PLYMOUTH, Mass. (AP) — Jurors in the Lindsay Clancy trial have been struggling to agree on a verdict following a trial over whether she should be held criminally responsible for killing her three young children at her Massachusetts home in 2023.
Both sides agree that she did it. But her attorneys argue that Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time and that poor mental healthcare exacerbated her condition. Prosecutors argue that she intentionally planned the killings.
Over 21 days of testimony, the jury heard from dozens of witnesses, including doctors, first responders, relatives and even Clancy’s former husband.
If convicted, Clancy's sentence could be as severe as life in prison. If found not guilty, she may be released or remain confined in a mental health facility. If the jury is unable to reach a verdict, the judge could declare a mistrial.
As the jury deliberates, here are key moments from the trial:
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.
Before sending the deadlocked jury home Thursday, Judge William Sullivan declined a defense request to remove one of the jurors following heated discussions from both sides.
Earlier, the jury's foreperson sent the judge a note saying a single juror won’t follow the court’s instructions about reasonable doubt.
Details of the jury room conflict weren’t revealed and only briefly discussed in open court, but it raised the possibility that a single holdout was standing in the way of a verdict.
Clancy’s attorney Kevin Reddington said the juror should have been dismissed from the case. Sullivan said removing a deliberating juror is a sensitive undertaking.
The judge questioned each juror individually in private, then reread his instructions about reasonable doubt in court.
Reddington said afterward outside the courthouse that the juror would be questioned again by the judge Friday.
Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague said in court that she believed Sullivan’s instruction was appropriate and no further action was necessary.
Jurors have sent notes to the judge at least three times since they began deliberating Aug. 27.
On Tuesday, the fourth day of deliberations, jurors sent a note in the morning saying they could not unanimously agree.
The note did not elaborate, and there were no clues as to whether a majority of jurors were leaning toward a conviction or acquittal. It also did not provide any insight into the tone of deliberations or whether they had been cordial or acrimonious.
Sullivan asked jurors to keep deliberating.
On Wednesday they sent the court another short note saying they were still at an impasse. Sullivan again told them to keep trying.
Clancy's former husband, Patrick Clancy, was first to take the stand.
In emotional testimony, he described the day he found his wife after she tried to kill herself.
Lindsay Clancy had sent him out to get takeout food and medication for their daughter, which prosecutors argue was an excuse to get him out of the house.
He came home to find the house unusually silent, before finding blood throughout the main bedroom and a window open.
Jurors listened to the 911 call Patrick Clancy made after finding his wife outside in the snow. Clancy can be heard speaking with his wife, then tells the dispatcher he’s going to check on the children.
Moments later, he howls and cries after finding his children in the basement. The confused dispatcher repeatedly asks what happened.
“She killed the kids!” he yells.
Clancy's mother, mother-in-law, sister, friends and co-workers testified that Clancy struggled with her mental health after giving birth to Callan, the youngest of her three children.
Clancy's mother-in-law, Susan Clancy, said she and her former daughter-in-law were close. Both worked as labor and delivery nurses. She described Lindsay as a wonderful mother.
But Susan Clancy testified that Lindsay had become anxious, paranoid and suicidal, and that the psychiatric care she was getting wasn't helping.
“She felt unwell. She had insomnia. She was losing her appetite. She was very anxious and sad,” Susan Clancy said. “She was begging for help.”
Lindsay Clancy’s mother, Paula Musgrove, testified that her daughter was scared of sleeping alone, became paranoid and believed the medications she was taking “were destroying her mind.”
“Mom, will you please come up and stay with me for a bit? I’m really sick. Something is wrong,” Clancy wrote in an October 2022 text message that Paula Musgrove read in court. “I had horrible insomnia all night, and I just don’t know how I am going to get through the day. … It’s just really scary, and I don’t want to be alone.”
Clancy saw several doctors about her declining mental health, and eventually checked herself in to a psychiatric hospital.
Her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, argued that she was misdiagnosed and overmedicated.
As he cross-examined one of her psychiatrists, Dr. Jennifer Tufts, Reddington questioned her expertise, prescribing decisions and use of 25-minute video appointments with limited time for talk therapy.
At one point, Reddington implied that Tufts was a box-checking “robot.”
“What did you do? You had a woman who was telling you she felt hopeless,” he asked as they discussed an appointment about two months before the killings.
“I told her that this was something we could address, that there was hope, that there are treatments, that there are different types of programs,” Tufts said, “so she knew that she still had options and a reason to hope.”
