The Lindsay Clancy Jury Enters a Third Day, a Detective Says He Was Told to Stand Down in 2009, Shanna Gardner's Trial Moves to 2027

0:03 Calaroga 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 31st, 2026. Somewhere in Plymouth County this morning, nine women and three men are walking back into a room they have already spent two days in. They have the case of a woman who strangled her three children, and they have three doors to choose from. And as of Friday afternoon, they had not chosen one. In Las Vegas, closing arguments happened this morning in the Tupac Shakur murder trial. The defense rested Thursday after three witnesses and less than two hours. Dwayne Davis decided not to testify. And the last thing that jury heard was a retired homicide detective saying he wanted to arrest Davis for murder 17 years ago.

0:55 and was told to stand down. And in Jacksonville, this was supposed to be the morning Shauna Gardner started picking a jury. She is not. That trial has been pushed to 2027, and the reason involves new charges filed against Mario Fernandez Saldana within days of his conviction. Let's get into it. On the evening of January 24th, 2023, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children with exercise bands in the basement of the house at 47 Summer Street in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callen was eight months old. Clancy then cut herself, went out a second-story window, and has been paralyzed ever since. On Thursday, after 21 days of testimony and 84 witnesses, the case went to the jury.

1:46 Nine women, three men. They deliberated Thursday afternoon. They deliberated Friday. They went home for the weekend without a verdict, and they are back in that room this morning. So let me tell you what they are actually deciding, and then let me tell you what nobody else is going to tell you about how long it is taking. They have three options. Guilty of first-degree murder, which in Massachusetts here means deliberate premeditation and extreme atrocity or cruelty, and which carries life without the possibility of parole. Not criminally responsible, which sends her to a state psychiatric hospital under a commitment reviewed periodically for as long as she is deemed mentally ill. Or manslaughter. The middle-door Judge Sullivan gave the defense at the last minute over the prosecution's objection. Now, about the deliberations. Two full days without a verdict in a case this size is not a signal. It is not a hung jury. It is not a hint. 21 days of testimony, 84 witnesses, five weeks of competing psychiatric opinion, and a jury instruction on criminal responsibility that is genuinely difficult to apply. If they had come back in 90 minutes, I would be telling you something was wrong. Anybody selling you a read on this from the length is guessing, and most of them know it. What I can tell you is this. A manslaughter option changes the arithmetic in a deliberation room. A jury that splits 8 to 4 on first-degree murder now has somewhere to go instead of hanging.

3:12 That makes a compromise verdict more likely and a mistrial less likely, and it means a longer deliberation is not necessarily a jury in trouble. It may be a jury working. And what I can also tell you is what those 12 people watched. Court TV's Lauren Silver put together a retrospective this weekend, and going back through it, a few things stand out that got lost while the trial was moving. The first witness in this entire case was Patrick Clancy, the children's father. He testified about coming home from a takeout run and a stop at CVS, walking into a silent house, finding blood in the master bedroom, and then finding his wife outside in the snow. He testified that she told him she had tried to kill herself and that the children were in the basement. Patrick Clancy has since divorced her and remarried. When he took that stand, it was the first time he had been in a room with his ex-wife since the day his children died.

4:09 She watched him. He mostly did not look back. He left the stand and left the courtroom before prosecutors played his 911 call. The court ordered the cameras off. Reporters inside described a seven-minute recording that begins with him telling a dispatcher his wife tried to kill herself and telling her to stay awake, and then the sound of him going downstairs. Jurors were seen crying. People in the gallery were crying. Lindsay Clancy was crying. Judge Sullivan called a recess the moment it ended. Then there is the medical examiner's testimony, which broke her. When the doctor started describing the ligature marks on each child's neck, Clancy said out loud that she could not do this, and the judge stopped the proceedings until she could compose herself. And then, during one of those recesses, a live microphone in that courtroom picked up someone whispering three words, shut her up.

