It was March 8, 1954, when Carl Fisher walked into his Waterville, , home to find his three beautiful children ᴅᴇᴀᴅ at the hands of his wife. Nearly 70 years later, Patrick Clancy would make an eerily similar discovery in .
The trial of Patrick’s wife has gripped the nation as true crime fanatics and journalists wait with bated breath to see if thefor the 2023 strangulation of Cora, five; Dawson, three; and Callan, eight months.
As remain in the spotlight, some are pointing out the parallels between Clancy and Constance Fisher.
Lindsay Clancy killed her three children in 2023 while suffering from postpartum depression
Constance, then 24, drowned her children – Richard, six; Daniel, four; and Deborah, 11 months – in a bathtub in 1954. Like Clancy, Constance claimed she heard a voice telling her to do it to save her children from evil, an old 1966 newspaper clipping from the Kennebec Journal revealed.
‘God told me to do it,’ the young woman told prosecutors. ‘They are in heaven, safe from evil.’
Lindsay also claimed to have heard a man’s voice for 18 minutes while she killed her children in 2023. She admits strangling them but says she was insane due to post-partum psychosis when she killed the youngsters and denies murder.
Jurors are currently deliberating Clancy’s fate. Decades earlier, Constance was ruled insane and sent to a psychiatric hospital, which she would later escape.
The Daily Mail takes a look at how the 1954 case compares to Lindsay’s.
Nearly 70 years earlier, Constance Fisher also killed her three kids before spending years in a mєntal hospital. After being released and restarting her family, she killed again
The Constance Fisher Case
When Carl Fisher returned home from his Maine Central Railroad job in March 1954, the family’s house was eerily silent, and his wife was nowhere to be found.
The father walked through the home and spotted what he believed were his two youngest apparently asleep in their beds. It wasn’t until he reached the bathroom and found eldest son Richard floating face-down in the bathtub that he realized the truth.
In a panic, he called for help as he searched for Constance, whom he found wrapped тιԍнтly in a blanket under their bed. She was next to an empty bottle of Selsun shampoo.
In a sᩚuᩚiᩚcide note, prosecutors said the then-mother-of-three had confessed to the killings to Carl, and asked for him to forgive her.
‘Maybe you don’t think I loved them. I did, oh, I did; my heart is breaking. I loved you, and I loved them,’ Constance wrote, a 1954 Bangor Daily News article said.
Constance, who was described as a ‘slender, brown-haired housewife,’ wished to be buried with Deborah and have her two boys together.
However, the mother survived the sᩚuᩚiᩚcide attempt. And it was later revealed by the family’s physician, Dr Richard Chᴀsse, that the 24-year-old had sought a psychiatrist for help just two months before about feeling depressed, the Bangor Daily News said at the time.
Constance Fisher is seen after her initial arrest. Her case has drawn comparisons to that of Lindsay Clancy
Constance, who was schizophrenic, spent years inside the Augusta State Hospital until her husband, Carl, peтιтioned for her release in 1955. She was released in 1959 after years with signs of psychosis
Lindsay Clancy: In court as the jury decides her fate
I’m Rachel Sharp, US Editor of The Crime Desk. I have been covering the Lindsay Clancy trial since Day One.
The Daily Mail will bring readers unrivalled coverage, reaction and analysis of the verdict in a special edition of .
The 36-year-old faces life in prison for strangling her three children with an exercise band.
This was confirmed by the chaplain at the Augusta State Hospital, the psychiatric facility she was taken to. The chaplain said the mother had suffered ‘mєntal disturbances’ before killing her children, but she wasn’t given help quickly enough.
Despite her mєntal woes, locals described the woman as a good mother who loved her kids.
‘She was giving her children – [three] of them then – proper attention, bringing them up very nicely. The kids were happy, she was happy, and her husband was contented,’ the chaplain said in 1966.
After killing her children, Constance was diagnosed with psychosis and as a paranoid schizophrenic.
She was deemed too mentally unwell to stand trial and went to live at the Augusta State Hospital until her husband peтιтioned to get her out in 1955.
In 1957, at her first hearing, her doctors said no. A year later, they admitted she had shown no sign of psychosis for years, and her release could be considered.
She was finally released in May 1959 after experts decided that she posed no threat to society.
Within a year, Carl and Constance would start a new family and go on to have three more children – Kathleen, Michael, and Nathalie. They relocated to Fairfield.
Similarly to Constance, Lindsay also said she heard a voice telling her to kill her children
For years, Constance was a happy housewife and mother, but history repeated itself in the most horrific way in June 1966 when the young woman drowned her other three children in a bathtub.
Carl, once again, entered a silent home and found Nathalie, nine months, ᴅᴇᴀᴅ in the bathtub. Kathleen, six, and Michael, four, were also found ᴅᴇᴀᴅ in the home.
