PLYMOUTH, Mass. — Lindsay Clancy didn’t appreciate the “wrongfulness” of killing her three children because of her mental health issues, a psychologist testifying for the defense said at her murder trial Wednesday.
The testimony of Dr. Paul Zeizel is the strongest evidence yet to support the defense contentions that Clancy should not be held legally responsible for murder because she has bipolar disorder and was in the grip of a rare mental illness called postpartum psychosis when she killed her three children before trying to kill herself. Zeizel began seeing Clancy as a patient at a hospital after the deaths.
“She was unable to conform her behavior to the rule of law. She had no appreciation for the wrongfulness of her act,” Zeizel said, adding that she had “a mental disease or a defect.”
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.
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Clancy, 36, has pleaded not guilty to murder charges in the deaths of Callan, Dawson and Cora Clancy, who ranged from 8 months to 5 years old. Postpartum psychosis is linked to the stress, sleep deprivation and hormonal changes that follow childbirth. Researchers estimate that the condition – which is more serious and less common than postpartum depression – afflicts 1 to 2 per 1,000 women after delivery.
Prosecutors say the former labor and delivery nurse planned the January 2023 killings and contrived to get her husband out of the house by sending him to pick up medicine for one of their children and dinner for the family.
Clancy was not getting better
Zeizel, who said he spent more than 35 hours with Clancy over dozens of visits and reviewed her medical records, said she went to a perinatal clinic in December 2022 because she felt her “brain was damaged,” “she should kill herself” and that she “is never going to get any better.” She also showed signs of psychosis, was paranoid and feared that people could hear her thoughts and that she would lose her children.
“She was worried that her children would be removed from her and that she would never see them again,” he said.
But just because she was in a psychotic state, Zeizel said, that didn’t mean she couldn’t do “everyday tasks of living” like driving and searching the internet, a reference to the fact that the day of the killings she took her daughter to the doctor, played with the children in the snow and searched online for a pharmacy and a restaurant.
“So the fact she is not talking about the unicorns in the corner, she is not slurring her words and she is not unable to walk, to your opinion to a degree of medical certainty, does that mean she is not in a psychotic state?” Clancy’s attorney Kevin Reddington asked.
Zeizel responded: “It does not.”
Prosecution challenges Zeizel’s credibility
On cross-examination, prosecutors pointed out mistakes Zeizel made in his report about Clancy and questioned whether he could be objective about her diagnosis when he was seeing her as a patient and working with the defense including appearing with Reddington at a news conference.
Zeizel acknowledged that there was nothing in Clancy’s medical records in which she reports hearing voices telling her to kill herself, only that she told her caregivers that “she wanted to die.”
Prosecutors have questioned the seriousness of Clancy’s suicide attempt. After strangling her children, Clancy jumped from a second-story window and remains paralyzed from the waist down.
Prosecution brings up the children’s birthdays
Prosecutor Shanan Buckingham also read from daily reports from Tewksbury Hospital, the state psychiatric hospital where Clancy stays, that included the anniversary of the killings and what would have been her children’s birthdays. Those reports mentioned her parents sometimes visiting or her talking with other patients. But they never mentioned anything she did to remember her children.
Reddington asked Zeizel if he saw anything in the record from the hospital about her “laughing, and partying and having a good time” while in the hospital.
“Lindsay Clancy has bad days and worse days,” Zeizel said.
Zeizel also said Clancy often talks about her children, aiming to dispel prosecutors’ contention that she never mentions them. “She really loves them and misses them and thinks of them every single day, almost every moment of the day,” Zeizel said.
If convicted of murder, Clancy faces life in prison without parole. If found not guilty because of a lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility.
