Lindsay Clancy, the mother accused of murdering her three children, was suffering from a ‘command hallucination’ at the time, her trial has heard.
Clancy, 36, is said to have planned the killings of Callan, Dawson and Cora Clancy, whose bodies were found in the basement of the family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in January 2023.
She does not deny killing them, but her lawyers argue she should not be held criminally responsible for their deaths because she was suffering with postpartum psychosis.
Her trial, which has captivated millions in the US and beyond, heard from the final defence witnesses on Friday, including Phillip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist and expert in filicide – the killing of a child by a parent.
Resnick told jurors he spent hours interviewing Clancy and believes she was ‘clearly psychotic’ at the time of the killings.
The expert, who also testified for the defence in the infamous trial of Andrea Yates for drowning her five children in 2001, described several categories of filicide, including killings involving abuse.
Others involve psychosis or what he calls ‘altruistic’ filicide — a killing committed ‘out of love rather than hostility’.
He said he found Clancy’s case involved both of the latter categories, but he didn’t find evidence of abuse.
Resnick said Clancy suffered from severe depression, showed evidence consistent with bipolar disorder and reported hearing a voice commanding her to kill her children.
‘My opinion is that Ms Clancy was, due to her mental disease, unable to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law on the day that she took the lives of her children’, he told jurors.
‘It was a matter where she was just following the command rather than being able to make any decision to do it or not.’
‘It was like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings’
He added: ‘A hallucination is simply hearing a voice, and the voice can be benign or it can be more malignant.
‘About a third of voices are called command hallucinations. That is an instruction to do something, and the majority of those commands are benign. It might be “open a window”, “get a glass of water”.
‘It might be something much more ominous, such as to kill oneself or harm someone else. Those are dangerous command hallucinations.
‘Now, in Ms Clancy’s case, she had not only a command hallucination on the day that she killed her children – she had what is known as a delusion of influence.
‘That is, not only did she hear a command, but she felt that her body was taken over by an external force, where she were in a dream state and did not have control of her own body.
‘It was almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings.’
Resnick said Clancy had a delusional belief that if social services took the children or if she killed herself, her children would suffer without her.
He said she believed that they would be better off dying with her and going to heaven.
‘She believed that she was doing what was right for her children,’ he said.
‘In her mind, she believed that she would be doing her children a favour by having them go to heaven with her rather than remain on earth without her doing the mothering.’
Prosecutors say Clancy contrived to get her husband out of the house on the day of the killings by sending him to collect some takeout food and pick up medication for one of the kids.
He arrived home to find Clancy on the floor, with a 911 call picking up his horrified reaction as he goes inside and finds the bodies of their three children: ‘She killed the kids!’
‘She was begging for help’
Clancy has observed her trial from the confines of a wheelchair after she was paralysed from jumping out of the window following the killings.
Family members, including her mother, former mother-in-law and sister, gave evidence earlier this week saying she had mental health struggles and described thoughts of harming herself and her three children in the months before she killed them.
‘She was begging for help,’ Clancy’s former mother-in-law, Susan Clancy, told jurors of the ‘very nurturing, very loving’ mother.
Clancy’s mother, Paula Musgrove, said her daughter had loved her children and was dedicated to them.
But she said that starting in October 2022, she began to frequently stay at Clancy’s home after receiving a text message from her saying: ‘It’s just really scary and I don’t want to be alone.’
Clancy told her then-husband, Patrick Clancy, and Musgrove in December 2022 ‘she had thoughts of harming the children’, Musgrove said.
The couple divorced after the killings.
Allison Osga, Clancy’s sister, testified that around that time she learned Clancy was ‘feeling numb’, having suicidal thoughts and seeking treatment.
In late December, ‘she told me she had had suicidal ideation every day for a month’, Osga testified.
But under questioning by a prosecutor, Osga, who is a social worker and by law required to report suspected harm to children, said she never had enough concern about the children’s safety in January 2023 to file a report about her sister.
‘There’s no reason she couldn’t tell right from wrong’
After the defence rested its case, prosecutors began calling rebuttal witnesses.
Dr Avram Mack agreed that Clancy suffered from a major depressive episode but said he found no evidence of mania or hypomania to support a bipolar diagnosis — or of psychosis — leading up to the killings.
Mack said Clancy recounted the killings to him, saying she heard a loud male voice telling her to kill the children so she could kill herself.
She recalled strangling the children and saying ‘go to God’ as she did so, he told jurors.
Mack said Clancy was experiencing severe mental illness when she killed her children but that it was a continuation of the depression she had experienced for months in which she was able to control impulses and distinguish right from wrong.
He said: ‘There’s no reason that psychosis in and of itself inhibits a person’s ability to know right from wrong.’
Clancy faces life in prison without parole if convicted of first-degree murder.
If found not guilty due to lack of criminal responsibility, or by reason of insanity, she would be committed to a state psychiatric hospital for evaluation.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
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