Lindsay Clancy trial spotlights psychiatric hospital stay before she killed her 3 children

Lindsay Clancy 's murder trial zeroed in Friday on the nearly five days that the Massachusetts mother spent in a psychiatric hospital a few weeks before she killed her three children.

Her stay is a key chapter in both the prosecution and defense narratives about her mental state when she strangled the children in their suburban home and then jumped out a second-story window.

In questioning one of her McLean Hospital psychiatrists on Friday, a prosecutor underscored that Clancy denied to hospital clinicians that she wanted to hurt anyone else or planned to kill herself. Clancy's lawyer, meanwhile, aimed to flesh out the defense's claim that she sought mental health help for months, wasn't properly diagnosed as she went from provider to provider, and was put on a series of medications that left her worse off.

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.

Clancy has pleaded not guilty to murder charges in the January 2023 strangling deaths of Callan, Dawson and Cora Clancy, who ranged from 8 months to 5 years old. They were found in the basement of the family's home in coastal Duxbury, Massachusetts, and their mother was lying, badly injured, in the yard. She remains paralyzed from the waist down.

Prosecutors argue that Clancy, a 35-year-old former labor and delivery nurse, was an intentional killer who attacked her children after getting her husband out of the house by asking him to run errands. The defense doesn't dispute that she killed the children but says she shouldn't be held criminally responsible, contending that she was so mentally ill that she heard voices telling her to kill them and herself.

In the criminal trial and a medical malpractice lawsuit, Clancy's attorneys say she had bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis — a break with reality that a small fraction of women have after childbirth — that weren't fully diagnosed until after the killings, though one of her outpatient providers considered bipolar disorder in 2022.

Clancy recounted that provider's opinion and disagreed with it after she checked herself into McLean early on New Year's Day 2023, psychiatrist Dr. Alia Goodheart told jurors Friday.

When Goodheart joined Clancy's lineup of providers that Jan. 3, the patient expressed concerns about an antipsychotic medication she'd previously been prescribed to help with insomnia, and about feeling numb, which can be a side effect of that drug, Goodheart said. She diagnosed her with insomnia with a mental health condition and tapered down the medication.

Clancy then reported she could sleep, was eager to go home in time for a long-planned belated birthday party for Cora, and booked herself follow-up outpatient care, the psychiatrist testified. The hospital discharged her that Jan. 5 with prescriptions for an antianxiety drug and a sleep aid.

“She had never stated that she had any thoughts of harming anybody else,” Goodheart told jurors. And although Clancy said she'd had suicidal thoughts, she denied having them in the moment and indeed said she had reasons not to take her own life: “her children and her family, her mother,” Goodheart recalled.

When defense lawyer Kevin Reddington had his turn to question the psychiatrist, he emphasized that the hospital care team didn't do various tests — Goodheart said they weren't necessary — or learn that she had called a suicide hotline that fall. Nor did the providers talk to various outpatient clinicians who had treated Clancy over the prior months, though they did speak to her husband.

“She was very sick, wasn’t she?” Reddington asked at one point.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Goodheart responded.

If convicted of murder, 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.

Defendant Lindsay Clancy listens during her murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., on Thursday, July 30, 2026. (CJ Gunther/The Boston Herald via AP, Pool)

Defendant Lindsay Clancy listens during her murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., on Thursday, July 30, 2026. (CJ Gunther/The Boston Herald via AP, Pool)

Defense attorney Kevin Reddington and Lindsay Clancy listen to the 911 recording from Jan. 24, 2023, during Clancy's murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., on Wednesday, July 29, 2026. (David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via AP, Pool)

The former home of Lindsay Clancy is seen in Duxbury, Mass., on Thursday, July 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Michael Casey)

ROANOKE, Va. (AP) — A federal judge has sided with the Virginia NAACP in its lawsuit against a county school board’s reinstatement of Confederate military names to two schools, saying the decision discriminated against Black students and ordering the board to change the schools' monikers again.

In an opinion filed Thursday in U.S. District Court of Virginia, Judge Michael F. Urbanski said the school board in Shenandoah County violated Black students’ rights under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, which forbids racial discrimination in state-supported institutions. The decision also violates the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, the court found.

Confederate army officers' names are “vestiges” of Shenandoah County's segregationist history that required separate schools for Black and white students.

“The Confederate names were restored with complete awareness of their historic legacy and ongoing discriminatory impact,” Urbanski wrote. “In the court’s view, the affirmative act of reinstating these vestiges of segregation is far more problematic than a passive failure to remove a long-standing name or symbol.”

The judge ordered the board to settle on new school names “on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed.”

Unlike memorials named after Confederate figures, schools are places where children should have an “educational environment free of vestiges of racial discrimination,” Urbanski added.

Jim Guynn, the attorney representing Shenandoah County, did not immediately respond to a phone message seeking comment.

In a statement Friday, the NAACP Virginia State Conference called the ruling “a decisive victory" for students.

“For decades, the practice of honoring Confederate leaders in Virginia schools has been steeped in a history of racial discrimination,” said its president, the Rev. Cozy Bailey. “The school board’s 2024 renaming decision is impossible to explain except through the lens of race."

The Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs represented the NAACP.

“The court acknowledged that such names inflict real, racially disproportionate harm," said Kaitlin Banner, deputy legal director.

The Virginia NAACP filed the suit on behalf of six students and their parents in June 2024 after the school board voted 5-1 to change Mountain View High School back to Stonewall Jackson High School and Honey Run Elementary back to Ashby-Lee Elementary, which combines the names of Gen. Robert E. Lee and Turner Ashby, a Confederate cavalry officer. The board reversed a 2020 decision to remove the original names against a backdrop of nationwide protests over racial injustice.

The NAACP argued in its lawsuit that Black students, who make up less than 3% of the school system’s population, would be “required against their will to endorse the violent defense of slavery pursued by the Confederacy and the symbolism that these images have in the modern White supremacist movement.”

Under President Donald Trump's second administration, some statues honoring Confederate figures have been restored after being removed in 2020. It is part of Trump's ongoing efforts to control how American history is framed at Smithsonian museums, monuments in national parks and in classrooms.

Board members who voted to restore the Confederate names said they were honoring popular community sentiment. They said the previous board members who voted to remove the names in 2020 had ignored constituents and due process on the matter.

FLE - A crew removes the statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson, July 1, 2020, in Richmond, Va. (AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)