What Lindsay Clancy's Chaplain Left Out of Her Notes

**Tony Brueski** (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.

**Tony Brueski** (0:20)
On January 31st of 2023, Lindsay Clancy woke up in a hospital bed at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She had just been taken off a breathing tube, and she was paralyzed from the jump that was supposed to kill her. A chaplain named Sheila Cavanaugh sat beside her and held her hand in this moment of chaos. I don't know any other way to express it. Clancy's first words, I'm so glad that my children are safe. Seven days earlier, she had strangled all three of them. Cavanaugh did not correct her. She answered the way a chaplain answers, telling Lindsay her children were safe and in heaven with God. Then the two of them prayed.
On the seventeenth day of the Clancy murder trial, that hospital room went in front of the jury and the testimony took about twenty minutes. Those twenty minutes handed the jury the question. This whole case turns on. What do twelve people have to believe about this woman to decide the voice in her head was never real? Because that's what the prosecution certainly wants. They want you to believe that is a fabrication. Okay, well, let's play a little game of how do we get there. Kavanaugh testified that Clancy talked about a voice, a male voice, persistent with the command, kill the children and then herself. If she didn't obey, the voice told her neither she nor the children would be safe. Kavanaugh said, Clancy, return to it across multiple visits. Then Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague stood up and landed the end of the day. Kavanaugh kept notes on her visits. The notes covered her interactions, her thoughts, her feelings. And Sprague asked whether the notes ever once recorded Clancy saying she heard a voice or what that voice said.
And Kavanaugh answered, correct, never once, not in the notes. That's a real point. And it deserves straight treatment. A witness described years of conversations about a voice and in her own paperwork never mentions it. Sprague's job is to find gaps like that. And then she found this one with a single question. This is the job of an attorney, of a prosecutor, of a defense attorney, whatever role you're playing, you're looking for gaps. The gap matters because of who the burden or who carries the burden in this courtroom. Nobody disputes what happened inside the house on January 24th of 2023, except people on the Internet who seem to know better. The defense agrees Lindsay Clancy is the one behind this. She strangled Cora Dawson and Callan with exercise bands. The only question left in this trial is the condition of her mind while she did it. That's really what is on trial here. Massachusetts law puts that question on the prosecution. This is important. Clancy raised a lack of criminal responsibility defense, which is the legal name for an insanity defense. And once she raised it, she stopped having to prove anything. She's not the one who has to prove she was in a psychotic state. It's now the state, the Commonwealth, has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was criminally lucid, having an ordinary Tuesday. Everything was good and fine. And if you've been watching the trial, pretty much every piece of evidence has shown her brain was nowhere near a condition of just another Tuesday and she's just completely with it. That means proving she had no mental disease at all, or proving that even sick, she still understood the wrongfulness of what she was doing and could have stopped herself. That's what they have to prove on the state's part. Prove a woman wasn't psychotic beyond a reasonable doubt. The voice sits at the center of that fight. So the state has to convince 12 jurors, or 18 actually in this case, the voice was never real. There are only two roads to get to that conclusion. Road one, the chaplain can't be trusted. And let's take a look at who that road runs through. Kavanaugh visited Clancy about 14 times at the hospital, then kept coming back on her own. Roughly 200 visits at Tewksbury Hospital across three years. Nobody pays her to testify. She isn't a hired expert building a report for either side. And by her own account, she wasn't there to evaluate anyone. She also acknowledged that parts of what a patient tells a chaplain stay confidential. So this whole gotcha thing is kind of like going to a priest and saying, well, what did they tell you in confession?