5:05 Reddington accused the prosecutors of saying it about his clients crying. Both Jennifer Sprague and Shanann Buckingham denied saying anything. Nobody has established who spoke, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But that is the temperature this trial ran at. Here is the piece that I think matters most and that almost nobody covered properly. Two of the prosecution's expert witnesses work for Park Dietz and Associates. If that name means nothing to you, it should. Park Dietz was the prosecution's expert at Andrea Yates' first trial in Texas, the one where she was convicted. His testimony turned out to be inaccurate, and that inaccuracy is what got her conviction thrown out.

5:47 At her second trial, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity. So the defense in this case stood up and pointed out that the Commonwealth was paying a firm founded by the man whose bad testimony broke the most famous postpartum psychosis prosecution in American history. That is not a cheap shot. That is a legitimately loaded fact, and Reddington used it. The Yates shadow ran through this whole trial in other ways too. Dr. Philip Resnick, the defense expert, testified in both Yates trials. And a nurse who worked alongside Lindsay Clancy on a labor and delivery floor testified that years ago, the two of them had discussed the Yates case and that Clancy cried about it and said she could not understand why any mother would hurt her children. Think about that testimony for a second.

6:38 Years before in a hospital, a young nurse cries about Andrea Yates and cannot comprehend it. That is either the most damning evidence that she knew exactly what she was doing or the most heartbreaking thing in this entire trial. It depends entirely on which door those 12 people walk through, and both readings are available. There is one more witness worth revisiting because she is the reason the defense has an argument at all about the system. Dr. Jennifer Tufts was Lindsay Clancy's psychiatrist. She was a prosecution witness, and on direct she told the jury what the state needed, that Clancy never disclosed hearing voices, never described any compulsion to hurt her children, and that in her judgment this was postpartum depression, not psychosis. Then Reddington cross-examined her, and she acknowledged that she had never met Lindsay Clancy in person, not once. Every appointment was remote. She acknowledged she never ordered blood testing to see what the medications she was prescribing were actually doing. And she acknowledged that she had become board certified only days before she began treating this patient.

7:44 That is the defense case in miniature. Nobody is saying Dr. Tufts wanted this to happen. What Reddington is saying is that a rapidly deteriorating woman was being managed over video by someone who had just gotten certified and never ran a blood panel. And that when this woman called a suicide hotline, she was turned away because she did not have a plan. Whether that is a failure of a system or a failure that excuses a crime is exactly what those 12 people are arguing about right now. Then Thursday, the closings. Reddington told the jury this prosecution is a mess. And at one point, he slammed coins down on a table in front of them, making his argument about what the state's case was actually worth. A reporter inside the room said one juror appeared to be holding back tears while he spoke. Then Jennifer Sprague stood up for the Commonwealth, and she walked over and she picked up each of those coins, one at a time, as she told the jury that Lindsay Clancy meticulously planned the deaths of her children.

8:42 That is as good as closing argument gets in an American courtroom. Whatever you think of this case, that is two lawyers at the top of their craft. And when they were finished, something happened in that room that I keep thinking about. The jurors took no notes. For five weeks, they had filled notebooks. During closings, nothing. They just watched. And for the first time all trial, a row of Massachusetts state police officers sat in that courtroom. Many of them had testified about what they found when they were called to Summer Street. They came back for the end. There was one more moment during this trial that I want to give you because it is small, and it says something about what these killings did to two families.

9:24 Susan Clancy, Patrick's mother, testified as the first defense witness. She told the jury her daughter-in-law had been begging for help, and when she finished and walked past Lindsay Clancy on her way out, a reporter in the room described her looking at her for several seconds, trying to catch her eye, and then giving a small nod. Patrick's family did not come back after their testimony. Lindsay's parents, who moved from Connecticut to Massachusetts after the killings, have been there every single day. Reporters described the two families keeping to opposite sides of the courthouse hallway. Three children joined those families. together. Now there is a corridor between them. Cora Clancy was five years old and in kindergarten. Dawson Clancy was three.

