Lindsay Clancy's Own Journal Read by Both Sides, Timothy Busfield's Bid to Toss His Indictment, a Psychologist on Chris Watts

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher and this is Daily Crime Injustice from Calaroga Shark Media. It's Wednesday, August fifth, twenty twenty six. Before we start, a warning about today's show. We are going to talk about the deaths of small children, about strangulation, and about suicide. We are also going to talk about a criminal case involving allegations of sexual abuse of children. Nothing in this episode is graphic, and I'm not going to describe anything that does not need describing. But if that is not something you can carry with you this morning, skip this one and come back tomorrow. We will be here. Here's what we've got. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, the Lindsay Clancy trial spent its fifth day of testimony doing something I have rarely seen a trial do. The prosecutor read from Lindsay Clancy's private journal to prove she was in her right mind.

1:00 Then the defense attorney picked up the same journal, turned to a different page, and read from it to prove she was not same handwriting, same woman. Two completely opposite arguments, and in between, a parade of doctors describing what a hospital does when three small children arrive not breathing. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, an Emmy winning actor you have watched on television for forty years is three weeks out from a hearing that could decide whether the child sex abuse case against him survives at all. Timothy Busfield says the grand jury that indicted him never got to hear his side. Prosecutors say the case is exactly what it looks like. A judge takes that up on August twenty fifth, and later in the show, we are going back to a case this feed has covered before. Chris Watts, Frederick, Colorado, August twenty eighteen. A forensic psychologist has just given a lengthy interview about what he believes was going on inside that man's head. And it is worth talking about as long as we are honest about what psychology can and cannot do, because there is a difference between explaining a man and excusing him. Let's get into it. Let's start in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, where the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy has now finished its fifth day of testimony. If you're new to this one, here is the shape of it.

2:25 On January twenty fourth, twenty twenty three, in a house on Summer Street in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Lindsey Clancy strangled her three children with exercise bands. Cora was five, Dawson was three, Callen was eight months old. She then cut herself and went out a second story window. She survived. She is paralyzed. She uses a wheelchair. She has been held at Tewkesbury State Hospital since twenty twenty three. Her lawyers do not dispute that she killed her children, not one word of it. Kevin Reddington, her defense attorney, has been telling any one who will listen for three and a half years that his client was a devoted mother who was overtaken by postpartum psychosis and by an ever changing pile of psychiatric prescriptions that made her worse instead of better. His argument is not that she didn't do it. His argument is that she was not criminally responsible when she did. The prosecution's position is simpler and colder. Assistant District Attorney Shenan Buckingham put it plainly in her opening. This trial is not a public debate about women's mental health and how the medical system treats women. Her position is that Lindsey Clancy knew what she was doing, that she engineered the window of time to do it, and that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts holds people responsible for what they do. So that is the fight, not what happened why. And Monday was the day the jury started getting handed the raw

3:55 material for both sides at once. State Police Trooper Corey took the stand and read from Lindsey Clancy's own journals the ones investigators pulled out of that house. And these are not vague entries. These are the private notes of a labor and delivery nurse, a woman who spent her working life helping other women through the exact thing that was destroying her, writing down that she was drowning, that she had, in her words, crazy brain fog, that she couldn't make a plan, that she was living moment to moment, waiting for the next nap. In a November entry, she wrote that she was so desperate for a break from taking care of everyone that her own mind was hunting for something physically wrong with her. She wrote about feeling guilty for not breastfeeding. She wrote about being frightened of going back to work. She wrote about feeling disconnected from her own children and from her own husband. Now Here is what I want you to sit with the prosecution.

4:52 Put those journals in front of the jury the prosecution because from where the Commonwealth is standing, a woman who is doc documenting her symptoms in a notebook, tracking her prescriptions and her dosages by hand. Reading a book about postpartum anxiety is a woman who is oriented, who knows something is wrong, who is capable of monitoring herself. That is not They will argue a person untethered from reality. And then Kevin Reddington stood up and read from the same journal, because from where the defense is standing, those pages are a woman screaming for help in the only place she felt safe writing it down. One line he read out loud, I want help. I want to be well. Look, I'm going to be honest with you. I have watched a lot of trials and I have almost never seen a single piece of evidence do that much work for both sides. At the same time, that journal is going to be in the deliberation room, and twelve people are going to read it, and half of them are going to see a diary, and half of them are going to see a symptom log, and that argument is the entire case. The rest of Monday was medicine, and it was hard. Doctor Michael Snyder, who treated Cora at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Plymouth, told jurors that the five year old arrived with no heartbeat. He described bruising to her neck PATIKII, which is the pinpoint bleeding you see in the eyes, after strangulation, blood from her nose.

