In the depths of the pandemic, mother of three Chelsea DeFina set up a Zoom group to help fellow moms keep each other accountable in their fitness journeys.
The attendees were an eclectic mix and included a woman named Lindsay Clancy.
DeFina knew Lindsay from her middle school cheer squad and remembered her fondly as a sweet girl. She hadn’t seen her in person in more than a decade, so she was excited when she joined.
Lindsay, who was pregnant with her third child, soon impressed DeFina and the other group members.
She would attend nearly every session, working out even when she was seven or eight months pregnant. Sometimes her oldest two kids, a girl and a boy, would pop into the frame, “working out” alongside the ladies.
“She was an inspiration,” DeFina said.
When Lindsay gave birth to another boy in May 2022, she stopped checking in. DeFina reached out, but didn’t hear back.
“I assumed she was busy keeping up with a newborn and toddlers,” said DeFina. “I didn’t believe it when I learned that it happened. It didn’t make sense.”
What happened: On January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy, a 33-year-old nurse, wife, and mom, asked her husband, Patrick, to run an errand near their home in Duxbury, Massachusetts.
While he was gone, Lindsay strangled her three children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — with exercise bands from their home gym.
Then she cut her neck and wrists with a knife, swallowed prescription pills from her nightstand, and threw herself out of a second-story window.
A 911 call bore witness to the worst moments of Patrick Clancy’s life, when he returned home and discovered the scene.
“His screams seem[ed] to get louder and more agonized as time passed,” court records state.
Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead at the hospital. Doctors were able to get Callan’s heart beating again, but tests revealed he had no brain activity.
After three days on life support, Callan died three days later. By then, the news of the Clancy kids and their mother made headlines, not only in Massachusetts, but nationwide.
Three years later, two narratives have emerged surrounding the children’s deaths that are so disparate, so incompatible with each other, that they almost seem to represent two parallel universes.
In one, Lindsay is an unrepentant monster. With forethought and malice, she killed her children. Why? Because she’s evil.
The other narrative is more complicated. Lindsay loved her children, but was betrayed by her own mind and did the unthinkable. Why? Because she was sick.
According to her friends, several of whom I spoke to over years of reporting, Lindsay was a normal middle-class woman. Chillingly so.
Those who knew her casually describe her as kind, but reserved. A quiet girl, but one everyone liked.
But to her best friends? Lindsay wasn’t shy at all.
“We were always laughing about something stupid and having fun,” recalled her close friend, who wanted to remain anonymous for fear of online retribution.
Another, who also only agreed to speak anonymously, told me: “I just want there to be truth put out about her, since everything so far has been painting her like a monster.”
“That’s been awful to witness as someone who has looked up to Lindsay for so many years. The system failed her, and she doesn’t deserve what happened. Her family didn’t deserve to be ripped apart. And I truly believe this tragedy could have been prevented had she received the proper care.”
While attending Lyman Hall High School in the small town of Wallingford, Connecticut, Lindsay was part of a tight-knit group of girlfriends.
They went to class together, studied together, drove around on the weekends and had sleepovers.
Lindsay, who lived with her parents and older sister at the time, was a competitive cheerleader, a National Honor Society student, and an involved classmate who participated in various clubs and events.
Lindsay also was laser-focused on her future.
“Being a nurse and a mother was her life plan since high school and that always made perfect sense to me because taking care of people just came naturally to her,” said Samantha Peck, a friend of Lindsay’s through middle and high school.
For Peck, there’s one memory of Lindsay that sticks with her.
“I had a tricky relationship with food at times in high school and would often not bring lunch,” she recalled. “She would always say she was full after half her sandwich and encourage me to have the rest so it wouldn’t go to waste…I don’t know if she even realized what a positive impact she was having on me, but she just had this inherent nurturing nature.”
After high school, Lindsay attended Quinnipiac University in nearby Hamden, CT, graduating in 2012 with a degree in Biology.
“I remember crying our eyes out together the night before we went away to college, even though we knew we would see each other soon,” her friend recalled.
But the group of friends never wavered. Posts on social media show the women together, visiting each other at their respective colleges, reuniting in their hometown, hugging each other at parties.
Her friend was even with Lindsay the night she met Patrick in 2016, who said the pair had “an immediate connection.”
“I remember thinking soon after they started dating that he was the one for her, she just seemed smitten,” she said. “She always said he was the nicest guy she ever dated. They treated each other really well.”
For Lindsay, it seemed like everything was falling into place. She married Patrick, and on Christmas Eve 2017, Lindsay and Patrick welcomed Cora. In September 2019, they welcomed their son, Dawson.
As her friends began having children of their own, Lindsay, a labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, was a source of support.
“When I became a mom, she was always the first person I would text when I needed advice or reassurance,” her friend recalled.
But after all, Lindsay was human, with her own anxieties and stresses like any other, often turning to the internet for parenting help, specifically, mom-focused Facebook groups.
In May 2021, in a group called “Attachment Parenting for Littles,” a Facebook account that appears to be Lindsay’s asked for advice dealing with outbursts from then-19-month-old Dawson, whom she called “the most difficult human I have ever encountered.”
