Months before Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children, she lost significant weight, couldn't sleep and complained of postpregnancy mental health issues, the family’s former nanny testified at her murder trial Wednesday.
But the nanny never worried the Massachusetts mother might be a danger to her children or to herself.
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A page from a notebook kept by Lindsay Clancy in which she documents her medications and feelings during Clancy's murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., Monday, Aug. 3, 2026. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)
Lindsay Clancy grabs a tissue after witness Elaine Rossi, the nanny to the Clancy children, testified during her murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026. (David L Ryan/The Boston Globe via AP, Pool) CORRECTION: Source is The Boston Globe, not The Boston Herald.
Lindsay Clancy enters the courtroom after a short break in her murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026. (David L Ryan/The Boston Globe via AP, Pool) CORRECTION: Source is The Boston Globe, not The Boston Herald.
Elaine Rossi, the nanny to Clancy children, enters the courtroom to be a witness during Lindsay Clancy's murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026. (David L Ryan/The Boston Globe via AP, Pool)
“I observed a wonderful mom who loved her kids,” Elaine Rossi told the jury on the seventh day of the trial in Plymouth. “She was concerned about their safety, and Callan eating and sleeping. She was a wonderful mother.”
Clancy’s defense says she was a loving mother who was overmastered by postpartum psychosis, a dangerous psychiatric condition that afflicts a small proportion of women after childbirth and affects their hold on reality.
Prosecutors contend that she acted intentionally on Jan. 24, 2023, and should be held criminally responsible for the deaths of Callan, Dawson and Cora Clancy, who ranged in age from 8 months to 5 years.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.
Rossi was hired in September 2022, a few months after Callan was born, and let go in December after Clancy, 35, decided not to return to work. Rossi said she wasn’t told why Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, chose to remain at home.
She testified Wednesday about her time with the Clancy family, describing Cora as a “girly-girl” who loved arts and crafts. Three-year-old Dawson was “full of energy, rambunctious, funny, silly.” Callan was the “sweetest, happiest baby.”
The defense sought to portray Clancy as a doting mother who acknowledged her mental health difficulties. Prosecutors likely hope the jury will see a mom who wasn't impaired by her mental health.
Rossi testified that she saw prescription medicine bottles in the house, and that Clancy "shared with me she had postpartum and couldn’t sleep,” and had taken to sleeping in the basement.
In her journals during that time, Clancy indicated she was struggling with anxiety and feeling overwhelmed by motherhood.
Both the prosecution and defense read excerpts from her diary to the jury Monday, where she catalogued an ever-shifting lineup of psychiatric prescriptions, as well as thoughts of suicide. Clancy remains paralyzed from the waist down after jumping from her home's second-story window on the night of the killings.
Clancy wrote about her struggles to get newborn Callan to sleep, and constant worries of his being sick. She also expressed concerns about going back to work, not being able to breastfeed, and feeling disconnected from her children and her then-husband.
“I’m so desperate to get a mental break from taking care of everyone that my mind is trying to find something physically wrong with me,” she wrote in a Nov. 18, 2022, entry.
“I have crazy brain fog. I feel like I can’t make a plan,” she wrote in another, undated entry. “I live moment to moment waiting for the next nap time.”
Clancy’s lawyers don’t dispute that she killed the children. But in the criminal trial and a medical malpractice lawsuit, her attorneys say she had bipolar disorder that wasn’t fully diagnosed until after the killings. Her attorneys say her condition seemed to worsen on the psychiatric medications, some of them problematic for bipolar patients.
If convicted of murder, Lindsay Clancy faces life in prison without parole. If found not guilty due to a lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility.
A page from a notebook kept by Lindsay Clancy in which she documents her medications and feelings during Clancy's murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., Monday, Aug. 3, 2026. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)
Lindsay Clancy grabs a tissue after witness Elaine Rossi, the nanny to the Clancy children, testified during her murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026. (David L Ryan/The Boston Globe via AP, Pool) CORRECTION: Source is The Boston Globe, not The Boston Herald.
Lindsay Clancy enters the courtroom after a short break in her murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026. (David L Ryan/The Boston Globe via AP, Pool) CORRECTION: Source is The Boston Globe, not The Boston Herald.
Elaine Rossi, the nanny to Clancy children, enters the courtroom to be a witness during Lindsay Clancy's murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026. (David L Ryan/The Boston Globe via AP, Pool)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Jeanine Pirro this week found out there is a trade-off between loyalty to President Donald Trump and being loyal to reality.
The U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — a fierce defender and decades-long friend — openly refuted Trump’s claims of vandalism regarding one of his treasured construction projects in the nation's capital, admitting in court filings that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was due to shoddy workmanship.
The moment comes as the Republican president is struggling to convince Americans that they should believe what he is telling them about the economy, his agenda and his war on Iran before pivotal midterm elections in the fall — and reveals the inherent challenges for his team in delivering hard truths he does not want to hear. Trump has historically engaged in exaggeration, but this was a moment in which he wanted a U.S. citizen, Olympic canoeist David Hearn, to be indicted, tried and possibly imprisoned for the act of touching a chunk of sealant in the already damaged pool.
