Lindsay Clancy Trial: Prosecution's Psychologist Just Undercut the Insanity Defense

**Tony Brueski** (0:00)
This is live courtroom coverage of the trial of Lindsay Clancy from the Hidden Killers podcast in True Crime Today. Now, back to the courtroom.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:12)
Thank you, Your Honor. Doctor, before we broke, you were describing the various psychological tests that you conducted on Ms. Clancy. Can you tell us the results of those tests?

**Kirk Heilbrun** (0:22)
Yes, I can. On the MMPI, which I spoke about first, and this was, of course, three-and-a-half years after the alleged offense. So, it's going to describe, much of it is going to describe her thinking and feeling and behavior in April of 2026 rather than January of 2023 But it's something that's always a challenge when you try to reconstruct what happened some time ago, and so some of these tests were administered from the standpoint of what was it like for you back then. But the MMPI was delivered in terms of how you're doing right now. And she, on the response style scales that I talked about earlier, she showed a slight tendency to underreport, to deny unusual experiences, although she did that in a way that was pretty sophisticated. She's a bright woman. And so given this, we kind of take into account a little bit the fact that she might be underreporting a little bit in terms of what's really wrong with her. However, there are a number of what we call clinical scales on this test, and she was not elevated on any of them, meaning that she's not actively symptomatic in many areas or in great distress in certain ways. But there was one scale that is elevated, and that is the suicide and death ideation scale, thinking about suicide and death. And I should say that Ms. Clancy has been on one-to-one suicide precautions, which is the highest level of precautions that a hospital can take, since she came to Tewksbury. This is a very long time to be on that kind of precautions. And what it says to me is that she was at risk for suicide, she remains at risk for suicide, and so she still is. The Adverse Childhood Experience Questionnaire I mentioned earlier, basically it's a measure of whether somebody is reporting, experiencing as a child or adolescent, adverse or traumatic events. And she was not. So she had a zero on that. There were two measures of suicide intent. One is called Beck's Suicide Intent Scale, and the other is called the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale. And I can sum up those results very quickly by saying that when she responded to one of them as she would have if she'd been filling it out in January of 2023, what it suggested is that this was a very serious suicide attempt at that time. And when she responded to both of them as she feels right now, she also was indicating that she remains at high risk for suicide, and hence the one-to-one supervision for three and a half years.
The brief symptom inventory is something where you ask people about a number of possible symptoms that they've been experiencing within the last month or so. I gave it to her under two circumstances. One is, how are you doing right now? That is around April of this year. And the other was, how were you doing in January of 2023?
Her description of how she was doing in January of 2023 is that she endorsed feeling blue or still extremely depressed, feeling no interest in things, thoughts of death or dying, feeling hopeless about the future, feeling very self-conscious with others, and the idea that something is wrong with her mind. She thought depression, suspiciousness, memory problems, problems with attention and concentration, and things like she was having trouble concentrating, so she'd be cooking, for instance, and she'd forget what step she was on. So most of these are consistent with symptoms of depression. So I thought that they were good indications that she was endorsing feelings of depression, although she was improving somewhat from her December feelings.
Something called the Obsessional Beliefs Questionnaire has three scales. One scale is kind of responsibility threat estimation, which is a belief about your personal responsibility and overestimation of threats. She was not elevated on that. A second was perfectionism and certainty. She was not elevated on that either, although she is, she works hard and so on, but she was not elevated on the perfectionist aspect of this test right now. However, she was elevated on something called importance and control of thoughts, meaning that for her, it's always been important to be able to work hard and control what's going on with her mind and her life. And one of the things that I'm going to talk about in a few minutes that I think was making her depressed and hopeless and sad and so on, is that she had been trying very hard since October to, to basically control the problems that she was having and it wasn't working. It was not succeeding for her. Okay, and then there was something called the Lohenny Slade Hallucination Scale. And so she endorsed the following things. Sometimes a passing thought will seem so real it frightens me. Sometimes I get distracted trying to concentrate on my work. That was something she endorsed back in 22 and 23