On December 6, 2022, Lindsay and Patrick Clancy sat down together in an office at South Shore Health’s perinatal behavioral health program.
The nurse practitioner across from them was Rebecca Jollotta. She had been treating Lindsay for about a week. Lindsay told her that her insomnia had begun after she took Zoloft, which had kept her awake for forty-eight straight hours. Jollotta thought that was an unusual way to react to that drug. That reaction suggested something underneath the anxiety and the depression that had been treated with prescriptions since September. She raised the possibility of an underlying bipolar disorder.
What happened next is in the record because Jollotta described it from the witness stand.
“I recall Patrick saying, ‘My wife is not bipolar.’”
And then: “Lindsay looked at me; she did not say anything.”
Lindsay Clancy was a labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General, on leave since Callan was born and expected back. She had spent her working life in a hospital with women in the first days after they gave birth.
That was the appointment where Jollotta raised the dose of the Seroquel she had started her on days earlier, and recommended that Lindsay be hospitalized. That recommendation was the first of three she would make in ten days, each one more urgent than the last. None of them was taken.
Nearly four years later, that exchange was put in front of a jury, and it was the Commonwealth that put it there. In a case that needed the deaths of Cora, Dawson and Callan Clancy to be a choice rather than an illness, a husband refusing a diagnosis is a useful thing to have in evidence.
That is one reading of what happened in that room.
On September 4, a jury in Plymouth Superior Court told Judge William Sullivan it could not reach a verdict, and he declared a mistrial. Those twelve people had been given five weeks of testimony and more than seventy witnesses. They had forensic experts for both sides, four of whom had examined Lindsay Clancy in person.
The experts disagreed. They had her medical records, her text messages and her search history, laid out side by side in a way nobody living through it ever had them. They deliberated for seven days. Their notes told the judge they were split eleven to one. Nine women, three men. Kevin Reddington, Lindsay’s attorney, said the eleven were for a verdict of not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. He asked Judge Sullivan twice to remove the holdout and was refused, then petitioned a single justice of the Supreme Judicial Court to stop the mistrial and was refused again.
And they knew how it ended.
Most of the coverage of this trial has presented it as a fight over whether Lindsay’s postpartum psychosis was real. That is not what it was. Avram Mack, one of the forensic psychiatrists the Commonwealth called, agreed that Lindsay Clancy was severely mentally ill. The disagreement that hung the jury was legal, not diagnostic.
Some people believe that there is no circumstance under which a mother killing her three children can be excused, and that no punishment is sufficient. That is a coherent moral position, held by reasonable and decent people. It is also not the question anyone in that jury box was asked.
An insanity defense does not ask a juror to decide whether an act was justifiable. Nobody in that courtroom, on either side, thought that what happened to Cora, Dawson and Callan was anything but monstrous. The question put to those twelve people was narrower and colder than that: whether, at the moment she did it, this woman met a legal standard written by a legislature.
He Had Known Her for Years. Jollotta Had Known Her for a Week.
The prosecution’s version of those five words is that Patrick Clancy stood between his wife and the diagnosis that might have saved his children.
The trouble with it is the arithmetic of the people who knew her.
A witness is someone standing outside a thing with a clear view of it. That is what the word means, and it describes nobody in the Clancy house. Patrick was being asked, in an office, by a clinician he had met once, to accept that the woman he had been married to for years was not the person he understood her to be. Refusing that is not obstruction. It is what being inside it looks like.
A family has years of a person to go on, and that continuity is exactly what makes an illness invisible from where they stand. Lindsay was still recognizably Lindsay. She still cooked. She still got the children where they needed to be. A husband watching his wife move through an ordinary afternoon has her whole history set against one strange sentence from last week. The history is not wrong. It has just stopped being the better guide.
A clinician gets one appointment and the history the patient gives her. That is a worse view of a person in every way except the one that turned out to matter.
