PLYMOUTH, Mᴀss. — Lindsay Clancy sobbed in court Wednesday as jurors listened to the anguished 911 call her then-husband made after returning from an errand to find she’d strangled their three children in their Mᴀssachusetts home.
On the roughly 7-minute recording, Patrick Clancy can be heard speaking with his wife upon finding her badly injured and bleeding in their yard, after she jumped from the home’s second-story window.
“Look at me,” he says. “Say my name.”
He then tells the dispatcher he’s going to check on the children. Moments later, he howls and cries after finding them in the basement. The confused dispatcher repeatedly asks what happened.
“She killed the kids!” he yells.
Three years after their deaths, the murder trial has centered on Lindsay Clancy’s mental state at the time. Her lawyers will seek to prove she had postpregnancy psychosis, a rare mental illness linked to the stress, sleep deprivation and hormonal changes that follow childbirth.
Prosecutors say Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse at Mᴀssachusetts General Hospital, acted intentionally and is criminally responsible for the deaths of 3-year-old Dawson, 5-year-old Cora, and 8-month-old Callan in January 2023.
Her lawyer said in opening arguments Monday that she had bipolar disorder, and that antidepressants prescribed after the birth of her third child worsened her condition. On the day of the killings, Lindsay Clancy said she heard a voice telling her, “This is your last chance. Kill the children so you can kill yourself,” according to her lawyer.
If convicted of murder, she faces life in prison without parole. If found not guilty due to a lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility.
Patrick Clancy has said in interviews that he forgives his ex-wife, whom he viewed as ill rather than evil. The trial marks the first time he has seen Lindsay Clancy since the killings.
A husband’s emotional testimony and a chilling 911 call
Patrick Clancy testified Wednesday that his last image of Dawson was of the boy sitting on the couch, eating chicken nuggets and green beans. Lindsay Clancy had asked her husband to make a quick trip for takeout food and medication at a pharmacy for Cora. Prosecutors say this was an excuse to get him out of the house.
Jurors were shown surveillance video from the pharmacy of Patrick Clancy on the phone with his wife, asking a question about the medicine.
“She was pretty quiet. It sounded like she was busy,” he testified Wednesday. “I remember hanging up thinking she was probably in the middle of giving baths or something like that.”
Returning home, it was unusually silent. He called out to his family.
When no one answered, he searched the children’s rooms and the bathroom, again thinking they might be in the tub, before finding blood throughout the main bedroom and a window open.
Injured but conscious, Lindsay Clancy told him she’d tried to kill herself and that the kids were in the basement, without saying they were ᴅᴇᴀᴅ. He didn’t realize he was still on the phone with 911 as he ran downstairs to find each had been strangled with exercise bands.
Lindsay Clancy’s parents, seated in the front of the court, also cried as the call was played. Patrick had already left the room after finishing his testimony.
Jurors were shown the clothes each child had been wearing, with a prosecutor pulling the items from clear plastic evidence bags: pajamas and a pink robe for Cora; a nightshirt and dinosaur underwear for Dawson; a red onesie decorated with snowflakes for Callan.
The trial will hinge on Lindsay Clancy’s mental state
Patrick Clancy testified Monday about his wife’s deteriorating mental health in the months before the killings, including her telling him about intrusive thoughts of harming the children and of suicide.
Lindsay Clancy had sought care from experts in postpartum mood disorders, was put on multiple psychiatric medications, and when nothing worked, checked in to a psychiatric hospital. She killed the children 19 days after she was discharged.
No one ever told Patrick Clancy his wife shouldn’t be alone with the children, he testified Wednesday. “I didn’t know what psychosis was until after this happened.”
Clancy and her ex-husband accuse her medical providers of failing to properly diagnose, treat and monitor her, according to lawsuits filed earlier this year.
On cross-examination, Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, aimed to demonstrate she took her medications and closely tracked her declining mental health. He introduced daily, handwritten notes she took of her medicines and her mood, including repeatedly writing “horrible thoughts.” She also had a book and fact sheet on postpartum anxiety and a chart where she tracked her mood.
Reddington also got Patrick Clancy to acknowledge that many of her medical appointments starting in the summer of 2022 were with nurse pracтιтioners and on Zoom calls lasting only 20 minutes. They also went through multiple medications she was prescribed, including Seroquel — an antipsycH๏τic medication for which doctors increased her dosage in December.
“The idea was that it would help with sleep, but she didn’t get better. She got worse,” Patrick Clancy said.
💔 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.
