Judge Declares Mistrial in Lindsay Clancy Murder Case After Jury Remains Deadlocked
A Massachusetts judge declared a mistrial Friday in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, the former labor-and-delivery nurse accused of strangling her three young children in Duxbury in 2023. The jury, after more than 38 hours of deliberations across multiple days, told the court for a third time that it could not reach a consensus on whether Clancy was criminally responsible for the deaths.
Judge William Sullivan had signaled early Friday that he intended to end the deadlocked trial. Before that decision became final, Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, made an emergency appeal to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, asking for time to challenge the mistrial based on the conduct of one juror. A note from the jury had suggested that juror refused to apply the legal standard of reasonable doubt. Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt denied the defense’s petition, allowing Sullivan to formally dismiss the jury and declare the mistrial.
Reddington later said the juror in question was the lone holdout preventing a unanimous not-guilty verdict. Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz declined to respond to reporters’ questions about that characterization after the proceedings ended.
Clancy, 36, admitted to killing her children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan — inside their Duxbury home on Jan. 24, 2023. Her defense argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, a rare and poorly understood condition, and that she could not appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions. Prosecutors contended that Clancy, who was never formally diagnosed with postpartum psychosis, had planned the killings carefully and should be held fully responsible.
The trial turned on her mental state. Over nearly five weeks of testimony, jurors heard from family members, psychiatrists and other medical professionals about the steep decline Clancy experienced after the birth of her youngest child. She had reported postpartum anxiety after earlier pregnancies, but the symptoms became far more severe after Callan was born in May 2022.
Beginning in September 2022, Clancy sought treatment from multiple psychiatric providers. Over the following months, she was prescribed at least 13 medications, including Zoloft, Ativan, Prozac and Ambien. Her condition continued to worsen, with periods of depression, dissociation and insomnia. In mid-November she went to an emergency room for help with sleep, and by the end of that month she was experiencing symptoms that left her unable to tell what was real.
Her mother, Paula Musgrove, testified that near the end of December Clancy told her she had “thoughts of harming the children.” Clancy checked herself into a psychiatric hospital on New Year’s Day and was discharged after five days. According to phone data presented at trial, she researched suicide methods, treatments for hallucinations and the question, “Can you treat a sociopath?” She had a final virtual psychiatric appointment Jan. 23, the day before the killings.
Patrick Clancy, her ex-husband, testified that hours before the deaths she seemed to be having “one of her best days.” She had taken their daughter to a doctor’s appointment, built a snowman with the kids and helped with art projects. “I was hopeful,” Patrick told the jury. “She seemed much better.”
Later that evening, Patrick returned home from errands and found the children strangled with exercise bands. He then discovered that Lindsay had tried to take her own life by cutting herself and jumping from a second-story window. She survived but suffered a spinal cord injury that left her paralyzed from the waist down.
According to legal filings, Lindsay described hearing “a loud, demanding, repetitious” male voice telling her, “This is your last chance. Kill the children so you can kill yourself,” and said she felt a force come over her. “I lost all control. My body started acting without any control on my part. I was just following commands,” she said in a separate malpractice lawsuit she filed against the medical providers who treated her in the months before the killings.
The defense pointed repeatedly to what it described as major failures by those providers, arguing they missed clear warning signs of an impending psychotic breakdown and cycled her through an abruptly changing list of drugs that made her condition worse. Her lawyers argued that she had been “begging for help,” and one of her former in-laws, Susan Clancy, testified to the same effect.
Prosecutors did not dispute that Clancy was struggling, but they argued she intentionally concealed the extent of her symptoms. They emphasized that the psychiatrists who treated her said she never voiced a specific plan to hurt herself or her children. Dr. Jennifer Tufts, who treated Clancy from September 2022 until the day before the killings, told the jury she would have been very concerned if she had heard such thoughts. Psychiatric nurse practitioner Rebecca Jollotta also said she saw no signs of psychosis or mania.
Defense expert Dr. Paul Zeizel, a clinical and forensic psychologist who spoke with Clancy after the killings, testified that she was unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions. “She was unable to conform her behavior to the rule of law,” he said. Her attorneys also called Dr. Zeizel to describe how Clancy’s inability to process reality had left her disconnected from the people around her.
In closing arguments, Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague offered the prosecution’s theory of motive: Clancy was depressed, exhausted and “done,” but her children were keeping her from ending her misery. “She had to remove the protective factor,” Sprague said. “I’m not saying she was happy about it. I’m saying it was what she had to do to end her misery.”
The case has drawn renewed national attention to postpartum psychosis, a condition that affects roughly one to two women per 1,000 after childbirth. Experts told NPR and The Guardian that the condition remains underrecognized and underfunded in medical research. Dr. Veerle Bergink, a psychiatrist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said doctors are not adequately trained to spot it. Dr. Susan Hatters Friedman, a reproductive and forensic psychiatrist at Case Western Reserve University, called it “the scariest mental illness that I know of.”
Kristina Delaney, founder of the nonprofit Cherished Mom and someone who experienced postpartum psychosis herself, said the mistrial underscored how much remains unknown about the condition. “It should not take a tragedy to start talking about postpartum psychosis and here we are — it’s outrageous it has become a viral topic after lives are lost and in a courtroom surrounding Lindsay Clancy,” she said.
Following the mistrial, Reddington moved quickly to set the next steps. Judge Sullivan scheduled a status hearing for Sept. 29 at 9 a.m. ET, where the possibility of a second trial could be discussed. Clancy is expected to remain at Tewksbury Hospital, a state-run psychiatric facility, while prosecutors decide whether to retry her, pursue a plea agreement or drop the charges. Cruz said Friday that he would not announce a decision on a retrial immediately.
Patrick Clancy issued a statement through his attorney thanking the jury for its work and saying a second trial would be “extraordinarily painful” for him and his family.
If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, call 911, or call the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-8255 or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741.