Patrick Clancy Was Still Screaming When Police Came Back

**Tony Brueski** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
Jennifer Stratton told the jury, she used her thumbs. She's a Duxbury firefighter and paramedic. And on the night of January 24th of 2023, she ended up in the basement of a house on Summer Street, doing chest compressions on an eight month old baby named Callan Clancy. You don't use your palms on a baby that size, you use your thumbs. That's the technique. And she said it out loud in the court room in Plymouth because the prosecutor asked her to describe what she did. Kevin Reddington objected to her describing it. Judge William Sullivan let her answer. That exchange took about 15 seconds on the third day of the testimony in Lindsay Clancy's murder trial. And it settled more about how this case is being tried than anything else in the room. Reddington wasn't objecting to the fact. He's never disputed the fact. He was objecting to a jury having to sit inside it. He lost. He was always going to lose it. He's already lost the bigger version of that same argument before the trial started and he'd lose it twice more before lunch. What you need going in is less than you'd think because the strange thing about this trial is how little of it is actually contested. Lindsay Clancy is 35 She worked as a labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital. She does not deny that she killed her three children, Cora, who was five, Dawson, who was three and Callan, who was eight months old. Her own lawyer put it on the record before opening statements. In the circumstances of the act, he said, are not in dispute. What's in dispute is her mind.
Her defense is lack of criminal responsibility. Her lawyers say she was in postpartum psychosis and that she heard a voice telling her this was her last chance. Prosecutors allege she acted deliberately and meticulously and that she was coherent in functioning in the days before and that she is criminally responsible. A murder conviction means life without parole. Finding of not criminally responsible means committed to a state mental health facility. Two questions and only one of them is live. The third day of the testimony we spent entirely on the settled one, CBS News Boston counted ten first responders on the stand that day, officers, firefighters, EMTs, paramedics. They came up one after another and told the jury what they walked into. Duxbury officer Stephen Hall was among the first to get there and he found Lindsay Clancy in the backyard in the snow, drifting in and out of consciousness. After going out a second floor window, Hall testified that none of the cuts on her wrist or her neck were actively bleeding. Hold on to that detail, it sounds like scenery, it isn't scenery.
On the stand, Hall took his glasses off and wiped his eyes. The Boston Globe reported that he spoke haltingly and struggled to keep his composure. That's three years later, under oath in a courtroom in Plymouth. Then he heard Patrick Clancy start screaming from inside the house. Officer Brian Josephine had been dispatched separately and he was standing over Lindsay in the yard when the screaming started. He and Hall went in, I can't wake them up, I can't get them up, Patrick told them. According to Josephine's testimony, they went down to the basement where Patrick told them what his wife had done. Josephine testified that of the three children, only Callan had a pulse at all and it was faint. Based on my training experience from previous incidents, I knew it wasn't going to be good, Josephine said. He picked Dawson up chest to chest and carried him out of the house to an ambulance. Then he went back inside down the stairs again and took over chest compressions on Cora. Officer Vincent Cahill came in behind him, found Patrick in the basement and got pointed to the left. Cahill testified that he found two children there and that neither one had a pulse. He started dragging furniture out of the way so the paramedics coming down the stairs would have room to work. Then he did rescue breaths on Cora with a bag valve mask. Later he was posted at the door to log everybody going in and out. Fire Captain PJ Hussie was working at a 24-hour shift at that moment in time. He was outside the house when he heard a scream and he looked through a basement window. I saw a male who I now know is Patrick Clancy unwrapping something from a child's head, Hussie testified. He said he learned later that child was Dawson. It turned very chaotic very quickly, Hussie said, as more ambulances came in. Jennifer Statton and her partner Patrick Dwyer pulled up to a scene where another crew was already kneeling over Lindsay in the backyard. Somebody yelled at them to get inside. They went to the basement and found Cora and Callan on the floor. Dwyer went to Cora Statton, Stratten went to Callan. Dwyer testified that Cora's skin looked pale. He gave her CPR down there, tried to defibrillate her and went working on her in the ambulance to Beth Israel. Stratten did compressions on Callan with his thumbs. Then in his own words, she scooped him up in his arms, carried him out of that basement and rode with him to the hospital. Neither child ever started breathing. Loring Nudd, who goes by Chuck, is retired now. He was a Duxbury firefighter, an EMT then. He was pulling a stretcher out of an ambulance in the driveway when an officer came running out of the house carrying Dawson. They put the boy on the stretcher and started CPR. He wasn't breathing. Nudd hauled equipment down to the basement for the other two, then drove the ambulance to the hospital in Plymouth with Dawson in the back. He was on the stand about ten minutes. Nobody crossed examined him at all. Captain Keith Nettie was off to do that day and got called in because of what it was. He testified that they worked on Dawson with intubation, CPR, epinephrine, and that the boy still had no pulse in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Somewhere in the middle of all of it Josephine went back upstairs and found Patrick in the kitchen. He was still frantic, kind of in shock. Josephine testified, still screaming and losing himself. They called for a second ambulance for him. Nobody files a motion about that. There's no ruling to make on it, but the state's own witnesses spent a morning establishing under oath that the house produced more casualties than the three in the basement. The man they were loading into that second ambulance had been on this same witness stand a few days earlier describing the same night. Reddington saw all of this coming from a long way off. Before opening statements, he moved to Caffett. One police officer, one firefighter, one EMT, anything past that, he argued, stops being evidence and starts being volume, starts being his show, starts being his circus. He was careful about how he said it. He told Sullivan he wasn't trying to minimize the horror of what happened in that house. Piling on responders, he argued, there's no purpose other than to inflame the jury. In the same stretch of argument, he called what the district attorney's office was building a circus. That's a defense attorney doing defense attorney things. And of course, he wants less of this in front of a jury, but he wasn't inventing the problem. He'd sat through the grand jury, where by his account, firefighter after firefighter gave the same rendition of the same scene. He'd also tried to split the trial in two so a jury could decide the act first and the mental health evidence second without one bleeding into the other. And about those same first responders, he said this, what these people went through is just horrific. Sprague's answer was stronger than the defense wanted it to be. She told Sullivan the Commonwealth didn't pick any of this. The Commonwealth did not choose the number of victims. The defendant did, she said. The Commonwealth did not choose the ages of the victims. The defendant did. Trimming the witness list, she argued, doesn't just shorten the morning. It means dropping the testimony about one of the three children. Then she turned towards Reddington and invited him to tell her, which of these children don't matter.