Constance, once again, attempted to kill herself unsuccessfully with drugs, a pellet gun, and a kitchen knife.
‘I hope you understand,’ the religious woman wrote in a second sᩚuᩚiᩚcide note. ‘It’s the only way I could be sure they would go to heaven.’
She would later tell Waterville Captain Albert Drost: ‘I drowned them.’
He testified that the mother-of-six expressed no remorse, telling him: ‘No, I am not [sorry]. The children would have had a hard life ahead of them. They are better where they are.’
Drost also testified that authorities had found Constance with a gun near her after drowning her children, but she told him she was unable to kill herself because the ‘gun didn’t work.’
‘She was going to use a knife, but she fell asleep before she could,’ he testified in 1967, the Lewiston Sun-Journal newspaper reported.
Nearly 70 years after Carl walked into his home in Maine to find his children ᴅᴇᴀᴅ, Patrick Clancy did the same in Mᴀssachusetts (pictured)
Patrick also found his wife after she attempted sᩚuᩚiᩚcide
She was once again brought to the Augusta State Hospital, this time with no hope of being released after once again being deemed to insane to stand trial.
For seven years, Carl faithfully visited her, but he eventually couldn’t handle it anymore and stopped.
Shortly after, Constance escaped the confines of the asylum. For days, authorities and the hospital looked for her with no luck.
She was eventually found by a hunter, who discovered her bloated body in the Kennebec River, which was near the hospital. Fisher died at the age of 44.
Constance would go on to be laid to rest next to the graves of her six children. In 1990, her husband would join them.
Cora, five, and Dawson, three, were found ᴅᴇᴀᴅ in the basement of the Clancy house. Callan, eight months, was found alive, but died in the hospital days later
The Comparison
Nearly 70 years after Constance first took the lives of Richard, Daniel, and Deborah, Patrick Clancy would walk into his home in Duxbury, Mᴀssachusetts, in January 2023 to find his three children killed.
Cora and Dawson had been strangled to dєatᩚh by exercise bands in the couple’s basement. Their youngest, Callan, was found alive and would die days later in the hospital.
Clancy, who was suffering from postpartum depression, tried to kill herself by jumping out of an upstairs window. She survived but was permanently paralyzed from the waist down.
Despite the similarities on paper, experts told the Daily Mail that there are substantial differences between the two cases.
Constance was schizophrenic, whereas Lindsay was suffering from postpartum depression.
‘[These are] very different cases in the sense of psychiatric diagnosis,’ Dr Blair Steel, a licensed clinical psychologist with Carrara Treatment, told the Daily Mail. ‘Constance had a long-standing psych illness of paranoid schizophrenia, so she had historical accounts of auditory hallucinations, delusional thinking, all of that.
‘Which is very different than, Lindsay’s postpartum depression. She had treatment around the time of the killing, she had all these medications around the time of the killing, so it was not this long-standing mєntal health [issue].’
Dr Blair Steel said Constance had a lifelong disease, whereas Clancy had postpartum depression and no history of psychiatric problems
Both women killed less than a year after the birth of the youngest child, with Dr Steel saying that timing may have been significant.
‘There’s the overlap of the hormone imbalance that takes place. If you think about around 11 months, a baby’s starting to wean, so the maternal hormones are completely changing,’ Steel said.
Clancy had been on multiple different types of medication prior to the killings. It is unclear what medication Constance was using, if any. Her first murder spree predated Thorazine, the first widely available antipsycH๏τic, being approved by the FDA.
‘If Constance’s exhibited signs of psychosis, it’s likely that treatment with antipsycH๏τics might not have been available to her at the time of the initial murders,’ Omotola Ajibade, a dual board-certified adult and forensic psychiatrist who has administered insanity defense evaluation tests, told the Daily Mail.
‘Constance was likely depressed at the time, and she also had psoriasis. In some extreme cases, psoriasis can lead to psychiatric symptoms,’ he said of the common skin condition that causes unsightly red blotches.
However, both Steel and Ajibade said the likelihood that Clancy would relapse and kill her children again, if she were to have more in the future, is very low.
‘With proper treatment, including medication and psychosocial support, it is unlikely that Clancy would suffer the same fate as Constance,’ Ajibade told the Daily Mail.
Omotola Ajibade, a dual board-certified adult and forensic psychiatrist, said Constance would not have had antipsycH๏τics available to her at the time of the first murders
Steel said Constance’s diagnosis was a lifelong condition, whereas Clancy’s is ‘more episodic.’ Postpartum depression would eventually go away, whereas schizophrenia would not.
He said that no two mєntal health diagnoses are like one another and that new mothers need to be heavily-supported to keep tabs on any potential mєntal health issues.
If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts or actions, please call the National sᩚuᩚiᩚcide H๏τline at 988.
💔 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.
