Mᴀssachusetts mom Lindsay Clancy blankly stared in court Monday as she headed to trial for fatally strangling her three small children in an alleged postpartum psycH๏τic state, new pH๏τos show.
The wheelchair-bound 35-year-old remained stoic, showing little emotion, as she looked down at one point and closed her eyes during jury selection in the sensational case in Plymouth.
The highly anticipated trial will hinge on whether jurors believe the killer mom — paralyzed from a later suicide attempt — was suffering from postpartum psychosis worsened by a cocktail of prescribed drugs when she committed her unthinkable alleged crime, experts said.
“The whole case is just her state of mind and whether she was aware of right from wrong and literally if [she was aware] what she was doing was going to end up killing her kids,” former prosecutor Mark Bederow told The Post.
“Any juror is gonna wanna know why the hell would this woman do this? Why would a seemingly normal young woman living a beautiful life just murder her three children?”
Clancy is accused of using exercise bands to kill her young kids in the basement of the family’s Duxbury, Mᴀss., home before becoming paralyzed from the waist down from a botched bid to kill herself Jan. 24, 2023.
Her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, has said he plans to ask the jury to find her not guilty by reason of insanity on the grounds she was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis and heard a voice telling her to carry out the heinous acts.
Legal experts said that key to her defense will be educating the jury, through medical witnesses, about the rare mental disease that allegedly led to the tragedy.
Clancy’s team will call medical experts to testify about postpartum psychosis, the treatment Clancy was receiving and the medications she was on — all in a bid to explain why she wasn’t in her right mind during the crimes and ultimately why she should be let off the hook, experts said.
Prosecutors will likely meanwhile call their own expert medical witnesses to argue that Clancy wasn’t suffering a mental break but rather was lucid enough to methodically plan how to get her husband out of the house that day so she could be alone with their children: Dawson, 3, Cora, 5, and 8-month-old Callan.
“It boils down to a battle of the experts,” former prosecutor Margaret McLean told The Post.
Bederow added that severe postpartum is “quite obviously a real thing and can lead seemingly normal people to do completely abnormal things.’’
Clancy and her husband, Patrick Clancy, have both filed lawsuits against the doctors who treated herm claiming they failed to diagnose her postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder.
The docs also put her on a revolving door of powerful antipsycH๏τic drugs and a “polypharmacy” of other psychiatric medications, the suits claim.
McLean said she thinks the defense strategy could raise enough reasonable doubt for jurors to either find her not guilty by reason of insanity or convict Clancy of a lesser included offense, such as involuntary manslaughter.
Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse at Mᴀss General Hospital, tried to kill herself by slicing her wrists and throat and throwing herself out of their home’s second-story window.
She is now a paraplegic and wheelchair-bound, which could also help to garner sympathy from jurors, McLean said.
“Here there is so much evidence showing that Lindsay Clancy sought help, and you’re going to have excellent experts come on to talk about what she was going through and the fact that she’s bound to a wheelchair,” McLean said. “I think that some people will have sympathy for her.”
But Bederow also noted that “it will take a great deal of humanity and compᴀssion for jurors to get past the act itself and really focus on her mental state.”
Two advocates for perinatal mental health in women, who experienced severe postpartum reactions themselves, said they agree that Clancy probably had postpartum psychosis and that better awareness and treatment could have prevented the tragedy.
“The description of what happened with her is pretty much textbook,” said Teresa Twomey, a former lawyer and current mediator.
“Essentially, whenever I see a story of a woman who is described pretty universally as a great mom, who then does something to harm somebody that is completely outside of her past behavior and what people describe as her nature, my ᴀssumption is psychosis.”
Paige Bellenbaum a social worker and perinatal-mental-health specialist, said “This is a woman who wanted nothing more than to be better.’
“For almost two years, She was trying so hard to get better, but when women don’t have access to specialty treatment providers … this is where mistakes can happen.”
Clancy’s trial is slated to last one to two months and could feature the testimony of up to 200 witnesses, including Patrick.
Judge William Sullivan has said there will be 18 jurors chosen, including alternates.
Dr. David Benjamin, a clinical pharmacologist and forensic toxicologist who is slated to testify on Clancy’s behalf, said, “This is one of the saddest cases I’ve ever been involved in.”
He said he doesn’t know why the doctors she was seeing at the same time were undermining each other by yanking Clancy off of certain meds and putting her on others without consulting each other.
“I’m going to take you off all of those meds and put you on these and you’ll do much better,” Benjamin said of her doctors’ apparent thoughts.
“And you know what happens? The person falls out of gear and commits a crime or hurts somebody because the stupid second doctor, their ego got in the way, and they changed what she was doing.”
“There’s this Macy’s versus Gimbels atтιтude among the docs,’’ he said, referring to the famous onetime business battle between the legendary department stores.
“Like, who’s the best doc in the world. And poor Mrs. Clancy is in the middle of it.”
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
