toxicology is worth pausing on because the defense theory is not only that she was mentally ill, it is that she was misdiagnosed and over medicated by the people who were supposed to be treating her. Doctor Justin Brower walked the jury through the blood work. One drug in her system is normally an anti seizure medication

7:33 that is also used to treat bipolar disorder, and he said it was right in the middle of the therapeutic range. A second drug, same story. A third and antipsychotic, looked high to him depending on the dosage, though he would not call it toxic or lethal. A fourth look therapeutic, and on cross Reddington got him to agree that blood levels do not tell the whole story without knowing the underlying facts of a case. That is the defense chipping nobody is going to win this trial on a toxicology chart. But every witness who says the medication picture was complicated is a witness the defense will point back to enclosing. There was also a development Tuesday that is going to shorten this trial. Lindsey Clancy agreed to a stipulation, which means she and her lawyers formally accepted certain facts as true, so the state does not have to call witnesses to prove them. When the defense is not contesting that she did it, there is no reason to make a parade of technicians establish it. That agreement is likely to knock a meaningful number of witnesses off the list, which brings us to yesterday, day eight, a full day, and the case moved to the part everybody in that courtroom has been bracing for. Prosecutors were expected to call a doctor from the Massachusetts Medical Examiner's Office. That witness is the one who opens the door to the autopsy evidence, including autopsy photographs that Judge William Sullivan has impowered. Those images have been kept from the public and from cameras. The

9:04 jury sees them nobody else. Does. I want to be straight with you about how we are handling this. We are recording this show while that testimony is still going on. So I am telling you what was scheduled and what the reporting in the room said was coming, not what a witness ultimately said. We will have the medical examiner's testimony for you on Monday, but I can tell you what it is for the medical examiner is the witness. The defense cannot argue with. Everything else in this trial is interpretation. Was she psychotic? Was she in control? Did the drugs help or hurt? The autopsy is not interpretation. The autopsy is a record of what was done to three small bodies, and it is going to be entered into evidence in front of twelve people who have spent two weeks looking at photographs of a house full of toys.

9:56 The state's cause of death findings have been public since twenty twenty three. Cora and Dawson died of asphyxia. Callan died of complications of asphyxia three days later at Boston Children's Hospital after his father agreed to stop life support. Here is where this trial is headed. The prosecution is still putting on its case. When they rest, the defense goes, and that is when you will hear the postpartum psychosis evidence in full. Reddington has told the jury his client experienced command hallucinations, that a male voice in her head told her to kill the children and then herself, and that she could not resist it. After the defense rest the state gets to come back with its own mental health experts and rebuttal to argue that she knew what she was doing and could have stopped. And one thing worth saying clearly because people keep getting it wrong. If this jury finds Lindsey Clancy not criminally responsible, she does not walk out of that courthouse. She goes to a state psychiatric hospital and she stays there under periodic review until a court is satisfied she can live safely in the community. She is already in custody at Tewkesbury Hospital.

11:02 She is paralyzed from the injuries she caused herself that night. There is no version of this where she goes home. Cora Clancy, Dawson Clancy, Callan Clancy five three and eight months old. Somebody has to keep saying their names because this trial is about to become extremely technical and it is easy to lose them in it. When we come back. A woman in Pensacola went home to get her dead mother's bowl and never left the house alive, and her husband's lawyer says she left him with no other choice.

11:49 Rosa Maria Kramer was forty seven years old. She lived in Pensacola in Escambia County in the Florida Panhandle. She had a father she took care of. She had a sister who checked on her. She had a dog. She had a husband, Timothy Kramer, and in July of twenty twenty four, she left him. She packed up and moved into her father's house. She left a letter behind for him, explaining herself, this is a new case for us, so let me set the ground rules up front. Timothy Kramer, now fifty three, is charged with first degree premeditated murder and aggravated animal cruelty. He has pleaded not guilty. He is presumed innocent, and this trial is happening right now in Escambia County. His lawyers concede he pulled the trigger.

