'One of Her Best Days': Patrick Clancy Testifies, the Man Who Slept in the House of the Woman He Killed, 'Bring a Gun' at a Walmart

0:03 Callaroga Shark Media. Good morning, and welcome to Daily Crime Injustice. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Wednesday, July twenty ninth, twenty twenty six. Before anything else today a date fifty years ago. Tonight, on a street in the Bronx, an eighteen year old named Donna Lauria was shot and killed while she sat in a parked car with her friend. That was the first attack in what became the Son of Sam case, and it was the beginning of the worst year New York City ever had. We told that entire story last week in a five part series called Summer of Fear, New York nineteen seventy seven. It's sitting in this feed right now. If you missed it, go back and start at part one. Fifty years is a long time and Donna Lauria's name deserves to be said out loud today Now a warning about what's coming. Today's episode deals with with the deaths of three small children, with suicide and self harm, with sexual assault, and with domestic violence. There is no version of this hour that is easy listening.

1:11 If you've got kids in the car, this is the stop. We'll see you tomorrow at four point fifty three. In the afternoon on January twenty fourth, twenty twenty three, in a house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, a woman texted her husband about dinner. She hadn't cooked anything, maybe they should get takeout. They went back and forth about which restaurant. They talked about the baby's nap, They talked about what everybody wanted to eat. It is the single most ordinary conversation two parents can have. Patrick Clancy came up from the basement where he'd been working. He picked up his son, Callan, eight months old, and rocked him on his knees for a minute. He kissed his daughter, Cora on the head.

1:53 Cora was five. He looked over at Dawson, three years old, sitting there working his way through a bowl of chicken nutuggets. Then he got in the car to pick up the food and grab something from the pharmacy. That was the last time Patrick Clancy saw his children alive. On Monday morning, in a courtroom in Plymouth, Patrick Clancy climbed into the witness box and told twelve strangers about that bowl of chicken nuggets, about the kiss on his daughter's head, and about a phone call fourteen seconds long that he took while he was out running errands, a call in which, according to the Commonwealth, his wife said nothing at all that worried him. Fifteen feet away at the defense table, Lindsey Clancy wiped her eyes, then she started to sob.

2:39 He is back on that stand today. Lindsay Clancy is on trial in Plymouth Superior Court on three counts of first degree murder in the deaths of Cora, Dawson and Callen. She admits she killed them. She is pleaded not guilty and argues she is not criminally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis. Judge William Sullivan is presiding. In Mike's County, Ohio spelled Meigs and pronounced megs. Nineteen year old Samuel Holchstetler has pleaded guilty to aggravated murder in the death of twenty eight year old Rosanna Kinsinger and was sentenced Friday to life in prison with parole eligibility after twenty five years. And in Las Vegas, two women are facing felony charges after a fight outside of Walmart on Boulder Highway ended with one man shot in the stomach and another man. One of the women's husbands shot and killed by a police officer in the parking lot.

3:34 Segment one, the Commonwealth versus Lindsay Clancy. We've been on this case for a year and a half, the civil suits, the fight over what the jury would be allowed to see, the pre trial rulings two weeks ago, and now finally the thing itself. On Monday morning, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts stood up and told twelve people what it thinks happened inside that house. Before I go one word further a correction from this show. In our June and July coverage, we described Callan Clancy as seven months old. Court, TV, CNN, NBC, and the Commonwealth's own exhibits all put him at eight months. Eight months is the number that one is on us, and I'd rather fix it out loud than quietly. Assistant District Attorney Shenan Buckingham delivered the opening for the Commonwealth, and the theory she laid out is not complicated. It's brutal, but it isn't complicated. She told the jury that Lindsey Clancy sent her husband out of the house on purpose, take out from a restaurant, then medicine from the pharmacy, enough time and that while he was gone, she took all three children down into the basement and used exercise bands to kill each one of them. Then, Buckingham said, she went to the kitchen, took a knife, and went upstairs to the master bedroom, where she noticed she'd missed a call from Patrick, so she called him back fourteen seconds.

