Trial of Lindsay Clancy, the mom who killed her 3 children, enters second week of testimony

(AP) — After an opening week of wrenching testimony and a jury trip to the home where Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children, her murder trial resumed Monday with more testimony about the killings in a coastal Massachusetts town in 2023. Monday’s witnesses are expected to include police officers and doctors involved in the immediate response to the killings, building on testimony some of their colleagues gave for the prosecution last week. Witnesses in ensuing days could shed more light on the mental health issues at the heart of the case.

Clancy’s defense says she was a loving mother who was overmastered by postpartum psychosis, a dangerous psychiatric condition that afflicts a small proportion of women after childbirth and affects their hold on reality. Prosecutors contend that she acted intentionally and should be held criminally responsible for the deaths of Callan, Dawson and Cora Clancy, who ranged in age from 8 months to five years. Clancy, 35, wept at the defense table as ex-husband Patrick Clancy and other witnesses testified last week about the killings.

He found the children in the basement of the family’s home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and their mother gravely injured in the yard. She had jumped out a second-floor window and remains paralyzed from the waist down. ___ EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide.

If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. ___ Lindsay Clancy’s lawyers don’t dispute that the former labor and delivery nurse killed the children.

But in the criminal trial and a medical malpractice lawsuit, her attorneys have said that she had bipolar disorder that wasn’t fully diagnosed until after the killings and that her condition seemed to worsen on an ever-shifting lineup of psychiatric prescriptions, some of them problematic for bipolar patients. In the three months before the January 2023 killings, various clinicians prescribed Lindsay Clancy a range of antidepressants, sleep aids, an antipsychotic and other medications while she reported increasingly profound insomnia, anxiety, despair and confusion about what was real, according to her lawsuit. Defendant sought help for postpartum depression When she sought care at a postpartum depression program in late December 2022, providers noted that her symptoms mi…

After an opening week of wrenching testimony, Lindsay Clancy's murder trial resumes Monday with more testimony about the killings in a coastal Massachusetts town in 2023.