Lindsay Clancy and the question the Duxbury jury could not settle

Hours before Patrick Clancy came home to find his three children injured in the basement, his wife sent a photograph of herself and the children building a snowman. An investigator told a Plymouth jury about it under questioning from the defense. The same phone held a search for a restaurant in a neighboring town. Prosecutors wanted jurors to consider how closely Lindsay Clancy had calculated the time her husband would be away that evening. Both lawyers had reason to ask the jury to look at the hours before Patrick Clancy came home.

Cora was five, Dawson three and Callan eight months old. On January 24, 2023, Patrick went out to pick up medicine for his daughter and dinner for the family. When he returned to their Duxbury home, Lindsay had fallen from a window. The children were in the basement. Cora and Dawson died that day. Callan survived long enough to reach a hospital, where he died days later.

At trial, Lindsay’s lawyers acknowledged that she had strangled the children. The question for jurors was whether a mental illness had deprived her of the capacity to understand the wrongfulness of her actions or to control them. She was a nurse who had sought psychiatric care before the killings. Her defense argued that she had experienced postpartum psychosis. The state argued that what she did before Patrick left showed planning.

One of the people who described her account of that evening to the jury was a psychiatrist retained by the prosecution. Gregory Saathoff testified that she told him she had been at the refrigerator when she heard a man’s voice ordering her to kill the children and herself. Saathoff doubted that explanation. Among the things he questioned was her account that the voice ceased immediately after Callan was strangled. Jurors had to weigh what Clancy had told a doctor long afterward alongside the records she had made that day. Doctors could offer opinions. None had been in the kitchen with her.

Two notes from the jury room

By the end of the first trial, one juror favored conviction and the others did not. The foreperson sent Judge William Sullivan two notes questioning whether the holdout was following the court’s instructions. Sullivan sent the jurors back to deliberate. On September 4, 2026, with the jury still deadlocked, he declared a mistrial.

Clancy’s lawyers argued that Sullivan should have questioned the jurors further before discharging them. If a juror had actually refused to follow the law, they argued, the court could have replaced that juror and let deliberations continue. Sullivan read the notes differently. He concluded that they described an impasse and gave him no reliable reason to remove someone for reaching a different conclusion.

On November 9 he denied the request to dismiss the case, allowing it to proceed toward a possible retrial. A hearing was scheduled for November 16. A great deal of the last day of the children’s lives can be reconstructed from photographs, phone records and Patrick’s account of coming home. The first jury parted over the one thing those records could never show directly: what their mother understood as she acted.

Research Sources

The following resources were consulted to verify and update this article.

• CBS reporting on the children, competing trial accounts and mistrial
• Associated Press on Sullivan’s decision and the foreperson’s notes
• The Boston Globe’s courtroom account of the snowman photograph, phone searches and testimony
• The Boston Globe on Saathoff’s interviews with Clancy and his testimony about her account