Lawyer for Mass. Mom Who Killed Her 3 Children Before Suicide Attempt Reveals Her Defense

Mar. 15, 2025

Lindsay Clancy.Photo: Lindsay Marie Clancy Facebook

TheMassachusetts mom accused of killing her three young childrenbefore 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.

She has pleaded not guilty.

Cora, Dawson and Callan Clancy.Lindsay Marie Clancy/ Facebook

Lindsay Marie Clancy/ Facebook

She is being held at Tewksbury State Hospital, Reddington confirmed during a live court hearing on Wed., Dec. 18.

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 Timesreports.

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.”

source: people.com