10:08 Callan Clancy was eight months old. 400 women stood outside that courthouse in pink for their mother. That is not a criticism. It is a fact about where the attention went. Nobody was standing outside for them. Someone has to say their names. When we come back, a detective says he was ready to arrest Dwayne Davis for murder in 2009, and somebody told him to stop. Tupac Shakur was shot at an intersection off the Las Vegas Strip on September 7th, 1996, riding in a BMW driven by Marion Knight. He died six days later. He was 25. Dwayne Davis, known as Kefi D, is 63, and he is the only person ever charged. He has pleaded not guilty. On Wednesday, prosecutors rested after roughly 25 witnesses. On Thursday, the defense put on its entire case in under two hours. three witnesses, all three of them former Las Vegas police. And Dwayne Davis did not testify. Michael Sanf told reporters afterward that his client made that decision Thursday, sitting in the courtroom, and that he leaves it to his clients because it is their constitutional right. I want to note the irony without being cute about it. This is a man whose entire legal jeopardy exists because he could not stop talking.

11:42 Four recorded police interviews, a memoir, a docuseries, a YouTube channel where he held up his own book and told people to spend $ 20 on it. And in the one room where talking would have been under oath and subject to cross-examination, he went quiet. That is almost certainly correct lawyering. It is also the whole case in one gesture. Now, the defense case. It was small, but two pieces of it matter. The first two witnesses were former Metro officers Stan Hitt and Charlie Mangrum, who were working in overtime security detail outside Knight's Las Vegas home the night of the shooting. Knight was expected to host a party after the Tyson fight. Those officers testified about the vehicles they saw coming and going through that gated community, and they told the jury they saw a cream or white-colored Cadillac there.

12:29 That is Samft planting a seed. If a light Cadillac was outside Knight's house that night, then a light Cadillac is not automatically Dwayne Davis' Cadillac. It is a small point. In a case with no murder weapon, no fingerprints, and no eyewitness who can identify a face, small points are what the defense has. The third witness is the one you need to hear about. Dan Long is a retired Las Vegas homicide detective who picked up the Shakur case in 2004. And his testimony was extraordinary for a defense witness, because most of it was about how badly this investigation went. Long told the jury the case file had to be locked down inside the police department because of unauthorized interest from other officers. He said the way he filed reports had to be changed so his work stayed secure. He testified that thousands of guns were tested over the years, and not one of them matched the cartridges recovered at that intersection. Los Angeles authorities dug a gun out of a backyard thinking it might be the weapon. It was not.

13:34 He described going to Compton and purely by chance seeing DeAndre Smith, one of the men the state says was in that Cadillac, walking across a field. Long had no jurisdiction there and no cause to stop him. Smith told him where to go, in language I will not repeat. Long waved goodbye. Smith was dead before the end of that year. And then Long got to 2009, and this is the part that stops you. Long was in the room when Dwayne Davis made admissions to police, along with a detective from Los Angeles and Davis's attorney at the time, Wayne Higgins, who has since died. Long recorded the conversation himself. He said Davis got nervous during parts of it and at one point asked him to leave the room and that he came back and kept going. Long testified that Davis was giving information to try to work off drug charges he was facing. But Long was not interested in drug charges. He wanted a murder case. And that is the piece that has always made this case strange. Every time Dwayne Davis talked to law enforcement, he was talking because talking bought him something. In 2008, it was Los Angeles detectives working the Biggie Wallace murder and an offer of immunity. In 2009, it was drug exposure in Las Vegas. Later, it was book money and television money. The state's argument is that a man does not repeatedly confess to a murder he did not commit. Samf's argument is that a man absolutely does. If every single time he opens his mouth, somebody hands him something for it. So he left California,

15:06 intending to go back to Las Vegas, get an arrest warrant, and arrest Dwayne Davis for the murder of Tupac Shakur. He turned over his recording and a transcript to the Clark County District Attorney's Office. And he testified that they told him to stand down. 2009. Dwayne Davis was arrested in 2023. 14 more years. Now understand why the defense called him. Sonft's argument is that if there had been a real case in 2009, somebody would have brought it. And that what changed between then and 2023 was not evidence. It was a book, a docuseries, and a man's mouth. His position is that the state built a prosecution out of publicity. But listen to what else that testimony does, because I do not think Sanft can fully control it.