One person had the years and the training. Allison Ozga is Lindsay’s sister. She is also a licensed social worker, trained to recognize exactly this, and a mandated reporter in her working life. She saw Lindsay at Thanksgiving and found her mood and her energy well off baseline. She saw her once more, at Cora’s birthday party in January, and after that only by text. She testified that there was no point between January 1 and January 24 when she was concerned enough about her sister or the children to file a report.
From the witness stand, Ozga described her sister at the January birthday party as going through the motions, tired, still struggling. Ozga is a licensed social worker. She had known Lindsay her whole life. On January 7, she saw what Patrick saw.
I have spent thirty years assessing people I did not know before the day I evaluated them, and the advantage is not insight. It is distance. Every person watching Lindsay Clancy that winter was watching from inside their own relationship with her. None of them could see her the way a stranger with a chart sees her.
They knew what Lindsay was like before. What they heard were yes-or-no questions. Was she bipolar? Had she ever been suicidal?
Seven Clinicians, Four Health Systems, Four Months
Callan was born in May. The summer was good. She was exercising again and running road races, and six weeks after the birth she posted that she was feeling dialed in, that nutrition and mindset and exercise had made all the difference. The people around her remember energy and enthusiasm.
That summer is where Phillip Resnick, the forensic psychiatrist the defense called, would later put the beginning of the illness. He diagnosed bipolar II, which requires a stretch of elevated mood and energy somewhere ahead of the depression, and what he found in those months was mild mania. Avram Mack read the same records and found no mania or hypomania anywhere in them, which is why he did not diagnose bipolar disorder at all.
One describes a woman recovering well from a third birth. The other describes the first phase of the illness the defense argued was still running in January. They are describing the same summer.
By the middle of September, Lindsay was seeing a psychiatrist named Jennifer Tufts, who diagnosed generalized anxiety disorder and prescribed Zoloft. She was breastfeeding and worried about what the drug would reach, so she waited about a month and began taking it in mid-October.
October 20. An early morning text to her mother, later read to the jury.
“Mom, will you please come up and stay with me for a bit?”
“I’m really sick. Something is wrong.”
She wrote that she had horrible insomnia all night and did not know how she was going to get through the day, that the medicine her doctor had prescribed for anxiety had made things worse, and that it was really scary and she did not want to be alone.
Paula Musgrove got in her car in Connecticut and drove to Massachusetts that day. By her account, it was also a day Lindsay went to an emergency room.
November 16. An emergency room, after roughly two days without sleep. Trazodone. It did not help.
November 20. She called her mother-in-law. Susan Clancy had been a labor and delivery nurse for thirty-eight years, and what Lindsay described to her was insomnia, no appetite, anxiety, sadness. Susan referred her into South Shore Health’s perinatal behavioral health program, and a nurse practitioner named Julie Paul called Lindsay the same day. Susan Clancy testified that her daughter-in-law was begging for help.
Thanksgiving. Her sister saw the change.
November 29. Rebecca Jollotta took over the case from Paul.
November 30. Lindsay texted her mother-in-law that she was not okay, that she was terrified to take her medication that night, that she had never been this depressed before, and that she believed the medication had brought it on.
December 6, 12, and 15. Three recommendations: hospitalization, then a partial hospitalization program, then inpatient care. On the last of those days, she went to the emergency room at Massachusetts General, the hospital where she worked, and she declined admission.
Somewhere in that stretch, she called a crisis line. She called twice, and both times she was told there was nothing they could do for her, because she did not have a plan to kill herself. The line said it would send her resources. Her therapist testified that as far as she knew, they never arrived.
Between September and January, Lindsay Clancy was treated by a psychiatrist; two nurse practitioners and a therapist at a perinatal behavioral health program; two psychiatrists on an inpatient unit; and a psychiatrist at a postpartum day program. Seven clinicians in all, spread across Aster Mental Health, South Shore Health, McLean, and Women and Infants Hospital in Rhode Island. Inside her own family, a labor and delivery nurse and a licensed social worker.