“I mean that with all the love in my heart, but I honestly cannot make it through a day without getting so frustrated with him,” she wrote, asking for “solidarity/advice/anything.”
In August 2022, the same Facebook account thought to be Lindsay’s posted in a group for “morning mantras.”
“Had my third baby 2 months ago and tried to stick with my MM after he was born, but the last two weeks or so haven’t done any of the elements of it and I’m definitely struggling because of it!”
“Wish me luck! Someday it will get easier,” she wrote, with a silly-face emoji. “Pic of the 3 [kids] that make it so darn hard to have ‘me’ time.”
But it seems apparent now that what Lindsay was dealing with was far beyond the scope of a self-help routine.
In interviews with authorities, Patrick first mentions Lindsay’s struggles in September 2022, when, he said, she began to feel “anxious” about her return to work. She began boomeranging between psychiatrists, medication and even an inpatient stay in a psychiatric unit.
In November 2022, Lindsay’s apparent Facebook account posted to a group titled “I Am Not Alone: Postpartum Depression/Anxiety & Rage.”
She wrote she had “extreme insomnia” and worsening depression on Zoloft, that Ativan had made her “feel like herself again,” but she knew she could not take it long term “as it is addictive.”
“Any advice on an alternative that has a similar effect?” she wrote.
According to prosecutors, Lindsay kept “meticulous” journals and notes, both on paper and on her phone, detailing the number and dosages of medications she was on. She wrote that she had experienced difficulties with every medication she had been prescribed.
Lindsay also wrote about how she was feeling, including her suicidal ideation. At some point, she researched “ways to kill,” although investigators don’t elaborate on what the context for these searches was.
“I think I sort of resent my other children because they prevent me from treating Cal like my first baby,” she wrote. “And I know that’s not fair to them. I know that. I was feeling so depressed last evening when Cora and Dawson came home from school. I know it runs off on them so we had a pretty rough evening. I want to feel love and connection with all of my kids.”
That December, when she was evaluated at the Women and Infants Center for Women’s Behavioral Health in Providence, Rhode Island, a local outpatient clinic for perinatal and postpartum mental health, she was not given a diagnosis of postpartum depression.
According to court records, she was told “she had no symptoms” of the condition by the doctors at the clinic.
Later that month, she wrote in her journal that she had begun experiencing “suicidal ideation,” and told Patrick that she had begun to have thoughts of killing herself and the kids.
After speaking with her psychiatrist, Lindsay decided to self-admit to an inpatient psychiatric unit at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, where she stayed from New Year’s Day 2023 to Jan. 5, 2023.
“The hospital did not file any paperwork attempting to have her committed as a danger to herself or others,” the indictment reads. “When she was discharged, she denied having any auditory or visual hallucinations and denied any homicidal or suicidal ideation.”
Lindsay returned home. She kept journaling, and on Jan. 20, she googled “can you treat a sociopath?”
Everyone, it seems, was worried about her.
The day Lindsay came home from the hospital, Patrick described her to a friend as having “the worst side effects possible.”
Lindsay’s family had also driven from Connecticut to be there for her following her hospital stay.
Four days later, she killed her three children and failed in her own suicide attempt.
On Feb. 7, 2023, Lindsay, now paralyzed from the waist down and lying in a hospital bed with a mask covering most of her face, was arraigned on Zoom for three counts of murder in the deaths of Cora, Dawson, and Callan.
In the indictment, Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague charged that it was a case of premeditated murder — one she intended to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law.
“The defendant is a danger to herself and others,” reads the indictment. “She planned these murders, gave herself the time and privacy needed to commit the murders, and then strangled each child in the place where they should have been the safest—their home. She did so with deliberate premeditation and extreme atrocity and cruelty.”
According to evidence presented in her lawyer’s opening statement in court on Monday, Lindsay sought help from psychiatrists 19 times in the months preceding the killings.
To Chelsea DeFina, the answer to what happened seemed obvious. This was the tragic case of a mother experiencing a horrific psychotic break, not a murderer.
“The health care system is a mess; there’s nothing out there for moms,” she explained. “You’re just told to go home and figure it out. I have no idea why Lindsay would do what she did but I can only say from knowing her she was not in her right mind. That was not her.”
Kevin Reddington, Lindsay Clancy’s defense attorney, is making this precise case. Lindsay and her children were the collective victims of dire circumstances.
“Our society fails miserably at treating women with postpartum depression or even postpartum psychosis,” he stated, adding, “Our society completely abandons women with this condition.”
Despite the enormous swell of online hate against Lindsay for the killings, over the course of my reporting for this story, Lindsay’s friends still support her.
“Lindsay was a wonderful, present mom,” a close friend of Lindsay’s said. “Growing up, she would always talk about wanting a huge family. Her babies were her life.”
But now she will have to face the atrocity she committed — and accept the jury’s verdict on whether she is a cold-blooded murderer or was a mother caught in a dangerous and beyond tragic spiral of mental illness.
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