A GoFundMe set up for the parents of Massachusetts mother-turned-killer Lindsay Clancy has raised nearly $1 million as organizers say the couple has spent their life savings to help her on trial.
Roughly $936,000 has been donated to the online fundraiser titled “The Musgrove Family Fund,” which is dedicated to Ms. Clancy’s parents, Mike and Paula Musgrove.
The week-old GoFundMe hopes to bring in $2 million for the Musgroves, with organizers saying the parents have absorbed “travel, lodging, and living costs” to remain close to their daughter, who faces murder charges for strangling her three children in 2023.
“Nothing about this fund asks anyone to share their view of Lindsay or the criminal case. It asks donors to recognize the extraordinary financial burden her parents have carried simply by continuing to be present,” organizers wrote. “The purpose of this fund is to help Mike and Paula rebuild the financial stability they have sacrificed over these past three years.”
The fundraising page said the parents relocated from Connecticut to Massachusetts to be with Ms. Clancy during the legal saga. Mrs. Musgrove is retired, while Mr. Musgrove works as a photographer.
Organizers said both parents consented to the fundraiser being created for them, and Ms. Clancy’s defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, was made aware of it.
“The case will eventually reach its conclusion. Whatever that outcome is, Mike and Paula will still have to pick up the pieces of the lives they have put on hold to be there for their daughter,” the GoFundMe reads. “They should not have to face that future without the financial foundation they spent decades building.”
Ms. Clancy’s trial has become a media sensation, with prosecutors trying to convict her for killing her three children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan — after sending her husband out on an errand run in January 2023.
She then leapt from their Duxbury home’s second-story window in a failed suicide attempt, prosecutors said. The fall left the defendant paralyzed from the waist down.
Ms. Clancy’s defense team argues her severe postpartum depression, which was documented by nearly 20 trips to various doctors in the months before the killings, means she cannot be criminally liable for the slayings.
Mrs. Musgrove took the stand this week to testify about her daughter’s degrading mental health in the months before the killings.
Mrs. Musgrove said that in December 2022 Ms. Clancy revealed to her mother and her then-husband, Patrick Clancy, that she was becoming psychotic.
“She told us she had thoughts of harming the children,” Mrs. Musgrove testified.
Ms. Musgrove further said that her daughter believed her medication regimen was “destroying her mind.”
But earlier in the trial, other witnesses said that Ms. Clancy often skipped medication prescribed for her anxiety, depression and insomnia.
Ms. Clancy’s doctors also testified that the defendant never showed signs of psychosis or mania.
If convicted, Ms. Clancy could be sentenced to life in prison.