She said it out loud, to all of them. She told her mother she was really sick. She told her mother-in-law she had never been this depressed. She told seven clinicians she could not sleep and that the medicine was making it worse.
She Sat Them Down in the Kitchen
Sometime that December, on a date nobody at the trial could pinpoint, Lindsay asked her husband and her mother to sit down. She had something she needed to tell them.
Her mother remembered how nervous her daughter was. Then Lindsay told them she had been having thoughts of harming the children.
Patrick was in the room, and his account is the more detailed of the two. She described the thoughts as intrusive. She said she had no plan to act on them. She said the thoughts disturbed her. And he asked her directly whether she felt she needed to be kept away from the children.
She said no.
He testified that he found the exchange confusing, because a minute later she was in that same kitchen making Cora, Dawson and Callan their lunch.
Asked at trial whether she had been concerned for the children’s safety after that conversation, Paula Musgrove said she was not.
She was asked why.
Because she was there.
She did not consider having her daughter committed. Asked whether she had thought about bringing her back to Connecticut, away from the children, she said she had not.
Earlier that fall, on a night in late November or early December, Lindsay had been afraid to be alone and asked whether she could sleep in her mother’s bed. She did. Asked at trial whether she had considered having her daughter committed that night, or calling 911, or getting her any immediate help, Paula Musgrove said no to each.
The best-known study of thoughts like the ones Lindsay described followed a hundred women from pregnancy through twelve weeks after delivery. Every mother in it reported unwanted thoughts of the baby coming to harm by accident. Close to half also reported unwanted thoughts of harming the infant on purpose. Clinicians call these thoughts ego-dystonic, meaning the mother experiences them as horrifying and repellent. They frighten her. Nothing in the research links having them to acting on them.
An intrusive thought and a psychotic one are not the same thought at different strengths. They belong to different illnesses. What separates them is not the content. It is whether the thought horrifies her when she has it. A mother with intrusive thoughts is frightened of them. She hands the baby to someone else, she avoids the stairs, she asks whether she ought to be kept away from her children. A mother in postpartum psychosis has lost the part of her that finds the thought alarming. It does not arrive from outside her. It makes sense.
In December, Lindsay called the thoughts intrusive. She said they disturbed her. She said she had no plan to act on them. Her husband asked whether she needed to be kept away from the children, and she said no.
Psychosis changes that answer. Asking again is the only way to find out. Jollotta was gone after December 21. The clinicians who knew about intrusive thoughts at all had not been told the thoughts were about her children. The two people who had been told were sitting at the kitchen table with her.
What stops a woman from saying any of this out loud is not the thought. It is the calculation that comes right behind it: that if she tells anyone, she will be written down as a danger to her own child, that someone official will come to the house, and that the baby will be taken. That fear is neither paranoid nor rare, and it is why these thoughts stay in the room where they started.
So the frightening part of that December afternoon is not that Lindsay Clancy was having thoughts of harming her children. It is not that she said so. She sat down with the two people who loved her most and told them the truth. The frightening part is that telling them changed nothing.
He Asked the Right Question from Four Feet Away.
Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague put that same fear in front of the jury in her closing. Lindsay withheld the thoughts from her providers, she argued, because she was afraid her children would be taken from her. Concealment is a calculation, Sprague told them, and a woman who can calculate knows that what she is hiding is wrong.
Lindsay had told her clinicians about intrusive thoughts, though not that they were about the children. Jollotta knew that much. In the same stretch of weeks, she sent Lindsay mood charts to track her sleep and her irritability, and she recommended a book. It is called Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts, and it exists to tell mothers that these thoughts are common and that having them predicts nothing about what they will do.
The literature says to ask a short set of questions. Is there a plan? How much distress do the thoughts cause? Does she understand them as a symptom? Has she ever acted on one?
Patrick asked the most important one: whether she needed to be kept away from them.
He asked Lindsay. Answering it meant seeing her own mind from the outside.
