The Prosecution Told Lindsay Clancy's Jury Why She Killed Her Children

**Tony Brueski** (0:11)
The prosecution's second rebuttal expert took the stand in Plymouth Superior Court on August 24th and said something the Commonwealth almost certainly did not rehearse. Dr. Kirk Heilbrun is a forensic psychologist. He's testified in roughly 330 cases. The prosecution called him to destroy the insanity defense to tell 12 jurors that Lindsay Clancy wasn't psychotic when she strangled Cora Dawson and Callan in the basement of their Duxbury home on January 24th of 2023 He may have done exactly that, but the explanation he offered the jury instead wasn't exactly a monster. It was a mother. Heilbrun testified that Clancy killed her three children because she loved them.
Not because the voice told her to. Not because she was in the grip of a psychotic episode, because she'd planned to kill herself and couldn't bear the thought of leaving them behind without her. That's the prosecution's theory now. The prosecution has to live with it. The Commonwealth's own expert made the emotional case for conviction a little harder to sell. And then the prosecution reached for the jury's faith for the second time in eight days.
And the judge said, shut it down. And the day ended. Like Gordon Ramsay shutting down a kitchen. He did the same sort of thing. Shut it down.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:49)
What are you doing? The result?

**Tony Brueski** (1:51)
Oh, I'm not. I don't do it. Gordon Ramsay.
Hi, I'm Tony. We're talking about the Lindsay Clancy case. Sure, you're here for that. Love to get your thoughts on the comment section on Substack and YouTube. Links are in the description. And while we're doing so, if you want to follow along at home beyond YouTube, we take the podcast with you right there. There's a QR code on the screen. That QR code will take you to our podcast channels, or actually takes you to our link tree. And there you can select where you want to get your podcast from. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever. Hit subscribe, take us with you, and get the audio anywhere you go. And you don't miss any of our coverage of this case and the many that we're covering for you right here. So check that out. We'll leave that QR code up on the screen. The morning started with the prosecution's first rebuttal witness finishing up Dr. Avram Mack, a forensic psychiatrist retained through Patrick Dietz. An associates had been on the stand since Friday. He appeared via Zoom. Defense Attorney Kevin Reddington had been cross-examining him. And on August 24th, he came back to finish the job. You can almost hear the Mortal Kombat, finish him in the background. Round three, fight. It was kind of like that.
Reddington confronted Mack with the prior case in which a judge reportedly found him unqualified to give testimony. Mack disagreed with that characterization. On redirect, Assistant District Attorney Shannon Buckingham clarified that Mack was paid for his time, regardless of his opinion. Mack's position hadn't moved across two days on the stand. Clancy was suffering from a major depressive episode, not psychosis, according to him. And even psychosis wouldn't necessarily prevent someone from knowing right from wrong. Clancy grinned when Reddington finished. Mack left behind. That's a key thing that they got the expert to admit there, that psychosis doesn't necessarily mean you know the difference between right and wrong.
That's, that's true. That is true. That's, that's kind of how it works. Here's the analogy I've been making. Maybe it helps. Maybe it doesn't. I don't know. Compass, a compass, old school compass, ones that, you know, that on your phone, but like magnetic compass. You don't know what that is, Google it. I'm sorry. The world has failed you so much that you don't know what a compass is. But here, if you knew what a compass is. True North. Now, here's a little thing with compasses. It's, it's, it's governed by magnetic pulse. That's how a compass can tell you where North is, because, because there's invisible magnetic fields that are pulling on our planet. I know. I'm sorry. I'm doing a whole rundown of how compasses work, but in case you're not aware.
Now, there are spots on our planet and there are, there are conditions, things around, there's a sense, can sometimes mess with the compass, mess with the compass is pull. And it makes it think that north is some other direction when it's not. There's, there's natural ways this occurs. There's ways it can be influenced by stuff.
So you can be on the middle of the woods. And if your compass is broken, a could be broken. Or if there's some sort of pull that's that's telling you that north is really not north and you think you're going north. You can go down a path for quite a ways. You can walk the whole day thinking I'm I just I went eight miles north today. Oh my God. And this is great. This is what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm supposed to be going north. And then you find out you're going southwest the whole time when suddenly the pull is released. You get out of that zone where the magnetic pull is telling you your true north is not true north. This is how a compass can work and how someone can be lead astray or the compass is broken and someone can be lead astray in a different direction. But they are fully fledged believers that they are doing the right thing and going down the right path. The argument is from Lindsay Clancy is that she was a full fledged believer that she was doing the right thing by taking the lives of her own children. That that was, that's just what you do in this scenario. It makes no sense. It's horrible, obviously. But when your compass is broken, when your brain is broken, when you're in the state of psychosis, that's how that can happen.