6:18 They worked on her for thirty minutes, then they stopped because there was nothing left to do. Callin the baby lasted longer. He was transferred to Boston Children's Hospital. Doctor Andrew Caprero told the jury the infant arrived cold, limp, not making any movement on his own. Pupils fixed and dilated ligature marks around his neck. His brain had swollen past what the skull could hold. They got his heart beating on its own. That was all they got. Callan Clancy was declared brain dead and removed from life support on January twenty seventh, three days after his mother put her hands on him. I want to say Dawson's name here too, because the medical testimony Monday entered on his sister and his brother and the middle child. In a case like this can get lost in the record. Dawson Clancy was three years old. He liked the same thing's three year olds, like he is just as dead and he counts just as much. Then came the testimony about the defendant herself, and this is where the trial started to turn toward the question the jury actually has to answer.

7:22 Doctor Kelly McDonough, an emergency physician at South Shore Hospital, testified that Clancy came in as a Level one trauma patient after a fall from height, breathing on her own at first, then intubated to protect her airway. Scans of her head showed nothing remarkable. She was moved to Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, where an ICU nurse testified that Clancy went into cardiac arrest, that the team did CPR and opened a massive transfusion protocol, and that it saved her life. By January twenty eighth, she was awake. She still had a breathing tube, so she communicated by writing on a whiteboard. She wrote that she was fused. She wrote that she couldn't feel her legs. The nurse described her as cooperative with a flat effect, and on February second weeks in, she wrote a question about her attorney.

8:14 That nurse testified it was the first time Clancy referenced anything about the case at all. Doctor Segil Shaw, a psychiatrist at Brigham and Women's, testified that by January twenty ninth, Clancy was asking to change her health care proxy. She wanted it moved off her husband and onto her parents. Shaw testified that they did not get into why, and then the witness the prosecution really wanted. Doctor jillim Biswass, a forensic psychiatrist at Brigham and Women's who sat with Lindsay Clancy on January twenty sixth, twenty twenty three, less than forty eight hours after the killings. Biz Was testified that Clancy was awake and oriented intubated so she gestured for paper and a pen. Asked about her mood, she wrote one word horrified, She wrote, Do I have an attorney?

9:05 She asked if her body was broken, She asked if her legs were straight. She asked where her family was and whether she could have visitors. And here is the piece the Commonwealth is going to hammer. This was testified that she documented that Clancy was not showing the sign she was screening for, not disorganized, not responding to voices, not paranoid, not delusional. This was testified she found Clancy capable of making her own decision about surgery, and that Clancy's answers were relevant to the questions asked. That's the prosecution spear. Two days after, a forensic psychiatrist looked for psychosis and wrote down that she didn't find it. Reddington's cross was the obvious one, and it landed where you'd expect.

9:50 He got Biswis to confirm she saw Lindsay Clancy exactly once, for something like twenty to thirty minutes. He got her to acknowledge she has treated many patients who hear voices, including patients experiencing command hallucinations, the kind that tell you to do something, and he got her to say that the duration of a psychotic episode absolutely depends on the patient, which is the whole defense. In one sentence, psychosis is not a permanent condition. It has a beginning, and it has an end. And whether it had already ended by the afternoon of January twenty sixth in a hospital bed in a woman who had just been through a massive blood transfusion and who could only answer with a pen is not something One twenty minute visit settles. There is one more date in this case that I cannot stop thinking about, and it hasn't come into evidence in front of this jury yet. According to Clancy's own civil lawsuit, her psychiatrist saw her on January twenty third, twenty twenty three, the day before, for seventeen minutes. Seventeen minutes for a woman on a rotating shelf of psychiatric medications who had checked herself into a psychiatric hospital on New Year's Eve, who had been discharged from a postpartum program after a single day. Now, the providers who have responded to those lawsuits deny the allegations and dispute that she ever clearly told them she intended to harm the children. That is their right, and I am telling you their position. But if that seventeen minute number holds up in evidence, somebody's going to have a very bad day in a civil courtroom,