This is not a flaw in the questions. It is a flaw in asking them from four feet away at your own kitchen table. The screen assumes an interviewer with distance and a subject who can report on herself reliably, and in that kitchen there was neither. What Patrick had instead was a wife who said no and then went and made lunch, which is the most reassuring thing a frightened man could have been handed.
And her mother’s answer, the one that reads so badly in a transcript, is the most human line in five weeks of testimony. Presence instead of assessment. She was there. She would see it coming.
A Social Worker at McLean Picked Up the Phone
On December 30, Patrick called South Shore Health to say his wife wanted to go to McLean. The next day, with the suicidal thoughts persisting, he took her back to the emergency room at Massachusetts General, hoping she could be transferred there. They had no diagnosis, he testified, and did not know what was wrong. She was scared and did not want to go, and he told her she had to. On January 1, she admitted herself to McLean Hospital in Belmont.
The diagnosis recorded there was major depressive disorder, severe, without psychotic features. Her attending psychiatrist, Alia Goodheart, testified that Lindsay presented as a low-level-risk patient: appropriately dressed, polite, cooperative, with normal speech. Goodheart observed no signs of psychosis. Lindsay denied any plan to kill herself and denied any intention to harm anyone else.
Postpartum psychosis is rare, on the order of one or two births in a thousand. It usually comes on fast, over days rather than months; often within the first two weeks after delivery. The risk declines significantly after fifteen days. However, a late-onset version has also been identified; the largest single risk factor is bipolar disorder.
The symptoms also move. A woman can be delusional at eight in the morning and by two in the afternoon be dressed, pleasant, and giving a clear and accurate account of herself. The afternoon is not recovery. It is the same illness. Clinicians who treat the condition describe women hearing voices while they do the laundry and order dinner.
Callan was eight months old in January. Resnick was asked about that and agreed that psychosis that far out from a birth would be rare. He said the illness had not started in January, that it was his opinion that Lindsay’s symptoms had begun within three months of Callan’s birth, back in the summer when nobody was worried. This put the onset inside the postpartum window.
Postpartum psychosis is not in the DSM, the manual that defines psychiatric diagnoses. What it offers instead is a specifier attached to a mood episode, and it covers only onset in the first four weeks after delivery. There is no box for what Resnick was describing.
A five-day admission sees a narrow slice of any of this. Everyone who works on an inpatient unit knows it. That is why, somewhere in those five days, a social worker at McLean went looking for the part of the picture Lindsay could not give them herself.
She called Patrick.
A collateral call is how a unit finds out what the illness looks like to someone who has been watching it. The team sees the patient every day and forms its own view. What they cannot get from that is history, or a baseline, or any account of the weeks before she walked in. The only source for that is somebody outside the room.
What came back was this. Patrick told the social worker that his wife had never had suicidal thoughts.
She was on that unit because of suicidal thoughts. She had gone to an emergency room with them on December 31 and admitted herself the next day, and the call was placed while she was still inside.
He also raised a concern about dependency. He said he believed Lindsay had given in to social pressure to take psychiatric medication because friends of hers were taking it. And he said he was very unhappy with the medical care she had received, though Goodheart clarified from the stand that he had not been talking about McLean.
Six weeks before that, he had been sitting in his own kitchen while his wife told him she was having thoughts of harming their children.
He had driven her to an emergency room twice. He had sat through the December 6 appointment. When they called him for her history, what he gave them was his account of what had gone wrong with her care.
When someone you love comes apart, and no one can tell you why, you build the explanation yourself. That is what he gave them.
No evidence emerged at trial that any clinician at McLean, or anywhere else, called Paula Musgrove, who had been sitting at the same kitchen table when her daughter said it out loud.
Lindsay Clancy went home on January 5.
On December 1, She Told Two Clinicians the Same Thing
A month before that phone call, on December 1, Lindsay saw Jennifer Tufts. She reported intrusive thoughts she attributed to one of her medications and asked to stop it. She said she felt as though she were going to die. She denied being suicidal but said she was close to it. Tufts recorded that she felt very hopeless.
