Today, Explained - The Lindsay Clancy murder trial

Episode Date: August 6, 2026

A Massachusetts jury is weighing whether a woman should be convicted in the deaths of her three young children or found not guilty based on her defense of postpartum psychosis. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Lindsay Clancy attends her murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court on July 29, 2026. Photo by David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Before she killed her three young children, Lindsay Clancy was, by all accounts, an ordinary person. She met her husband Patrick in her 20s. They got married and moved to the suburbs. Lindsay was a labor and delivery nurse at Mass General. Was she a good mother? Yes, says everyone. Her now ex-husband, who has refused to condemn her. What kind of a mother was she? She was very dedicated. She did everything. She started reading them books at three months.

and she made up songs for them. I remember she used to make green eggs and ham for Cora. A former nanny? I observed a wonderful mom who loved her kids. Do I love Lindsay? Yeah. I did love Lindsay, yes. Lindsay Clancy admits that she killed her kids,

but she says she was experiencing postpartum psychosis. Now her future is in a jury's hands. That's coming up on Today, Explain from Fox. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats, according to consumer advocate.org.

You get paid back up to 90% of vet bills at any vet in the U.S. in Canada, with claims paid back in as a little as two days. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now. for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. This is today explained. I'm Noelle King. You should know before we get into it that today's show includes details of a very gruesome crime. If that is not for you, how about this? I'll see you back here tomorrow. Christina Rex has been covering this story literally from the day the crime occurred. She's a reporter with WBZ.

That's the CBS affiliate in Boston. I asked Christina what she'd learned at the trial about when it became clear that something was wrong with Lindsay Clancy. Yeah, so it really seems like the spiral, as it's been referred to, in court starts in September of 2022. So at this point, the youngest Callan is around four months old, and the family has just had what was described as a very pleasant summer, you know, going to Cape Cod, going to the beach. Lindsay is supposed to be heading back to work in October, but starts to experience that same

anxiety, and then it seems to become something deeper. She reports having feelings of depression, and she actually ends up seeking out a psychiatrist at that point and getting a Zoloft prescription. And she doesn't like the way it's making her feel. She also starts experiencing some insomnia, so much so that she separates and goes and sleeps down in the family basement to try and get better sleep. At this point, she starts seeking out new care. So she switches from a psychiatrist to a perinatal psychiatrist instead, and then a different psychiatrist after that. Over the course of November and December, there are multiple emergency room visits as Lindsay starts reporting some suicidal ideation. And she goes to the ER at one point because she hasn't slept in 48 hours.

She starts reporting to her husband Patrick not only those suicidal ideations, but one time she reported to him a fear that she was going to harm their children and also a fear that the children were like going to become very ill. And she reported having intrusive thoughts. So she ends up trying to do an outpatient program for mothers. But when she gets there, she reports that she's told that she's actually not a good fit for the program. So she leaves after a day. Then it kind of all comes to a head on New Year's Eve into 2023, which is when Patrick takes Lindsay to the emergency room at Mass General. And at this point, she's recommended to do an inpatient stay at McLean Hospital, which is like the primary inpatient mental health facility in Massachusetts. So she goes there for five days.

January 24th, 2023 was the day that these murders happened. Can you walk us through what happened on that day, what you've learned in court? Yeah. So it was a weekday. So her husband Patrick was working in the basement, working from home at the time. Lindsay is not working. She's the primary caretaker for the kids. And he reported that Lindsay was playing with the kids outside in the snow, kind of a normal day.

A day he actually described as one of her best days yet because he thought she really seemed to be getting better at this time. This is two and a half to three weeks after she got out of that inpatient psychiatric facility. At one point during the day, Lindsay texts Patrick. Something along the lines of, do you want to get takeout? I haven't planned anything. And he says, sure, and she picks a restaurant, asks him what he wants. He tells her, she calls the restaurant, orders dinner. At the same time, she tells him she needs him to run out to CVS because she needed some kids' mural acts for their daughter. So shortly after five o'clock that night, he leaves the house to run to CVS and then pick up the takeout.

