Who Lindsay Clancy is

Before

Lindsay Musgrove grew up in Wallingford, Connecticut. She trained as a nurse, and she worked in labor and delivery — the ward where women have babies. It is worth pausing on that, because it means she had professional knowledge of maternal health, had coached other women through the worst hours of their lives, and knew what postpartum illness looked like from the clinician's side of the bed.

She married Patrick Clancy. They had Cora in 2017, Dawson in 2019, and Callan in May 2022. Her husband later wrote that being a mother was, in his words, all she ever wanted, and that her passion for it had taught him how to be a better father.

The months that changed

After Callan was born, something went wrong, and the people around her could see it. Family members testified that from the autumn of 2022 she became increasingly anxious, then paranoid, then suicidal. She told her mother that the medications were destroying her mind.

She was not ignoring it. She sought help repeatedly. Over a period of months she was prescribed and cycled through approximately ten different psychiatric medications. She spent time as an inpatient at McLean Hospital. She saw a psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Tufts, across fourteen telehealth appointments in four months — the last of them on January 23, 2023, the day before her children died.

Dr. Tufts testified that Clancy "never seemed psychotic" to her, and that she had not been told about any thoughts of harming the children. In December 2022, Clancy had told her mother exactly that.

Whatever else is true, that gap is real: the most dangerous thing she was experiencing was said to her mother and not to her doctor. Clinicians who testified in this case described that pattern as the central problem in postpartum psychosis — a woman who admits to frightening thoughts about her baby has a well-founded fear about what happens to that baby next.

January 24, 2023

Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. They died at the family's home on Summer Street in Duxbury. Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead that day; Callan died on January 27 after three days on life support.

Nothing on this page reduces that, and nothing about postpartum psychosis is offered here as a reason it should be reduced. Three children are dead. Their names are the reason anyone knows this story.

Immediately afterward, Lindsay Clancy went out a second-storey window in an attempt to kill herself. She survived, and has been paralysed from the waist down since. She has attended her own trial in a wheelchair.

What her defense argued

Dr. Philip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist and one of the most experienced expert witnesses in the country on maternal filicide, testified that Clancy was "frankly psychotic" on the day. He described postpartum psychosis on top of severe depression and bipolar disorder, and testified that she experienced command hallucinations — a male voice directing her to kill her children and then herself — and that she felt disconnected from her own body, with no sense of control over it.

A hospital chaplain, Sheila Cavanaugh, testified that Clancy told her the voice had said that if she did not obey it, neither she nor the children would be safe.

What the prosecution argued

It would be dishonest to leave this out, so here it is.

Prosecutors have argued that she planned the killings and staged her fall as a suicide attempt afterwards. They pointed to an internet search — "can you treat a sociopath?" — made four days beforehand, to diary entries about her difficulties with her third child, and to the absence of any contemporaneous record of voice-hearing in her medical notes. They introduced nursing notes from Tewksbury State Hospital suggesting she functioned normally on significant dates. Dr. Avram Mack, who examined her in April 2026, testified that he found "nothing remarkable" on his mental status examination.

Twelve jurors in Brockton are weighing those two accounts against each other. This page does not weigh them for you, and it does not need to for the rest of it to matter.

Where she is now

In custody, paralysed, on trial for the deaths of her three children, facing a mandatory sentence of life without parole if convicted of first-degree murder. If the jury instead finds her not criminally responsible, she does not go home — in Massachusetts that ordinarily means commitment to a secure psychiatric facility, with release contingent on periodic court review.

On August 12, 2026, during medical examiner testimony about her children's injuries, she said "I can't do it" and was wheeled out of the courtroom.