12:32 What they dispute is why so when I described the States case, understand that is an allegation a jury has not yet ruled on. Here is what is not in dispute. About two weeks after Rosa left on the morning of July twenty third, twenty twenty four. She drove back to the house on Hillcrest Avenue where the two of them had lived. She was there to collect her belongings. She arrived around six in the morning, and she picked that hour to deliberately because her husband worked an overnight shift and was not due home until eight. The plan was to be gone before he got there. Prosecutor Amy Shay told the jury in her opening statement Tuesday that the entire morning was a setup. She said Timothy Kramer had spent the previous day trying to get his wife to talk to him and getting nothing back. She said he then told her he had things she needed, items that had belonged to her mother who had died, a bowl, a photo album, her birth certificate, and Shaye told the jury he specifically told his wife to come first thing in the morning so that the two of them would not have to see each other because he would still be at work. He was not still at work, according to the state. He left early, came home ahead of her, and parked his truck around the back of the house where she would not see it when she pulled in on Wednesday, the jury heard the messages. Britney Crawford, a criminal investigator with the Escambia County Sheriff's Office, read them into the record, twenty four hours of text from Timothy Kramer to his estranged wife on July twenty second. She

14:04 did not answer any of them. He asked if he could call her, just to hear her voice. He told her he was hurting badly without her. He told her he loved her and missed her, and asked her to come spend the night. He pushed her on the letter she had left, telling her she had said that day that they could fix things, and he brought up a night gown she had left behind at the house and told her that leaving it there had been leading him on for three days. Twenty four hours of that into silence. The defense pushed back on the framing. Attorney Andrew Benson told the jury there were days and weeks of messages between these two people showing that the feelings were unresolved on both sides, not just his, and he flatly denied there was any plot to kill her. I want to be fair to that argument, so let me put it the way the defense would two people in a collapsing marriage send each other a lot of messages, and if you pick out only the day desperate ones, you can make anybody look like a predator. That is a real point about how evidence gets curated. Now here's the state's answer to it. And it does not come from a prosecutor.

15:10 It comes from the defendant. Sometime after Rosa Kramer was shot, Timothy Kramer started texting his sister, Dolores Kramer, Call me now, he wrote, call me now, it is important. When he got her, he told her he had killed his wife and that it was self defense. About half an hour after that first text, his sister wrote back and told him he had said he killed her and that she could not be an accessory to this, and that she had a fiance and his daughter to think about. And then Timothy Kramer asked his sister a question. He asked it more than once. He asked her to be honest with him about whether if they put out a warrant for his arrest, she would be willing to hide him at her house. His sister kept telling him he had nothing to worry about if it was really self defense.

15:56 He was not convinced because he had gone and looked up floor to stand your ground law, and he told her that after reading it, he thought he was in serious trouble because by what he had read, he did not have the right to use it. That is the defendant, in his own words, hours after the shooting, telling his own sister that he had just researched the legal defense his lawyers are now running, and concluded it did not apply to him. There is a playbook for this. You shoot somebody, you get out ahead of it. You tell one person your version, so it is on the record somewhere, and you go find out how much trouble you are actually in. What he was not counting on was that every one of those messages would be read out loud in a courtroom two years later by a sheriff's investigator.

16:39 There is one more piece. After Rosa Kramer stopped answering her phone, her sister got messages from Rosa's number saying she had gone to the beach and saying that Timothy had done nothing but give her her things and that she had left. Her sister did not buy it. She called the Escambia County Sheriff's office that day because Rosa had missed taking their to a doctor's appointment, and Rosa did not miss things like that. Deputies found Timothy Kramer at his sister's house in Milton. His sister told them that her brother had admitted shooting his wife in the head and claimed self defense. When deputies got to the house on Hillcrest, there was blood on the tile floor in several places. They found the dog, a medium sized dog, severely injured and malnourished. That dog survived, and then in a back bedroom they found Rosa Kramer on the floor, wedged between the bed and the wall with multiple gunshot wounds.

17:34 She had been shot four times, two shots to the head, one to her side, one to her knee. Now the defense theory, and I am going to explain it rather than endorse it, because that is the job. Andrew Benson told the jury that this was a marriage in pieces and that Rosa Kramer showed up that morning upset and determined to buy the property out from under her estranged husband. When he refused, Benson said she attacked him, punching him kicking him in the knees. Benson said his client went into survival mode, pushed her back, staggered to the gun grabbed it and fired in her direction as she came at him again. He told the jury that Rosa Kramer had a black belt and that Timothy Kramer had bad knees in a bad back. And he said that what happened was a tragedy, but that Rosa left him with no other choice. And on the dog, the defense has an answer to prosecutors say he shot his wife and he shot the dog. Benson told the jury the dog got between the two of them when the gun went off, and that the bullets passed through the dog and into Rosa Kramer. Let me be careful here, because a jury is going to test that theory against physical evidence. I have not seen, and neither have you, but I will tell you what that theory has to carry. It has to explain four separate gunshot wounds, including two to the head of a woman found on the floor of a back bedroom wedged against a wall. It has to explain a shot to the knee, to explain a dog that deputies described as not just shot but malnourished. And it