Paul Zeizel, a clinical and forensic psychologist who visited Lindsay Clancy in the hospital after she killed the children, testified that he overheard her saying that a disembodied male voice had told her she had no choice but to kill her children and then herself. Zeizel said he believed Clancy wasn't responsible for her actions because of her deep mental illness.
Prosecutors called a rebuttal witness, forensic psychologist Kirk Heilbrun, who said he didn’t believe Clancy had hallucinated voices.
“One of the things that she said when I asked about what happened, is that in the course of strangling each child, she said, ‘Go to God, baby. Go to God,’” he said. “That was part of her expectation that she and the children would be together in heaven with God.”
Dr. Gregory Saathoff, a senior psychiatrist for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, testified for prosecutors that Clancy “had the capacity to know right from wrong.”
After testimony was complete, each side got about an hour to make their closing argument to the jury.
Reddington showed the jury a photograph of the Clancy family, looking happy, and a second one of Lindsay Clancy in the hospital.
“How does this turn into this?” Reddington asked. “How? Because of the damn medicine and the lousy medical care that she got.”
Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague said criticizing the mental health system was “a distraction.” She said Clancy chose to kill her children because doing so would make it easier to kill herself.
“She was depressed. She was exhausted. She was done. She didn’t want to try anymore. She felt damaged,” Sprague said. “But those kids, those kids were her protective factor. Those kids were keeping her from ending her misery.”
Assistant DA Jennifer Sprague makes her closing arguments for the jury asking them to find Clancy guilty during the Lindsay Clancy murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., Thursday, Aug. 27, 2026. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)
FILE - Patrick Clancy sits on the stand during the Lindsay Clancy murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., on Wednesday, July 29, 2026. (David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via AP, Pool,File)
Lindsay Clancy listens to a witness on video during her murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court, Monday, Aug. 24, 2026 in Plymouth, Mass. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)
NEW YORK (AP) — Gloria Steinem, the celebrated author and activist who became the most visible symbol of the U.S. women’s movement and remained a fierce and eloquent advocate for equality for six decades, has died. She was 92.
With her trademark streaked hair parted down the middle and large aviator glasses, Steinem, a co-founder of Ms. Magazine, was a hugely recognizable presence wherever she went. And she went everywhere: Much of her life as an advocate was spent on the road, speaking at college campuses and community centers, at rallies and marches.
“You can’t do it on the phone or on the web,” she told The Associated Press in a 2015 interview. “You have to be there with all five senses. It should be obvious that people can’t empathize with each other unless we’re in the same room.”
Steinem, who had been in declining health, died Wednesday at her home in New York City, according to a post on her social media page. She had recently completed a memoir, to be released this fall.
“Gloria’s greatest gift was her ability to listen to others, to make others feel seen and heard,” the post said. “Her words, actions, and example gave people permission to be their truest selves.”
Though Steinem had recently become more frail physically, her wit and humor remained totally intact. Her friend and fellow activist, Abigail Disney, said she'd visited Steinem’s Manhattan home a bit over a week ago, as those close to her gathered by her side. “She was just as funny and just as sharp as I have ever known her,” Disney said. And, she said, generous.
“Everything Gloria did was rooted in kindness,” Disney said. “It flowed through her political activism.”
Steinem began her career as a journalist, notably reporting in 1963 on degrading conditions in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire — an undercover assignment she later came to regret. She credits a meeting six years later, where women spoke out in favor of abortion rights, with changing her career path.
“That speak-out was the beginning of activism for me,” Steinem, who had undergone a secret illegal abortion herself at age 22, told the AP in an email in 2022, reflecting on the reversal of Roe v. Wade. “Either our control over our own bodies is equal, regardless of sex or race, or we’re not living in a democracy.”
Those who watched Steinem denounce discrimination for so many years likely never suspected that she’d had to overcome a deep fear of public speaking. She would have simply stuck to writing, she said, if only editors at the time had been willing to let her write about the women’s movement.
But they weren’t interested, she told the AP in 2015. “So I ended up going out and speaking, which was my nightmare,” she said. “I mean, I was terrified. But I’m grateful, even though I still get scared even now.”
Time hardly slowed Steinem down; through her 80s, she was traveling the globe and speaking out on issues of importance to her. These included everything from genital mutilation to Korean reconciliation, but it was equality for women that took precedence. “Being a feminist means that you see the world as whole instead of half,” she once said. “It shouldn’t need a name, and one day it won’t.”
