Jury selection starts Monday for Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury mother who strangled her three young children and then jumped out a window — and the only question the system seems interested in is whether she had a good enough reason.
Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan were killed in their own home on January 24, 2023. Their mother admitted to her husband on a recorded 911 call that she tried to kill herself. When Patrick Clancy asked where the kids were, she said, "In the basement." Officers found all three unconscious, strangled with exercise bands. They were pronounced dead at area hospitals. Clancy, now paralyzed from her suicide attempt, faces three counts of first-degree murder at Plymouth County Superior Court.
The facts aren't in dispute. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington concedes Clancy killed her children. His play is an insanity defense rooted in postpartum psychosis — a real condition, but one now being weaponized to dodge accountability for three dead kids. Reddington told the court that "our society fails miserably in treating women with postpartum depression or even postpartum psychosis" and called the killings "a situation that clearly was a product of mental illness."
CNN's coverage leans hard into that framing, opening with Patrick Clancy's errand to grab takeout and medicine, building sympathy before a single fact about the murders. The network calls the insanity plea an "uphill battle" but devotes paragraphs to the defense's narrative about medication mismanagement.
The Boston Herald, to its credit, reported what CNN buried: the sheer volume of psychiatric drugs Clancy was prescribed. Patrick Clancy's wrongful death suit against her medical providers lists Zoloft, trazodone, Prozac, Ambien, Remeron, Klonopin, and Seroquel — a pharmacological cocktail that would stagger anyone. The suit describes the family's life as "idyllic" before Lindsay's mental health struggles began after Patrick returned to work and she was left home alone with three children under five.
Here's the tension the establishment coverage won't name: the pharmaceutical industry may bear real responsibility for what happened, but that doesn't erase Clancy's. Plymouth County Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague put it plainly — strangulation takes time. "She could have changed her mind at any point during that time and removed those bands from their necks and she did not." Clancy herself told authorities a voice told her to kill the children and herself.
Judge William F. Sullivan denied Reddington's motion to let other women who suffered postpartum psychosis testify, noting expert testimony would suffice. Sprague countered that if those witnesses were admitted, the Commonwealth could call mothers with the same diagnosis who didn't murder their children — a point so obvious it shouldn't need stating.
Patrick Clancy sits at the top of the defense witness list, a father supporting the woman who killed his children while suing the doctors who treated her. He's allowed his grief. But three children are dead, and the system is working overtime to ensure nobody in a courtroom has to say who is responsible.
The trial begins. The experts will line up. The drugs will be debated. And Cora, Dawson, and Callan will still be dead.