19:06 has to sit alongside a defendant who within hours was asking his sister to hide him and telling her that he had read the self defense statute and did not think it covered him. That is a lot of way on the phrase survival mode. And here is the part I keep coming back to. Rosa Kramer did everything you are supposed to do. She left, she moved in with her father. She timed her return to the house for a window when he would not be there. She was not being careless, She was being careful, and she was careful in exactly the way people tell women to be careful. The two weeks after a woman leaves are the most dangerous two weeks of her life. Everybody who works in this field knows that Rosa Kramer knew it well enough to plan around it. It was not enough because the person she was planning around knew the plan. She went back for a bowl that belonged to her mother. Rosa Maria Kramer, forty seven years old, Pence Zacola, Florida, say her name after the break. A convicted doctor in Hawaii says the jury that convicted him did not understand its own verdict. And one of his exhibits is a YouTube comment.

20:26 Gerhard Koenig wants a do over. Longtime listeners know this one. We covered the Gerhart Konig trial in Honolulu, from the first day of testimony through the verdict, and if you are new, here is the short version. March twenty fourth, twenty twenty five, Ariel Koenig's birthday, her husband Gerhart Koenig, an anesthesiologist based on Maui, took her to Oahu for the weekend. They went hiking on the Polypuka Trail, a narrow cliff edge route that the state of Hawaii has actually closed because of how dangerous it is. What happened on that trail was the subject of a three week trial. Ariel Koenig testified that her husband attacked her near the edge, tried to stab her with a syringe, and when that failed, beat her in the head with a rock. She said she screamed because she believed he was trying to knock her unconscious so he could drag her over the side.

21:16 Two hikers heard her came running and found them. That interruption is why she is alive. She was hospitalized in critical condition with a fractured skull and a complex scalp laceration. Her husband was gone when police arrived and was arrested hours later. Gerhardt Koenig testified in his own defense and told the jury a completely different story. He said his wife shoved him first, tried to push him off the edge, and hit him with a rock, and that everything he did was self defense. Prosecutors said the real motive was that he had discovered his wife's relationship with a coworker and did not want to pay for a divorce. His own older son testified that his father admitted to trying to kill her. On April eighth of this year, after more than eight eight hours of deliberation, a Honolulu jury came back not guilty of second degree attempted murder, guilty of attempted manslaughter based on extreme mental or emotional disturbance.

22:11 We explained the mechanics of that verdict on this show when it came down in Hawaii. That is not a lesser finding about what he did. It is a finding that he intended to kill her, but that he was under such extreme emotional disturbance at the time that his culpability is reduced. Intent to kill is still an element. The disturbance mitigates it, it does not erase it. Maximum sentence twenty years. Judge Paul Wong set sentencing for August thirteenth. That is next Thursday. It is not happening next Thursday because Gerhard Koenig has filed a motion for a new trial, and the argument is this. His lawyers say, the jury did not actually find intent to kill and therefore convicted him of a crime it did not believe he committed.

22:57 Where does that come from? After the trial, to jus gave interviews about their experience. Koenig's defense went through those interviews and says the jurors repeatedly indicated they did not believe he intended to kill his wife and describe conduct that sounds more like recklessness than a specific intent to kill. In an excerpt attached to the motion, the jury four person said the whole panel agreed Ariel Koenig had suffered a head injury that could have caused serious harm, but that nobody thought he meant to kill her. And the defense has a signed declaration from that four person stating that the jury did not unanimously believe he had an intent to kill his wife. I want to be honest with you. If you take that at face value, that is a serious problem because in Hawaii you cannot be guilty of attempted manslaughter under this theory. Unless you intended to kill. If twelve people convicted him of a crime while not agreeing on its central element, that is not a technicality. That is a broken verdict. But there is a reason courts almost never go down this road, and it is worth understanding because it is going to decide this motion. There is a long standing principle in American law that you generally cannot impeach a verdict with the juror's own accounts of how they deliberated. Once the verdict is announced and the jury is discharged, what happened in that room is essentially sealed. There are narrow exceptions, mostly for outside influence, for information that reached the jury improperly,

24:27 and in some jurisdictions, for racial bias. The reason for that rule is not cruelty. It is that if losing parties could go interview jurors afterward and hunt for confusion, no verdict in this country would ever be final. Jurors are not lawyers. Ask any twelve people to describe a legal standard weeks after the fact, and you will get twelve different descriptions, and about nine of them will be wrong. That is not evidence the verdict was invalid. That is evidence that legal instructions are hard. Prosecutors have filed their opposition, and that is essentially their position. They argue these statements do not amount to the kind of misconduct that lets a court reopen its own verdict. They also note in that filing that when the state sent an investigator to speak with the four person about the declaration she had given the defense, she appeared visibly upset and said she did not want to be interviewed. That detail is the state's characterization in the state's own filing, and I want to flag it as such. But if it holds up, it complicates things because it suggests a juror who signed something for one side and then did not want to talk about it with the other. Now the second argument in Koenig's motion, which is where this gets ridiculous. His lawyers also raised the possibility that a juror was using a phone to communicate during deliberations. Their evidence is a screenshot of a comment posted in the Law and Crime YouTube stream of the trial. The account posting it had a Bart Simpson profile picture and the phrase eat my shorts.

