What Lindsay Clancy Did the Minute Her Husband Walked Out

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Drake.

**Tony Brueski** (0:09)
Let's talk about one more case, this one going to trial here.
Lindsay Clancy's murder trial, it is starting jury selection beginning. A Massachusetts mother charged with strangling all three of her children while her husband was out picking up dinner that she sent him to get. The prosecution says she checked Apple Maps to time his drive and committed the crimes then. The defense says she was buried under nine medications and hearing a voice that told her to take her children with her. Jennifer Coffindaffer, retired FBI special agent, along with us today and Robin Drake, retired FBI special agent. This is a case that has a lot of people divided. I think a lot of people are divided based on life experience, quite honestly, of dealing with folks who've had postpartum, whether them being themselves or someone they care about, and understanding just how volatile and scary and horrible that is. And folks who've dealt with the mental health industry and maybe been prescribed cocktails of drug after drug after drug after a nice five-minute consultation. Here, take this, see if it works for you. Oh, didn't work? Try that. And know, again, another story of systems, medical systems, not communicating about what they are giving the single human being that they're caring for. Lindsay Clancy's lawyer offered to formally admit that she killed all three of the kids if the judge would split the trial into guilt and sanity phases. She's not arguing that she did it. She knows she did it. She's saying that she wasn't in the right mental state. Is anybody in the right mental state after taking that kind of a cocktail of drugs and your body doing what it does in the postpartum psychosis state? That that many say that she was in does where do you think this goes Jen when this this gets to the courtroom?

**Jennifer Coffindaffer** (2:04)
This is my issue with this. Okay.

**Tony Brueski** (2:06)
Yeah.

**Jennifer Coffindaffer** (2:10)
Women know that there are issues with postpartum, right? We've all seen stories. We all are educated about that by our doctors that listen, this could happen to you and you could have this child and want to kill the child because that's what postpartum, you're depressed, you don't want this child, don't want anything to do with that. And we're educated about that.

**Tony Brueski** (2:31)
Yeah.

**Jennifer Coffindaffer** (2:32)
So I'll never forget this conversation my husband had with me before our first child.
You know, we had a niece that had it and it was bad, really bad. And he just looked at me and he's a man of few words and he said, if you feel like killing our son, can you just let me know? And I'll make sure to kind of get him out of the picture. Of course, I mean, I fell in love. I wrote a poem. The only time I've ever been published was a poem about I never knew love before I had my son. And what my point is, is we are talking about from A to Z and we're only talking about Z.
We're talking about after all these prescription drugs, blah, blah, blah. What happened to A? What happened to realizing you have an issue and steps being taken to either get the child out of that situation or otherwise protect the children? You know why nobody ever speaks for the children? Children have no voice. In the case we just discussed prior to this, they have no voice and that is why it's easy to trample and everything. So in my opinion, this, the mother who realized she had a problem, she went to Z and then ended up killing. What happened in between?

**Tony Brueski** (3:51)
She went to A, B, C, D, E, F and G.
She did. She tried to get help. The doctors kept giving her new cocktails of medicine. I guess the only thing that could, I guess the argument could be made, well, if she's in this sort of state, remove the kids from the house, have them go somewhere else, have dad move, but that's not necessarily a realistic option for most people. It's not like she sat there and said, this is me, deal with it. She did take so many steps. She is the shining example of someone who raised her hand gazillions of times and was failed by the system, and the medications screwed her up even more, and then this was the result. Then the system turns around and says, well, it's your fault.

**Robin Drake** (4:45)
I get teary every time I think about this case. This is one of the most, I hate covering cases like this too, and I know a lot of viewers are saying the same thing. Because outside of the dad being able to step in to Jen's point and just take the kids away for years, I mean, it's like, when's the end state on that? And you don't know, because you think everything's good.