A state psychiatrist testified that Lindsay Clancy spoke the words "Go to God" aloud as she strangled each of her three young children with exercise bands, and that the killings were methodical, not psychotic.
Dr. Avram Mack took the stand Friday afternoon at Plymouth County Superior Court in Massachusetts as prosecutors opened their rebuttal case in Clancy's triple murder trial. His testimony offered the starkest challenge yet to the defense's central claim: that Clancy, a 36-year-old labor and delivery nurse, was so consumed by postpartum psychosis on January 24, 2023, that she could not control her actions when she killed Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months old, inside the family's home in Duxbury, Massachusetts.
Clancy has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. If convicted of three counts of first-degree murder, she faces life in prison with no possibility of parole. If the jury accepts the insanity defense, she would be committed to a psychiatric facility with periodic review. Closing arguments could come as soon as Tuesday.
Mack, who evaluated Clancy for the state in April, more than three years after the killings, told jurors he concluded she was suffering from a major depressive episode on the day she killed her children. But he found no evidence of psychosis or bipolar disorder, AP News reported.
That distinction matters. Depression alone does not satisfy Massachusetts's legal standard for insanity, the inability to conform one's conduct to the requirements of the law. Mack testified that Clancy's actions showed she could.
He described the killings as sequential and goal-directed. Clancy first took Dawson to the basement and strangled him. She strangled each child one by one with an exercise band, saying "Go to God" each time, according to testimony reported by the Daily Mail.
Mack told the court the phrase was "not only hope for the children but a description of the situation." He framed it not as the ravings of a woman who had lost touch with reality, but as evidence that Clancy understood what she was doing, and chose to do it anyway.
"The deaths were done one by one in a way that was organized and attempted to achieve a particular goal. Her attempt at suicide was also organized in that it included as many methods as possible."
That suicide attempt came immediately after the killings. Clancy cut her wrists and neck, took medication, cut a window screen in the second-floor master bedroom, and fell or jumped from the window. She survived.
One of the most striking details in Mack's testimony concerned Clancy's own description of the hours before the killings. She told Mack the day had been "a fun and productive day." Her husband, Patrick Clancy, corroborated that account, telling investigators it was the best day Lindsay had experienced in a long time.
Mack used this to undercut the defense theory that Clancy had been overtaken by an acute psychotic break. A person in the grip of psychosis severe enough to compel murder, Mack argued, would not typically describe the preceding hours as pleasant and normal.
He also pointed to what happened after the killings. Clancy woke from her suicide attempt with what Mack described as "immediate horror and shame", a reaction, he said, that demonstrated she knew what she had done was wrong. Hospital chaplain Sheila Cavanaugh, who testified the day before Mack, said Clancy told her days after the killings that she was glad the children were "safe."
Mack acknowledged that Clancy reported hearing a loud male voice that told her: "You should kill the kids. This is your last chance, so you can kill yourself." But he concluded that the reported voice did not amount to a psychotic episode that stripped Clancy of criminal responsibility. He testified there is no reason psychosis in and of itself prevents a person from knowing right from wrong.
The prosecution's rebuttal follows days of defense testimony built around the opposite conclusion. Dr. Phillip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist whose career includes testimony in the cases of Jeffrey Dahmer, Casey Anthony, Ted Kaczynski, and Andrea Yates, evaluated Clancy in May 2023, roughly four months after the killings, at the defense's request.
Resnick testified that Clancy was "frankly psychotic" at the time of the killings. He diagnosed her with bipolar two disorder with severe depression and postpartum psychosis, and concluded she had a mental defect that left her unable to conform her conduct to the law.
His account of the killings differed sharply from Mack's framing. Resnick told jurors Clancy experienced "command hallucinations", voices that directed her to act, and a "delusion of influence," a belief that her body had been seized by an outside force.
"It was almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings."
Resnick categorized the killings as both "altruistic filicide", in which a parent kills believing it serves the child's interest, and "acutely psychotic filicide," driven by a complete break from reality. He testified that Clancy believed she was doing her children a favor by taking them to heaven with her, the New York Post reported.
Dr. Paul Zeizel, another defense psychiatrist, testified earlier in the week that Clancy suffered from postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings and cannot be held criminally responsible. He was the first psychiatrist to offer that opinion at trial.
One detail from the defense case complicates the prosecution's path. Resnick testified that Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, a prosecution expert who has not yet taken the stand, found that Clancy was not faking her symptoms and tended to minimize rather than exaggerate or lie about what she experienced. Heilbrun is expected to testify as one of two remaining prosecution rebuttal witnesses, along with Dr. Gregory Saathof.
That finding does not settle the central question. A person can genuinely suffer from severe mental illness and still retain enough awareness to be held legally responsible. But it narrows the ground the prosecution can stand on. The state cannot argue Clancy was performing. It must argue instead that her real, documented suffering did not rise to the level of psychosis, and that she retained the capacity to choose differently.
Defense cross-examination of Mack is expected to continue Monday morning. Fox News reported that defense attorney Kevin Reddington has finished calling his own witnesses and described the jury as "very, very focused." He called Clancy "surprised and emotional" over the crowds that gathered in her support outside the courthouse.
Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. Their mother strangled each of them with an exercise band, said "Go to God" as she did it, and then tried to kill herself. None of those facts are in dispute.
What the jury must decide is whether Clancy was so far gone that the law cannot hold her accountable, or whether, as the prosecution contends, she understood what she was doing, carried it out with deliberate organization, and chose a phrase that showed she grasped the finality of her actions.
Two expert psychiatrists say she was psychotic. At least one says she was not. The jury has heard both sides describe the same set of facts and reach opposite conclusions. Closing arguments could begin as soon as Tuesday.
Three children are dead. The question is not what happened. The question is whether the law still means something when the facts are this grim and the defense is this sympathetic, or whether a sufficiently tragic story can override accountability itself.
