Lindsay Clancy

Killer Psyche

This episode examines the tragic case of Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts nurse who killed her three young children and attempted suicide. Host

Key takeaways

• Lindsay Clancy was prescribed as many as 13 different psychiatric medications in a period of only a few months.
• The defense argues that 'command hallucinations'—a voice instructing her to kill—were the primary driver of the tragedy.

Main topics

• Postpartum Psychosis
• Command Hallucinations

Notable quotes

What happens when the mind you trust to tell you what is real begins telling you something else?

Conclusion

The episode serves as a harrowing critique of how systemic failures in

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Hey, Killer Psyche fans, have you heard? Audible subscribers can listen to new episodes of Killer Psyche early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. A listener note. This episode contains adult content and is not suitable for everyone. Please be advised. Speaker 2 (0:35) There is a story in the Bible about a father who is asked to kill his son. His name is Abraham and his son's name is Isaac. And according to the book of Genesis, God tells Abraham to take Isaac to a mountain and sacrifice him. Abraham obeys. He takes his son up the mountain, builds an altar, binds Isaac, and raises his knife. What makes the story so disturbing is not simply that Abraham is willing to kill his child. It is that in Abraham's mind, this is not murder. It is obedience. He believes he has been given a command by God. And because he believes the command is real, the impossible becomes possible. At the last moment, an angel stops Abraham and Isaac lives. The knife never falls. But the story leaves us with a question far more frightening than whether Abraham loved his son. Of course he did. The question is, what happens when the mind you trust to tell you what is real begins telling you something else? For thousands of years, stories have tried to imagine the terrible things that can happen when love, belief, and reality collide. This one is not imagined. On January 24th, 2023, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, three children were found mortally injured in their home. Five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan. Their mother, Lindsay Clancy, was found alive. She had attempted to take her own life. And in the months leading up to that night, according to her family and her defense, Lindsay had been struggling with a rapidly deteriorating psychiatric condition. She sought help. She saw doctors. She was prescribed medication after medication. Her family watched her change, and eventually, prosecutors and defense attorneys would offer two profoundly different explanations for what happened inside that house. One says Lindsay Clancy knew what she was doing. The other says that by then, she was experiencing a severe mental illness that had fundamentally altered her perception of reality. And somewhere in between those two explanations is the question that makes this case so difficult to look at. What if a person can love someone completely? and still become capable of destroying them. Lindsay Clancy's story is not the story of Abraham. There was no angel. There was no last second intervention. And there was no simple answer to the question of what could make a loving mother do the unthinkable. Speaker 1 (3:50) James Arthur Ray was a charismatic self-help guru who promised his followers a path to wealth and enlightenment by becoming the best versions of themselves. But not all who followed him finished their journey. For the best Bingeable series, listen to the Audible True Crime Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (4:10) From Audible Originals and Treefort Media, I'm Candice DeLong, and this is Killer Psyche. Speaker 2 (4:37) For five decades, I studied people's minds through my work as an FBI profiler and psychiatric nurse. I've interviewed countless murderers, including many serial killers. Why did they do it? To get a satisfying answer, we have to dive deep into their minds so that I can give you my best analysis of what made them do what they did. This episode is Lindsay Clancy. As many of you know, before I joined the FBI, I spent 10 years working as a psychiatric nurse. That experience gave me real insight into and real experience with women suffering from severe postpartum mental illness. Now, you would have to be living under a rock not to have heard the name Lindsay Clancy. Her story has entered the zeitgeist, and it has dominated headlines for months. Everyone seems to have an opinion, and plenty of people have their own theories, some of them pretty far-fetched and bordering on, dare I say, conspiracy theory. Here's the thing, though. This case was never a whodunit. We know who did it. What we do not know, what this case forces us to sit with, is why. Why would a devoted mother, a nurse herself, someone who spent her career caring for other Speaker 1 (6:12) people's children, take the lives of her own children? Well, Speaker 2 (6:17) we have seen this before. 25 years ago, it was Andrea Yates. Today, it is Lindsay Clancy. And count me among the people who have a strong point of view on this case. I believe that Lindsay Clancy belongs in a psychiatric facility and not in a prison. And I believe that just like the case of Andrea Yates, a jury will eventually see it that way as well. There is no bringing the Clancy children back, but there is real value for parents, for clinicians, for anyone who loves someone who is struggling in understanding how they died. With that, let's get to our story. Speaker 2 (7:05) At 4.02 in the afternoon on Tuesday, January 24th, 2023, Lindsay Clancy was at home in Duxbury, Massachusetts. She was 32 years old. She was a labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her job was to help bring other people's babies into the world. At home, she had three children of her own. Cora was five. Dawson was three. and Callan was eight months old. Her husband, Patrick, was working from home. And by all outward appearances, January 24th was an ordinary Tuesday. That morning, Lindsay had taken Cora to a doctor's appointment. Later, the children played outside in the snow. Lindsay took pictures. She texted some of those pictures to her mother. She sent others to Patrick. Three