Massachusetts trial opens in deaths of 3 children

July 28, 2026

2–3 minutes

Summary

Jurors heard opening statements in Lindsay Clancy’s trial over the 2023 deaths of her three children in Duxbury, Massachusetts.

Why this matters

The case centers on whether Clancy was criminally responsible at the time of the killings, a key issue in a trial that could result in a mandatory life sentence. It also draws attention to how mental illness is addressed in criminal court.

A Massachusetts jury on Monday heard competing accounts of why a mother killed her three children in 2023, with a defense lawyer saying Lindsay Clancy was experiencing postpartum psychosis and a prosecutor arguing the killings were planned.

Clancy admitted she strangled her children in January 2023 with exercise bands in the basement of her home in Duxbury, a Boston suburb. She then cut herself with a knife and jumped from a second-story window in an attempt to kill herself, leaving her paralyzed.

In Plymouth County Superior Court, defense attorney Kevin Reddington told jurors that Clancy, now 35, had struggled for months with postpartum mental health issues after the birth of her third child.

“This is a woman that was suffering from psychosis at the time that she went down to that basement,” Reddington said.

He said Clancy had sought treatment from multiple health care providers and had been prescribed several drugs that did not help. “She’s living her own hell,” he said. “She knows what happened with those kids.”

Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham said the case was not about broader questions of women’s mental health care, but whether Clancy understood that killing her children was wrong and did it anyway.

Buckingham said evidence would show Clancy sent her then-husband, Patrick Clancy, to pick up a food order after using her phone to calculate how long he would be gone so she could act “swiftly to accomplish a very specific goal: to kill.”

Patrick Clancy, the prosecution’s first witness, said Lindsay Clancy had been discharged from a psychiatric hospital less than two weeks earlier, but showed no signs in the following days that she planned to hurt herself or the children. He said she seemed “normal” when he left to get dinner.

“I came upstairs,” he said. “I took Callan for a minute, and I rocked him by my knees, kissed Cora on the head, and I said I’ll be right back.”

The trial ended for the day before Patrick Clancy described what happened when he returned. Buckingham told jurors that he found Lindsay Clancy in the backyard, called 911, and later found the children in the basement. The children were Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan.

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