11:22 and it will not be a jury of twelve deciding it. There's a playbook for this, by the way, not for the killing, for the aftermath. A system that hands out prescriptions faster than it hands out appointments and then acts stunned when the person on the other end of those prescriptions comes apart where the trial stands right now. Court was dark on Tuesday, which has been the pattern in this trial. Testimony is set to resume Wednesday morning in front of Judge William Sullivan, and the witnesses coming up are expected to move deeper into the mental health evidence at the center of the case. That means dueling experts, and that means this is where the verdict actually gets to defy. The math is stark. If the jury convicts on murder, Lindsey Clancy goes to prison for life with no parole. If the jury finds her not criminally responsible, she does not walk out the door. She is committed to a state mental health facility. Those are the two roads.

12:17 There is no version of this where she goes home, and whatever that jury decides, the arithmetic that matters most doesn't change. 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. Their mother killed them. Whether the law calls that murder or calls it illness, three children who should be seven, five and three years old right now are not. Someone has to say their names coming up. An Emmy winning actor four felony counts, and a grand jury that asked to hear from his witnesses and was told it would have to come back another wei. That hearing is three weeks out. Stay with me, welcome back. I'm Garrett Fisher. This is daily crime and justice, and I want to handle this next one carefully because it involves children, and it involves a man who has not been convicted of anything. Timothy Busfield, you know the face, even if the name takes a second Emmy winner. He was Elliott on thirty something. He was Danny Kohnkanon on the West Wing. He was Kevin Costner's brother in law in Field of Dreams. He has been directing and producing television for decades. He is married to Melissa Gilbert, who most of America met as Laura Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie. In February of this year, a grand

13:48 jury in Bernolillo County, New Mexico, indicted Busfield on four counts of criminal sexual contact of a child under thirteen. All four are third degree felonies, each one carries up to six years. He pleaded not guilty on February tenth, and he has denied the allegations at absolutely every opportunity say that part again, because it matters. He has pleaded not guilty, He has not been convicted, and under the law and under the standards of this show, he is presumed innocent unless and until a jury says otherwise. The district attorney who brought the case, Sam Bregman, said that himself in the statement announcing the indictment. The allegations come out of the New Mexico set of a Fox drama called The Cleaning Lady, where Busfield worked as an actor, a director, and an executive producer. The accusers are twin boys who appeared on the show as child actors. They are identified in court records only by initials. We are not naming them, we are not describing them, and we are not going into the specifics of what is alleged beyond the legal language, which is that the indictment accuses Busfield of touching the intimate parts of one of the boys over his clothing on dates in October of twenty twenty two and September of twenty twenty three. That is all you need. That is all anybody needs now. The reason this case is in the news right now is a hearing on the calendar for August twenty fifth, and to understand what that hearing is, you have to understand how this case got here, because the road is genuinely strange.

15:21 It starts in November of twenty twenty four with a phone call to Albuquerque police from a pediatrician who had just examined the twins. The parents had raised concerns about how Busfield interacted with their sons. The doctor also told police his exam found no signs of misconduct and that neither boy had disclosed anything to him directly. Officers interviewed the boys separately that night. Both of them denied being touched inappropriately. No charges. Case closed. In February of twenty twenty five, two anonymous complaints about Busfield came into a sag Aftra hotline. Neither one alleged sexual touching. The Union forwarded them to Warner Brothers, the studio behind the show, which hired an outside attorney to investigate. That investigation could not corroborate either complaint. Witnesses said they'd see nothing. Busfield went back to work. Then, in July of twenty twenty five, a draft civil complaint arrived on behalf of the twins, and the allegations got much broader. Warner Brothers brought the investigator back. That second inquiry ended up incomplete because the boys and their parents were not made available to be interviewed.

