After his wife, Lindsay Clancy, strangled their three children to death at their home in a Boston suburb in 2023, Patrick Clancy rose to her defense. He publicly blamed postpartum mental illness for the tragedy and urged empathy for “the real Lindsay,” a mother he described as loving in the “fibers of her soul.”
On Monday, though, as Ms. Clancy’s trial on murder charges began, Mr. Clancy found himself a reluctant witness for the prosecution. Lawyers for the state say that Ms. Clancy killed their children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — intentionally and rationally, and then fabricated claims of psychosis and hallucinations.
“The evidence will show she coldly and calculatingly executed her children,” Shanan Buckingham, an assistant district attorney, told the jury in her opening statement.
With Mr. Clancy as their first witness, prosecutors sought to portray the defendant as a normal, content suburban mother in the weeks before the killings. They showed photos and videos of family outings to a water park, a science museum and a birthday party, and repeatedly asked Mr. Clancy if she had been able to join in activities and interact with the children.
He appeared subdued and minimally cooperative at times, speaking quietly and giving terse answers to prosecutors’ questions. His voice broke with emotion only briefly, when he was asked to describe his children’s personalities and favorite things.
Mr. Clancy, who has since divorced Ms. Clancy, also described the deterioration of her mental state and the couple’s increasingly urgent efforts to find effective mental health care in the weeks before their children’s deaths on Jan. 24, 2023.
At times Mr. Clancy pushed back against the suggestion that his former wife, seen smiling in photos, had been as happy and stable as she looked. “Very depressed,” he answered when asked how she had been feeling on the day one such photo was taken.
Still, he acknowledged, on the day she strangled their children, Ms. Clancy had seemed happy as she built a snowman in the backyard with their children while he worked from home in his basement office.
“She was having one of her best days,” Mr. Clancy said.
Within hours, it would end in horror. Mr. Clancy briefly left the family’s home in Duxbury, Mass., a small town south of Boston, to pick up dinner and returned to find the children in the basement with exercise bands wrapped around their necks, he told investigators.
Ms. Clancy, 35, slashed her own wrists and neck after strangling the children, and jumped from the couple’s second story bedroom window; she suffered traumatic spinal injuries and is paralyzed, according to her lawyer.
The killings, and murder charges, have revived a long-running debate about how the legal system should treat mentally ill mothers who kill their children. Twenty years ago, when Andrea Yates, a Texas mother who drowned her five children, was found not guilty by reason of insanity, the verdict was seen as a breakthrough in public understanding of postpartum mental illness.
Ms. Clancy, who has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, faces a penalty of life imprisonment without parole if convicted. In court in Plymouth, Mass., on Monday, she sat in a wheelchair as she watched her former husband testify, occasionally dabbing her eyes with a tissue.
Kevin Reddington, her defense lawyer, told jurors in an opening statement that his client loved her children, and that she killed them because she was suffering from severe postpartum mental illness that caused auditory hallucinations commanding her to do so.
Mr. Reddington condemned state prosecutors for charging Ms. Clancy with murder. Singling out the Plymouth district attorney, Timothy J. Cruz, he argued that the charge was excessive and cruel.
“Tim Cruz, right there in the front row, brought this charge, and he knew it was going to kill the soul of this young woman,” Mr. Reddington said. “She knows she killed these children — the question is what was going on in this woman’s mind.”
In a lawsuit filed this year against clinicians who treated his former wife, Mr. Clancy argued that they had failed to monitor her reactions to medications they had prescribed “or attend to her worsening psychiatric condition.”
Twice in December 2022, he testified on Monday, Ms. Clancy told him she had harbored thoughts of harming their children and feared that “something might happen to the kids.” When Mr. Clancy asked her if she had a plan to harm them, she said she did not.
After that, Mr. Clancy said, he asked Ms. Clancy’s parents to come stay with them, and he stepped up his efforts to help her find effective mental health care. But he said he had not worried about the children’s safety, because Ms. Clancy “did not show any intention of harming the kids.”
“I asked her if she needed to be kept away from them, and she said no,” he said. “It was very confusing. The next minute, she was making them lunch or playing with them.”
Mr. Clancy’s testimony will continue on Wednesday; he is also expected to testify for the defense.
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