The defense began to present their case in the Lindsay Clancy trial on Monday after prosecutors rested their case against Clancy, whom they alleged “deliberately and meticulously” killed her three children in 2023.
Clancy’s defense attorney Kevin Reddington called the 35-year-old’s mother and sister to the stand as two of the defense's first witnesses.
Clancy’s sister, Allison Ozga, testified that she saw her sister's mental health deteriorate throughout the fall of 2022, describing her as feeling "numb" and "hopeless."
Clancy has pleaded not guilty to three murder charges in connection with the deaths of her 5-year-old daughter Cora, 3-year-old son Dawson, and infant son Callan at her family's home in the Boston suburb of Duxbury on Jan. 24, 2023.
Paula Musgrove, Clancy's mother, said she saw Clancy’s mental health began to spiral in October 2022, and that by December, she shared that she “had thoughts of harming the children.”
“I remember her being very nervous. nervous. I remember her saying, ‘I just have to tell you guys something, and then she told us…She told us that she had thoughts of harming the children,’” Musgrove said.
Musgrove described Clancy as a “very loving mother” who felt strongly about having kids.
“I felt it was the best thing that ever happened to her, and she would do anything for her children. She was just a loving mother,” she testified.
As her voice cracked with emotion, Musgrove also described how much she loved her three grandchildren.
“I love my grandchildren with all my heart. You never know what it's like to love a grandchild until you become a grandmother, and it was the most beautiful thing. I loved them with all my heart,” she said.
Musgrove said she and her husband spent time living with their daughter and her family starting in October 2022, and recounted that Clancy was losing weight and appeared paranoid.
According to Musgrove, Clancy by January “said that she couldn't remember anything” and attributed her declining mental health to the medication she was taking at the time.
“The medication was pretty much just destroying her mind, and it wasn't her. She said that this isn't me. I just want to feel better, and enjoy my kids again,” she said.
Reddington has argued that Clancy had postpartum psychosis and severe mental illness, and that she attempted to take her own life after strangling her children.
Postpartum psychosis is a rare but serious medical emergency characterized by severe, rapid onset psychiatric episodes such as mania, depression, delusions or hallucinations. It can have rapid onset in the days or weeks after birth, research shows.
Last week, jurors heard from five different medical professionals who treated Clancy in the months before she killed her children.
While the doctors and nurses generally offered consistent testimony that Clancy was not showing symptoms of postpartum psychosis, they acknowledged on the stand that Clancy was being treated by multiple providers who did not always communicate with one another, including on what medications she was being prescribed, during the same timeframe they treated her.
Clancy was prescribed more than a dozen psychiatric medications in the four months before she killed her children, and her lawyer argues that being overmedicated and misdiagnosed worsened Clancy's mental illness.
On Monday morning, one of the final witnesses called by the prosecution testified that five days before Clancy killed her children, her phone was used to look up the “symptoms of postpartum psychosis."
In the preceding days, Clancy’s phone was also used to search “ketamine for suicidal ideation” as well as how long some medications take to treat depression, according to Ian Whiffin, a manager with the digital forensics firm Cellebrite, whom prosecutors brought in to analyze her phone movements.
Whiffin also testified about health data taken from Clancy’s phone and smart watch about her movements on the night she killed her children.
According to Whiffin, Clancy’s devices showed that she was walking up the equivalent of two flights of stairs between 5:33PM and 5:38PM – and that she spoke with her ex-husband, Patrick Clancy, over the phone after she had gone up the first flight of stairs.
Clancy strangled her children in the basement of her home before going up to her second-floor bedroom and attempting to kill herself.
“In between when the flight climb started and the flight climb ended, you have the two calls: the incoming call that was missed from Patrick, and then the outgoing call to Patrick,” a prosecutor asked.
“Correct,” Whiffin said.
If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. Free, confidential help is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You are not on your own.
