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.
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A psychologist testified today that he doesn't believe Lindsay Clancy was experiencing acute psychosis because of the brevity of the voice she claimed she heard, the length of time since she'd given birth and inconsistencies in in her account of what happened. "She's never experienced it since, but she only experienced it for the 18 minutes or so that it took to kill the children," Kirk Heilburn testified. "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," he continued. "Why is that, doctor? Why why are you careful when someone tells you that they only experience this voice during a criminal offense?" asked Jennifer Sprague, an assistant district attorney in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. "Well, because it provides a convenient way of of lessening your own culpability. I mean, it's always possible, but as I said, I find it very, very rare," Heliburn answered. Heliburn also said Clancy "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 [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition] 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." "Now it could be something else, and there were certainly some things that I saw that were symptoms of depression and other sorts of things that she experienced in January. But it was given the time, it was less likely I thought to be postpartum," he said. Heliburn also said Clancy's inconsistencies are "important because it suggests inaccuracy." "To me, when asked about this, 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," Heliburn said. But she told a psychiatric nurse "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." "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? I mean, here it couldn't be both because she said, 'I only heard this. To some people, she said that, and then I heard this plus this. To other people, she said that," Heliburn said. Heliburn will continue testifying on Tuesday (August 25, day 20).