15:52 A homicide detective sat in a room, listened to a man describe his role in a murder, believed him enough to want a warrant, and was told no. That is not a story about a weak case. That is a story about a case that sat in a drawer while the family of a 25-year-old waited another 14 years. Both of those things are in that testimony. The jury gets to decide which one they are hearing. Closing arguments are this morning in Clark County. Then that case goes to a jury too. And here's what those 12 people are actually being asked. Under Nevada law, you can be convicted of murder without ever touching a weapon if you intentionally participated in the killing or helped it happen. Prosecutors have never claimed Dwayne Davis fired a shot. They have built everything on the argument that he obtained the gun, he was in that car, he ranked high enough that nothing happened without his say-so, and he has told the world about it repeatedly for money. Samf's answer is one sentence long, and he has been saying it since the first day.

16:52 You cannot convict a man of murder using only his own bragging. That is the question. Not whether Dwayne Davis said it. Whether saying it is enough. Tupac Shakur was 25 years old. He was shot at a red light while sitting next to a man who survived. 30 years, one trial, one defendant, and a detective who says he was ready 17 years ago. Someone has to say his name. When we come back, Shauna Gardner was supposed to start picking a jury this morning. Here is why she is not.

17:42 Last week, a Duval County jury convicted Mario Fernandez Saldana of first-degree murder and solicitation to commit a capital felony in the ambush killing of Jared Bridegan. He faces an automatic life sentence and returns to court October 5th for a sentencing date. We told you Friday that Shanna Gardner would begin jury selection today in the same county three days later. That was the schedule. 500 potential jurors had been called for her. It is not happening. On Thursday, Judge London Kite granted an unopposed defense motion for a continuance. Prosecutors agreed to it. Gardner's trial has been pushed to jury selection on May 3rd, 2027, with three weeks of trial to begin May 10th. That is a delay of more than eight months, and the reason is genuinely startling.

18:29 Shortly after Mario Fernandez Saldana was convicted of murder last week, prosecutors filed two new felony charges against him in a separate matter involving alleged sexual offenses. He has not been convicted of those charges. He is presumed innocent of them. I am not going to characterize the allegations beyond that. And there is no reason for anyone listening to this to know more about them than that they exist and that they are pending. What matters for this segment is what Gardner's lawyers are doing with them. Their filing argues that these new charges point to a motive Fernandez Saldana had to kill Jared Bridegan that had nothing to do with Shanna Gardner at all. And because the charges were filed so recently, they say they need time to investigate that theory before they can defend her. So here is the shape of what is coming. Shanna Gardner has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, conspiracy, solicitation, and child abuse.

19:25 And she is presumed innocent. And her defense is now apparently going to be that the man she married did this for his own reasons. That is a legally coherent strategy, and it is also a brutal one. The state's entire theory of this murder is that these two people did it together, that she wanted her ex-husband gone over a custody fight, and that Fernandez Saldana was the one who arranged it. If Gardner's team can convince a jury he had a private motive she knew nothing about, the conspiracy falls apart and she walks. It is also worth remembering how much the state has already put on the record about her. Prosecutors told the Fernandez-Saldana jury that Gardner's family money sat in a trust, that she could only become trustee once every legal entanglement with Jared Breidigan was finished, and that the custody fight had been grinding on since their divorce in 2015. A Jacksonville Beach detective testified he found text messages going back to 2015 in which Gardner and a friend discussed a murder-for-hire plot. None of that was tested by her lawyers, because it was not her trial.