That same day, she wrote to Rebecca Jollotta through the patient portal.
“I also just feel concerningly numb right now, like I have no emotion whatsoever.”
“I feel like I’m going to die, and I don’t care.”
And then she asked her nurse practitioner what she should do about it.
Jollotta read the message as emotional blunting, the deadening of feeling that comes with severe depression, where a person stops feeling anything at all, good or bad. She answered with crisis resources rather than an emergency room.
Tufts had seen it the same day. Lindsay told her she kept reaching out to different people and not sticking with the plan, and Tufts advised her to keep one prescriber. The only remedy available was to ask the patient, who could not sleep, could not feel anything, and thought she was dying, to go and fix it herself.
In November, Jollotta took over Lindsay’s care at South Shore. She testified that she did not know Lindsay was still seeing Jennifer Tufts, and that she never spoke with Tufts. On December 1, Lindsay described what was happening to her to both of them. One of the two did not know the other was treating her.
Two clinicians. One patient. One day. Neither of them knew what the other had been told.
The prosecution read the same facts differently. In her closing, Sprague told the jury that Clancy had not always been forthcoming with her providers and was impatient when the prescriptions did not work quickly, that she wanted to get better on her own terms, and that as a labor and delivery nurse she knew that was not the right way to go about it. That argument only works if there was a coherent system to jump between.
Fourteen Sessions Without Two-Thirds of the File
Tufts did not know about the hotline calls. Reddington asked her whether it would surprise her to learn that Lindsay had called a suicide hotline twice in that period and been turned away both times. “It surprises me that she called them twice,” she answered. She acknowledged that she did not think she had ever asked.
She also testified that she did not have, and had not sought, the records of the psychiatric treatment Lindsay was getting elsewhere, and that she learned about the McLean admission only after Lindsay had already been discharged from it. Fourteen telehealth sessions, the last of them on January 23, were conducted without the other two-thirds of the file.
On December 20, Lindsay entered a day program at Women and Infants Hospital in Rhode Island. She was out after one day. According to her own civil filing, the team there believed her presentation was more pharmacologically induced than depressive, and she was advised to come off the Seroquel that Jollotta had prescribed.
Jollotta testified she was concerned about that discharge. She agreed to help with the taper anyway. And she testified that nobody from Women and Infants ever called her about it.
December 21 was Jollotta’s last contact with Lindsay Clancy. The one clinician who had escalated three times in ten days, who had raised bipolar disorder, who had recommended hospitalization and then partial hospitalization and then inpatient care, was out of the picture for the last month before January 24.
Goodheart had never spoken with Jollotta. She had no access to Jollotta’s records, which were held in a different system. Asked on the stand whether Lindsay was ever asked to sign a release so that McLean could obtain records from Jollotta, or from Tufts, or from Julie Paul, Goodheart answered no to each.
And on cross-examination Reddington asked her how many women she had treated who were suffering from postpartum psychosis. There was a long pause.
“I haven’t seen any.”
Plenty of competent psychiatrists in this country have never treated a case of postpartum psychosis. But the attending on a five-day admission of a postpartum mother in acute crisis had no experience with the condition Lindsay’s defense would argue she had, and nothing in the path that put her on that unit was built to check.
The prosecution read the same facts differently. In her closing, Sprague told the jury that Clancy had not always been forthcoming with her providers and was impatient when the prescriptions did not work quickly, that she wanted to get better on her own terms, and that as a labor and delivery nurse she knew that was not the right way to go about it. That argument only works if there was a coherent system to jump between.
A mother visiting from Connecticut and an exhausted husband have been asked why they did not assemble a picture of Lindsay Clancy that no single professional treating her ever assembled either, from a set of records the professionals could not see, across four health systems none of them could see into. Nobody expects a family to hold a case conference.
That is what a system is for.