16:29 And then September of twenty twenty five, one of the twins, in a therapy session, said for the first time that Busfield had touched him. That was the first documented allegation of sexual contact in the entire file, and it came almost a year after both boys had told police the opposite. Forensic interviews followed on October thirty first. Busfield was arrested in January of this year. The grand jury indicted him in February. So you've got a timeline where the first accounts in the later account don't match. And this is exactly the place where two things are true at once, and I need you to hold both of them because the whole case lives in that space. Thing one delayed disclosure by children is real. It is one of the most thoroughly documented phenomena in the entire field. Kids who have been abused frequently do not say so the first time an adult in a uniform asks them, especially if they like the adult they'd be accusing, especially if they're worried about what happens to everyone if they talk. Prosecutors argue that is precisely what happened here, that the boys later gave consistent accounts to multiple professionals, and that no specialists raised a concern about coaching thing two. A delayed disclosure is also structurally the hardest kind of evidence to test, and the defense has built its entire case on that, plus a claim about how the indictment was obtained, which brings us to August twenty fifth. On June eighteenth, Busfield's lawyers filed a motion to quash the indictment not emotion,

18:02 to declare him innocent, emotion, to throw out the grand jury's action on the grounds that the process was so defective the indictment shouldn't stand at all, and the transcripts, which have since been reported on are the reason this motion is not frivolous. At the grand jury, the prosecutor called exactly one witness before Bussfield himself was brought in. Busfield, who chose to testify in his own defense, told the grand jurors that he had brought witnesses with him to the courthouse people who had been on that set ready to testify that they had never seen anything inappropriate. The grand jurors asked about hearing from them. They were told that to do that, the panel would have to vote unanimously to subpoena the witnesses and then come back another week to hear them. The grand jurors did not do that.

18:48 They returned a true bill on four counts. They also declined to indict on additional child abuse counts prosecutors had sought. The defense motion further argues prosecutors already had material that undercut the accusations before the grand jury ever met, including the Warner Brothers investigation and a polygraph bus Field says he passed. His attorney, Larry Stein, has said flatly that his client is innocent and has accused the State of suppressing exculpatory evidence. Prosecutors have not conceded any of that, and a polygraph, i'll remind you, is not admissible at trial in most American courtrooms for exactly the reasons you'd expect. Here's what I actually think about August twenty fifth, and I want to be precise because this is one of those situations where people are going to read. Whatever result comes out as a verdict, and it is not one.

19:39 If the judge quashes that indictment, it does not mean Timothy Busfield is innocent. It means a grand jury proceeding was run badly and prosecutors can go get a new indictment and do it right. If the judge lets the indictment stand, it does not mean Timothy Busfield is guilty. It means the case proceeds to a trial, currently set for May of twenty twenty seven, expected to run three weeks, where twelve people will actually weigh the evidence. There's one more piece, I'll mention only because leaving it out would be dishonest, and then I'm leaving it alone. The defenses argued the allegations are financially motivated, pointing to the boy's parents. Prosecutors reject that framing, and their answer is the correct one on the law. Whatever an adult's financial history is, it does not determine whether a child was harmed. Separately, older allegations against Busfield from decades ago, involving adults, surfaced after this case became public. Those never resulted in criminal charges.

20:38 They are not part of the new Mexico case. And the judge at January's detention hearing said he gave them little weight. So I am not going to relitigate them here. What I'll say is this, two boys made an accusation. A man says it never happened, and has said so under oath. Somewhere in there is a truth that matters enormously to a small number of people, and it is going to take until at least next spring to get at it. In the meantime, the only responsible thing any of us can do is refuse to decide it for them. Accountability doesn't have a legal department, but it does have a courtroom, and that courtroom hasn't opened yet. When we come back, Chris Watts, a forensic psychologist, read on what was going on inside that man's head and the difference between explaining somebody and excusing them. Welcome back one more time, last story today, and it's won. This feed has been to before. Longtime listeners will remember we opened our Labor Day family Massacre run with Chris Watts. Frederick Colorado, the Facebook Dad, the man who stood on his own front lawn doing television interviews begging for his family to come home while he knew exactly where they were, because as he had put them there. The reason we're back is that on July twenty ninth, The Daily Mail published a long interview with doctor Gary Bruccato as part of a

