Lindsay Clancy Is on Trial. So Is Postpartum Psychosis.

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**Natalie Kitroeff** (0:35)
From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroeff. This is The Daily. The trial of Lindsay Clancy, a mother who killed her three children, has captivated the country for weeks. Not just because of the horrific nature of the crime, but because of the difficult questions it's raised about how we treat or fail to treat postpartum women who were in crisis. As of Thursday afternoon, Clancy's fate is in the hands of a jury, which is expected to deliver a verdict in the coming days. Today, my colleague Ellen Barry takes us inside the courtroom to understand the stakes of the outcome.
It's Friday, August 28th.
Ellen welcome back to The Daily.

**Ellen Barry** (1:41)
Thank you for having me.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (1:43)
So you have been in the courtroom, I understand, for every day of the Lindsay Clancy trial.
Just talk about why. What drew you to this case initially?

**Ellen Barry** (1:54)
Well, I cover mental health for the Times, and I had the feeling when I read about the crime that it was going to end up revolving around a psychiatric disorder.
This happened in January of 2023 in Duxbury, Massachusetts. I live not far away, and I drove over to the house where the family lived, where the crime occurred. What I found, as one often finds after there's been a terrible loss of life, is that the neighbors had created a kind of a shrine outside this house. They had left squishmallows and Thomas the Tank Engine, and toys for the kids, teddy bears. But what I sort of didn't expect to find is that people were leaving cards and flowers for Lindsay Clancy as well, as if she were another victim in this crime. And it made me wonder whether maybe we are changing sort of in the way we look at mental illness, and in particular, postpartum mental illness in the society.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (3:15)
All right, I wanna talk about the response to this case, but first, can you help us just establish the basic facts of the crime? Tell us who Lindsay Clancy is and what she's accused of doing.

**Ellen Barry** (3:29)
Right, so Lindsay Clancy is a labor and delivery nurse. She lived in Duxbury, this town on the south shore of Massachusetts, with her husband and her three children, Cora, Dawson and Callan. About three, four months after the birth of her third child, she went to a psychiatrist complaining of symptoms like insomnia and anxiety and depression, and started taking an antidepressant in hopes that it would help her get through this period. But over the next three months, despite a long series of prescriptions and seeing quite a few mental health providers, her condition seemed to get worse and worse.
One night at the end of January in 2023, she asked her husband to go out and pick up takeout for them for dinner, and she strangled all three of her children. They were three and five and eight months. Then she went upstairs and tried to die by suicide.
She survived, although she is paralyzed, but the kids did not, and she was charged with three counts of first degree murder.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (4:53)
It's just so terrible. It's hard to imagine a more tragic thing than a mother killing her three children. It's hard to even think about.

**Ellen Barry** (5:06)
Yeah, I think that feeling has really permeated the whole trial.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (5:11)
And Ellen, we should say that those facts, they're not in dispute because Clancy and her lawyers admit that she did this, that she strangled her children.

**Ellen Barry** (5:24)
She has not disputed committing the crime.
She has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. And her defense has been consistently that she committed these actions in a state of psychosis because she heard a voice telling her to do it.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (5:41)
So that's what this trial is about. That's what this trial hinges on.

**Ellen Barry** (5:46)
Correct. The jury will ultimately have to determine whether they believe that she did this in psychosis or whether she knew what she was doing. And if she's found guilty of first degree murder, then she will be sentenced to life without parole, probably in a medical unit. If she is found not guilty by reason of insanity, she will remain where she is at a forensic psychiatric hospital for an undefined period of time.