In January 2023, Massachusetts’ Patrick Clancy returned home to find his bloodied wife lying on the lawn of their backyard.
After his wife Lindsay Clancy strangled their three young children, she slashed her wrists and jumped from the bedroom window, where she was found by her husband, who was sent to the basement.
That’s where he found the lifeless bodies of his three babies.
Almost two years later, Patrick is breaking his silence and revealing the chilling details of a phone call he had with his wife, who claims a “voice” commanded her to kill their kids.
Keep reading to learn why the mother, who Patrick insists is not a “monster,” says she killed her children.
In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Patrick Clancy reveals that his wife Lindsay started to struggle with a postpartum mental health crisis shortly after the birth of their youngest son Callan, who was eight months when he died.
Lindsay, a respected labor and delivery nurse, was on a cocktail of prescription drugs, including three antidepressants, and by the end of December 2022, she admitted to having “thoughts of wanting to die.”
She also told her husband that she felt “numb” to their three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 7-month-old baby Callan.
Patrick later told investigators that his wife confessed to having unwanted thoughts of harming her children.
In the new year, Lindsay checked herself into Belmont’s McLean Hospital psychiatric facility and when her husband went to visit, he said that Lindsay didn’t belong there.
“There were people there who were clearly, like, nuts,” Patrick tells the New Yorker. “Lindsay seemed to have it together.”
He adds that she even texted him: “I don’t belong here.”
After only five days of care, Lindsay was released and claimed she had no more intrusive thoughts.
On the morning of January 24, 2023, Patrick said Lindsay was “feeling good” and “slept pretty well,” leading him to believe she was improving.
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Sometime that day, Lindsay took Cora to the pediatrician over tummy pains and then texted her husband about 5 p.m., asking him to grab a laxative for their daughter and some takeout for dinner.
Reports reveal that while he was at the drugstore for Cora, Lindsay called to make sure he picked up the right brand of laxative.
Patrick explains that when they were on the call, Lindsay sounded “busy” doing something.
About 6 p.m., Patrick learned why she was distracted when he returned to their unusually quiet Duxbury, Massachusetts home with dinner and medicine for Cora.
Thinking perhaps it was bathtime for the kids, Patrick headed upstairs, looking for his family.
After breaking down the locked bedroom door, Patrick found a bloody knife on the nightstand and a shattered window.
The horrified father raced to the backyard and found Lindsay lying on the lawn, covered in blood with broken bones and barely conscious.
“What did you do?” he questioned Lindsay, who replied, “I tried to kill myself.”
Patrick then asked where their babies were.
She said, “in the basement.”
The devastated dad then found Cora, Dawson and Callan, all with exercise bands still wrapped around their little necks.
Desperately trying to rip the straps from their throats, he begged each child to breathe, his cries echoing through the house.
“What do you do when you have three kids like that?” he told the news outlet of the agony he experienced in deciding which child to save. “How do you pick?”
Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead at the scene, while Callan died in hospital a few days later.
Lindsay survived the jump from the second-storey window but is paralyzed from the waist down.
She pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder, three counts of strangulation, and three counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
After the tragic day, the couple didn’t speak for about six months.
Before her arraignment, Patrick said he received a voice mail from an unknown phone number. It was Lindsay, calling from her psychologist’s phone to say she loved him.
When he returned her call the next day, the woman explained to her husband that a “voice” told her it was her “last chance,” and then commanded she kill the children and then herself.
“She did not sound like my wife,” Clancy said of the phone call.
Looking for real answers, he pressed Lindsay about what happened that day.
“I think one of the first things I asked was: ‘Did you plan this? Is that why you sent me out?” he recalled. “She said, ‘No it just was like, a snap of the fingers.’”
He continues: “Then I said, ‘Did you Google ‘ways to kill?’ And she said, ‘Yeah for myself, because I was suicidal for two months.’”
Despite his grief and losing everything he loved, Patrick does not fault his wife for killing their precious three children.
“I wasn’t married to a monster, I was married to someone who got sick,” he said.
Expressing his forgiveness, he adds, “I’m still hurting, but I can smile, and even laugh sometimes, and it’s true for Lindsay too, because humans are resilient.”
A date for Lindsay Clancy’s trial has not yet been set.
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