22:09 new investigation into the case. Brucato is not a tabloid rent a quote. He is a clinical psychologist formerly at Colombia's Medical Center, co creator of the Columbia mass Murdered database, and co author with doctor Michael Stone, of a book called The New Evil, which is used as a textbook in forensic training programs. When he talks about the architecture of violent crime, it is worth listening. Let me renchor the facts first, because they are not in dispute, and they never have been. August thirteenth, twenty eighteen, Chris Watts strangled his wife Shanan in their home. Shanan was thirty four years old and fifteen weeks pregnant with a son the family had already named Nico. He then drove his two daughters, Bella, who was four, and Celeste, who was three, out to an oil site operated by the company he worked for, with their mother's body in the vehicle. He killed both girls there and disposed of their bodies. He buried Shannan in a shallow grave nearby. Then he went home and played the frantic husband on camera for the better part of a week. On November sixth, twenty eighteen, he pleaded guilty. On November nineteenth, Weld County District Judge Marcelo Kopcow sentenced him to three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, plus two more life sentences running concurrently, plus forty eight consecutive years for the unlawful termination of a pregnancy, plus twelve years on each of three counts of tampering with a deceased human body. The judge called it the most inhumane and vicious crime he had presided

23:40 over in thousands of cases. Prosecutors took the death penalty off the table in exchange for the plea, and they did that after asking Shannan's family what they wanted. So that's the record. Now here's Brucado's read, and I want to walk you through it because I think it's useful, and then I want to tell you exactly where I think it stops being useful. His starting point is compartmentalization. Some people, he says, are genuinely capable of running two separate lives at once, and the people inside the first life have no idea the second one exists, which explains something that has bothered everybody about this case since day one. How the friends, the neighbors, the family, all of them were completely fooled. Brushato's answer is that being fooled was not a failure on their part, it was the design.

24:29 Then he gets into the affair. Chris Watts was involved with a coworker, Nicol Kessinger at the time of the murders. Brusato's argument is that the affair was never really about Kessinger, it was about who Watts got to be when he was with her. He describes a man who felt diminished in his marriage and found a relationship where he felt in control, wanted, and in Brucato's word, viral. Watts didn't want a different woman. He wanted a different version of himself, and that, Brucchado says, is where the family stopped being a family and started being an obstacle. He has a term for this elimination murder. It's when somebody is killed not out of rage at that person specifically, but because they are standing between the killer and something he wants romance, money, freedom, a blank page. Bruciado notes that this shows up both in people he'd call emotionally immature, who want to tear the old chapter out of the book and move on, and in people who are psychopathic, where there's less impulsivity and less feeling of any kind. And he makes the point that the frightening version of that second type is that they lack compassion but have plenty of surface charm.

25:44 Everybody thinks they're wonderful right up until they treat human beings like pieces on a board. He also draws a distinction between how Watts killed his wife and how he killed his daughters. And this is the part that is stayed with me. Strangling somebody takes time, It is close. It requires you to be in their face. Brucado reads that as rage directed at a specific person. The girls, he says, were killed in a way that let their father avoid looking at them. His read is that the primary hostility was aimed at Shanan, and the children were, in the coldest possible sense, in the way. And then there's the drive. Brucado says he has often wondered about that car ride a man behind the wheel with his dead wife in the vehicle and his two living daughters in the back working out logistics. What do I tell them what happens when one of them sees that is not a man in the grip of an impulse, that is a man doing arithmetic. All right, here's where I get off the bus. Briuccado himself is careful about this, and I'll give him full credit for it. He says explicitly that he cannot diagnose Chris Watts from a distance.