4:57 The prosecutor's framing of that call was the coldest line the morning. Nothing in it worried him. He went on with his task, and she went on with hers. After she hung up, prosecutors say she cut her own arms and her own neck and went out a second story window. Buckingham's portrait of the defendant is a woman who was not sick, but controlling her words, meticulous, controlling, manipulative, a woman who no longer liked the life she had built, who found it harder and harder to manage, and who saw an exit and took it. She called it a selfish choice. Kevin Reddington, for the defense, walked up to that jury box and did something you don't often see.

5:39 He said, he'd normally start by thanking them for their service. In this case, he said, God bless you, you are going to have to listen to some of the most horrific things, and look at some of the most horrific things. Then he told them what the defense case actually is. That she loved those children right up to the moment they died, that she has been living inside a nightmare that has not end and will not end. And he described what she did to herself going out that window in clinical detail because he needs the jury to understand it. Shattered thoracic spine, shattered cervical spine at the first disc every rib broken. She is paralyzed. She will be paralyzed for the rest of her life. She is not he told them, going to get up and walk out of this courtroom now. I want to be careful here because this is the exact place where a case like this gets sloppy. Reddington is not arguing that his client didn't do it. Nobody in that room is arguing that the question in front of this jury is narrower and harder whether Lindsey Clancy, at the moment she did it, was capable of understanding what she was doing and conforming her conduct to the law. That is a legal standard, not a sympathy contest. Explaining the defense theory is not the same as buying it and I want you deciding for yourself as the evidence comes in, because the Commonwealth's first witness gave both sides something. Patrick Clancy took the stand around eleven forty five Monday morning. He and Lindsay are divorced.

7:07 Now he is remarried and moved to New York, and he walked the jury through the arc of a life. They met in twenty thirteen, moved in together in twenty fifteen, had three children. He described how she went from working more than forty hours a week as a labor and delivery nurse to two ships a week after their first child was born, how every time she was supposed to go back, something in her tightened, How it got worse with each birth. By the time callan arrived. He said, you could see it on her, the stress, the anxiety, and then he said a sentence that is going to sit with that jury for the rest of this trial. We didn't have a diagnosis, We didn't know what was wrong. He testified that in September of twenty twenty two, at a wedding in New Hampshire, she told him during a walk that she was going to start taking zolof for the anxiety, and that he learned later she already had the prescription in hand when she told him. He testified that in December of twenty twenty two, she confided that she was having intrusive thoughts, thoughts about harming the children or about something bad happening to them. He was not concerned for their safety at the time, he said, because she showed no intention of acting on any of it.

8:17 She saw doctors, multiple doctors, She was prescribed a list of medications. She was hospitalized. She was discharged from one hospital on January fifth, nineteen days before she killed her children. And here is the line the commonwealth needs and the defense has to live with. Patrick Clancy told the jury. I was hopeful. She seemed much better. He said, she seemed happy. He said she was having one of her best days. And it was exactly that her looking better that made him comfortable leaving those three kids alone with their mother while he went to pick up dinner. Look, I'm going to be honest with you. I don't know what that testimony proves, and neither does anyone else. Yet execution will tell you. It proves she was lucid and calculating.

9:04 The defense will tell you that a woman deep in postpartum psychosis presenting as calm on the outside is not a contradiction. It's the whole terrifying point, and that this is exactly why people miss it. Two completely different readings of the same man's memory of the same afternoon, and that jury is going to hear both of them from expert witnesses for weeks. What I do know is that across twenty twenty two there were a lot of appointments, a lot of prescriptions, an impatient stay, a discharge, and a husband asking out loud, what is wrong with my wife and not getting an answer. There's a playbook for this, and the playbook keeps failing at the same spot. Court adjourned at three o'clock Monday. Tuesday was a day off.

9:46 Patrick Clancy is back in that box today and he is going to be asked to describe what he found when he came home. One more thing, and I think it matters. Last Friday, Judge Sullivan granted Patrick Clancy's motion restricting media access to his nine one one call and to photographs of his dead children. The court ordered that they not be recorded, displayed, reproduced, or distributed. Good that man is about to be cross examined about the worst afternoon of his life on a live stream. The least the system can do is refuse to turn his children into content court Clancy was five years old, Dawson was three, Callen was eight months old. There is a photograph and evidence of the three of them sitting together in a wagon when we come back. An Amish community in southern Ohio, a woman who moved there to be a school teacher, and a nineteen year old who volunteered to be the one to tell her father she was dead. Rosanna Kinsinger was twenty eight years old. She grew up in Missouri, and she moved to Meigs County, Ohio, in the southeastern corner of the state along the River to teach school.

