Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman charged with murder for strangling her three young children in 2023, reported hearing a voice commanding her to kill the children and then herself, according to two witnesses who testified at her trial this week.
Ms. Clancy’s lawyer has argued that she killed her children because she had been suffering from severe postpartum mental illness and had auditory hallucinations of a voice ordering her to do so.
The two witnesses, a hospital chaplain and a forensic psychologist, supported that claim as the defense presented its case over the past few days, providing the most detailed picture yet of Ms. Clancy’s state of mind in the weeks after the killings.
Ms. Clancy, 36, does not deny killing the children, — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — at her home in Duxbury, Mass., a Boston suburb, on Jan. 24, 2023. She has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, citing postpartum psychosis. She faces life in prison without parole if convicted.
The psychologist, Dr. Paul Zeizel, who evaluated Ms. Clancy after the killings, testified that in his opinion, she “was unable to conform her behaviors to the rule of law, and she had no appreciation for the wrongfulness of her act.”
The high-profile murder trial began just over three weeks ago, and the prosecution rested on Monday after calling more than 70 witnesses.
Prosecutors argued that Ms. Clancy had planned the killings rationally and plotted to get her husband, Patrick Clancy, out of the house before she choked their children with exercise bands.
They have also suggested that her activities in the weeks before the killings, which included taking her children on family outings and building a snowman with them hours before they died, did not indicate that she was suffering from mental illness.
Both Dr. Zeizel and the chaplain, Sheila Cavanaugh, met Ms. Clancy while she was hospitalized after the killings. She had cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window of her home in what her lawyers have called a suicide attempt, leaving her partially paralyzed.
Ms. Cavanaugh said in her testimony on Thursday that she vividly remembered Ms. Clancy’s first words to her, one week after the killings. “She said to me, as I held her hand to comfort her: ‘I am so glad my children are safe.’”
In multiple visits after that, Ms. Cavanaugh added, Ms. Clancy described a persistent male voice that had goaded her to kill her children and herself, adding that the voice had “told her that if she did not follow the command, neither she nor her children would be safe.”
Dr. Zeizel, who testified on Tuesday and Wednesday and told jurors that he had met with Ms. Clancy repeatedly after the killings, said that he had also heard her describe the voice.
Two weeks after the killings, Dr. Zeizel allowed Ms. Clancy, who was handcuffed to a hospital bed, to use his phone to call her husband.
“She expressed love for him,” Dr. Zeizel testified, “and she had said that she heard a male voice ordering her, telling her, that she didn’t have any choice but she had to kill her children and then kill herself.”
According to her medical record in the months leading up to the killings, Dr. Zeizel said, Ms. Clancy had repeatedly sought treatment for feelings of depression, numbness and brain fog, along with thoughts of suicide and concerns that she would hurt her children.
He added that she had spoken of the children regularly since they died. “She really loves them and misses them and thinks of them every single day, almost every moment of the day.”
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