What Lindsay Clancy Had Scheduled The Day Before

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is The Big Breakdown, a long look back at some of the biggest stories we're covering for you at the Hidden Killers Podcast and True Crime Today.
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:16)
Lindsay Clancy doesn't have to prove she was out of her mind. That isn't a technicality, and it isn't a defense lawyer giving you a talking point. In Massachusetts, when a defendant raises lack of criminal responsibility, the burden doesn't move to her. It stays with the Commonwealth. Prosecutors have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was criminally responsible on the day her three children died. Not that she did it. Nobody is arguing that. Her own attorney told the court the circumstances of what happened aren't in dispute. The state has to prove her mind was working well enough to be held to account for it, and it has to prove that to the same standard it would need for a fingerprint or a confession. Twelve women and six men are seated in Plymouth Superior Court. Judge William Sullivan has told them this could run two months. So, when Plymouth County Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham stood up to give the state's opening statement, she wasn't decorating a story the jury already half believed. She was starting from behind, carrying a burden most people follow. Most people following this trial don't know that she's actually carrying. Three weeks before her children died, Lindsay Clancy drove herself to a psychiatric hospital on New Year's Eve and checked herself in. According to the malpractice complaint later filed against her providers, she was not seen by a doctor for three days. She was discharged after five, with no indication from the hospital that she was a danger to anyone.
And what she built, all of it on, was a clock, a phone call that lasted fourteen seconds, is going to do the enormous amount of work in this case that the prosecution needs it to do to prove she's this evil person who is plotting.
Or will it? Or will that that fourteen second call really not do a whole hell of a lot?
There's an appointment on Lindsay Clancy's calendar the day before her children died that never came up in the state's opening at all. She sat with her psychiatrist on January 23rd of 2023, according to the civil litigation. The note from that visit records no change in her mood and quotes her saying she was desperate for something that would work quickly to get her out of the state that she was in. Desperate. 24 hours out.
The state's opening doesn't go anywhere near it because they can't go anywhere near it. Because it would completely destroy their whole theory. There's something about what a not guilty verdict actually does here that the jury may not fully understand yet. Something the Commonwealth has every reason to leave alone. This is where the state plants its flag.

**Shanan Buckingham** (3:34)
Go to 3V and he's going to stop at CBS on the way there. That's when the clock starts, ladies and gentlemen.
The defendant knows that Patrick has to stop at CBS, go to 3V. She knows that it's about five miles from their house to get to the restaurant. She knows approximately how much time she has for him to go there and come back.

**Tony Brueski** (3:59)
That's it. That's the story of premeditation. She knew roughly how long a CVS run takes.
Buckingham told the jury the clock started when Patrick Clancy walked out the door for takeout five miles to the restaurant. A stop on the way for a children's laxative, the pediatrician had recommended that morning for a five-year-old with a stomach ache. The state's argument is that a woman who could estimate that errand was a woman in full possession of herself. The claim underneath it is is also worth saying plainly because the state never says it plainly. The claim is that organization proves sanity. That a mind coming apart can't also keep time.
That isn't what the clinical literature says. In fact, it's actually close to the reverse. Postpartum psychosis shows up in roughly one in two births per thousand. The depressive subtype is the most common of the three. About 41% of the cases in the research. It's also the most dangerous. Clinical sources put the rate of harm to a child in that subtype near four and a half percent. Command hallucinations are a documented feature of the illness, not a story assembled afterwards by a defense team. So are delusions of control, the experience of acting under an outside force. One study of postpartum bipolar psychiatric patients found symptoms of that kind in 62% of them. None of that describes somebody who can't function, describes somebody whose reality has been rewritten while the machinery keeps running on schedule, which brings us back to the phone call. Patrick called from CVS. She missed it. She called back and they talked for 14 seconds. Buckingham told the jury that nothing she said in that call concerned him. 14 seconds, that's the Commonwealth's evidence of a sound mind. It's also about how long it takes to tell your husband, you're fine when formats of professionals have been telling him, you're improving.