Three Records of the Same Nineteen Days
Nineteen days passed between the afternoon Lindsay Clancy came home from McLean and the afternoon of January 24. Three separate records were kept of those nineteen days. Each one is internally coherent. Together they do not describe the same woman.
The first belongs to her family.
January 7 was Cora’s fifth birthday party, held late because her birthday fell on Christmas Eve. Patrick testified that his wife’s mood that day gave him hope. The next day they went to a museum. On January 14, she texted her mother that she was hanging in there and waiting for the day she would wake up and feel like herself. On January 15, they took the children to a waterpark on the Cape, and he testified that her mood seemed better and that she was able to take part in more than she had been. On January 19, her sister texted with her and came away thinking she seemed okay.
That is a record of a woman getting better.
Three people read the birthday party three different ways. It is the reason Lindsay left McLean early. It is the afternoon that gave her husband hope. And it is the afternoon her sister described two ways, four years apart. Same party. Same woman. The differences have nothing to do with who was paying attention.
The second record is the clinical one.
On January 6, the day after she came home, Jennifer Tufts wrote that Lindsay appeared to be deteriorating. Not improving. Not unchanged. A little worse. Tufts saw her three more times that month and kept adjusting the medications. At the last of those appointments, on January 23, Lindsay reported no motivation and a feeling of numbness. She said that she had to force herself out of bed and out of the house, and that she was managing to do it. She denied thoughts of suicide. She denied thoughts of harming anyone else. Tufts observed no psychosis, and testified that Lindsay never expressed any plan to harm her children.
That is a record of a woman getting worse.
The third record is her phone, and nobody read it until it was evidence.
On January 18, she searched “ketamine for suicidal ideation.” On January 19, she searched the symptoms of postpartum psychosis, and then psychosis symptoms. Four days before the killings, she searched whether a sociopath can be treated. Across that month, she also searched her own medications, bipolar disorder, hallucinations, insomnia, and the location of the carotid artery.
That is not a record of mood at all. It is a record of a woman trying to work out what was wrong with her.
The Commonwealth read the phone differently, and not without reason. Sprague told the jury that Clancy had looked up how long it would take her husband to collect the takeout and the medication, and argued that a woman capable of that arithmetic was not a woman out of touch with reality. Reddington’s answer was that she wanted to know when he would be home to help with baths and bedtime. Both readings come from the same device, and the jury had no way to sort them except by deciding first what kind of woman she was.
January 19 turns up in two of the three records. It is the day her sister, a licensed social worker, read her texts and came away thinking she seemed okay. It is also the day she typed the name of her own illness into a search bar, two weeks after being discharged from a psychiatric hospital.
Nobody around her was using that word. Patrick Clancy testified that he had never heard the term psychosis before the killings, and that his wife had never used it in front of him. Not her family, not her outpatient providers, not the hospital she had just left. The only person in Lindsay Clancy’s life who was looking at postpartum psychosis in January was Lindsay Clancy, alone, on her phone.
None of the three records is false.
The family’s record was built out of what she was still able to show them at a birthday party, a museum, and a waterpark, and she was still able to show them a great deal. The clinical record was built out of short appointments, Lindsay’s own answers to direct questions, and no access to two-thirds of her care. The phone is the only one of the three she was not managing for an audience. It contains what she was not showing anyone.
Nobody ever had all three in front of them. Her family had the first, and whatever she chose to report of the second. Tufts had the second, and whatever Lindsay chose to tell her of the first. No one read the third until after three children were dead, and by then it had stopped being a medical record and become an exhibit.
She had left McLean after not quite five days, ahead of the Friday that had been planned, having asked to go home so she could be there for her daughter’s birthday, with a two-week supply of medication and outpatient follow-up arranged as a condition of leaving. Goodheart testified that she had no concerns about Lindsay’s safety, or anyone else’s, at discharge.
Patrick understood that McLean had discharged her.
