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Patrick Clancy’s painstaking account of the night his three children died may have given prosecutors their clearest framework yet for arguing that Lindsay Clancy was lucid, deliberate and criminally responsible at the time of the killings, a legal expert says.
Testifying Wednesday in Plymouth Superior Court, Patrick walked jurors minute by minute through the errands that took him away from the family’s Duxbury, Massachusetts, home on Jan. 24, 2023: a trip to CVS for a child’s stool softener, followed by a stop to pick up dinner.
He said Lindsay called him back while he was inside CVS, understood why he was there and calmly approved a generic substitute. When he returned home, he found an eerily quiet house, blood inside the couple’s locked bedroom and Lindsay injured beneath an open second-story window.
When Patrick found Lindsay Clancy lying on her back beneath their bedroom window, he said she had deep cuts on her wrists and a red line across her neck.
“What happened?” he recalled asking her.
“I tried to kill myself,” she responded, according to Patrick.
He then asked, “Where are the kids?”
LINDSAY CLANCY’S EX-HUSBAND DETAILS PILL USE AS EXPERT SAYS EVIDENCE COULD SHAPE MURDER TRIAL
“They’re in the basement,” Lindsay told him.
Patrick testified that she did not say the children were injured, in danger or needed help.
Attorney Shari Karney said those seemingly mundane details, the text messages, phone call, dinner order and timing of Patrick’s drive, may become critical as prosecutors try to prove Lindsay understood her actions when the children were strangled with exercise bands.
“I call this case murder versus madness,” Karney told Fox News Digital.
Karney said Patrick’s testimony largely helped the prosecution because it portrayed Lindsay as responsive and organized shortly before the killings. The state, she said, is attempting to “squeeze that timeline” as tightly as possible around the precise moment the children were killed.
WATCH: Patrick Clancy recounts finding wife after she said she tried to kill herself
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“That’s fairly lucid,” Karney said of Lindsay’s ability to discuss the CVS purchase and coordinate the takeout order.
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But the defense is expected to argue that competence during routine tasks does not establish criminal responsibility during the killings. Lindsay’s attorneys contend she suffered from severe mental illness, including postpartum psychosis, and was impaired by a shifting regimen of psychiatric medications.
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Patrick testified that Lindsay later told him she heard a man’s voice telling her that if she did not act then, she would “lose her chance.” He also said she had never previously told him she was hearing voices or experiencing psychosis.
Karney said the case will likely turn on whether jurors view the killings as a calculated act or “a catastrophic collapse” caused by severe psychological illness.
WATCH: Lindsay Clancy breaks down as jury hears husband’s frantic 911 call
The emotional stakes were on display when prosecutors played Patrick’s 911 call for the jury. The recording was barred from broadcast or reproduction under a court order, and the pool camera remained trained on Lindsay.
She sobbed and buried her face in her hands as the call played.
Karney said that reaction could help both sides.
For the defense, she said, it humanized Lindsay as a “shattered, broken” mother confronting the consequences of the worst night of her life. For prosecutors, the same reaction captured the horror of the killings.
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Before the recording was played, Judge William Sullivan warned jurors not to allow sympathy, anger, passion or pity to influence their verdict.
“You must not be influenced in any way by the unpleasant nature of some of the evidence,” Sullivan said, reminding jurors that their verdict must not be based on “sympathy, anger, passion or prejudice or pity.”
Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, has pleaded not guilty to three counts each of murder and strangulation.
