MOTHER PLEADS NOT GUILTY TO MURDER OF THREE CHILDREN IN MASSACHUSETTS

Lindsay Clancy searched online for information about hallucinations, psychosis and medication side effects in the weeks before she strangled her three young children in January 2023, according to phone data presented at her murder trial in Massachusetts on Thursday. The children — Callan, Dawson and Cora Clancy — were found in the basement of the family home in Duxbury, south of Boston. Their father discovered their mother lying in the yard after she jumped from a second-storey window; she remains paralysed from the waist down. Clancy has pleaded not guilty to murder charges.

In late December 2022, Clancy searched for suicide methods, bipolar disorder and insomnia, and the following month looked up information about postpartum depression. In October 2022, she wrote a detailed note expressing doubts about her parenting ability, including concerns about being unable to give her youngest child the same attention as her two older children, aged 3 and 5. The note stated: "I'm terrified of something happening to my kids or doing something wrong to mess up their development." Clancy, a former labour and delivery nurse, described herself as overwhelmed by parenting information.

The defence argues that Clancy was suffering from bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis, a rare condition affecting perception of reality after childbirth. A forensic psychiatrist diagnosed her with both conditions following the killings. Text messages between Clancy and her then-husband Patrick show them discussing their children's routines on the day of the deaths; she expressed relief that one child's kidneys were functioning properly. The trial continues in Massachusetts.