By Chelsea Bailey, CNN
(CNN) — When Patrick Clancy left his Duxbury, Massachusetts, home on January 24, 2023, he had no way of knowing a quick errand to grab takeout and medicine for his daughter would forever change his life.
When he returned to the colonial on Summer Street he shared with his wife, Lindsay, and their three children, he found the house unusually quiet, he would later tell police.
Searching for his family, Patrick tried his bedroom, but the door was locked, he would say. When he finally got in, he saw blood in the room and the second-story window open.
He ran outside, where he found Lindsay lying on the ground beneath the window. She had injuries on her wrists and neck.
Frantic, he dialed 911.
“What did you do?” Patrick asked his wife, a Plymouth County assistant district attorney would later recount the recorded call.
Tried to kill herself, Lindsay told him.
“Where are the kids?” Patrick asked.
“In the basement,” she responded.
Moments later, Patrick Clancy could “be heard screaming in agony and shock as he found his children,” the prosecutor, Jennifer Sprague, would say.
Officers found Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan unconscious. It was obvious each had been strangled, the officers later testified in sworn affidavits.
The children were taken to area hospitals, where they were all eventually pronounced dead.
Lindsay Clancy, who was paralyzed by the injuries from her suicide attempt, was charged with three counts of murder and strangulation in her children’s deaths.
Her trial is set to begin Monday.
Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse at a nationally recognized hospital in Boston, has pleaded not guilty. She is being held at the public Tewksbury Hospital in Massachusetts.
While she did kill her children, she shouldn’t be found criminally responsible for murder, her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, has said in court proceedings as recently as June.
And while there is precedent for such an argument, experts tell CNN Clancy’s defense could be facing an uphill battle.
911 call and expert testimony could be key
Clancy, 35, had long struggled with depression, even going so far as to voluntarily commit herself to a local psychiatric hospital less than a month before her children’s deaths, Reddington has said. Clancy’s doctors took her on and off medications to treat the depression, which her attorney has said worsened her symptoms.
“Our society fails miserably in treating women with postpartum depression or even postpartum psychosis,” Reddington said at a 2023 arraignment hearing. “This is a situation that clearly was a product of mental illness.”
Throughout pretrial hearings, Reddington has signaled he plans to argue Clancy should not be held “criminally responsible” for the deaths of her children because she was suffering from extreme mental health distress.
Reddington and the commonwealth’s prosecutors sparred in June over what expert evidence would be admissible if he were to pursue that defense, commonly called an “insanity plea.”
Jurors should “hear why Patrick Clancy and his wife Lindsay would go to consult with doctors because of depression, because of the life that she was living, which was one of horrific misery because of medications,” Reddington argued during a June hearing.
Prosecutors pushed back and suggested they may be prepared to offer their own experts to testify to the question of criminal responsibility.
Ahead of the trial, the commonwealth also filed a motion to admit audio recordings of the 911 call Patrick Clancy made after returning home and discovering his family. Prosecutors claim Clancy’s descriptions of how he found his children and the meth