Judge Denies Mistrial in Lindsay Clancy Trial

A Massachusetts judge on Monday refused to declare a mistrial in the triple-murder trial of Lindsay Clancy after a prosecution expert brought up her Roman Catholic faith on the stand.

Clancy, 36, a former labor and delivery nurse, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to three counts of murder in the January 2023 strangling deaths of her children Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, at the family's Duxbury home.

Judge Sullivan struck the religious testimony and told jurors to ignore it. Closing arguments are expected Wednesday.

What Happened in Court

Forensic psychologist Kirk Heilbrun, testifying as a rebuttal witness for prosecutors, told the jury he diagnosed Clancy with bipolar 2 disorder and said she was experiencing anxiety, depression, insomnia and suicidal thoughts in the weeks before the killings.

But he cast doubt on the core of the defense case: her claim that a male voice commanded her to kill herself and her children. Clancy never reported hearing the voice before or after the killings, Heilbrun said.

"To put it mildly, that would be a very, very unusual pattern or manifestation of how this kind of thing comes about," he testified.

He said he is "always very careful" when someone reports a symptom only during the commission of an offense. "It provides a convenient way of lessening your own culpability. It's always possible, but as I said, I find it very, very rare."

Heilbrun described the account as more consistent with an intrusive thought than a command hallucination, and said the first thing Clancy told her then-husband Patrick Clancy after her suicide attempt was that she had tried to kill herself. "If she had actually experienced this command hallucination, she might have said something like 'I did what I had to do' or 'I did what the voice said,'" he testified.

He called the killings "altruistic filicide" — killing one's children out of love. "When she decided at some point that she was going to put a stop to (her life), then she had to answer the question of what to do about the kids, and she didn't want to leave them, and she was convinced they would suffer without her," Heilbrun said.

His testimony ended abruptly Monday afternoon after he invoked Clancy's Catholic upbringing while explaining her mindset, referring to testimony that she said "Go to God" as she strangled the children.

"She was raised as a Catholic, and this, as I understand Catholic considerations, that's not necessarily what happens, but when I asked her about that, 'Isn't suicide a mortal sin?'" he said.