He calls Lindsay and she doesn't answer. And then she calls him back at some point. While he's in CVS, he has a question about the medication. She answers him normally. He really doesn't suspect anything is wrong. But he says maybe she seemed kind of distracted. She's pretty quiet. It sounded like she was busy.

I remember hanging up thinking she's probably in the middle of giving baths or something like that. So it sounded to you like she was in the middle of something? Yeah. Probably about a half hour after that, he arrives home. And what happens, we know this through his own test. as well as listening to the 911 call. He gets home. He goes in the house.

Nobody's responding to him. The house is really quiet. Is that unusual? Yeah. And when you realized it was really quiet, what did you do? I called out. And who did you call out to? Everyone.

Did anyone answer? No. So he goes upstairs to the master bedroom to look for Lindsay and notices the door is locked, which is unusual. He finds a key and he unlocks the door. I just saw blood everywhere, and the window is open. So without even going to the window, he immediately runs outside to the backyard, and he finds Lindsay on the ground after an apparent suicide attempt. He's on the phone with 911 in that 911 call, which was not allowed to be recorded,

but I heard in court, you can hear him saying, Lindsay, stay with me, look at me, look at me. He asked her at some point, I said, where are the kids? You can't hear her response. You can just kind of hear her moaning in the background, but he said, She said they're in the basement. About four minutes in, first responders get there. And he says to them, can you take care of where I got to go check on my kids?

And you hear his footsteps, enter the house, go down to the basement, and he says, guys, like looking for the kids, and then just horrific screams in agony as he discovers all three of his children in the basement, they had been strangled with exercise bans. Dawson, the middle son, was in the office, separated from his sister. brother who were together in the living room. As you can imagine, all hell breaks loose at this point. All first responders are called in who can come to that house and life-saving efforts are made on all of the children. All of the children and Lindsay and eventually Patrick because of his emotional reaction are brought to hospitals. Cora and Doss and the older children are declared dead

at the hospital pretty early on. And then Callan the baby does stay alive for a few days because they did get his heart started again, but he died a few years. days later because his brain never recovered. All right, so obviously a very devastating day. It has been three and a half years since then. What is Lindsay Clancy's situation today? She severely injured her spine in that fall from the second story window. So she's paralyzed from the waist down, wheelchair bound, and she is technically in custody, but she lives full time at an inpatient psychiatric facility, like a secure facility. And according to her attorney, her understandably mental health is just shattered.

She's living her own hell. She knows what happened with those kids. And she wanted to die. And she's pleading not guilty. Yeah? She's pleading not guilty by, in what Massachusetts is called, mental disease or defect, what's commonly known as not guilty by reason of insanity.

She's not saying I didn't do this. In fact, she is saying I did do this. In an episode of postpartum psychosis, I wasn't in my right mind when it happened. Given that the plea, is, I did it, but there was a reason behind it. What are the arguments being made by the prosecution and the defense here? What's really standing out? So the prosecution is arguing that Lindsay Clancy was in her right state of mind when she killed her kids. One by one, she strangled

a life out of each one of them. She did so with no hesitation, with deliberate premeditation, and extreme atrocity and cruelty. And they are claiming that she became so overwhelmed with motherhood and that she was such a controlling person. in general, that when she felt like she was losing that control and feeling so overwhelmed with having three kids, that she made the decision that she wanted to take her own life. And because no one could take care of her kids the way she wanted them to, she had to take them with her. The defense has claimed that she was a wonderful mother until she'd snapped that day. This is a woman that did not get the medication, did not get the medical and treatment.

that she's so deserved. This is a woman that was suffering from psychosis at the time that she went down to that basement. And Lindsay had previously reported after the incident happened that she had heard a man's voice, kind of commanding her to do so. So the idea of a command hallucination is going to be a big part of the defense's case. This conversation around postpartum mental illness has been charged in this country for quite some time, obviously, because often it involves very gruesome crimes. Does Massachusetts state law involve any kind of consideration for postpartum psychosis or mental illness? No. In fact, Lindsay Clancy's defense attorney has said that that is one of the challenges of the case is that it's kind of a novel concept for him to introduce in this state.

