Lindsay Clancy was not suffering from acute psychosis when she killed her three children but took their lives so they wouldn’t “suffer” after she took her own life, a forensic psychologist testified Monday her murder trial.
Kirk Heilbrun said he ruled out acute psychosis with command hallucinations because he didn’t believe Clancy when she said she heard a voice telling her to “kill the children so you can kill yourself.”
“She described this as hearing a voice she had never heard before, experiencing a hallucination, and has never experienced it since. But she only experienced it for about 18 minutes, which was necessary to kill the children,” Heilbrun testified. “To put it mildly, that would be a very, very unusual pattern or manifestation of how something like this comes about. Very unusual.”
A central issue in the trial is Clancy’s mental health. Defenseman Kevin Reddington doesn’t dispute that Clancy killed the children in January 2023, but says she shouldn’t be held criminally responsible for doing it postpartum psychosisa rare mental illness linked to stress, lack of sleep and hormonal changes after childbirth.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes a discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the U.S. National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline can be reached by calling 988 or texting.
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Clancy didn’t want to leave her children behind
After killing her children, Clancy jumped from a second-story window and remains paralyzed from the waist down. Heilbrun testified that he concluded that Clancy killed her children because she wanted to kill herself but didn’t want to leave them behind.
“One of the things she said when I asked what happened was that as she strangled 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 in heaven with God.”
Heilbrun also mentioned Clancy’s Catholic faith, which led to Reddington filing a motion for a mistrial, which Judge William Sullivan denied.
He later instructed the jury to disregard reference to “the religion in which the defendant was raised,” calling it “a completely inappropriate area of testimony.”
The prosecution argues that Clancy did not suffer from psychosis
Heilbrun is the latest prosecution witness to say that although Clancy was mentally ill, she still knew what she was doing was wrong.
On Friday, Dr. Avram Mack, a forensic psychiatrist, said he found no evidence of mania or hypomania to support a bipolar diagnosis – or psychosis – in the lead-up to the murders. He said that Clancy was suffering from severe mental illness when she killed her children, but that it was a continuation of the depression she had experienced for months, during which she was unable to control her impulses and distinguish right from wrong.
However, Heilbrun said he determined Clancy had bipolar 2 disorder and said it was difficult to make a diagnosis, at least in part, “because of all the diagnoses in the records and all the symptoms she was experiencing.” People with bipolar 2 disorder experience cycles of depression and hypomania that are less intense than the mania that occurs in bipolar 1 disorder.
Early in the trial, the jury learned that Clancy had sought treatment for her mental health issues from multiple providers and even checked herself into a psychiatric hospital.
Prosecutors allege the former labor and delivery nurse planned the murders and managed to get them caught Husband out of the house by sending him to get medicine for one of their children and dinner for the family.
Clancy, 36, has pleaded not guilty Murder charge in the deaths of Callan, Dawson and Cora Clancy, who were between 8 months and 5 years old. Closing arguments are expected later this week.
The defense argues she had postpartum psychosis
The condition Clancy’s lawyer says she had when she killed the children postpartum psychosis, is more serious and rarer than postpartum depression.
The last witness to testify for the defense before the prosecution called counterwitnesses was Dr. Phillip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist and expert on filicide, the killing of a child by a parent.
Resnick testified Friday that Clancy was “clearly psychotic” and had no control over her actions the day she killed her children. “It was almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings,” he said.
This was confirmed by another defense witness, psychologist Paul Zeizel, who concluded that Clancy “had no understanding of the wrongfulness of her actions.”