11:08 That was the reason she went to teach children in an Amish community that needed a teacher. Her father, Moses Kinsinger, described her afterward as outgoing and friendly, somebody who liked being around people. On March twelfth of twenty twenty five, she spent the day building a greenhouse with a group of people from her community. One of them was a nineteen year old named Samuel Holchstetler, who lived with a family across the road from her. People who were there that day would later describe watching him show off around Rosanna, trying to flirt with her. The prosecutor in this case, Mags County Prosecutor James Stanley, was blunt about what that was and what it wasn't. His words in open court, the defendant and Rosanna were not courting. They were not dating.

11:52 They were not together, They were not seeing each other. They were not in a casual sexual relationship, he said. Friends had testified that Rosanna didn't particularly like him. The next day, she didn't show up for work. She didn't show up for anything. Friends and neighbors went to check on her. The back door of her trailer had been left open and a goat had wandered inside. They went further in and they found her. The elders of the community stood outside and worked out what to do. They settled on calling nine one one, and they sent a group two miles up the road to tell her parents. Samuel Hawkstettler went with them, and when they got there, according to Stanley, Hoachstettler took it upon himself to be the one who told Rosanna's father that his daughter was dead.

12:38 He killed her, and then he stood in her parents' doorway and told them. It didn't stop there. Stanley told the court that Hawkstettler then volunteered to go out to the Kinsinger farm and help with the chores, helped get the barn ready for the funeral. And he did. He helped. He was a welcome guest in that house, not just during the day. He slept there Friday night, he slept there Saturday night, he slept there Sunday night. Rosanna's parents and her brothers and sisters had no idea that the person sitting with them while they grieved was the person who killed her. Stanley called that, aside from the rape and the murder themselves, perhaps the cruelest thing the defendant did.

13:20 I'm not going to argue with him. Investigators determined Rosanna had been the victim of a violent sexual assault and that she died during it. The state's position is that Hawkstetler pressed the blankets over her face with enough force to dislodge her lower dentures and pressed down on her torso until she could not breathe. That is what asphyxiation means when you say it plainly. Hulkstettler was arrested in May of twenty twenty five and indicted on aggravated murder, two counts of murder, rape, two counts of kidnapping, and strangulation with sexual motivation and sexually violent predator specifications attached. Well, here's where the case got complicated. Hoax Stettler confessed he was brought into the sheriff's office for a DNA collection, and he told them what he did, and a judge threw that confession out, finding that hoax Stettler, who speaks Pennsylvania Dutch, did not actually understand the rights he was waving.

14:18 Court proceedings in this case ran with an interpreter. I know what some of you are thinking, but that ruling is the system working exactly the way it's supposed to. A waiver you don't understand, isn't a waiver If you only want that rule to apply to people you like. It isn't a rule, it's a preference. What it did do was change the math. Stanley told the court on Friday that he still believed the state's case was strong, but he admitted the suppression was part of why he put a plea on the table. His phrase, the state is hedging its bets as far as what could possibly happen at trial, So, four days before jury's selection was set to begin, Samuel Hoakstetler withdrew his not guilty plea and pleaded guilty to aggravated murder. The remaining counts and specifications were dismissed as part of the agreement. His attorney told the court that the smothering was quote a result of his lack of experience, that it was never his intention that his client feels a great amount of remorse.

15:20 I'll let you sit with that one for a second. That's the defense in experience. Huastetler himself addressed the court briefly. He said he was sorry for everything he did. He said he wished he could go back to those days and make a different life. He said he didn't know how to fully express how sorry he was. Judge Linda Warner sentenced him to life in prison. He will be eligible for parole after twenty five years. He gets credit for time served, and if he is ever released, he will register as a Tier three sex offender and as a violent offender twenty five years. He's nineteen. Run that math and tell me how you feel about it Meeks County Sheriff Scott Fitch said afterward that no court outcome can erase what the family lost, and that he hoped the plea gave them a measure of justice. That's the standard thing law enforcement says, and this time I think he meant it, because what else is there to say.

