Lindsay Clancy's Trial Turned When The State's Witnesses Spoke

**Tony Brueski** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Drake.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
Let's talk about more of the case itself. Eight days of a testimony, actually nine now in the Lindsay Clancy trial. And something strange keeps happening. The prosecution's own witnesses keep describing a wonderful mother, her friends, her nanny, Patrick's own father, then a medical examiner walked the jury through what happened to eight month old Callan and Lindsay sobbed so hard the judge had to stop the trial.
You guys have a lot of questions about this. A lot of questions, a lot of statements coming up over and over. And we're going to try and get to a lot of your questions in this case in this segment. And our next we're going to talk about Nancy Guthrie a little bit too. So that's coming up. So hang out for that. And of course, drop your questions in the comments section as we now kind of move on to the actual trial itself, not the conspiracy that's somehow naturally everything seems to have come along with a conspiracy these days.
It's true though. It feels like every case we cover now is a conspiracy. It just used to be some cases we get a conspiracy. Now it seems like every one.

**Robin Drake** (1:13)
Well, you know why?
The algorithms feed it. That's why they do. People come up with it really to invent it so they can get hits, likes, subscribes and everything else. So if you're a nutter, you get more likes and you make more money. I mean, it really the Google machine supports nutters. That's true.

**Tony Brueski** (1:32)
It does. I mean, if you can come up with a crazy idea and a case, you're going to get people looking at it. She Googled the takeout, sent her husband on the errand and had exactly enough time. This is a comment. I want to believe she was sick, but that looks like a plan to me.
Somebody talk me out of it. Okay. Talk her out of it, Robin.

**Robin Drake** (1:59)
Science is solid. I looked it up again, and Siobhan can speak to it better because she's licensed in this area. But a psychotic break, you can actually do that volume and that amount of pre-planning and still be in a psychotic break. Because when you hear the word psychotic break or psychosis, we're really thinking that it's on brain off.
I think people kind of naturally, their brains go to kind of like schizophrenia. They become someone else.
That's not the way it works. And it's also, as I understand it, it ebbs and flows out of how aggressive it is or how it recedes. And when you're in it, you can be in it for minutes, hours, days or weeks. And it's something added on top. So she was having command hallucinations as part of what she's saying she had, which is part of psychosis, part of this. These command hallucinations, and I look this up, because the real legal battle here is, should she have been reasonably able to make a choice to overcome command hallucinations in the psychotic break? Because that is really what is at stake here. And this is what the real trial is about. Is the choice and understanding of what she was doing was wrong and she had a choice to not do it. And so that's why they're examining these command hallucinations. And so these command hallucinations are added on top of everyday life, so it cannot, for others outside looking in, it does not look like she's in psychosis. Matter of fact, that's why the psychiatrist said she did not present as being in psychosis, even though internally she was in psychosis. And this is what the next group of people on the stand are going to show, and also what is described by her and all the people in her life, because the only thing that would explain the behavior that she had of killing her three kids with all these people saying, what a great wife, mother, not overwhelmed, not trying to get out of being a mother, all these things, the only thing that would explain that would be a psychotic event. And so that's why you can do planning while still in a psychosis doing these horrendous things. And the compulsion that someone feels, and the fear they have of not doing what the command voice says, is that it's that overwhelming, that prevalent, that it's, unless you've ever experienced one yourself or witnessed one in person, I think it's very, and that's why people have a challenge with this one, it's very, very hard to understand exactly how powerful that is and why it actually is a reason for the insanity plea.