A jury is to determine whether Lindsay Clancy is criminally responsible for killing her three children in 2023 in Duxbury, Massachusetts. She was being treated for postpartum mental health issues when she killed the children: Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, who was 8 months old. Plymouth County Superior Court Judge William Sullivan is presiding over the jury trial, which began on July 27 and is expected to last six to eight weeks.
Curated by: Meghann Cuniff (223 videos)
A forensic psychologist who analyzed Lindsay Clancy at the request of prosecutors testified today (Monday, August 24, day 6) Kirk Heilburn will return to the witness stand on Tuesday after the judge recessed the jury for the day after specially instructing them not to consider Clancy's Catholicism. The instruction followed Heliburn testifying about that Clancy told him she believed she'd be in heaven with her children, which he said conflicted with his understanding of Catholicism. You can watch the first part of Heliburn's testimony here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQGPSR_ZgMs 12:02 "There ended up being, in my mind, two possible explanations for why she did what she did. The first being the acute psychosis with command hallucinations, and the second being this was a serious suicide attempt, and she wanted the children to be with her, so she wouldn't be separated from them, and so they wouldn't have to suffer after she was gone. Now, in a minute, I'm going to talk about the evidence that I saw supporting each of those, but I will will tell you right now, in advance of talking about that, that most of the evidence that I saw I saw supported the second one, and not the first." 16:55 "And so Ms. Clancy, thinking that if someone knew she thought of harming her kids, her kids might be taken away. That's not a false belief, correct?" "Well, that was what I was trying to say: is that it is not a false belief. It's quite possible that it could come to pass." 17:59 "the way she described this as happening is that she heard a voice that she'd never heard before, experienced an hallucination, and she's never experienced it since, but she only experienced it for the 18 minutes. or so that it took to kill the children, and to put it mildly, that would be a very, very unusual pattern or or manifestation of how this kind of thing comes about. Very unusual. I've been doing this kind of evaluation for many, many years, and I'm always very careful when someone tells me that they experience a symptom only during the course of committing an offense." "it provides a convenient way of of lessening your own culpability" 19:44 "And what was the the next part of evidence that you saw against acute psychosis?" "There was some discussion of whether this was postpartum, and so she was about eight months away from. Having having given birth to Callan, her youngest child, and most of the explanations, or most of the sources of authority, like DSM 5 or the Cleveland Clinic, will point to maybe one month after birth or two months after birth or something like that, but the farther away you get time-wise from the birth, the less likely it is under those kinds of authority to to be postpartum" 20:47 "She said the voice said, "This is your last chance. You have to kill the kids so you can kill yourself, and it just kept repeating that and only that, and only that for about 18 minutes or the duration of the time it took to to do this. There were other times, though. For instance, when she was in the hospital after this happened, and was talking to a psychiatric attending. When she said that the voice had said other things, for example, the children will suffer without you, or you have to take the kids with you, or things like that. So, inconsistency is important because it suggests inaccuracy. In other words, which version is accurate? Is it the first? Is it the second? Is it neither?" 23:32 "What I would say is, the more inconsistency there is, the more problematic I find it to take any one particular account and say this is the accurate one" 33:09 "Well, there were some there were some additional inconsistencies in terms of whether she knew that when I asked her whether she was aware that it was illegal or immoral, she said basically, "I wasn't thinking about this at all. No, no thoughts, no decisions, none of that. It was just all action." "One of the things that Dr. Resnick wrote in his report is that she was intellectually aware that it was wrong or illegal, but not morally. And what she said to me is that I just don't think I wasn't thinking about that at all. I didn't know any of that." 36:40 "In the course of strangling each child, she said, "Go to God, baby, go to God," and that was part of her expectation that she and the children would be together in heaven with God. She was raised as a Catholic, and this, as I understand, Catholic considerations. That's not necessarily what happens. But but when I ask her about that when I said, "Isn't suicide a mortal sin?" Judge Sullivan calls the attorneys to the bench and court is in recess for 25 minutes. 46:36 "Just before we broke, there was some testimony from that last witness, and I just want to give you some instructions in regards to that testimony, and I just wanted to let the religion that the defendant was raised with is absolutely an inappropriate area of testimony. It is to be stricken. It is not to be considered."