The Lindsay Clancy Jury Gets It This Week, a Murder-for-Hire Trial With No Gun and No DNA, and Seven Years to Find Morgan Bauer

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is Daily Crime Injustice from Calaroga Shark Media powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Tuesday, August twenty fifth, twenty twenty six. After twenty two days of testimony, more than forty witnesses, and five weeks of a Plymouth County jury sitting in a room listening to psychiatrists disagree with each other, it is finally almost over. Closing arguments in the Lindsay Clancy trial are expected today and then twelve people go into a room and decide whether a woman who killed her three children is criminally responsible for it. In Jacksonville, the second week of testimony opened in the trial of Mario Fernandez Saldana for the murder for higher killing of Jared Bride again, and the state spent Monday trying to trace a gun.

0:56 It did not entirely go their way, and in a court house in Covington, Georgia, lawyers began picking a jury in a case about a nineteen year old named Morgan Bauer who vanished in twenty sixteen and whose family spent seven years being told there was nothing to find. Let's get into it. On the evening of January twenty fourth, twenty twenty three, Lindsey Clancy strangled her three children with exercise bands in the basement of their house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, while her husband was out picking up takeout and a prescription. Cor was five, Dawson was three, Callen was eight months old. Clancy then cut herself, went out a second story window, survived, and has been paralyzed from the waist down ever since.

1:42 She has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first degree murder. Nobody in that courtroom disputes that she did it. The only question is whether the Commonwealth can prove she was criminally responsible. The defense rested Friday after ten witnesses. Clancy never took the stand, and since Friday afternoon, this trial has belonged entirely to one man, doctor Avra Mac, the prosecution's forensic psychiatrist. Let me tell you what Mac has actually told this jury, because it is more careful than the headline suggests. Mac does not say Lindsey Clancy was fine. He says she was severely mentally ill. What he says is that what she had was a major depressive episode, not psychosis, and that it was a continuation of the depression she had been living in for months.

2:29 He found no evidence of the mania you would need to support a bipolar diagnosis, and critically, he told the jury she retained the ability to understand right from wrong and to control her behavior. Then he gave the prosecution the single most devastating piece of testimony in this entire trial. Clancy told Mack what she said to her children while she was killing them, three words go to God. And Mac's reading of that was this, it is a way of thinking about those children as innocents, as people who had done nothing wrong, while what she was doing was the opposite. It was wrong, and she knew it. I want to be careful here because that is one psychiatrist interpretation of three words spoken by a woman in the worst moment of her life, and a different expert read the same words as a mother in a dream state trying to send her children somewhere safe. But you can see why the Commonwealth built its closing around it. Mack also told the jury Clancy described hearing a loud male voice that night telling her to kill the children so that she could then kill herself. He does not dispute she reported that His position is that hearing it does not settle the legal question, because, in his view, she was still able to conform her conduct to the law.

3:42 And then came Monday, and Monday got ugly. Kevin Reddington spent the morning on cross examination, and he went after the framework rather than the man. His line of attack was that Mack was working from a definition that is too rigid. The American Diagnostic Manual defines postpartum onset as four weeks after birth. Reddington got Mack to acknowledge that the World Health Organization uses a different window, and that a proposed revision to the American manual would extend it to six weeks. Callan Clancy was eight months old, so you can see the shape of the argument. If the official cutoff is four weeks, then by definition, nothing that happened to Lindsay Clancy in January of twenty twenty three was postpartum anything. Reddington's point is that the calendar is a bureaucratic convenience, not a biological fact, and that the experts themselves cannot agree on where to draw the line.

4:39 Here's the part that tells you how tense that courtroom got. According to reporters, in the room, Mack at times simply refused to answer Reddington's questions, and Judge William Sullivan had to intervene more than once to get the witness to respond. Look, I'm going to be honest with you. When a paid expert starts fighting the lawyer instead of answering the question, Jury's notice they may not follow the argument about diagnostic windows. They absolutely notice a man on a witness stand who does not want to say a word out loud. Whether that helps Reddington or just makes everyone tired. By day twenty two, I do not know, but it happened, and it happened in front of the people who decide this.