And the only legal threshold that exists here is a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. But that could be any type of mental disease or defect. I know that you've been covering this story right from the beginning. This is obviously a local case that has come to receive an enormous amount of national attention because of the details, I'm sure. What has the conversation been like around the trial and around Lindsay Clancy? Yeah, I think there's two major camps of thought and then some minor ones. So the two major camps of thought are a community of people locally who acknowledge a broken mental health system. and a system that doesn't take postpartum issues seriously enough.

She definitely was, like, way over-medicated on, like, just weird cocktails and medication. I think that she definitely did the due diligence to seek help. The medical system seemed to have failed her. Listen, I'm not saying she's innocent. I'm not defending what she did. I'm just saying I don't think she should go to prison for the rest of her life. I think she was in severe mental health crisis, psychosis. On the other side, there's a group of people who don't believe Lindsay Clancy actually had postpartum psychosis.

Or say, even if she did, that's not a reason to get away with killing your three children. You know, walk her up in prison and throw away the key. I don't understand the links that some people are going to defend this woman. She did this to her three children. So no, I would not have sympathy for her. And if you want to know why, Cora is my why. Dawson is my why. And Callan is my why.

There is also some, I would say, small but very vocal social media chatter, really putting a lot of blame on Patrick Clancy. So when is Patrick Clancy's trial? He didn't know what medication was taken when she'd seen the doctor, what dosage that medication was, because he didn't care. He was supposed to help her. And he didn't. He didn't. It's been pretty tough to watch that as someone from Massachusetts,

as someone who has followed this case from the very beginning. Because Patrick Clancy, even though they're divorced now, but he has supported Lindsay since this happened. Let me ask you lastly to reflect on something based on your years of covering this story. Do you think it is possible that something good comes out of this trial, that maybe there is more attention to, you know, a situation postpartum mental illness that didn't previously exist or that we see empathy or sympathy.

different when mothers are charged with horrible crimes? Like, is there any, is there any light here, do you think? I think it's hard to find the light in a case that's this dark. But at the same time, the possibility of some kind of greater outcome from this case is really the only thing that keeps me going in my work. You know, I cover a lot of very depressing stories. I cover a lot of criminal trials. And in this conversation, in this trial, especially where the conversation is not, did she do it? It's why did she do it? And if it really was because of these severe postpartum mental health issues,

what can be done to prevent this from ever happening to another family ever again? I mean, the public reporters, anybody in that courtroom has seen this family's trauma just like ripped open again for the whole world to see over the course of this trial. And at times it feels so unfair to watch it happening that way. And I can only hope that conversations that are happening about maternal mental health are some tiny positive outcome from this negative experience. Christina Rex. She's with WBZ, which is the CBS affiliate in Boston. Coming up, a reproductive psychiatrist who has treated women with postpartum psychosis is going to tell us what it is.

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My name is Julia Nardi-Riddle. I am a physician, a reproductive psychiatrist here at the University of North Carolina in the Center for Women's Mood Disorders. I both am a practicing clinician in clinical care as well as a clinical researcher and educator. What do you sort of focus on? As a reproductive psychiatrist, I focus on everything related to the female reproductive system and mental illness, mental wellness. So that includes menstrual cycle-related disorders, disorders related to pregnancy and the postpartum, and perimenopause. The Lindsay Clancy case is drawing a lot of attention to something called, postpartum psychosis. This is not a term that I was very familiar with. I definitely had heard of

postpartum depression, but I understand postpartum psychosis is something quite different. What is it exactly? So it is very, very different than historically when we talk about the baby blues, which is sort of a transition of all the changes that happens in the first few weeks and the majority of women experience that for a few days. Then, as you mentioned, postpartum depression, which are current rates put it at about 15%, so kind of one to two and ten women, whereas postpartum psychosis is a very rare disorder. The incidence of postpartum psychosis seems to be right now estimated at about one to two in a thousand, so it's very, very rare. In the vast majority of cases, it is considered an affective disorder. Affective means like a mood disorder, and in the majority of those cases,

