The Whole Lindsay Clancy Case, Start to Finish: Four Months of Care, Eighty-Four Witnesses, Seven Days of Deadlock, and No Answer at All

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, September 7th, 2026. At 23 minutes past two on Friday afternoon in a courtroom in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial in the case of Lindsay Clancy. Twelve people had spent roughly 38 hours across seven days trying to answer one question, and they could not do it. Jury notes indicate they were split 11 to 1 in favor of acquitting her. The courts are closed today. There is no new filing, no hearing, nothing to report from Plymouth County. So we are going to do something we almost never do on this show. We are going to go all the way back to the beginning and take the whole thing apart. The night itself. The four months of medical care that came before it. The trial. The experts who could not agree. The circus that grew up on the sidewalk. And the collapse. Because after six weeks, this case is going to be argued about for years by people who watched about nine minutes of it. And I would rather you had the whole record. This is the Lindsay Clancy case, start to finish. Start with the children because they are the reason. Cora Clancy was five years old. She was in kindergarten. Dawson Clancy was three.

1:33 Callan Clancy was eight months old and had been alive for less than a year. They lived at 47 Summer Street in Duxbury, Massachusetts, a coastal town about 35 miles south of Boston, with their mother, Lindsay, who was a labor and delivery nurse, and their father, Patrick. On the evening of January 24th, 2023, Lindsay Clancy asked Patrick to go out. There was takeout to pick up and a prescription to collect at the pharmacy for Cora. He was gone roughly 25 minutes. In that window, in the basement of that house, she strangled all three of her children with exercise resistance bands. Then she cut her own wrists and her neck and went out a second-story window. The fall did not kill her. It severed her spine. She has been paralyzed from the waist down ever since, and she will be for the rest of her life. Patrick Clancy came home to a silent house. He found blood in the master bedroom. He found his wife outside in the snow, and she told him she had tried to kill herself and that the children were in the basement.

2:35 His 911 call became the single most devastating piece of evidence in this trial. It runs about seven minutes. It starts with him telling a dispatcher his wife tried to kill herself and telling her to stay awake. and then you hear him go downstairs. When prosecutors played it in court, the judge ordered the cameras off. Reporters inside described jurors crying, Lindsay Clancy crying. The judge called a recess as soon as it ended. She was charged with three counts of first-degree murder. She pleaded not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. She has never once denied doing it. And here's something you should know before we go any further, because it shapes everything. Patrick Clancy has publicly forgiven his ex-wife.

3:21 He has described her as a good mother who became ill. He divorced her, moved to New York, remarried, and he has still stood in public and said she was sick. There is no version of this story where the surviving parent is out for blood, and any coverage that suggests otherwise is inventing a character that does not exist. Now rewind four months, because this is the part of the case most people have never heard, and it is the part that should terrify you. On September 15th of 2022, Lindsay Clancy had her first appointment with a psychiatrist named Dr. Jennifer Tufts. It was a Zoom appointment. She was prescribed the antidepressant Zoloft. Over the next four months, her mental health came apart, and it came apart in front of professionals.

4:05 This was not a woman hiding a decline. Callan had been born in May of 2022. By that autumn, she was in the medical system and staying in it. She saw multiple providers. By the defense's count, she was prescribed more than a dozen different medications in that window, with drugs added, swapped, and stopped. She reported anxiety, insomnia, brain fog, depression, suicidal thinking, and intrusive thoughts about harming her children. She told her mother she was suicidal. She told her husband she was afraid she would hurt the kids. She searched the internet for postpartum depression. She called a suicide hotline. Twice.

4:46 And twice she was turned away because she did not have a plan. On January 1st, three weeks before her children died, she voluntarily admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital and stayed five days. Think about what that means. 23 days before three children were strangled in a basement, their mother checked herself into a psychiatric facility. She was discharged. She went home to those children. And nobody who treated her, according to their own testimony, saw signs of postpartum psychosis, or heard her describe a voice. And in the week before the killings, Patrick Clancy went to a doctor and said his wife was being turned into a zombie. Five days before, she searched for hallucinations and psychosis symptoms. The following day, she searched for where the carotid artery is and how to cut your own throat. She also kept a journal, and prosecutors used it. The Commonwealth's reading of those entries was that they showed a woman who resented the life she had and made a choice. The defense's reading was that they showed a mind coming apart in real time. That jury got both readings and, as it turns out, could not agree on which one was right either. Dr.