As the years went on, Steinem’s visibility endured. A few days after her 85th birthday, she was leading a women’s “talking circle” at an off-Broadway play celebrating her life, where one by one, women in the audience — many fighting tears — rose to thank her and tell their own stories of discrimination. In 2020, her life was the subject of a feature film, “The Glorias.”
And at 91, she collaborated on a picture book with Liberian peace activist and Nobel laureate Leymah Gbowee aimed at inspiring young people to change the world. “Rise, Girl, Rise: Our Sister-Friend Journey. Together for All” was published in February.
The constant visibility came with a price; even into her older years, Steinem expressed frustration that despite her accomplishments, she was often described as beautiful or glamorous. A 1992 Vanity Fair profile even noted her “spectacular racehorse legs.”
“Nobody ever called me beautiful until I was publicly a feminist, and that was in my mid-30s,” she told AP in a 2011 interview. “It was clear that label was being assigned to me. The most hurtful part is that you work very hard, and people say it’s because of your looks.”
Of course, Steinem also had to deal with hostility — sometimes from surprising places. Appearing on Larry King’s talk show on CNN in 1990, she was visibly stunned when a female caller greeted her cheerfully, then told her to “rot in hell” because she had ruined “the beautiful American family.”
But by then, she noted, at least people were taking feminists seriously. That wasn’t the case in 1972 when she co-founded Ms. Magazine and many commentators — especially male — dismissed it as ridiculous, predicting an early demise.
Among Steinem’s detractors was President Richard Nixon, who was caught on an Oval Office tape ridiculing both her and the “Ms.” title. The ridicule was mutual: In a 1972 National Press Club speech, Steinem called Nixon “the most sexually insecure chief of state since Napoleon.”
It was just one example of Steinem’s trademark wit. Before she married at 66, she often explained her singlehood by saying “I can’t mate in captivity.” Laughter, she wrote, was “the only free emotion — the only one that can’t be compelled.”
Gloria Marie Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio. Her father was a traveling antique salesperson; she spent her early years on the road with her parents, not attending regular school. “I just read everything I could get my hands on,” she told an audience at Manhattan’s 92NY earlier this year.
In 1944 her parents divorced, and 10-year-old Gloria was left to take care of her mother, a once-promising journalist who struggled to combine her work with running a household and who eventually suffered a nervous breakdown.
As a young girl she excelled at tap dancing — it was even going to be her “ticket out of Toledo,” she said. That particular career did not materialize, though, and she attended Smith College in the 1950s — a time when, she said, women were being educated to be mothers and wives.
But marriage was not on Steinem’s mind. “I was engaged to a very nice man. It wasn’t his fault, but I just didn’t want to get married,” she told her 2026 audience. Instead, she took a modest fellowship to travel to India. After that, Steinem headed to Manhattan, where she couldn’t rent her own apartment because landlords assumed if a single woman “could earn enough, you must be a hooker.”
She wanted to write about politics. But editors gave her assignments on food, fashion, and, in what she jokingly called “the low point of my life,” an article about textured stockings. Even more demoralizing was her experience with an editor who, she said, gave her a choice one day: Spend the afternoon in a hotel with him, or mail his letters on the way out.
She chose to mail the letters. “There was no word for sexual harassment then,” she has said. “It was just life.”
But one assignment in 1963 sounded compelling: posing as a Playboy Bunny for an exposé in the now-defunct Show magazine. Steinem auditioned, assuming she’d be weeded out. But she was given her bunny costume — “so tight, it would give a man a cleavage” — and worked at the job for about a month.
“I could not have made a bigger mistake,” she told the AP in 2011. “It was personally and professionally a disaster. In the short term, it was much harder to get assignments, and in the long term it’s been used to ridicule me.”
Steinem was in her 30s when she joined the editorial board of New York magazine, and her writing became more political. In 1969, she went to cover an abortion rights hearing. She had never told anyone about her illegal abortion at 22, in London. That was the moment, she has said, that triggered her career as a women’s rights activist.
Steinem founded the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971 along with Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug.
Unlike her friend Abzug, however, Steinem was not comfortable in front of a crowd. Gradually, with her early speaking partner Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a Black feminist and child welfare advocate, she found her footing. The two formed a powerful partnership at a time when feminism was viewed as largely a white, middle-class movement. In an iconic photo, the two raise their right arms together in the Black Power salute.