A hospital sending a patient home because she is better and a hospital agreeing to let her leave because she asked and met the criteria are two different events. The first is a judgment about her illness. The second is a judgment about whether she was allowed to go. Patrick believed he had been given the first. For the next nineteen days, everything he saw was measured against a recovery nobody had declared.
She Had Slept. She Had an Appetite. She Took Cora to the Pediatrician.
On the morning of January 24, Lindsay had been home for nineteen days.
She told Patrick she had slept well and felt good. She was worried about Cora’s stomachache and thought it might be something serious, so she took her to the pediatrician. In the afternoon, they built a snowman in the yard and did art projects at the table. In the evening she said she wanted takeout. She looked up how long it would take him to go and come back, and Patrick left to pick it up.
She had slept. She had an appetite. She took a sick child to the doctor and built a snowman with the other two.
There was nothing in that day to alarm anyone who had been watching her since October. Everybody had been watching her since October.
While he was gone, she strangled all three of them with exercise bands.
Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old.
Cora and Dawson died that night. Callan was resuscitated and died three days later at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Lindsay Clancy survived that night. She cut her wrists and her neck and went out a second-story window, and she is paralyzed. She has spent more than three years in a state psychiatric facility, and she sat through the whole of her trial in a wheelchair with two nurses beside her.
Connections That Were Never Built
What failed was not a person.
Records that follow a patient from one system to another. Goodheart couldn’t see Jollotta’s notes because they lived in a different building on a different network, and no one asked Lindsay to sign the document that would have moved them. Women and Infants sent her home without calling the prescriber who had sent her there. Neither of those is a judgment call that somebody got wrong. They are connections that were never built, and they are buildable.
A collateral call that asks a family member for observations instead of judgments. What Patrick got asked was some version of, “Are you worried about her?” which is a request for a conclusion from the one person on earth who cannot produce a useful one. What she said on the fourteenth is answerable. Whether she is saying it more than she was a month ago is answerable, and nobody but him could answer it. Whether she is dangerous is not a question he was ever equipped to take.
Discharge language that says whose decision it was. The hospital determined she was well enough to come home, or she asked to come home and met the criteria for leaving. Say which one it was, out loud, to the family who will be living with her that night.
And on the family’s side, one thing, which is not assessment and never should be. Write it down at the time. Two lines a day, in her words, dated. Participation ruins the memory before anybody gets around to asking for it. It happened to Allison Ozga on the witness stand. Then, when they ask you for a conclusion, give them an observation instead. “I do not know what it means, but here is what she said on the fourteenth, and here is what she said last night.”
That last part is why I wrote a guide for partners and family members rather than for clinicians. It is called Something’s Been Wrong Since the Baby, and it is the first in a series called The First to Notice. The title is the whole argument. The people who see it first are rarely the people trained to interpret it, and nobody ever tells them what their job is. The guide does not teach anyone to assess. It teaches them to keep a record and hand it over.
It is not out yet. If you want a copy of the draft before it is, reply to this email, and I will send you one.
Both Lindsay and Patrick Clancy have filed malpractice suits against providers and institutions that treated her. Both are pending, and the providers deny wrongdoing. Whether a second criminal trial occurs rests with Plymouth County District Attorney Tim Cruz. A status conference is set for September 29.
The Answer Was in Four Buildings
After seven days, a jury could not return a verdict about what had been happening in the mind of one woman.
On December 6, in an office at South Shore, a man was told that the wife he had known for years might be someone other than the person he thought she was. He had a few seconds to decide what to do with that; no records, no training, and no idea that anyone would ever go back and look at how he answered.
He said she was not. Nine days later he drove her to an emergency room.
The records that could have answered the question existed the entire time. They were at Aster Mental Health, South Shore Health, Women and Infants Hospital in Rhode Island, and McLean. Four sets of notes about one woman, on four systems that could not see each other, and the first proceeding with the power to gather all four was a murder trial, nearly four years after Cora and Dawson and Callan were dead.
As always, thank you for reading this issue of The Mind Detective. This was one of the most difficult cases I’ve ever written about. I hope I’ve been fair.