5:19 Prosecutors are calling three medical experts in rebuttal in total. Mack was the first. The rest were expected to be short. So let me tell you what you're going to hear today. Because both closings are already visible in the record. The Commonwealth is going to argue planning. Their whole case has been that Lindsey Clancy engineered the window. She was the one who asked her husband to go pick up medicine for Cora and food from a restaurant. That is what created the twenty five minutes she was alone in the house with those children. Jennifer Sprague will walk that jury through the phone data, the searches, the Apple watch logging her moving through the house, and she will argue that a woman who can order takeout and time an errand is a woman executing a plan. Matt gave her the closing line, and she will use it. Go to God.

6:08 Reddington is going to argue that the entire frame is wrong. His case has never been that Lindsey Clancy was confused. It is that she was failed methodically by people whose job it was to catch this. She reported anxiety, insomnia, intrusive thoughts about harming her children. She was prescribed and re prescribed, and had her medications changed. Her husband went to a doctor the week before and said his wife was being turned into a zombie. Reddington's version is that a system watched a woman deteriorate in real time, kept adjusting the dosage, and then acted shocked. And both of those things can be true at once, Which is the actual problem this jury has, which brings us to today and to the question this jury actually has to answer, Because almost every version of this story you will gets it slightly wrong. The question is not whether Lindsey Clancy was mentally ill. Everybody agrees she was. Both sides every expert that is not in dispute, and it never was.

7:13 Massachusetts uses a two part standard, and the defense only has to get there on one of them. Either Clancy was unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of what she was doing, or she was unable to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law, unable to know it was wrong, or unable to stop herself one or the other, and the burden is on the commonwealth. Once criminal responsibility is genuinely in play, it is the prosecution that has to prove she was responsible, not the defense that has to prove she was not. If the jury finds her guilty of first degree murder, it is life in prison with no possibility of parole. If they find her not criminally responsible, she goes to a state psychiatric facility and she does not simply walk out. That is a commitment with its own review process that can last the rest of her life, and there is still the open question of what else goes on that verdict. Slip Reddington has been pushing for an involuntary manslaughter option built on involuntary intoxication. The argument that Clancy was over prescribed and that abruptly changing her medications altered her mind in a way she did not choose.

8:23 Prosecutors have fought it. If Sullivan allows it, this jury gets a middle option. If he does not, they are choosing between prison and a hospital with nothing in between. One more thing worth noting, and then I want to close this segment properly. Rusty Yates, who was married to Andrea Yates when she drowned their five children in two thousand and one, has spoken publicly in recent days about Patrick Clancy, and his message was that the blame being aimed at Patrick is baseless. He would know he spent years being told he should have seen it coming. And that is worth sitting with, because there is a version of this conversation happening online right now that has decided Patrick Clancy is the villain here. He went to a doctor of the week before and said his wife was being turned into a zombie.

9:11 He came home from a. Twenty five minute errand to find his entire family destroyed. Whatever the failures were in that house, and there were failures, that man is not the person who has to answer for them. Coret Clancy was five and in kindergarten. Dawson Clancy was three. Calan Clancy was eight months old. Their mother killed them in their own basement, and today twelve strangers start deciding what the law says about that. However, this comes back. They were real children who liked real things and had names. Someone has to say them when we come back. A man who has known Mario Fernandez Saldona for years took the stand in Jacksonville and told the jury he did not give him a gun. We covered this case back in July when it was still a fight over subpoenas and phone records. It is a trial now and it is one of the most consequential murder cases in the country this year. On the night of February sixteenth, twenty twenty two, Jared Bride again dropped his nine year old twins at their mother's house in Jacksonville Beach after a dinner out and started driving home to Saint John's County. His two year old daughter, Bexley, was in the back seat. On a dark one way street called Sanctuary Boulevard, there was a tire lying in the road. Bride again stopped and got out to move it.

10:41 He was shot multiple times and killed. One round passed through the vehicle near where his daughter was strapped into her car seat. She was not hit. She was two years old, and she was there for all of it. Jared bride Again was thirty three. He was a design manager at Microsoft, a father of four, and, by every account of the investigation, a man with no enemies. Police looked for a robbery motive, and there was not one. His wallet and his watch were untouched. Prosecutors say the tire was placed there deliberately to make him stop, and they say the reason was a custody fight. Bridgin and Shanna Gardner divorced in twenty fifteen after five years of marriage.