5:55 Tufts testified for the prosecution. On direct, she told the jury Clancy never disclosed hearing voices and never described any compulsion to hurt her children, and that, in her judgment, this was postpartum depression, not psychosis. Then Kevin Reddington cross-examined her, and she acknowledged that she had never met Lindsay Clancy in person, not once. Every appointment was remote. She acknowledged that she never ordered blood testing to see what the medications she was prescribing were actually doing in this woman's body. And she acknowledged that she had become board-certified only days before she began treating her. Nobody in that courtroom accused Jennifer Tufts of wanting any of this to happen. That is not the allegation, and it is not mine either.

6:44 The allegation is that a woman deteriorating in real time was being managed over video by a provider who had just gotten certified who never ran a blood panel, and that when that woman picked up a phone and called a crisis line, the system asked her whether she had a plan, decided she did not, and let her go. That is the four months. And whatever you conclude about criminal responsibility, that record is not in dispute. Both sides put it in front of the jury. They just wanted the jury to draw different conclusions from it. And there is one gap in that record that the Commonwealth stood in for five weeks, and it is the strongest thing they had. Lindsay Clancy told a great many people a great many things in those four months. Her husband, her mother, her providers, her journal, crisis lines. But she never told a single treating provider that she was hearing a voice commanding her to kill her children. That detail surfaces afterward.

7:39 It surfaces to a chaplain, to her husband, and to experts hired to evaluate her. The defense answer is that psychosis is genuinely a nightmare to reconstruct after the fact, and that people inside it do not narrate it in real time. That is medically true. It is also true that the gap is there, and every prosecution expert stood in it. Cora, Dawson, and Callan died at the end of that four months. Someone has to say their names, and I am going to keep saying them all the way through today. When we come back, 84 witnesses, six experts, and the ghost of Andrea Yates. Jury selection began July 20th.

8:25 Opening statements were July 27th. The evidence closed on September 2nd. 21 days of testimony, 84 witnesses, 74 for the Commonwealth, and 10 for the defense. Roughly 300 exhibits. The Commonwealth's theory was planning. Assistant District Attorneys Jennifer Sprague and Shannon Buckingham argued that Lindsay Clancy engineered her own window of opportunity. that she was the one who sent her husband out for takeout and a prescription, and that a woman who can order food and time an errand is a woman executing a plan. They built it on data, her phone activity, her searches, her Apple Watch logging her moving through that house.

9:06 The defense theory was that she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis, made worse by a rotating set of prescriptions, and that the Commonwealth could not prove she was capable of stopping herself. Because that is where the burden sits in Massachusetts. Once criminal responsibility is genuinely in play, the state has to prove the defendant was responsible. The defense does not have to prove she was not. Patrick Clancy was the first witness the Commonwealth called. He has since divorced her, moved to New York, and remarried. Taking that stand was the first time he had been in a room with his ex-wife since the day his children died. She watched him. He mostly did not look back. His mother, Susan Clancy, testified for the defense and told the jury her former daughter-in-law had been begging for help. When she left the stand, reporters described her pausing as she passed Lindsay, trying to catch her eye and giving her a small nod.

10:02 The medical examiner's testimony broke Clancy. When the doctor began describing the ligature marks on each child's neck, she said out loud that she could not do this, and the judge stopped the proceedings until she could compose herself. That happened more than once. And then there were the experts. And this is where the case actually lived. For the defense, Dr. Philip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist who has testified in some of the most notorious cases in American history, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Timothy McVeigh, and both criminal trials of Andrea Yates. Resnick told this jury Clancy was frankly psychotic, that she was in a dream state, and that it was almost as though she were a puppet with someone else pulling the strings.

