A horrific 911 call chilled the courtroom on Wednesday where Lindsay Clancy is being tried for the killings of her three young children in 2023.
On the call, the children’s father, Patrick Clancy, is heard discovering their bodies in the basement of their family’s home in Duxbury, Mass., a suburb of Boston.
Mr. Clancy, arriving home from running errands, finds that his wife had slashed her wrists and throat and jumped from a second-floor window. He tells the 911 operator that he needs to “go check on my kids” and then heads inside to the basement.
That is followed by his repeated screams of horror as he finds Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, face down on the basement floor with exercise bands tied tight around their necks.
“No, no, no, my God,” Mr. Clancy screams in the recording.
“Sir? Hello? Hello?” the 911 operator says in response. “What’s going on in the basement, sir?”
Mr. Clancy’s screams and sobbing continue for more than 30 seconds before he answers: “She killed the kids.”
Judge William Sullivan, of the Massachusetts Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., excused the jury immediately after the 911 recording ended.
As the jurors left the courtroom, Ms. Clancy, 35, who was paralyzed in her suicide attempt that night, could be heard sobbing as she sat in her wheelchair. Her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, placed a hand on her shoulder.
The killings, and resulting murder charges, have revived a long-running debate about how the legal system should treat mentally ill mothers who kill their children. Ms. Clancy has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder. She faces a penalty of life imprisonment without parole if convicted.
Her lawyer argued in an opening statement on Tuesday that she had killed her children because she was suffering from severe postpartum mental illness that caused auditory hallucinations commanding her to do so. A lawsuit filed by her husband against mental health clinicians who treated her for several months before the killings accuses them of failing to monitor her reactions to medications they had prescribed “or attend to her worsening psychiatric condition.”
Prosecutors have argued that Ms. Clancy planned the killings rationally and intentionally. They have sought to portray her as a normal, content suburban mother in the weeks before the killings, caring for her children and escorting them on family outings.
Before prosecutors played the 911 call, Mr. Clancy, 38, testified for a second day on Wednesday, describing the routine errands that briefly took him away from home the night his children were killed. Prosecutors showed video clips of him picking up bags of takeout food at a restaurant and stopping to purchase a pediatric laxative at a pharmacy a few minutes from their home.
He said he called Ms. Clancy as he shopped at the pharmacy around 5:30 p.m., and spoke with her briefly to make sure he was buying the right medicine. Prosecutors asked if she seemed to understand what he was saying, and how she seemed.
“It sounded like she was busy,” Mr. Clancy said.
He said he returned home about 30 minutes later to a silent house, and called out for his family. “I called down to the basement and no one answered,” he said. He went upstairs to the couple’s bedroom, found the door locked, and worked to unlock it.
“I went in and saw blood everywhere and the window open,” Mr. Clancy said, his voice sometimes barely audible.
Racing back downstairs and into the backyard, he testified, he found his wife on the ground beneath the open window, deep cuts on her wrists and neck. In the recording of the 911 call, the sound of a woman crying can be heard in the background as Mr. Clancy urges his wife to stay awake and keep breathing.
“Look at me, look at me,” he tells her. “Lin, look at me, open your eyes.”
“I’m scared,” she seems to say as he urges her to stay awake.
Earlier on Wednesday, Mr. Clancy testified in response to prosecutors’ questions that no one had ever advised him not to leave his wife alone with their children.
He also described a phone call he received from his wife after the killings, while she was hospitalized, and said in response to prosecutors’ questions that Ms. Clancy did not mention their children.
“She didn’t talk about the kids,” he said. “She talked about what she went through.”
He said he did not recall if she told him during the call that she had experienced psychosis on the night their children died.
Mr. Clancy was excused from the courtroom before the recording of the 911 call was played for jurors.
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