The grieving husband of a nurse who killed her three children has revealed his disturbing phone call that day and the chilling reason he strangled them.
Patrick Clancy returned to his family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, on January 24, 2023, after picking up medication for his daughter and bringing food for his family, and found his wife, Lindsay, semiconscious in the backyard with cuts. on the neck and wrists. after throwing herself out of the bedroom window, and her three children, Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months, died in the basement.
He had earlier called his wife from the local CVS to confirm which brand of medication to buy for their daughter’s stomach pain. he told the New Yorker.
At first, Clancy said Lindsay didn’t answer, but she called again a minute later and sounded like herself as they talked for about 14 seconds.
But when he recounted the phone call days later, Clancy said he realized she seemed to be in the middle of something.
Patrick Clancy has revealed the horrible phone call he had with his wife, Lindsay, on January 24, 2023 while she was strangling their three children.
However, he says, he doesn’t blame her.
“I wasn’t married to a monster, I was married to someone who got sick,” he insisted to the New Yorker.
She said she had been suffering from anxiety and was institutionalized in the months before the brutal murders.
He also said that just days before his arraignment in October, he received a voicemail from a phone number he didn’t recognize, only to later discover that it was Lindsay, calling from a psychologist’s phone number to tell him that I loved him.
When she called again the next day, Lindsay allegedly explained that she heard a voice ordering her to kill the children and then herself because it was her “last chance.”
“She didn’t sound like my wife,” Clancy said of the phone call.
Patrick returned home that day to find his children strangled to death in the basement.
Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months, were killed.
It was another six months before the couple spoke again, and Lindsay told her husband that every day was the worst of her life, the New Yorker reports.
“She misses her kids,” Clancy said. —Which I know seems crazy to some people. But that’s the reality.’
Lindsay’s friends have also previously told how she often joked about having enough children to fill a “baseball team” and said she was “born to be a mother.”
But Lindsay apparently began struggling with anxiety shortly after the birth of her youngest son, Callan, who was murdered when he was just eight months old.
She told Patrick she wanted to use Zoloft as she prepared to return to work and started seeing a virtual therapist.
However, those virtual visits focused more on medication management, Patrick said.
Lindsay’s friends have said that she often joked about having enough children to fill a “baseball team” and said that she was “born to be a mother.”
In mid-November 2022, Lindsay lost her appetite and largely stopped socializing.
He also began having trouble sleeping, which led doctors to prescribe him more medication.
Lindsay’s defense lawyers have since argued that “horrible overmedication” is the cause of her mental deterioration, and prosecutors even revealed in court that seven different medications were found in her blood samples.
Investigators found bottles of diazepam, amitriptyline and trazodone, all antidepressants, in the family home.
All three had been prescribed to Lindsay 16 days before the traumatic incident.
Lindsay apparently began struggling with her mental health after the birth of her youngest son.
On the day of the murders, Lindsay was worried about her daughter’s stomach pain.
In late December, Lindsay insisted she needed to go to a hospital, telling Patrick, “I have thoughts of wanting to die and I feel numb to them.”
Around the same time, Lindsay also confessed to having unwanted thoughts of harming her children, Patrick later told police.
Then, in early January, Lindsay was admitted to McLean Hospital, a psychiatric facility.
But when Patrick visited her later that week, they saw a clearly agitated individual walking through the hallways talking to himself, she told the New Yorker.
“There were people there who were clearly crazy,” he said. “Lindsay seemed to have it all together.”
He added that she even texted him: “I don’t belong here.”
She was discharged from the hospital after just five days with a prescription for an antidepressant and denied having any further intrusive thoughts.
Patrick thought he had gotten better, and on the morning of January 24, he even told Patrick that he felt “fine” and was sleeping “pretty well.”
She took the girl to a pediatrician and asked Patrick to get her some medication.
Later that day, she became concerned about her daughter’s stomach pain and took the girl to the pediatrician.
Lindsay then texted Patrick around 5 pm to pick up Pedia-Lax for Cora and a takeout for dinner.
He didn’t think much of the request at the time, because he thought she was better off, he told the New Yorker.
But he said: “If I could go back in time, I would have called McLean and said, ‘Take her, lock the door and keep her there for a year, if you have to.’
He noted that she seemed “very well” that day.
‘So what do you do? Someone is having a great day. Should I call the hotline?
Lindsay had been institutionalized shortly before the murders, but Patrick thought she had fared better.
He returned to their home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and found Lindsay semiconscious in the backyard and the children with exercise bands still around their necks.
However, when he returned home, he found blood on the floor of the master bedroom and a bloody knife.
He then found Lindsay barely conscious in the backyard and asked her, ‘What did you do?’ to which she responded, “I tried to kill myself,” the New Yorker reports.
Patrick then asked where the children were, to which she replied, “in the basement.”
That’s where she found her children, Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months, with exercise bands still around their necks.
He tried to take them off and begged each child to breathe before they were declared dead.
Afterward, Patrick said he asked his wife some questions about what happened that day.
“I think one of the first things I asked was, ‘Did you plan this?’ Is that why you sent me?’ he told the New Yorker.
“She said, ‘No, it was just like a snap of the fingers.'”
He said he then asked her why she had looked up and how long it would take to pick up dinner, to which she responded that she was worried he would get stuck in rush hour traffic.
“So I said, ‘Did you Google ‘Ways to kill’?” And she said, ‘Yes, for me, because I was suicidal for two months.’
Lindsay has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder, three counts of strangulation and three counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
Lindsay pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder, three counts of strangulation and three counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington, who has indicated he plans an insanity defense, painted a picture of a woman struggling with mental illness, who had been prescribed about a dozen medications to try to control it.
“This is not a situation that was planned in any way,” he said. “This was a situation that was clearly the product of mental illness.”
But prosecutors countered that Clancy had previously been evaluated by mental health professionals and was told she had no postpartum depression or symptoms of postpartum depression.
They also claimed that Lindsay had been researching ways to kill with her cell phone in the days before the murders, and suggested that her suicide attempt that night was half-hearted and possibly even faked.
A date for his trial has not yet been set.