As she grew more famous, Steinem drew attention not just for her work but for a glamorous Manhattan life. Asked once about her streaked hair and aviator glasses, she explained that the hair was inspired by Holly Golightly, the free-spirited character in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
The glasses? They were “more about hiding,” she said.
When reaction was hostile, Steinem would try to reason that it was a step above ridicule. But sometimes it stung, like a snarky Esquire profile in the early ’70s, so hurtful that she cried, and colleagues called a news conference to defend her.
Then came Ms. Magazine in 1972. “I was so obsessed with the fear that it would fail and be a disgrace to the movement,” Steinem said later. And opponents hoped that would happen. TV newsman Harry Reasoner, an especially tart critic, later apologized on air. Steinem continued with Ms. until it was bought in 2001 by the Feminist Majority Foundation, and remained an adviser.
Steinem never had children, and said she never regretted it. “No, not for a millisecond,” she told the AP. “It’s important that some of us not have children, to show that we have a choice.”
In 2000, Steinem made a choice she’d never planned to: She got married, at 66, to British activist and businessman David Bale, whom she met at a fundraiser. Bale was the father of actor Christian Bale.
“I thought, ‘I haven’t changed, marriage had changed,’” Steinem said. “David and I wanted to be together, we loved each other. He needed a green card.” They married at a Cherokee ceremony in Oklahoma. Several years later, he became ill with brain lymphoma, and Steinem cared for him until his death in 2003.
Steinem said she had few regrets in life, but did miss being present when her father died. She received word that he’d been in a serious car accident, but did not respond in time, and he died alone. “I had taken care of my mom as a child, and I feared I’d never come back,” she explained.
She was also sorry that she didn’t become closer to her mother. “I was so fearful of becoming her,” she said in an HBO documentary, “Gloria: In Her Own Words.”
Steinem’s books included the 2015 road memoir “My Life on the Road” — but she wryly noted at the time that she’d never learned to drive. It would have taken away, she said, from her ability to converse with hosts who picked her up from airports or train stations. And, she noted, she always loved to chat with taxi drivers.
On Jan. 21, 2017, when hundreds of thousands of women gathered in Washington in their pink “pussy hats” for the historic Women’s March, it surprised nobody that the keynote speaker, and the most rousing, was Steinem.
“We are linked,” she told the crowd. “And this is a day that will change us forever because we are together.”
For many women, Steinem was the galvanizing voice that day. She would go on to advocate fiercely. But, though many saw her as a singular figure in history, she often liked to say that if she hadn’t come along, someone else would have accomplished the same things.
By the same token, she said, it was less important that younger people listen to her, and more important that they listen to themselves.
“The primary thing is not that they know who I am,” she said, “but that they know who THEY are.”
This story has been corrected to change the title of Steinem's 2015 memoir to “My Life on the Road,” not “A Life on the Road.”
FILE - Gloria Steinem poses for a picture at her home in New York on Oct. 19, 2015. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)
FILE - Bella Abzug, left, and Patsy Mink of Women USA sit next to Gloria Steinem as she speaks in Washington, Nov. 21, 1979. (AP Photo/Harvey Georges, File)
FILE - Leading supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment march in Washington, July 9, 1978, urging Congress to extend the time for ratification of the ERA. From left are: Gloria Steinem; Dick Gregory; Betty Friedan; Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, D-N.Y. (partially obscured); Rep. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md.; and Rep. Margaret Heckler, R-Mass. The women at far left and right are unidentified. (AP Photo/Dennis Cook, File)
FILE - Gloria Steinem, secretary of Women USA, left, and former Congresswoman Bella Abzug, president of Women USA, answer questions at a press conference in Washington, Nov. 20, 1979. (AP Photo/Harvey Georges, File)
FILE - Women's rights spokeswoman Gloria Steinem attends a news conference at the American Civil Liberties Union office in New York, July 12, 1973. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
FILE - New York Governor Kathy Hochul, left, Anna Wintour and Gloria Steinem attend the Michael Kors Fall/Winter 2023 fashion show in New York on Feb. 15, 2023. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
Gloria Steinem, Journalist and Activist talks during the Forbes 30/50 Summit at the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Wednesday, March 8, 2023. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)
FILE - Gloria Steinem speaks during the 2021 Princess of Asturias Awards ceremony in Oviedo, northern Spain, Oct. 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez, File)