20:32 In May of 2027, it will be. And there is a second thing in that filing that tells you how different her trial is going to look. At Fernanda Saldana's trial, his defense conceded that Henry Tennant was the man captured on video walking away from that scene. They did not fight it. Gardner's lawyers are going the other way. They have asked the judge to bar the state from calling a truck in surveillance footage Tennant's truck or from identifying anybody in that footage as Henry Tennant at all. Fernandez Saldana's team said, fine, that is Tenon. He just was not hired by our guy. Gardner's team is saying prove every inch of it. There is also a motion pending from the state to indict Gardner alongside Henry Tenon and try them together. Kite has not ruled. There is a hearing October 27th. And that piece is worth watching because it would change everything. Henry Tenon is the man the state says pulled the trigger. He pleaded guilty in 2023 under a deal that required him to testify against the other two, then withdrew that plea and told the court his statements under it had been false. Prosecutors went to trial against Fernandez Saldana without him and won anyway, which is the single most important thing that happened in that courtroom last week. They proved they do not need their cooperating witness, and now they are asking to put Gardner and Tennant in the same room, in front of the same jury, and let those two defense teams point at each other. Look, I'm going to be honest with you

22:02 about the delay itself because I know how it sounds. Eight months feels like a lot when a family has already waited four and a half years. Kirsten Breitigan stood outside that courthouse last week and said justice had been served in part. In part. And now the second part just moved to the middle of next year. But this one is not gamesmanship. Prosecutors did not oppose it. When new felony charges land against a co-defendant days before you pick a jury, and the other side says those charges might be relevant to motive, a judge who forces that trial forward is building an appellate issue with his own hands. Kite moved it because moving it was the only defensible thing to do. Accountability doesn't have a legal department, but it does have a calendar. And sometimes the calendar is the price of getting it right the first time. Jared Bridegan was 33 years old. He was a father of four.

22:56 He stopped his car to move a tire out of the road on a dark street because that is what a decent person does. And he was shot for it while his two-year-old daughter sat in the back seat. One conviction down, two trials to go, and the last one is now nine months out. Someone has to say his name, and we are going to keep saying it until this is finished. That's the show for Monday, August 31st. If this was useful, send it to one person. Word of mouth is the whole engine on a show like this. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment. Two juries are working right now, one in Plymouth and one about to start in Las Vegas. Tell me which one you think comes back first and what you think they say.

23:42 We will be here for both. I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better. A few notes on sourcing and timing. This episode was recorded before court opened Monday morning. The Lindsay Clancy jury began deliberating Thursday and had not returned a verdict when court recessed Friday. If a verdict came over the weekend or before this episode reached you, it is not reflected here. Closing arguments in the Dwayne Davis trial were scheduled for Monday morning in Las Vegas. Some details in our Clancy retrospective, including the composition of the jury and the account of moments the courtroom cameras were ordered off, come from reporters present in the room rather than from transcripts we have reviewed.

24:25 We have not repeated diary entries or medication counts that appear in single tabloid accounts we could not independently verify. On the hot microphone incident, the words picked up have been reported, but no one has established who said them. Kevin Reddington attributed them to the prosecution. Both prosecutors denied saying anything. That remains unresolved, and we are not treating his accusation as fact. On Las Vegas, outlets differ on the prosecution's final witness count, with both 24 and 25 reported, and on whether the evidence spanned eight or nine days of testimony. Allegations Dwayne Davis has made in recorded interviews about living people never charged in this case are claims made by a man whose own attorney has told the jury he cannot be corroborated. On the Jacksonville case, Mario Fernandez Saldana has been convicted of first-degree murder and solicitation to commit a capital felony and await sentencing. The additional charges filed against him after that conviction are pending and unproven and and he is presumed innocent of them. We have deliberately not described those allegations in any detail. Shanna Gardner has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent, and the argument that Fernandez Saldana had an independent motive is a claim made in a defense filing, not a finding by any court. Henry Tennant has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. This episode discusses child deaths, suicide, and postpartum mental illness. If you are struggling, you can call or text 988 in the United States to reach the

25:57 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. For postpartum mental health specifically, the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is available by call or text at 1-833-TLC-MAMA. Postpartum psychosis is rare, it is a medical emergency, and it is treatable when it is caught. The overwhelming majority of people who experience postpartum mental illness never harm anyone.