Patrick Clancy, the father of three children strangled by their mother in January 2023, has remarried and started a new life in New York City, even as Lindsay Clancy's murder trial moves into its defense phase at Plymouth Superior Court in Massachusetts.
The prosecution rested its case Monday after weeks of testimony that walked jurors through the final hours of 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan Clancy. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington immediately began presenting his case, arguing that Lindsay Clancy, 36, was "in the grip of postpartum psychosis when she killed her children" at the family's home in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Neither side disputes that she killed them. The only question before the jury is whether she bears criminal responsibility.
But as the trial grinds forward, Fox News Digital reported that Patrick Clancy, the man who lost all three of his children in a single evening, has moved on in ways few could have predicted. He relocated to New York City in the spring of 2023, just months after the killings. He filed for divorce in February 2024. And in the spring of 2026, he married Dr. Rachel Danis, a fertility doctor, in a ceremony in Central Park.
Patrick Clancy took the stand during the trial and struggled to hold back tears as he described his children. Cora, he said, "was into princesses, and she had a lot of friends. She just liked taking care of people." Dawson "liked the television show 'Paw Patrol'" and was into firefighters and trucks. Callan, the baby, "was just a happy baby."
Reddington acknowledged his client's ex-husband's composure in open court.
"How that guy is not an emotional basket case is beyond me, and he is trying hard to move on with his life. As the court is aware, they're divorced, he's remarried, he has a family."
Reddington also said Patrick "suffered one of the worst tragedies that anyone could ever suffer." That is not a contested point. What the defense wants jurors to understand is that even the man most devastated by these killings has shown grace toward the woman who committed them.
Days after the January 2023 killings, Patrick posted on a GoFundMe page asking the public to forgive Lindsay.
"I want to ask all of you that you find it deep within yourselves to forgive Lindsay, as I have...The real Lindsay was generously loving and caring towards everyone, me, our kids, family, friends, and her patients. The very fibers of her soul are loving. All I wish for her now is that she can somehow find peace."
That statement, written when the grief was still raw, now sits alongside the fact that Patrick has built a new household more than four hours from Duxbury. He works as a business applications sales executive at Microsoft. Dr. Danis reportedly moved into his Upper East Side apartment in 2025, and the couple married the following spring. Breitbart reported that during the trial's second week, audio of Patrick's 911 call was played in court, his voice captured saying, "She killed the kids!" to a dispatcher.
Patrick and Danis have no children together. TMZ reported the couple was spotted at an apartment in Manhattan on August 13, and Patrick previously described Lindsay's "big spiral" in earlier testimony as the trial opened. Men's Journal reported that a shared passion for hiking and fitness brought the couple together.
Lindsay Clancy faces three counts of first-degree murder. Prosecutors argue she planned the attack, noting she sent Patrick out for food and a pharmacy item before using exercise bands to strangle all three children. Cora was declared dead on arrival at the emergency room. Callan, found in cardiac arrest, died three days later.
Prosecutor Shanan Buckingham pushed back against any framing of the case as a referendum on maternal mental health care.
"This is not a public debate about women's mental health and how the medical system treats women."
The defense tells a different story. Reddington's team argues Lindsay suffered from undiagnosed bipolar disorder made worse by a rotating lineup of psychiatric medications in the three months before the killings. According to the defense, she was prescribed 15 different psychiatric medications. The day after her psychiatrist's last appointment, a 17-minute session on January 23, 2023, Lindsay heard a commanding voice telling her to "kill the children so you can kill yourself."
That voice was the subject of psychologist testimony earlier in the trial, and jurors also heard about Lindsay's disturbing internet search history in the days before the killings.
Journal entries from November 2022, two months before the killings, were read in court. In one, Lindsay wrote that she was "completely overwhelmed" and suffering from "horrible insomnia and anxiety." In another, she wrote: "It's like I'm so desperate to get a mental break from taking care of everyone that my mind is trying to make something physically wrong with me." She also wrote, simply: "I want help. I want to be well." The New York Post reported that a forensic psychiatrist who met with Lindsay two days after the killings, while she was still intubated, said she communicated via whiteboard that she felt "horrified."
One of the trial's most striking moments came when Susan Clancy, Patrick's mother and the children's grandmother, testified as a defense witness. She told the court that Lindsay was "begging for help" in the months before the killings and described her as a "wonderful mother" who was "very nurturing, very loving."
Susan Clancy also revealed a text Lindsay sent her on November 30, 2022: "I'm not okay and I'm terrified of taking meds tonight." The Associated Press reported that Susan told jurors, "Lindsay was struggling, we were all concerned."
Criminal defense attorney Donna Rotunno, commenting on the trial for Fox News Digital, noted the emotional weight of Susan Clancy's appearance.
"She is extremely sympathetic to what Lindsay was going through. And if you thought that, you know, anybody would wanna be upset about the loss of their grandchildren, it would be her, correct? She's the father's mother, and she's there supporting Lindsay so much so that she nodded to her as she walked out of the courtroom in this unbelievable, I think, show of humanity."
A clinical and forensic psychologist, Dr. Paul Zeizel, also testified for the defense, telling jurors that psychological testing found no evidence Lindsay was faking or exaggerating psychiatric symptoms. That testimony matters because it directly addresses the prosecution's implicit suggestion that the psychosis defense is a calculated strategy rather than a medical reality.
Earlier trial testimony detailed Lindsay's disturbing internet searches in the period before the killings, painting a picture of a woman in severe crisis, though prosecutors maintain that awareness of her own distress undercuts the claim that she could not distinguish right from wrong.
Sheila Cavanaugh, a board-certified chaplain at Brigham and Women's Hospital, testified Thursday about visiting Lindsay Clancy on January 31, 2023, eight days after the children died. Lindsay told her, "I am so glad my children are safe." Cavanaugh responded that the children were safe in heaven with God, and the two prayed together.
Judge William Sullivan ended court early that Thursday after Cavanaugh's testimony, sending jurors home until Friday. Family members have consistently described Lindsay as someone who was deteriorating visibly and asking for help that never came in adequate form.
The defense's case rests on a straightforward but difficult argument: that a woman drowning in untreated psychosis committed an act she would never have committed in her right mind, and that the medical system failed to catch her before she fell. The prosecution's case is equally direct: she planned it, she executed it, and planning is incompatible with the loss of criminal responsibility.
Patrick Clancy and his family co-founded the Heard Foundation, established in memory of Cora, Dawson, and Callan. Its stated mission is to "change how parents are cared for, so no parent faces perinatal mental illness in silence and no family is left behind." The foundation's work sits in uncomfortable tension with the prosecution's framing. If postpartum psychosis is real enough to build a nonprofit around, the defense will argue, it was real enough to drive what happened in Duxbury.
Dr. Rachel Danis, Patrick's new wife, spoke publicly about her own experiences with fertility pressures in a September 2024 podcast appearance. "I remember when I first froze my eggs, I felt like, I mean, even sometimes still, feel like this black sheep," she said on the "Fertility Forward" podcast. "I think for women, it's just really hard. We have so much pressure to balance career and personal growth."
As jury selection opened earlier this summer, the central tension of this case was already clear: everyone agrees Lindsay Clancy killed her children. The jury must now decide whether she chose to, or whether a broken system left a sick woman alone with the people she loved most.
Three children are dead. Their father has rebuilt. Their mother sits in a courtroom. And the system that was supposed to catch the warning signs has yet to answer for any of it.