The White House said that Trump was not aware ahead of time that Pirro’s office would drop the charges.
Trump says he told Pirro he was “not happy” about her decision and that a video backed him up even though it is not clear from the footage shot at a distance that any property destruction occurred. “Well I just think she was totally wrong,” Trump told reporters Tuesday night. “And everybody saw the vandalism.”
By publicly rebuking Pirro, Trump sent a message to other administration officials that he is not to be contradicted, regardless of what the facts show.
“He just blows it up like a keg of dynamite — it’s a form of intimidating employees to be in group-think,” said Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. “'If you work for me, you triple down.' Never disagree with the boss, even in a small fractional way.”
Trump has faced withering criticism for launching the war with Iran without fully laying out the rationale for the public or considering that country’s ability to withstand intense bombing. Trump snubbed a housing bill to address the affordability problems that voters say are their biggest concern, letting it become law without his signature.
Some Republican lawmakers have suggested that Trump is being sheltered from facts or chalk up his choices to poor staff work. During Trump’s second term, Republican senators including Ted Cruz of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina have said Trump was receiving “bad advice,” a subtle critique of the president that shifts blame onto the aides who are supposed to be providing him with credible information.
The latest blow-up "reflects a president who is struggling to shape the narrative as his national approval ratings remain extremely low,” said Julian Zelizer, a political history professor at Princeton University. “The more controversy that he faces — over Iran, the Epstein files, inflation and more — the less control he has and the stronger the chances that he will be forced to confront reality.”
The president continues to dwell on the 2020 election that he falsely claims to have won. He likes to boast that America is booming with an unverifiable $19.2 trillion in investments from foreign countries, even as economic growth has been meager over the prior three months. He posted a Jesus-like picture of himself on social media and said after a backlash that he thought it depicted him as a medical doctor.
The White House did not respond to questions about how aides brief the president and whether officials feel comfortable providing information that could contradict his public statements.
Until now, Pirro, a former judge in Westchester County, New York, and TV show host, has largely been faithful to Trump's wishes. Her office sent a subpoena in January to the Federal Reserve regarding the congressional testimony by the central bank's then-chair, Jerome Powell, about a $2.5 billion renovation of its headquarters.
Pirro defended her decision to threaten Powell, who said the threat of a criminal indictment was really a pretext to pressure the Fed into slashing its benchmark interest rates in accordance with Trump's wishes.
“This office makes decisions based on the merits, nothing more and nothing less,” Pirro posted on X. “We agree with the chairman of the Federal Reserve that no one is above the law, and that is why we expect his full cooperation.”
Her actions temporarily slowed efforts in the Senate to confirm Kevin Warsh as the next Fed chair. The Department of Justice dropped the investigation in April, roughly a month after a federal prosecutor said in a closed-door court hearing that the government had not found any evidence of a crime.
On the reflecting pool, Pirro pursued the investigation despite what defense lawyers say was abundant evidence from the outset that the damage at the pool was the result of preexisting problems that had nothing to do with Hearn. A new court filing from Hearn’s team disputes the department’s contention that it only recently learned its case was flawed and urges a judge to not only dismiss it but to foreclose the possibility of ever resurrecting it.
“From day one, the case against Mr. Hearn was motivated by political considerations and devoid of adequate factual support,” defense lawyers wrote. “Those political pressures have not dissipated in the mere four weeks since the government saw fit to obtain the indictment.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche declined to discuss internal Justice Department conversations related to the case.
He deflected on the question of whether or not he supported the decision, acknowledging on one hand that Trump has “every right to be extraordinarily frustrated with damage done to our national monuments in this city and elsewhere” while simultaneously praising Pirro for what he asserted was “an unprecedented effort” to improve safety in the nation’s capital.
“When you look at the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s body of work over the past year and a half and where we are in this city compared to where we were, they are doing a phenomenal job,” Blanche said. “Now does that mean that every case goes exactly the way that President Trump wants or I want or U.S. Attorney Pirro wants? Of course not, it doesn’t.”
What makes the reflecting pool incident different was that the administration contradicted claims of property damage made repeatedly by the president.
On Friday, the government moved to dismiss the criminal case and said any damage to the pool was caused by the bungled work of the contractor and “the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026."
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has supported Trump’s claims that vandals damaged the pool. That suggests that the conflict around this issue could continue to simmer.
While Trump and many of his supporters are able to exist within their own information bubble, the administration had basically declared in court that the president was wrong. That was different from a judicial ruling or news report fact-checking him, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
“It’s difficult to discredit that by saying these are anti-Trump forces,” she said.
Associated Press writers Eric Tucker in Washington and Darlene Superville in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., contributed to this report.
Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro listens as Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks to the press on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Foreign Ministers Meeting, in Pasay, Metro Manila, Philippines, Thursday, July 23, 2026. (Brendan Smialowski/Pool Photo via AP)
President Donald Trump talks to reporters before he boards Air Force One, Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2026, at Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
The Washington Monument is seen in the background of the now drained Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Wednesday, July 29, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)