10:49 He described what she did using two clinical terms, altruistic filicide, a parent killing a child out of a distorted belief that it is merciful, and acutely psychotic filicide. For the Commonwealth, three men. Dr. Avram Mack said what she had was a major depressive episode, not psychosis, and that she could tell right from wrong. His most damaging testimony was about three words. Clancy told him that while she was killing her children, she said, go to God. Mack's reading was that this showed she understood those children were innocents and that what she was doing was the opposite. Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, a forensic psychologist, told the jury that on several points her account more closely resembled exaggerated or fabricated hallucinations. He also testified that a voice appearing only during the roughly 18 minutes in which the children were killed and never before or after would be highly unusual. But the same witness also told that jury she is still grieving, still in mourning for those children, and that he would not describe her as self-centered. And Dr. Gregory Sathoff, a senior psychiatrist with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, spent about 11 hours interviewing her. His testimony was the most specific attack on the voice, that she had never reported hearing one before or since, that she described it as constant rather than intermittent, and that it stopped the moment the children were dead. Committing the act, he told the jury, is

12:22 not curative of a hallucination, and he had never seen that. Reddington's answer to all three was the same, and it worked well enough to hang a jury. He went at their credentials. He got Mack to acknowledge this was roughly the third time in his career he had testified on criminal responsibility. He got Heilbrun on his lack of experience actually treating postpartum psychosis. He got Sathoff to concede his published work is mostly about terrorism, not postpartum illness, and that he did not interview Clancy until more than three years after the children died. And he had one more thing. Two of the Commonwealth's experts work for a firm called Park Deets and Associates. Park Deets was the prosecution's expert at Andrea Yates' first trial, the one where she was convicted.

13:09 His testimony turned out to be inaccurate, and that inaccuracy is why that conviction was thrown out. At her second trial, Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity. The Yates case shadowed this entire trial. Resnick testified in both of hers. Two prosecution experts came from Dietz's firm, and a nurse who once worked alongside Lindsay Clancy on a labor and delivery floor testified that years earlier the two of them had discussed Andrea Yates, and that Clancy cried about it and said she could not understand how any mother could hurt her children. That testimony is either the most damning thing in this case or the most heartbreaking, depending entirely on which conclusion you have already reached. Both readings are available, which is a fair description of the entire trial. And I want to note the one thing all six experts agreed on, because it got lost constantly in the coverage. Every single one of them, defense and prosecution, testified that Lindsay Clancy was suffering from a serious mental disease or defect. Nobody argued she was well. The dispute was never whether she was ill. It was whether the specific illness she had took away her ability to know it was wrong or her ability to stop. That is a much narrower door than most people assume, and it is why this case was always going to be hard.

14:28 Two more things you should know about. The first is the charge conference, which almost nobody covered and which mattered enormously. At the very end, over the Commonwealth's objection, Sullivan agreed to give the jury a manslaughter option. So they went in with five choices. First degree murder, second degree murder, manslaughter, not guilty, and not criminally responsible. A middle option is supposed to prevent a hung jury. Remember that. The second is the closings, and they were as good as this work gets. Reddington dropped coins onto the prosecutor's table, one at a time, arguing that was what their case was worth. Then Jennifer Sprague stood up, walked over, and picked up each of those coins as she told the jury that Lindsay Clancy meticulously planned the deaths of her children. Sprague also made the argument that will define how people fight about this case for years. She told the jury Clancy had health insurance covering multiple doctors, access to specialty programs, 18 weeks of maternity leave, and help at home, and that this was not a woman suffering from a lack of care or resources. And for five weeks, that jury had filled notebooks. During closings, they took no notes at all.

15:39 They just watched. For the first time all trial, a row of Massachusetts state police officers sat in that courtroom, many of whom had testified about what they found on Summer Street. When we come back, the circus outside, the arrest, the holdout, and the collapse. While that trial ran, something was happening outside the building that had nothing to do with evidence. Roughly 400 women came to Plymouth and stood outside that courthouse in pink. They carried signs saying she needed help. Some flew in from other states. Flags from several countries were on display. The organizer, a woman with no connection to the family, told reporters it was not a protest and not a rally, that a mental health crisis is already loud and chaotic, and that a rally was not what Clancy needed. So they stood in silence for over an hour. then formed a circle, said the Lord's Prayer, and raised their hands in the shape of hearts.