11:23 They shared twins and reached a joint custody agreement, and then spent years fighting in family court about custody, about child support, about which schools the kids would attend. Prosecutors have put that grinding conflict at the center of the case. Assistant State Attorney Christina Steifler told the jury that Gardner wanted full custody and that the only people who stood to gain anything from Jared Bridegan's death were his ex wife and her husband. Steifler also told the jury about money. Gardner came from a wealthy family, and her parents had set up a trust with Fernandez Saldana as the trustee. The state's account is that this was a marriage of convenience from the start, that Fernandez Saldona married her to help her with her bridegin problem, and that after the killing, he moved fifty thousand dollars out of that trust into his own account and sold off what they had acquired together.

12:13 Gardner left Florida, he moved to Orlando. The defense pushed straight back on that. James Hill told jurors his client had access to hundreds of thousands of dollars and an army background, and that if he were a man running from a murder he had orchestrated, he would have left the country. Instead, he took a road trip to Pennsylvania and came back. Mario Fernande Saldana is thirty eight, an army veteran and the estranged husband of Bridegan's ex wife, Shanna Gardner. He is charged with first degree murder and solicitation to commit a capital felony. He has pleaded not guilty, and he is presumed innocent. Two other people are charged. Shanna Gardner has pleaded not guilty to first degree murder and related charges. Jury selection in her trial begins August thirty first, one week from two. And Henry Tennen, the man the state says pulled the trigger, is also charged and has a trial set for March of twenty twenty seven. Now, the ten In piece is delicate, and I want to handle it the same way we did in July. Tenan originally pleaded guilty to second degree murder in twenty twenty three under a deal that required him to testify against the other two. Then he backed out. He told the court his statements under that agreement were false. A judge let him withdraw the plea, and he is now going to trial. So the man the state calls the shooter is a person who admitted it and then took it back.

13:36 That does not make him innocent and it does not make him guilty. What it means is that his word is not doing any work in this trial, and prosecutors are not asking it to. So what is the state's case without him? It is three checks. Prosecutors say Fernandez Saldana paid ten and roughly ten thousand dollars after the murder. The checks were written for landscaping, roof repair, and an investment. A business idea. One of them, written weeks after the killing, carries a note in the memo line kickstarter and then good luck around those checks. The state has built a circumstantial structure. Tenon was a tenant in a property Fernandez Saldana owned.

14:17 Investigators found a tire at that same rental property that matched the tire in the road, same manufacture date, same plant, same identifying numbers. Tennant's DNA was on the tire at the scene. Phone records showed dozens of contacts between the two men, and GPS data shows Tenen driving Bridegins exact route twice in the weeks before, which prosecutors have called a practice run. An attorney not involved in the case put it plainly last week, and I think he is right. This entire trial hinges on what the jury decides those checks were for, because the defense has a real answer and it is not a stupid one. James Hill told the jury that Henry Tennan was a workhorse, that there is video of him tilling a front yard, cutting down trees, unloading tile from his truck, at that property. His argument is that Fernanda Saldana hired that man to do work, not murder, tree work, roofwork, landscaping, tile, and Hill has been hammering something the state cannot fix. There is no forensic evidence putting his client anywhere near this. Fernando Saldana's DNA was not on a single item submitted for testing.

