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Mike and Paula
A retired mother and a father who takes photographs for a living. Between January 2023 and August 2026, their entire life reorganised itself around a courthouse in Brockton, Massachusetts.
Wallingford, Connecticut
Lindsay Musgrove grew up in Wallingford, a town of about 45,000 in the middle of Connecticut. Her parents still lived there when she went to nursing school, when she married, when she became a labor and delivery nurse, and when she had the first of her three children. It is roughly a two-hour drive from Wallingford to Duxbury, Massachusetts — the kind of distance grandparents cover on weekends without thinking about it.
On January 24, 2023, that drive stopped being a weekend trip and became the organising fact of their lives.
The decision they made in the first week
There is a decision that families in this position make, usually without discussing it, and it is more consequential than it looks. It is the decision about whether to be in the room.
Being in the room means arranging your life around a court calendar you do not control. It means being present for hearings that get continued after ninety seconds. It means sitting through medical examiner testimony about your grandchildren. It means doing this not once but for three and a half years, because this case was continued, and continued again, while lawyers fought over psychiatric records and a reporter's notes.
The Musgroves decided to be in the room. Then they did the arithmetic on what that would require, and moved to Massachusetts.
What that cost
Paula is retired. Mike is a photographer — work that does not happen when you are sitting in a courtroom, and which does not pay you for the days you are not shooting. Between them, they now carry the cost of a second household in a state they did not live in, in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, maintained for a court schedule.
Add three and a half years of fuel, tolls, parking, meals bought out, a car worn down by the mileage, insurance, prescriptions, utilities, and the ordinary expenses that do not pause because your family is in crisis. That is what has consumed a lifetime of savings. Not one catastrophic bill — just the same modest costs, repeated roughly a thousand times.
August 17, 2026
When the defense opened its case, it called Paula Musgrove first.
She testified about the months before the deaths: that her daughter had become paranoid, that she said the medications were destroying her mind, and that in December 2022 she had told her mother she was having thoughts of harming the children. On cross-examination, the prosecutor asked her why, knowing that, she had not sought to have her daughter committed.
It is difficult to construct a harder question to be asked in public, under oath, about your own child and your own grandchildren. She answered it. Then she came back the next day and sat in the gallery again.
The strangers who showed up
On August 11, 2026, a woman named Brandee Mulligan — who is not family — started a GoFundMe for Mike and Paula. Nobody asked her to. It is verified by the platform, and Michael Musgrove is named as its beneficiary.
Within five days it had passed $600,000. It has since passed a million, from more than 31K separate donations. The average gift is small, which means the number of people who decided this was worth answering is very large.
That campaign is still running and still reaches the family; it is here if you would rather give that way. This page exists alongside it, and donations made here go to Mike and Paula directly.
The thing people find hardest
They are also grieving the children
The objection that comes up most often about this fundraiser is that supporting Lindsay Clancy's parents somehow slights Cora, Dawson, and Callan. It is worth sitting with why that does not follow.
Cora, Dawson, and Callan were Mike and Paula Musgrove's grandchildren. Whatever the jury concludes about criminal responsibility, the Musgroves lost three grandchildren in January 2023, and they lost them in a way that also took their daughter. There is no version of this where they are bystanders to the loss.
What is unusual about their position is not that they are grieving. It is that they have been grieving in public, in a courtroom, with cameras outside, for three and a half years — and that the alternative on offer was to abandon a surviving child. They did not take it.
You can hold both
Nothing about giving to this fund requires you to believe Lindsay Clancy was ill, or that she was not. It does not ask you to forgive anyone. It asks a narrower question: whether two people in their sixties and seventies should lose their retirement for the act of remaining present.