Lindsay Clancy Trial: FBI Psychiatrist Says She Knew Right From Wrong

Lindsay Clancy, 34, of Duxbury, Massachusetts, is on trial for the murders of her three children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 7-month-old Callan — allegedly strangled with exercise resistance bands inside the family's Summer Street home on January 24, 2023. Clancy faces three counts of murder and three counts of strangulation. She's pleaded not guilty, and her defense, led by attorney Kevin Reddington, is arguing she was in the grip of severe postpartum psychosis and psychiatric overmedication when it happened.

Today the prosecution's expert took the stand, and he didn't hedge. Dr. Gregory Saathoff, a forensic psychiatrist with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, testified that whatever voice Clancy said she heard never told her how to kill her children or where to do it — a detail the prosecution wants the jury sitting with. He described Clancy as gripped by a sense of "burdensomeness," convinced she couldn't return to work and that the family couldn't survive financially with her in it. He called her suicide attempt "very, very serious," pointing to the fact that she tried multiple methods as proof she meant it.

Saathoff landed on a diagnosis — bipolar II — and said Clancy was suffering from a genuine mental disease at the time. But he drew a hard line after that: disease or not, he testified she understood right from wrong, and she was criminally responsible for what happened.

That's the needle prosecutors are threading — real illness, real tragedy, but not legal insanity. After the killings, Clancy allegedly attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window and is now paralyzed from the waist down. Husband Patrick Clancy was out running errands at the time and has since relocated to Manhattan. The trial continues in Plymouth Superior Court.

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