Defense attorneys hammered Lindsay Clancy's psychiatrist over video-only appointments, limited experience, and medication choices in the months before the Massachusetts mother strangled her three young children, raising sharp questions about whether anyone in her care team grasped how far she had fallen.
Kevin Reddington, the defense attorney for the 35-year-old former labor and delivery nurse, spent much of Monday's proceedings at Plymouth County Superior Court in Plymouth, Massachusetts, pressing Dr. Jennifer Tufts on the quality of psychiatric care she provided from September 2022 through January 2023. Tufts treated Clancy exclusively through video appointments during that entire stretch. She never saw her patient in person, not once, until the two came face to face in the courtroom.
Day 10 of the trial laid bare a troubling picture: a young mother cycling through medications, reaching out for help through multiple channels, and slipping through every safety net the mental health system was supposed to provide. On January 24, 2023, Clancy strangled her three children, Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months, in the basement of the family's home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and then attempted to take her own life. She faces three counts of first-degree murder and life in prison without parole if convicted.
Clancy does not deny the killings. Her defense rests on a single claim: that severe, undiagnosed postpartum psychosis, made worse by the medications prescribed to her, rendered her not criminally responsible.
The cross-examination cut at the foundation of Tufts's care. Reddington zeroed in on the telehealth-only format, asking the psychiatrist whether she had ever offered Clancy even basic human comfort. Tufts finished her psychiatric residency in July 2022 and entered private practice just one month before Clancy's first appointment, a timeline that raises its own questions about her familiarity with severe postpartum conditions.
"Did you give her a hug?" Reddington asked. "Oh no, you were on telehealth so you couldn't, could you?"
Tufts acknowledged the limitation but pushed back.
"I couldn't give her a hug but that's not something psychiatrists normally do with patients."
The exchange was pointed, but Reddington's sharpest questions went to what Tufts knew, and what she missed. At Clancy's first appointment on September 15, 2022, the patient reported anxiety and insomnia. Tufts prescribed Zoloft, a common antidepressant. When Clancy returned on October 20, she reported crying all day, brain fog, racing thoughts, anxiety, and paranoia about developing suicidal thoughts. Tufts told her to stop the medication immediately.
Reddington pressed on the Zoloft decision, asking why Tufts would prescribe a drug with insomnia as a known side effect to a postpartum woman already unable to sleep. Tufts called it a "first-line medication for people with anxiety" and said individual responses to drugs vary widely.
The trial has already heard testimony about Clancy's deteriorating mental state in the weeks and months before the killings, including from her ex-husband Patrick Clancy, who described watching her condition worsen.
One of the most damaging moments of Monday's testimony came when Reddington asked Tufts whether she knew Clancy had confessed to her then-husband Patrick that she was having thoughts of harming her children. Tufts said she did not.
"No. If I heard that I would have been very concerned."
Reddington followed up: "You would have called DCF, right", referring to the Department of Children and Families, the state child-welfare agency.
Tufts hedged: "I might have."
That gap, between what Clancy was experiencing and what her psychiatrist knew, sits at the center of the defense strategy. Five doctors wrote Clancy a combined 30 prescriptions for 13 psychiatric medications in the four months leading up to the killings. Clancy sought help through outpatient providers, a suicide hotline, an emergency room, and a psychiatric hospital, but her condition kept getting worse.
Reddington told Tufts it should surprise her that Clancy called a suicide hotline "not once but twice, and was turned away." Tufts said it did surprise her. The defense attorney also established that Clancy had been afraid to take prescribed medications. Tufts confirmed that Clancy told her she was scared to take Buspirone, an anti-anxiety drug, and that Tufts had advised her of risks including "sedation or dizziness."
By December 1, 2022, Clancy was telling Tufts she was close to the edge. Tufts testified that Clancy "denied feeling suicidal but she was close to feeling suicidal. She was fearful of eventually having those kinds of thoughts." Tufts said she was concerned and provided "some therapies."
Two weeks later, on December 16, Clancy appeared on a video call with Tufts. Patrick Clancy was also present. Clancy told her psychiatrist she had gone to Mass General Hospital with suicidal thoughts and was feeling "hopeless." Tufts recommended a partial hospitalization program at Women and Infants Hospital in Rhode Island.
The day before the killings, Tufts had an appointment with Clancy and concluded she was neither homicidal nor suicidal. Less than 24 hours later, three children were dead.
After Reddington wrapped up cross-examination of Tufts, nurse practitioner Julie Paul took the stand. Paul started the perinatal clinic at South Shore Hospital in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and began treating Clancy around Thanksgiving 2022.
Paul told the jury that Clancy reported she couldn't sleep, a symptom Paul described as "very typical" for postpartum mothers. Paul prescribed the antidepressant Prozac on November 21, 2022, and told Clancy to continue taking Ativan, a benzodiazepine she was already on. Four days later, Clancy couldn't tolerate the Prozac. Paul pulled her off it and prescribed Mirtazapine, also known as Remeron, along with a one-time dose of Ambien for sleep. She also switched Clancy from Ativan to Klonopin, another benzodiazepine.
The murder trial has drawn national attention since jury selection, in part because of the broader questions it raises about how the medical system handles postpartum psychiatric emergencies.
On November 29, Clancy messaged Paul about a panic attack. Paul wrote back and told her to take Ativan, go for a run, and enroll in the Women and Infants Hospital partial hospitalization program, the same program Tufts would recommend weeks later. Paul is expected to face questioning from Clancy's defense attorney when testimony resumes.
Patrick Clancy has also filed suit against his former wife's doctors, claiming they "overmedicated" her. Lindsay Clancy sued Dr. Tufts for malpractice in January. Tufts, for her part, testified during cross-examination that she does not believe she was negligent.
Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague asked Tufts directly on the stand: "Did you see signs of psychosis in any of your interactions with Lindsay?" Tufts answered with a single word: "No."
Clancy appeared despondent in court Monday, sitting with her chin in her hands, her eyes and nose red. Her parents, Paula and Mike Musgrove, have been present at Plymouth County Superior Court for most days of the trial. The jury was released around 3:45 p.m.
The defense's strategy is clear: paint a picture of a woman who asked for help at every turn and was failed by a system that cycled her through drugs and video calls while her mind fractured. The prosecution's task is to show that Clancy, despite her suffering, acted with deliberate intent. Earlier in the trial, jurors heard the 911 call Patrick Clancy made after discovering his children, and prosecutors presented evidence that Lindsay Clancy sent her husband out for takeout food and pharmacy medication before the killings, a sequence they argue was a deliberate ploy to get him out of the house.
Patrick Clancy testified that he "didn't know what psychosis was until after this happened." His ex-wife had kept daily handwritten notes tracking her medications and mood, repeatedly writing "horrible thoughts", notes the defense introduced to show a woman aware of and struggling against her own deterioration.
High-profile murder trials routinely test the boundaries of courtroom procedure and public attention. Recent cases have sparked debates over courtroom access and transparency, and the Clancy trial is no exception, with every day of testimony drawing intense scrutiny.
The facts so far present a system that processed Lindsay Clancy through appointments, prescriptions, and referrals without anyone putting the full picture together. Whether that failure excuses what happened in that Duxbury basement is the question the jury will have to answer. But the record that emerged Monday, video-only visits, a psychiatrist who never knew her patient was thinking about hurting her children, and a medication carousel that spun faster as Clancy got worse, is a record that should trouble anyone who believes the system is supposed to catch people before they fall.
Three children are dead. Somebody failed them. The jury's job is to decide who bears the legal responsibility. The rest of us can already see that the safety net had holes big enough to lose a family through.