16:15 Rosanna Kinsinger moved across the country to teach kids how to read, and she was killed by a neighbor, who then ate at her parents' table for three days after the break. A fight in a Walmart parking lot at six in the morning, a phone call, and two people on the ground before the store had been open an hour Boulder Highway East, Las Vegas, Tuesday, July twenty first, just after six in the morning. The Walmart had been opened for something like an hour. Out front near a palm tree, a twenty eight year old man named Kwame Swain and I'll spell that for you. Kwam was in a loud argument with his girlfriend. Two women were walking into the store, twenty five year old Riki Award, who is listed in the arrest report under her maiden name Smith, and thirty year old of me A Blue. According to the arrest report, as the two women walked past, Swain said something to them. Words were exchanged. Blue swung at him, He ducked and swung back, and then all three of them were fighting in front of a walmart at six in the morning. Swain's girlfriend tried to break it up and got punched for it. Blue picked up a rock out of a planter, police say, a softball sized rock, and threw it and hit him. Store security waded in and separated everybody. Blue picked up more rocks and followed

17:47 him into the store, and security stopped her and made her drop them. That's where this should have ended. A stupid fight, trespass warnings, maybe a misdemeanor battery charge. Everybody goes home embarrassed. But at some point during that fight, Raki A Ward had stepped away and gotten on her phone. She was calling her husband, thirty five year old Travis Ward. Two witnesses told police they heard what she said to him, bring a gun. Travis Ward drove to the walmart and parked right in front of the entrance doors. His wife met him. According to the report, she told him where to find the man she'd been fighting with. He's inside no shirt. Surveillance video that Las Vegas police showed publicly on Friday, shows Travis Ward walking past shoppers, pulling a handgun out of his waistband and firing. The round went through Quame Swain's abdomen and out his back. Police state Ward tried to fire again and the gun malfunctioned. A twenty nine year old officer named Krystobaumcgana was pulling up outside.

18:45 He heard what he believed was a gun shot from inside the store, and a second later saw a man come out the doors holding a handgun. Mcgona fired. Travis Ward went down in the parking lot and was pronounced dead there. Mcgona has been with the department since twenty twenty four and is on routine paid administrative leave while the shooting is reviewed. That review is not finished, and I'm not going to pretend to know its outcome. Officers went inside and found Kuame Swain with a gunshot wound to the abdomen. He was taken out in critical condition. As of Friday, police said he had been upgraded to stable. Raki Award and Emia Blue were arrested the next day. Both are charged with battery with a deadly weapon, conspiracy to commit battery and disregard for the safety of persons or property resulting in death or substantial bodily harm. Ward faces additional counts. Both have the presumption of innocence and neither has been convicted of anything. At their first appearance last Thursday, a defense attorney made the argument, you'd expect miss Smith and Miss Blue were walking into the walmart, mister Swain said something to them, meaning he started it.

19:52 The prosecutor's answer was shorter. This entire incident stems from a physical fight that was started by this defendant, the co defendant, and then enlisting someone to come and show up with a firearm. The judge noted both women had prior contact with the courts. Ward was ordered held without bail. Blue was ordered held on twenty five thousand dollars bail with electronic monitoring. They were both due back in court yesterday after we recorded this. There's one more piece of this and I'm going to handle it carefully, quame Swain. The man who got shot is himself now facing three counts of domestic battery and a count of attempted coercion charges connected to his girlfriend and to a complaint she made to police. The day before, officers were actually looking for him when they found him bleeding on a Walmart floor.

20:41 He was booked in absentia from his hospital bed. He has not been convicted of any of it, and he is presumed innocent, same as everybody else in this story. And I want to be extremely clear about why I told you that. Not because it explains anything, not because it makes what happened to him a wash. A man being under investigation does not make him a legitimate target for a stranger's husband to execute in the health and beauty aisle. Those two facts sit next to each other, and neither one cancels the other. Because here's what I keep coming back to. Everything up to the phone call was recoverable, every single thing, the insult, the punches, the rock, all of it ugly and dumb and completely survivable. And then somebody made a phone call and asked another human being to bring a gun to a Walmart, and he did, and now he's dead in a parking lot, and another man has a hole through his abdomen, and a Las Vegas police officer has to live with what he did at six in the morning on a Tuesday. That's not a mistake. That's a choice, a whole chain of them.

