A Massachusetts father returned from a pharmacy run to find his three children strangled with exercise bands and his wife broken on the lawn — the end result of a mental health system that loaded a struggling mother with psychiatric drugs, discharged her, and walked away when the worst happened.
Patrick Clancy testified this week in the murder trial of his ex-wife, Lindsay Clancy, who admits she killed five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan in their Duxbury home in January 2023. The question for the jury is not whether she did it, but whether a woman pumped full of antidepressants and sent home from a psychiatric stay just days earlier could form criminal intent.
The courtroom heard Patrick Clancy's anguished 911 call. He had come back from picking up takeout and stool softener for one of the children. His last image of Dawson: the boy on the couch eating chicken nuggets and green beans. When he called from the pharmacy to ask which medicine to buy, Lindsay was quiet. "I remember hanging up thinking she was probably in the middle of giving baths or something like that," he testified, according to AP News.
He came home to silence. Blood throughout the bedroom. An open window. Lindsay had jumped from the second floor and remains paralyzed from the waist down. She told him the kids were in the basement — but didn't say they were dead. On the 911 call, he finds them. "She killed the kids!" he screams.
The Guardian and AP News both reported that Lindsay Clancy's lawyer says she had bipolar disorder and that antidepressants prescribed after the birth of her third child worsened her condition. On the day of the killings, she heard voices telling her, "This is your last chance. Kill the children so you can kill yourself." She had sought care from experts in post-pregnancy mood disorders, was put on multiple psychiatric medications, and checked into a psychiatric facility earlier that month. Then they sent her home.
Patrick Clancy testified that she had told him she was having thoughts of suicide and of harming the children. She was prescribed medications. She was hospitalized. And after discharge, she appeared "normal." That is the system's answer: prescribe, discharge, declare success. When the drugs don't work — or make things worse — nobody from that hospital comes back to answer for it.
Prosecutors argue the errand request shows premeditation and she bears full criminal responsibility. If convicted, she faces life without parole. If found not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility. Patrick Clancy, who has divorced her, has said publicly he forgives her and views her as ill, not evil.
The pharmaceutical companies that manufactured those antidepressants, the doctors who prescribed them, and the hospital that discharged a woman who had voiced suicidal and homicidal ideation — none of them are on trial. They never are.
The open question is not just what Lindsay Clancy did, but what a system built on prescriptions and quick discharges keeps doing to mothers nobody catches in time.