25:57 The comment claims the poster had been texting with one of the Jews error and that they were going for count three. That is it, that is the exhibit. Prosecutor's response was about what you would expect. They said there is no indication beyond an anonymous Internet comment that any contact happened, and that an anonymous YouTube comment is not sufficient to warrant a new trial. They are right. Attaching a Bart Simpson account to a motion in a violent felony case tells me the defense knows the first argument is doing all the work. One more piece of this that is actually straightforward law. Koenig's lawyers argue that if he does get a new trial, it can only be on the manslaughter charge because the first jury acquitted him of second degree attempted murder. That part is correct. Double jeopardy means the state does not get a second run at the greater charge. He was found not guilty of it, and that is permanent. There is a hearing on all of this on August fourteenth. The sentencing that was supposed to happen on the thirteenth is off the calendar until this gets resolved. And look, he is entitled to file this.

26:59 Everybody convicted of if a felony is entitled to challenge the verdict and if the first argument is right, he should get relieved. That is how the system is supposed to work. But I want to name what is also true. Every filing is another month, every hearing is another delay. Ariel Konig was beaten in the head with a rock on her own birthday, survived because two strangers happened to be walking the same trail, spent time in critical condition, and has since divorced him. She testified she sat in that courtroom and told twelve people what her husband did to her. She has been waiting since April for a sentence. She is going to keep waiting. Ariel Konig is alive because two people on a hiking trail heard screaming and ran toward it instead of away from it. That is worth saying out loud on a show that mostly covers what happens when nobody does. That is the show for Friday, August seventh, Monday, we will have the medical examiner's testimony from the Clancy trial and whatever came out of Thursday and Friday in that courtroom. We will stay on the Kramer trial in Escambia County as the state's case continues, and we will be watching the August fourteenth hearing in Honolulu.

28:11 If this episode was worth your time, the single most useful thing you can do is tell somebody about it, share it with one person who follows these cases. Word of mouth is the entire reason this show exists. And if you are listening on Spotify, leave a comment. There is a comment box right there on the episode. Tell me what you think about the Koenig motion or tell me I got something wrong. I read them for Calaroga Shark Media. I'm Garrett Fisher, Cora Dawson, and Callan Clancy, Rosa, Maria Kramer, Ariel Koenig, who is still here? Do better? A few notes on sourcing and legal status before we go.

28:52 Timothy Kramer has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. He is on trial right now, and everything attributed to prosecutors in this app episode is an allegation that a jury has not yet decided. The defense account of the shooting is his lawyer's opening statement, not a finding of fact. Court. TV datelined its reporting on this case from Orlando. The killing happened in Pensacola and the cases being prosecuted in Escambia County, and that is how we described it. Kramer's age was reported as fifty one and fifty two at the time of his twenty twenty four arrest, and is now reported as fifty three. Most reporting places the killing on July twenty third, twenty twenty four. At least one local account reference July twenty fourth, Court TV reports that Rosa Kramer had moved into her father's home. An early account of the arrest report described her as living elsewhere.

29:47 Lindsey Clancy has admitted the killings. The contested issue is criminal responsibility, not identity. Thursday's session, including the medical examiner testimony, was still underway when this episode was record, so we reported what was scheduled and expected, not what was ultimately said. Autopsy photographs in that case are impounded and have not been released publicly. Descriptions of Wednesday's testimony come from courtroom reporting by The Boston Globe, CBS Boston, NBC Boston, and Court TV. In the ConA case, the juror interviews, the four persons, signed declaration, and the YouTube screenshot are exhibits filed by the defense. The description of the four person's reaction to a state investigator comes from the prosecution's opposition filing.

30:34 No court has ruled on any of it. The hearing is set for August fourteenth. This episode discussed suicide, postpart of mental illness, and domestic violence. If you are struggling, the Suicide in Crisis Lifeline is available around the clock by calling or texting nine eight eight. For postpartum and maternal mental health, the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is free and confidential at one eight three three t LC m A m A. If you are in an unsafe relationship, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is one eight hundred seven nine nine seven two three three. This program is produced by Calaroga Shark Media Research Assistance is AI assisted and reviewed before broadcast. Nothing here is legal advice.