21:45 One of the shoppers in that store, a man named Christopher Goodlow, told a local station he'd come in for tilanhol before his morning walk and walked into something that looked like a war zone. Thirty two years in that city, he said, and he'd never seen anything like it. Cora Clancy was five years old, Dawson Clancy was three, Callan Clancy was eight months old. Their father is in a witness box in Plymouth this morning, and he is going to be asked to say out loud what he walked into when he came home with the takeout. Whatever that jury decides about criminal responsibility, and it is a genuinely hard question. Those three names are the reason anybody is in that courtroom. Rosanna Kinsinger was twenty eight. She moved from Missouri to Ohio to teach school. Her killer will be eligible for parole in twenty five years, and her father will be an old man when that hearing happens.

22:41 And Travis Ward is dead on a Walmart parking lot in Las Vegas because his wife called him and asked him to bring a gun to a fistfight. If today's episode did something for you, do us a favor and send it to one person. That's it, one person who'd want to hear it. Word of mouth is the entire reason this show exists. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment and tell me this. Patrick Clancy said his wife seemed happy that afternoon. She was having one of her best days. Does that sound to you like a woman who was well or like a woman nobody could see. That's the whole trial, and I want to know where you land before that jury does same question.

23:23 If you're over on YouTube, I'm Garrett Fisher. This has been Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Shark Media. Will be back tomorrow. Do better. A few notes for the record on Lindsay Clancy. Miss Clancy has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first degree murder and is presumed innocent. She does not dispute that she caused her children's deaths. The contested question is criminal responsibility. Everything attributed to prosecutors, to the defense, or to any witness is opening argument or testimony, not proven fact. Trial testimony is ongoing as of this recording and may have moved since we recorded.

24:05 We are correcting our own prior reporting, we previously described Callan Clancy as seven months old. Court TV, CNN, NBC and the Commonwealth's presentation all places him at eight months, and eight months is the figure we now use on Samuel Hochstettler. Mister hoax Stetler pleaded guilty to aggravated murder on July twenty fourth and was sentenced the same day to life with parole eligibility after twenty five years. The remaining counts and specifications were dismissed as part of the plea agreement, which means they were never proven at trial. The account of the assault comes from the prosecutor's statement in open court. Mister Hawkstetler's confession was suppressed before trial after a judge found he did not understand the rights he waived. Nothing in that suppressed statement was used in this segment. On the Las Vegas case, Rakeiah Ward, who appears in the arrest report and in some coverage under her maiden name Rakea Halema Smith, and Emia Blue, have been charged and are presumed innocent. We note a sourcing conflict.

25:15 The LNG crime account we reviewed describes ms Ward as having said something to the couple first. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police arrest report, as reported by the Las Vegas Review Journal, KLAS KTNV and KSNV, states that mister Swain spoke to the two women first. We use the arrest report version and are flagging the conflict rather than resolving it. Kwame Swain has been charged with domestic battery offenses arising from a separate complaint, and is likewise presumed innocent. Those charges are unproven and are not offered as justification for anything that happened to him. The officer involved shooting of Travis Ward remains under departmental review and no findings have been issued. Blue spelling appears as both Emiya and Amina across outlets. We use a MIA which matches jail and court records. Sourcing for Today Court TV, CNN, The Boston Globe, CBS Boston, Boston dot Com, NBC Boston, The Patriot Ledger, The Las Vegas Review Journal, KLAS KTNV, KSNV, News three, Las Vegas, Fox five, Vegas, WSAZ, wowk WCCHS, the Miggs County Sheriff's Office, the Miggs County Prosecutor's Office, and Law and Crime. We name victims because they deserve to be named.

26:35 We don't convict ahead of verdicts, and we don't pretend verdicts are always justice. Today's episode dealt with the deaths of children, with suicide and self harm, with sexual assault, and with domestic violence. If any of that is sitting heavy on you, help exists in the United States and Canada. You can call or text nine eight eight. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is one eight hundred seven nine nine seven two three three, and the National Sexual Assault Hotline is one eight hundred six five six four six seven three. Do Better.