50 to 80 percent, it seems to be related to bipolar disorder, but not always. There's a subset that is only in the postpartum. So what it is, postpartum psychosis, it's kind of a misnomer because it's not a classic psychotic illness like schizophrenia. It's more of a delirious mania or a severe depression with psychotic symptoms. It's less common that it's just the psychotic symptoms like delusions without concurrent mood symptoms, either elevated, right? So like a mania, you know, low in a bad depression or in this mixed state, which is actually

very hard to describe. unique to postpartum depression is that it has a pretty rapid onset. So we see it occur very, very early in the postpartum, often in the first few weeks. But the truth of the experience of women is because it's so hard to diagnose and currently often gets missed, it can have this very long tail where women really don't recover because they don't get the appropriate recognition and treatment. For how long do women typically suffer from this? You know, some of the data has shown that if we can identify it early, right? Either it's someone that had it in the past or they are lucky enough to be in care or have someone in their life that says you are not yourself. Let's get used to the hospital and it is identified correctly. Generally with appropriate treatment. So we're talking early on what you want to try to do is get that person sleeping. So we're talking about like a benzodiazepine, maybe an antipsychotic and then lithium. Some data has shown within 40 days. We can really get that person back in, but usually they have to be hospitalized. Now, the research also shows that in at least 50% of cases, it's misdiagnosed, which often means the wrong medicine

is given. So women can suffer with this for months and months, or it can mutate into something else. So it's not that the natural course of it will just go away. We don't know enough about what happens if you hopefully get someone sleeping, but then do they have this long tail of a depression afterwards? We don't have perfect data on that because we don't know who we're not seeing always. Do we know what causes postpartum psychosis, whether it is one thing, many things, environmental, internal? The postpartum is like no other time in a human's life. So many things change. First and foremost, as a society, we don't fully understand how the brain works. And the postpartum involves a few different things, right? So in pregnancy, hormones go to, you know, levels not seen in any other time

in our lives. So estrogen progesterone. So the leading theory right now is as those drop off, which they drop off rapidly as a woman delivers a baby, it seems to be that there's a subset of women who are very susceptible to that change. It's not a deficit, but it seems to be that either due to the neuroprotective agents within estrogen, due to substrates of progesterone, that parts of their brain do not respond to that rapid change the way somebody else that doesn't experience that experiences it. Okay, so that's one. Pregnancy and the postpartum are a very, very inflammatory period. Okay, first you're tolerating something that is partially not yours. So half of that genetic material is foreign to the body. And as pregnancy goes about, it can be a very, very inflammatory state. And if a woman has something like preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, there can only be more of an inflammatory state.

So that's another leading theory is that, is there an inflammatory pipeline here? Is there an inflammatory mediator that's causing this? then if you introduce severe sleep disruptions to someone with this vulnerability, right, that seems to be one of the real, real, real risk factors with someone with these vulnerabilities. And what is the postpartum, the early postpartum, but an exercise in the highest level of sleep disruption, right, that most people will ever experience. The Lindsay Clancy case is drawing so much attention because this is a horrific story, obviously. These are horrific details. Also, this is a very rare thing here, you know.

Do you have a sense of how often postpartum psychosis can lead to infanticide? Yeah, so I want to be very clear on something. The vast majority of women incur no violence. This is rare, treatable, and most women do not act violently. Not unheard of, which is why we consider it a psychiatric emergency, right? Not unheard of particularly suicide. So we worry even more about suicide, but we worry about both because the nature of the illness can involve so much paranoia or these delusional thoughts. It's not as if you ask a woman who's dealing with these and they just tell you, right?