26:53 He has never examined him. Nobody quoted in that article has What he is offering is a framework, and a framework is not a finding. And I want to be blunt about the reason we keep going back to this case seven and a half years later looking for a psychological key. It's because we want there to be a switch. We want there to be a mechanism, a broken part, a diagnosis, something that explains it in a way that makes it a category of event rather than a decision a man made. If there's a switch, then the rest of us are safe, because our switch is fine. There is no switch. Chris Watts made a series of choices over a period of hours, and every single one of them had an exit ramp he did not take. He could have left, He could have filed for divorce. He could have been the guy who blew up his marriage and lived with what people said about him at the grocery store. Millions of people do exactly that every year, and their children stay alive. That's not a mistake, that's a choice. One more thing before we close this out, on the record and on the level. The Daily Mail's new package on this case includes other material about Watts and about correspondence from prison that we have not independently corroborated, and I'm not putting it on air. What I've given you today is the court record and one credentialed expert's professional read of it. That's it, And Brucado ends his own interview in the right place, which surprised me for a tabloid piece. He says the emphasis has to stay on Shanan, on Bella, on Celeste, that the whole point

28:25 of what Watts did was turning people into objects that could be disposed of, and that we don't have to go along with it. He's right, So let's not. Shanan Watts was thirty four years old, she had a personality that filled a room and a phone full of videos of her kids. Bella Watts was four, Celeste Watts was three. Niko Watts never got a birthday. They were killed by a man who had promised to protect all four of them for a reason so small and so selfish it insults them to even say it out loud. Nobody was paying attention to her when Shenan told her friends she was afraid her marriage was ending. Somebody should have been. Someone has to say your name. That's the show for Wednesday, August fifth. If this episode gave you something worth thinking about, do me a favor and send it to one person, Text it to a friend who follows these cases. Word of mouth is genuinely how this show grows, and it costs you about nine seconds. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment. Here's what I want to know today, and I want a real answer, not a hot take.

29:29 In the Clancy case, the jury has to decide whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible, but there's a second question. The criminal trial can't touch whether a system that gave a woman in crisis a seventeen minute appointment the day before bears any of the weight. Where do you land? Can both things be true at the same time, or does one cancel the other out? I'll read those I always do. I'm Garrett Fisher. This is Daily Crime Injustice from Calaroga Shark Media. Take care of the people around you today, and if you're the one who need that's taken care of, let somebody. We'll talk tomorrow. A few notes before we go. This episode covers active criminal proceedings.

30:10 Timothy Bussfield has pleaded not guilty to all charges and is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law. Lindsay Clancy has pleaded not guilty and her trial is ongoing. Nothing in this episode should be taken as a prediction of any verdict. The Lindsay Clancy trial was in session Monday, August third, and was not sitting on Tuesday, August fourth. Testimony was scheduled to resume Wednesday morning before Judge William Sullivan. Any developments after our recording are not reflected here. Outlets covering Monday's Clancy testimony differ on some details. Which hospital transferred eight month old Callan Clancy to Boston Children's, which physician described, which injuries, and whether doctor Jill M. Biswass is described as a forensic psychiatrist or a forensic psychologist. We have used the most consistently reported version in each case. The seventeen minute psychiatric appointment on January twenty third, twenty twenty three comes from the Clancy's civil lawsuits, not from trial testimony. The providers named in those suits deny the allegations and dispute that Clancy told them she intended to harm her children.

31:19 Reporting on the Timothy Busfield case includes material drawn from police reports, court filings and investigative records reviewed by The Daily Mail that we could not independently verify the charges. The not guilty plead, the grand jury's refusal to indict on additional counts, the June eighteenth motion to quash, the August twenty fifth hearing date, and the May twenty twenty seven trial date are corroborated by wire and court reporting. The reported ages of the two boys vary across filings and news accounts. All charges involve a child under thirteen. Busfield's own age has been reported as both sixty eight and sixty nine during the case. The psychological analysis of Chris Watts in our final segment reflects the professional opinion of doctor Gary Bricado, who has stated he has not examined Watts and cannot diagnose him from a distance. Additional claims appearing in the same publication regarding Watson prison correspondence are single sourced and were not aired. If you are someone you know is struggling, the nine eight to eight Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available around the clock by caller.

32:24 Tax for pregnancy and postpart of mental health, Postpartum Support International can be reached at one eight hundred nine four four four seven seven three, and their helpline offers support in English and Spanish. To report suspected child abuse or to talk to a counselor about a child's safety. The child Help National Child Abuse Hotline is one eight hundred four two two four four five three