16:44 On the other end of that same sidewalk, a man showed up with a two-sided sign. One side named Cora, Dawson, and Callan. The other called for repealing the 19th Amendment, which gave American women the right to vote. I did not say his name when it happened, and I am not going to now. On TikTok, entirely baseless theories spread, claiming Patrick Clancy was somehow involved in the deaths of his own children. A man who came home from a 25-minute errand to find his entire family destroyed and who has publicly forgiven the person who did it got accused by strangers of doing it himself. And on Tuesday of last week, Massachusetts State Police arrested a 56-year-old woman in the courthouse parking lot. Prosecutors say she parked in a restricted area and filmed the jurors from her vehicle as they walked to their cars and that she told troopers she was waiting to see Lindsay Clancy. She was charged with intimidation of a juror. She is pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. The consequence was that Judge Sullivan had to spend the following morning swearing in all 12 jurors and all six alternates, one at a time, and asking each of them privately whether they could still decide the case fairly. Then the deadlock. They began deliberating Thursday, August 27th. On Tuesday, they sent a note saying they were at a standstill. Sullivan sent them back without giving the formal deadlock instruction, deliberately holding it in reserve. Wednesday, they told him again. This time, he read them the

18:14 Tui Rodriguez charge, the instruction that dates to 1851, that a number of states have banned as coercive, and that lawyers call the dynamite charge. He told them there is no reason to suppose the case will ever go to 12 people more intelligent, more impartial, or more competent. Then, to his credit, He immediately reminded them the burden stays on the Commonwealth and that doubt means acquittal. Thursday, the foreperson sent a note saying one juror was not following the law on reasonable doubt. Sullivan had Clancy wheeled up to the bench, brought each juror in individually, and re-instructed them. Reddington demanded the juror be removed. Sullivan refused and gave the reason that governs all of this. He does not feel it is proper for him to side with one side or the other in deliberations. A second note said the holdout had acknowledged doubt, but refused to apply it to the verdict. Reddington said the man had lied under oath.

19:13 Sprague said there was no indication anyone was trying to mislead the court. Sullivan declined to question him, and when Reddington asked him to read the instruction forcefully, said, What do you want me to do? Get a brass band? I'm not an actor. And then Friday, around 11, It is with a heavy heart that we report we are unable to come to a unanimous decision and will not be able to. Sullivan said that under the statute and the case law, he had no choice. Reddington asked for one hour to petition a single justice of the Supreme Judicial Court. Sullivan gave it to him and held his own order while 12 jurors sat in a room without being told why. The Supreme Judicial Court refused to intervene.

19:59 At 2.23, Sullivan declared the jury deadlocked, declared a mistrial, and discharged them. And then he thanked them. He told them they had known going in how long this would take and how hard it would be to listen to, and that they braced for it anyway. He said he understood they gave everything they could, and probably more than they thought they could. Now, the fallout. And there is a lot of it. Sullivan has set September 29th to determine next steps, at Reddington's request, because Reddington wants an immediate retrial. Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz has not decided whether to retry. He said the decision comes soon and signaled the fall. He defended the first-degree charges as warranted and appropriate, and he brought it back to the children, saying his office was at that courthouse because Cora, Dawson, and Callen are not. Cruz also revealed something that got very little attention. He said his two prosecutors were doxed and endured weeks of threats and ridicule. Reddington came out swinging.

21:03 He said Cruz knows that he was crushed and does not have a case. Asked what he would do differently at a retrial, he said, why would I? I won the case. He praised his client, said she is not good, and said she grieves the loss of those three children, naming all three of them. And then he said the thing I have to talk about. He said that jury was robbed by one man for whatever his agenda was. He said that man stole seven weeks from the other jurors. And he said he hopes that guy can sleep well at night. I understand why he said it. He is a defense lawyer who believes 11 people were prepared to free his client and one was not. And he is furious.