15:27 The lead detective acknowledged there is no surveillance, no fingerprints, no hair placing him in Tennant's truck or at Jacksonville Beach that night. Hill also pointed out that a man supposedly paid to commit a homicide apparently could not afford to fix his own truck afterward. That is the case. Money that the state says is a murder payment and the defense says is a paycheck, which brings us to Monday and the gun. There has never been a murder weapon recovered in this case, so the state has been trying to establish where a gun came from, and that effort ran into a wall Monday, when a longtime friend of Fernande Saldana took the stand and denied giving him the firearm investigators believe was used to kill Jared Bride. Again, I want to be precise about what that does and does not mean. It does not mean the state's theory is wrong. Witnesses deny things for all kinds of reasons, and the jury gets to weigh that. But the state needed that link and did not get it on the record Monday. And in a case with no murder weapon, no defendant, DNA, and no eyewitness, every failed link matters more than it would in an ordinary trial. There's a playbook for this, and prosecutors are running it. When you cannot put the defendant at the scene, you put his money there instead. Sometimes that works. Jury's convict on paper trails all the time. But it asked twelve people to take a longer walk than a fingerprint does, and the defense only has to make them stumble once. Jared Bride Again was thirty three years old. He was a devout

16:59 member of his church. He had four children, and the youngest one watched him die on a dark street over what prosecutors say was a fight about custody. His widow, Kirsten, has sat in that courtroom through all of it, including the moment they played the video of an evidence technician walking up to the scene in the dark. Four years and six months. That is how long it took to get a first trial. Someone has to say his name when we come back. Morganbauer was nineteen years old when she disappeared in twenty sixteen, and it took seven years to find her. This is a new case for us, so let me start at the beginning. Morgan Bauer was nineteen years old. She was from Aberdeen, South Dakota, and she had recently moved to the Atlanta air In February of twenty.

18:01 Sixteen, she disappeared. The last confirmed sightings put her at a gas station on Highway two seventy eight in Covington, Georgia, and a social media post from Yellow River Park in Porterdale, and then nothing. The two people last seen with her, her friend Caitlin Goebel, and Goebel's then boyfriend Jonathan Warren, told investigators and told Morgan's mother directly, that they had dropped her off at a gas station and that was the last they saw her. That story held for seven years, seven years of a mother in South Dakota not knowing seven years of a missing person's case that friends were openly afraid would turn into a homicide investigation. Seven years of Morgenbauer being officially a girl who walked away from a gas station. In July of twenty twenty three, the FBI helped Porterdale police search a property on Broad Street near the Yellow River. They found remains they were Morgan's.

18:59 A month later, Warren was arrested in Los Angeles and Goebel was arrested in Peoria, Illinois. In October of twenty twenty three, a Newton County grand jury indicted them both. The indictment alleges Morgan was strangled and that both of them put their hands on her neck. It further alleges that afterward they cut up and burned her remains to hide what had happened. In January of twenty twenty four, Jonathan Warren pleaded guilty at his arraignment, not to a lesser charge to all of it, including malice, murder, and an additional count involving the abuse of Morgan's body after she was dead. Prosecutors say he asked for the death penalty. At sentencing, he asked for life with the possibility of parole.

19:42 The judge gave him life without so One of the two people in that house is convicted sentenced and finished. The other is on trial starting now. Caitlin Goebel is thirty. She is charged with malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, tampering with evidence, and concealing the death of another. She has not been convicted of anything, and she has presumed innocent. Jury selection began Monday in Newton County before Judge Joe Bishop. And here is the strange thing about how this case broke open, because it did not break the way you would expect. Prosecutors say, Caitlin Goebel is the one who went to investigators in twenty twenty three and told them she had information about a murder. They say she did not initially implicate herself and instead pointed at Warren as the person solely responsible. Investigators concluded otherwise. The state's position is that she was just as culpable as he was, and in interviews with police, prosecutors say Goebel eventually acknowledged being present when Morgan was killed and helping cut up her body afterward, putting the remains in a suitcase and setting it on fire in a backyard. Her defense has said she was under Warren's control, but her attorney told the court on Friday that she will not be pursuing a battered person syndrome defense and will not be pursuing an insanity defense. So whatever the argument is going to be at this trial, it is not going to be that she was legally incapable of choosing.