They're suspicious of the whole world. It's not that they just say, oh, finally someone's asked, let me share with you all my thoughts. And I think about our patients, right? Our patients right now are terrified that, well, I become psychotic, will I hurt somebody? So it is treatable. Let me ask you on behalf of listeners, it will be a small number. but you never know who's listening. When do you know that it is time to seek help? What are things that you would identify as this is a red flag? You've got to talk to someone and soon. My opinion on this is

if it comes into your mind, it's time. Huh? You might be okay, but if it comes into your mind that you think you want to talk to somebody, doesn't mean you have to start a medication, doesn't mean you have to do anything more. But get the help, right? One of the best predictive factors for all of kind of maternal mental illness is support. And if extending your support team, to include counseling, to include a physician, to include a postpartum doula, or peripartum dula, if that increases your support network, then the minute you think about it, do it, because it might be your brain's way of telling you, either something is going on or something's coming. The other part of this that I want to mention is, in postpartum psychosis, there's not always an

awareness that you're in it, right? Because, again, the very nature of these illnesses makes it hard to know you're in it. And so it's often the spouses. It's often the family that says, this is not quite right, you know, but you can imagine if it's the first child and there's a spouse who themselves are anxious, they're like, well, I think it's normal. We do so much to normalize how, oh, of course you're exhausted. Of course you're not sleeping. It's so hard. Of course you're not eating. You must be exhausted, right? If your partner or your daughter or your sister or your friend is not quite themselves, right? They're telling you they don't want you to come over, but they're the most social person you know. They're not calling you. They're not responding.

That might be time to say to them, hey, I think we should reach out for help. It takes a village to raise a child, but it takes a village to take care of a mom, too. These are treatable illnesses, right? Postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, postpartum OCD, which we haven't even mentioned, and postpartum psychosis. Does the Lindsay Clancy trial and the conversation around this open the door in your experience to more research, to more efforts to study this, to try to treat this. Does this go anywhere? You know, this is an audio interview, but if you look, I'm crossing my fingers and toes. Like, please, please, please, let it be. Because we need this. We absolutely need more research. It affects the mother. It affects the baby. It affects the family. It affects the community.

It affects the economy. We know these things. It affects the whole system. The other thing, that I'd say is that, you know, we currently don't teach these things, right? We don't teach these things in psychiatry training, in psychology training, in social work training, right? Everyone that's in the mental health system is not receiving training on the unique things within reproductive health, right, within women's mental health. So asking a system, right, in which a mother is often seen once in the postpartum, and the practitioners are not getting training in this, to be able to understand it fully and recognize it every time and not misattribute it to something else, right? That's a big ask.

And so we need more care for mothers. We need more training for the workforce. All of those things are true. That was Dr. Julia Riddle at the University of North Carolina. If you are a new parent and you're going through it or you know someone who's a new parent and going through it, you should know that there is a hotline that you can call 24-7, the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline. It's at 833-TLC Mama. 833-852-62-2-24-7.

We're going to be off tomorrow. We call that a summer Friday here on Today, Explained. We have a nice little rerun for you in the feed about micro-dramas. You may recall they said the movies were dead, so they made micro-dramas. Then Christopher Nolan made a maxi drama. Everyone went back to the theater. Maybe they spoke too soon. Enjoy that one.

Avishai Artsy produced today's show, Amina El-Sadi, edited. Gabriel Donutov, check the facts. Patrick Boyd, mixed and mastered. I'm Noel King. It's today explained. Real Canadian Superstore has everything you need this back-to-school season. Save on lunchbox savers, like Ziggy's sliced deli-meat products for always 375. And get Life Brand Pure Vita shampoo or conditioner for $8 each. At Real Canadian Superstore, when you're ready, we're ready, with a whole world and more.

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