children, snow. A family going about its day. And then, sometime between late afternoon and early evening, everything changed. At 4.02, Lindsay searched online for information about Children's Miralax. Then she searched for a restaurant in Plymouth. She opened Apple Maps. She checked the drive time. Nothing about those searches by themselves explains what was about to happen. They are the kinds of things a parent might search for on any ordinary afternoon. But later, detectives would reconstruct those minutes. Because once the events of that evening were known, every minute mattered. At 4.47, Lindsay called a CVS pharmacy in Kingston. Six minutes later, Lindsay began texting with Patrick. She called in the family's takeout order. and she added a stop at the pharmacy to the evening's errands. Sometime around 5.15, Patrick pulled out of the driveway. The house was left with Lindsay and the three children inside. At 5.34, Patrick arrived at the pharmacy and had a brief phone conversation with Lindsay. What happened next would take approximately 25 minutes. 25 minutes that would turn a family home into a crime scene. Patrick returned home at approximately six o'clock and something was wrong. The house was silent. He went toward the bedroom, but the door was locked. He forced it open and then he saw blood. Later, Patrick would tell investigators, I just saw blood everywhere and the window was open. Outside the window was Lindsay. She was badly injured. She had cuts on her wrists and neck, and she had fallen from the second-story window. Patrick found her alive. He called 911 immediately. The dispatcher began trying to understand what had happened. Patrick was panicked. There was blood. His wife was outside. And then he asked the question that would change the call. Where were the children? Lindsay answered, in the basement. Patrick went downstairs. and found his three children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan. They were not simply unconscious. They had been strangled. Resistance exercise bands were around their necks. Cora was face down. Callan was nearby. Dawson was in the office. Patrick began trying to save them. He attempted CPR on each child. He moved from one child to another. And somewhere in the chaos, his voice was captured on the 911 recording. A scream, a sentence. She killed the kids. Within minutes, emergency responders began arriving at the house. Police, paramedics, firefighters. The scene that had been a family home only minutes earlier was now filled with first responders. Three children, one critically injured mother, Speaker 1 (11:12) and a husband. trying to understand what he was seeing. Speaker 2 (11:17) At 7.28 that evening, Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead. Callan was still alive. He was flown by helicopter to Boston Children's Hospital in critical condition, and Lindsay was taken to South Shore Hospital. She had survived the fall, but she was catastrophically injured. She had suffered a broken back, broken ribs, and injuries that would leave her paralyzed from the waist down. From this point forward, when Lindsay Clancy appeared in court, she would be in a wheelchair. But on the night of January 24th, there was no courtroom. There was only a hospital bed and a police investigation that was already beginning to move. Because detectives had dead children and a surviving mother. And a question. that would become the central fact of the case. What had happened inside that house? The next day, investigators obtained an arrest warrant for Lindsay Clancy. She was charged with homicide by strangulation and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. The charges concerned the deaths of her children and the attack that had left her critically injured. but one child was still fighting for his life. Eight-month-old Callan remained at Boston Children's Hospital. Doctors were trying to save him. Then, on January 27th, at 11.18 in the morning, Callan died. Three days after his siblings, he was eight months old, and with his death, the case became a triple homicide. On February 7th, Lindsay Clancy appeared for arraignment. not in a courtroom, from her hospital bed. She was still recovering from her injuries. She was still paralyzed, and she was under guard. The proceedings were conducted by Zoom. Lindsay pleaded not guilty. The judge ordered that she be held without bail, and that was the legal beginning of the case. But outside the courtroom, something much bigger was already happening. In Duxbury, people were gathering for vigils. Candles were lit. Flowers were left. The community mourned three children whose lives had ended in their own home. The story was beginning to attract national attention. The state wanted to know what had happened. But there was another question. A question that was not about the evidence. Not yet. It was about the woman lying in that hospital bed. Because the people who knew Lindsay Clancy knew her as a mother, a nurse, a wife, a friend, and a woman who had spent her professional life caring for mothers and newborn babies. And now she was accused of killing her own three children. Then there was the question that continues to hang over the case. Not, what did Lindsay Clancy do? But how did this woman do that? Because the timeline of that night is horrifying. But the timeline that came before it is where this story gets really complicated. Speaker 1 (14:47) James Arthur Ray was a charismatic self-help guru who promised his followers a path to wealth and enlightenment by becoming the best versions of themselves. But not all who followed him finished their journey. After Ray appeared on Oprah, thousands flocked to his events. But what many people didn't know about were his more extreme methods. Methods that pushed his followers to their limits, giving some the transformative experience they envisioned and killing others. For the best Bingeable series, like the one I just told you about, listen to the Audible True Crime podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can get all episodes early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. Speaker 3 (15:34) You stepped out for your morning jog. Except it's not your usual morning jog. You started listening to an epic sci-fi book on Audible. 30 chapters later, you've accidentally run a half marathon. You lost track of how far you've run, somewhere just past