What Prosecutors Made Patrick Clancy Count In Court

**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)
The prosecutor in the LindsayClancy trial asked Patrick Clancy on the stand to describe his children, and he had to stop and take a breath before he could get through it.
Cora was into princesses. She had lots of friends. She just liked taking care of people. Dawson liked trucks and firefighters and Paw Patrol. Callan was eight months old, and his father told the courtroom he was just a happy baby. Patrick Clancy said all of that out loud in Plymouth Superior Court, the witness stand, as a witness for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. His former wife sat at the defense table across the room sobbing. Then the same prosecutor picked up a plastic bag full of that woman's pill bottles and asked him whether he knew how many pills were missing. Lindsay Clancy is charged with three counts of first degree murder in the deaths of Cora, Dawson and Callan in the family's home in Duxbury on January 24th of 2023 She doesn't dispute that she killed them. Her attorney, Kevin Reddington, said so in his opening statement in front of the jury on the record. So this isn't a case about who did it. It's a case about whether she can be held criminally responsible for doing it, which is a different question and a much harder one. If the jury finds she wasn't criminally responsible, she doesn't walk out the front door of that courthouse. She goes to a state mental hospital facility or back to one really. And doctors decide periodically whether she's ever safe to leave. That's where she wants to be. That's what she's requested all along, to be locked in a mental facility for the rest of her life. Twelve women and six men are going to make that decision. The judge told them to plan on six to eight weeks in a witness list running to nearly 200 names. Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham opened by telling those jurors exactly what kind of person she believes they're looking at, controlling, meticulous, manipulative, not a woman in the throes of psychosis, Buckingham said, but a woman who acted intentionally, rationally and swiftly, despite that there being no actual evidence for that.
Then she told those jurors one more thing. This isn't a public debate about women's mental health and how the medical system treats women, she said, this case is about this defendant. No, it's actually 1000% about that because the actions that defendant took are directly corresponding, connected, related to, connected at the hip to women's mental health and how the medical system treated this specific woman and countless others out there. So again, you're wrong on that little factor.
Ms. Prosecutor, there's a number Patrick Clancy gave investigators. It explains why he later hired a lawyer and sued his wife's doctors. The Commonwealth's very first witness was the father of the three children. Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague walked him through the marriage, the three pregnancies, the maternity leaves, the babysitters and the anxiety that showed up every time Lindsay had to go back to her job as a labor and delivery nurse. Then Sprague entered a bag holding nine prescription bottles into evidence and started reading him the counts. Seven pills gone from Zoloff prescription filled in September of 22, six out of thirty gone from an Addamon prescription filled in October of 26, and a bottle with two pills gone, a bottle with three, a bottle nobody had opened at all. Then there were a lot of pills prescribed, the prosecutor said, but not a lot of pills taken, correct? He answered, no, I think the context is important. He pointed out there had been dosage adjustments made.
On the rest of it, he was blunt. He wasn't keeping track of the number of pills taken out of each bottle. The argument the state is making with that bag is straightforward enough. You can't blame the medication for what happened if you weren't swallowing the medication.
But she was taking the medication. Not as prescribed. I don't know if that helps your argument of her being in control if she's taking medication, on and off medication, having been misdiagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder when she was really suffering from bipolar 1 and postpartum psychosis. And then we're mixing a cocktail of medicines willy-nilly in the mix from a brain that is telling her don't take this and hearing voices saying kill your children. Yeah, you know, you're not going to get exactly the greatest decision-making power going on here. And you're the one that has to argue that she had great decision-making power here. What are you arguing, state?