21:44 That is human and it is his job to advocate. But I'm going to say this plainly because somebody has to. That juror is a private citizen who was ordered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to show up. He sat for six weeks. He deliberated for 38 hours. He was reported to a judge by his own foreperson, called into a courtroom to answer questions in front of the defendant, accused of perjury in open court by an attorney, and told by that same attorney on television that he should have trouble sleeping. No court found he did anything wrong. Judge Sullivan, who watched all of this, said expressly that the note did not indicate a juror refusing to follow the law. The prosecutor said there was no indication he was trying to mislead anyone. And a woman was already arrested for filming those jurors in a parking lot. That's not a mistake.

22:34 That's a choice. And it is a dangerous one. If holding out means the country learns your description and a famous lawyer tells you to lose sleep, then the next holdout folds and the unanimity requirement becomes decorative. The prosecutors got doxxed. The jurors got filmed. Patrick Clancy got accused on TikTok of murdering his own children. Everybody who touched this case got hunted by somebody. So here is where it stands. Lindsay Clancy remains at Tewksbury Hospital, where she has been for more than three years on suicide watch. A mistrial is not an acquittal and not a conviction. It is not a finding of anything. Double Jeopardy does not bar a retrial. Crews can retry it, offer a plea, or walk away. Both Lindsay and Patrick Clancy also have pending civil suits against several of her medical providers, alleging she was overmedicated. One more thing you should understand about Friday.

23:28 Reddington asked Sullivan to survey the jury on whether they could agree on a lesser charge before declaring the mistrial. That was not a courtesy. If they had agreed on manslaughter or second degree, the first degree murder charge would have been off the table forever. Sullivan denied it. So first degree murder is still on the table in any retrial. Cora Clancy was five years old and in kindergarten. Dawson Clancy was three. Callan Clancy was eight months old. They have been dead for three years and seven months. There has been a trial, a deadlock, an appeal to the highest court in the state, and a mistrial. There are 400 women in pink, a man with a sign about the 19th Amendment, a doxing campaign, an arrest, and two lawsuits.

24:13 And there is still no answer about what happened to them. there may never be one. Cora, Dawson, Callen. Someone has to say their names, and on this show, somebody always will. That's the show for Monday, September 7th. We are putting this case down now until there is real news, which will come on or before September 29th when Judge Sullivan reconvenes. Tomorrow, we catch up on everything that kept moving while we were all watching Plymouth. If today was useful, Send it to one person. This is the episode to send to somebody who has an opinion about this case and has only read headlines. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment. Knowing everything now, all of it, what would you have done in that room? I have gone back and forth for six weeks and I still do not know.

25:05 I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better. A few notes on sourcing. This episode is a retrospective assembled from our daily coverage of this trial and from reporting by outlets present in the courtroom. Courtroom exchanges and descriptions of reactions come from reporters in the room rather than from transcripts we have reviewed. Outlets have counted the trial's length, the deliberation hours, and the witness totals differently. We have used the figures most consistently reported and described others as approximate. A mistrial is not a verdict. Lindsay Clancy has not been convicted of anything and has not been acquitted of anything. She pleaded not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility, and the Commonwealth carried the burden of proof throughout. A retrial after a hung jury does not violate double jeopardy protections.

25:55 As of recording, the Plymouth County District Attorney had not announced a decision. On the 11-1 split, jury deliberations are secret. The characterization of the panel as split 11 to 1 in favor of acquittal comes from jury notes described in open court and was placed on the record by defense attorney Kevin Reddington. No juror has spoken publicly and the court has not confirmed a numerical split. Treat it as reported rather than established. The assertion that a juror lied under oath is Kevin Reddington's characterization made in open court and repeated to reporters. Judge Sullivan expressly rejected it, and Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague stated there was no indication the juror was attempting to mislead the court. No finding of misconduct has been made against any juror, and we will not be identifying or describing any juror further. The woman arrested outside the courthouse has been charged and has not been convicted. A not guilty plea was entered on her behalf, and she is presumed innocent. Our description of the medication count in Lindsay Clancy's treatment reflects the defense's characterization of her records. No medical provider has been found liable for anything. The civil suits filed by Lindsay and Patrick Clancy are pending and unproven. 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 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. For postpartum mental health specifically,

27:26 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.