References
Testimony described here is drawn from same-day courtroom reporting and from published transcripts of the trial. Quotations follow what witnesses and attorneys said on the stand or in open court. Material about the months before the killings that did not come in through testimony, including the summer of 2022, is drawn from the civil complaints filed by Lindsay and Patrick Clancy and from news reporting published in January 2023.
Case and filings
Commonwealth v. Lindsay M. Clancy, Plymouth Superior Court (Mass.). Indictments returned September 15, 2023, on three counts of murder in the first degree and three counts of strangulation; arraigned October 26, 2023; jury selection begun July 20, 2026; tried before Sullivan, J., July 27 to September 4, 2026; mistrial declared September 4, 2026.
Clancy v. Tufts, No. 2682CV00071 (Mass. Super. Ct., Norfolk County, filed Jan. 2026). Brought by Patrick W. Clancy, individually and as personal representative of the estates of Cora Marie Clancy, Dawson William Clancy, and Callan Patrick Clancy, against Jennifer A. Tufts, M.D., Rebecca H. Jollotta, C.N.P., Aster Mental Health, Inc., and South Shore Health System, Inc.
Clancy v. Tufts, No. 2682CV00081 (Mass. Super. Ct., Norfolk County, e-filed Jan. 22, 2026). Brought by Lindsay M. Clancy; adds additional individual providers together with McLean Hospital and Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island. Both actions are pending, and the defendants deny liability.
Trial coverage
Testimony, closing arguments, and the mistrial were covered same-day by CNN, WBUR, NBC News, CBS News Boston, ABC News, The Boston Globe, Boston.com, the Associated Press, NewsNation, Rolling Stone, and Court TV between July 27 and September 4, 2026. Rev.com publishes a full transcript of closing arguments. Patrick Clancy’s account of the aftermath appears in Eren Orbey’s “A Husband in the Aftermath of His Wife’s Unfathomable Act,” The New Yorker, October 14, 2024.
Clinical literature
Bergink, V., Rasgon, N., & Wisner, K. L. (2016). Postpartum psychosis: Madness, mania, and melancholia in motherhood. American Journal of Psychiatry, 173(12), 1179–1188. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2016.16040454
Brockington, I. (2017). Late-onset postpartum psychoses. Archives of Women’s Mental Health, 20(1), 87–92. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00737-016-0680-y
Brok, E. C., Lok, P., Oosterbaan, D. B., Schene, A. H., Tendolkar, I., & van Eijndhoven, P. F. (2017). Infant-related intrusive thoughts of harm in the postpartum period: A critical review. The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 78(8), e913–e923. https://doi.org/10.4088/JCP.16r11083
Fairbrother, N., & Woody, S. R. (2008). New mothers’ thoughts of harm related to the newborn. Archives of Women’s Mental Health, 11(3), 221–229. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00737-008-0016-7
Fairbrother, N., Collardeau, F., Woody, S. R., Wolfe, D. A., & Fawcett, J. M. (2022). Postpartum thoughts of infant-related harm and obsessive-compulsive disorder: Relation to maternal physical aggression toward the infant. The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 83(2), 21m14006. https://doi.org/10.4088/JCP.21m14006
Kleiman, K., & McIntyre, M. (2019). Good moms have scary thoughts: A healing guide to the secret fears of new mothers. Familius.
Lawrence, P. J., Craske, M. G., Kempton, C., Stewart, A., & Stein, A. (2017). Intrusive thoughts and images of intentional harm to infants in the context of maternal postnatal depression, anxiety, and OCD. British Journal of General Practice, 67(661), 376–377. https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp17X692105
I can't imagine having researched this and written it; reading it was very difficult. I believe you are consistently fair and making your sources always available is something I very much appreciate. You do a remarkable job of disclosing the incredibly heartbreaking and difficult things you write of. I thank you, Joni.
This is beautifully and expertly written. Your empathy for all of the many points of view is quite elegant.