21:13 The fight that got this. Case into the headlines is about what the jury is allowed to hear. The state moved to introduce Goebel's social media activity from around the time of the killing, material about satanism, about serial killers, about death. Prosecutors say it establishes motive. The defense argued it is inflammatory, that its prejudicial effect swamps whatever it proves, and that a jury shown that material will convict on vibes rather than evidence. The judge sided with the state that evidence is coming in and the post prosecutors have highlighted made the Knight Morgan died reads this is Bob. Bob kills people. I have thoughts about this, and I am going to give them to you straight. Occult evidence in a murder trial makes me nervous, and it should make you nervous. Two, this country has a genuinely embarrassing track record here. We ran a moral panic in the eighties and nineties that put people in prison over dungeons and dragons and heavy metal albums, and some of those convictions have since fallen apart, being a weird twenty year old who posts about the Satanic Bible is not evidence of murder. It is evidence of being a weird twenty year old. But that is not quite what this is, and I want to be fair about the distinction. A post made the same night a person died. Referring to a named object as something that kills people is not a general statement about someone's taste.

22:36 It is a specific thing said at a specific moment. Whether it means what the state says it means is exactly what a jury is for. The judge also went the other way on some of it. He granted the defense's request to strip out references to Goebel's drug use from her police interviews, and both sides agreed to redact material about Warren's past. So this is not a judge letting the state throw everything at the wall. The other thing to watch is that Jonathan Warren is expected to testify. The man already serving life without parole is going to take the stand against the woman he was living with and you should hear that with both eyes open. A convicted murderer with nothing left to lose is not automatically a liar, but he is not automatically anything else either.

23:23 Morgan Bauer was nineteen years old. She had moved across the country to a place where she did not know many people. When she disappeared. The two people who saw her last told everyone, including her mother, that she had been dropped off at a gas station and was fine. She was in the ground the whole time. Nobody was paying attention to her. A nineteen year old woman new in town vanishes, and it takes seven years and a federal search team to find out what happened in a house on Broad Street. Her mother spent those seven years pushing her friend spent those seven years afraid of exactly what turned out to be true. Morgan Bauer. Someone has to say her name, and for seven years, almost nobody did.

24:06 That's the show for Tuesday, August twenty fifth. If this was useful, send it to one person. Word of mouth is genuinely the whole engine on a show like this. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment. I want to know what you think. That Plymouth jury does with Lindsay Clancy because the lawyers I trust are split down the middle, and so am I. We'll be back tomorrow with Las Vegas, where the Tupac Shakur murder trial has now had two more days of testimony, and with whatever Plymouth County decides. I'm Garrett Fisher do better. A few notes on sourcing and timing. This episode was recorded before court opened Tuesday morning. Closing arguments in the Lindsay Clancy trial were expected Tuesday, but Judge Sullivan had indicated the schedule could shift depending on how long the remaining rebuttal witnesses take, and he had offered the attorney's additional time to prepare closings if they needed it. He also had not ruled, as of recording on whether involuntary manslaughter will be included as a verdict option. Nothing in this episode should be taken as a report on what actually happened in that courtroom today. Our account of Monday's cross examination, including the description of the witness declining to answer questions and the judge intervening, comes from reporters present in the courtroom, rather than from a transcript we have reviewed on the Jacksonville trial. Mario Fernandez Saldana has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent, as our Shanna Gardner and Henry Tennan, who face separate trials.

25:36 Henry Tennan entered. A guilty plea in twenty twenty three and later withdrew it, telling the court his statements under that agreement were false. Because that plea was withdrawn, we do not treat anything he said under it as established fact, and we have not used it as evidence against anyone. Reporting on the specific charges filed against Fernandez Saldana has varied between outlets, with some listing first degree murder and solicitation and others listing a different combination, including conspiracy and second degree murder. We have used the charges as described in the trial coverage on the Georgia case. Caitlin Goebel has been indicted and has not been convicted of anything. She is presumed innocent, and the account of what she told investigators comes from prosecutors, not from a finding by any jury. Jonathan Warren's guilty plea and life sentence are a matter of record.

26:28 We describe the. Additional offense he pleaded guilty to in general terms rather than naming. It out of respect for morgen Bauer's family. Warren is expected to testify for the state, and listeners should weigh testimony from a convicted code defendant accordingly. This episode discusses child deaths, suicide, and postpart of mental illness. If you are struggling, you can call her Tax nine to eight eight in the United States to reach the suicide and crisis lifeline for postpart of mental health. Specifically, the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is available by caller tax at one eight three three TLC M A m A. 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.