Lawyer for Mass. Mom Who Killed Her 3 Children Before Suicide Attempt Reveals Her Defense
Prosecutors allege that Lindsay Clancy committed premeditated murder when she killed her three children in her Duxbury, Mass., home before attempting to die by suicide
The Massachusetts mom accused of killing her three young children before slitting her wrists and jumping out of a second-story window in an attempt to take her own life is planning to seek an insanity defense, court records show.
On Friday, Dec. 13, Lindsay Clancy's defense attorney Kevin Reddington filed a defendant’s notice of lack of criminal responsibility in Plymouth Superior Court, court records show.
The document, obtained by PEOPLE, says “that statements of the defendant as to her mental condition will be relied upon by the defendant's expert witnesses and the defendant does intend to present to the court a defense of lack of criminal responsibility.”
Clancy, who was left paralyzed by injuries she sustained when she jumped out of the window, is charged with three counts of murder and three counts of strangulation or suffocation stemming from the harrowing Jan. 24, 2023, incident at the Duxbury, Mass., home she shared with her husband, Patrick Clancy, and their three children.
She has pleaded not guilty.
Lindsay Marie Clancy/ Facebook
Cora, Dawson and Callan ClancyShe is being held at Tewksbury State Hospital, Reddington confirmed during a live court hearing on Wed., Dec. 18.
Related: Mass. Mom Lindsay Clancy Was 'Mom Everyone Wanted to Be.' Now She's Accused of Killing Her 3 Kids
During that hearing, the judge scheduled the trial to begin on Dec. 1, 2025.
On Friday, Dec. 13, Jennifer Sprague, Assistant District Attorney for the Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office, had filed a motion for a trial date, asking for it to be scheduled in September 2025.
Clancy did not attend the hearing. Her appearance was waived.
Premeditated Murder or Psychotic Break?
Prosecutors claim that Clancy planned the murders of her three children — daughter, Cora, 5, and sons Dawson, 3 and Callan, 8 — when she strangled them with exercise bands in the basement of their Duxbury, Mass., home.
Her attorney argued that she was having a psychotic break when she killed the children and that the tragic situation “clearly was a product of mental illness,” he said in court in Feb. 2023, The New York Times reports.
Clancy was being treated for anxiety and postpartum illness following Callan's birth in May 2022 with up to 13 psychiatric medications that may have caused her to have suicidal and homicidal thoughts and suffer a psychotic break, Reddington said in court.
She was prescribed "some pretty heavy medications," Reddington told PEOPLE in 2023. "It was a toxic soup."
For months, she had told doctors that she was having adverse effects from all the medicines she was being given, Reddington said.
Weeks before her children were killed, Clancy voluntarily committed herself to a psychiatric hospital and was discharged days later, with the hospital not filing any paperwork to have her committed as a danger to herself or others, according to prosecutors.
Prosecutors say Clancy’s husband, Patrick, returned home from buying medicine for the children she had asked him to pick up from a local CVS and found her lying on the ground, in the backyard, paralyzed from the waist down after jumping from the window.
"What did you do? Where are the kids?" the prosecution said Patrick asked her.
"In the basement," she replied, according to prosecutors.
Inside the home, he found his three children in the basement with exercise bands wrapped around their necks, prosecutors said.
When first responders arrived, prosecutors said Patrick told them, “She killed the kids.”
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text "STRENGTH" to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to 988lifeline.org.
Read the original article on People
