THE judge in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial has slammed her lawyer’s attempt at adding someone to the witness list last minute, but there is still a chance the TikToker could be called.
Lindsay, 36, is on trial after she in the basement of their Duxbury, Mᴀssachusetts home on January 24, 2023.
Lindsay Clancy (pictured on Monday) has been accused of strangling her three children in 2023
Judge William Sullivan, who is overseeing Lindsay’s trial, was asked to consider allowing another witness to be added to the defense’s witness list
The witness worked at the McLean Hospital where Lindsay received treatment but left before Lindsay was admitted
Lindsay’s three children, Callan, Dawson and Cora were found in the basement of their Mᴀssachusetts home
If you or someone you know needs help or support for their mєntal health, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected with a certified crisis counselor.
The has since to three murder charges in connection to the deaths of her children: five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and
Lindsay has admitted to the killings, but her lawyer plans to argue she is because she was suffering from undiagnosed
On , Lindsay also crushed up pills, cut her wrists and neck with and of her second-story bedroom window, leaving her after strangling her kids.
Her , and since then there has been testimony from her, first responders on the fateful night, medical staff and her children afterward, friends and family.
Lindsay in her kids’ deaths have also taken the stand.
One of which was a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, where Lindsay checked herself in for inpatient stay on December 31, 2022.
Lindsay’s stay was also brought up during Patrick’s testimony, where said “the prosecutor made it out on direct exam that McLean is some kind of a five-star insтιтution.”
Now Reddington wants to call a woman who has shared several TikToks about what it was like working at McLean Hospital.
Reddington wants Emily Thorndike, who worked at the hospital for seven years as a mєntal health specialist but left one year before Lindsay was admitted, to testify about hospital staffing around the holidays.
Thorndike, now an independent clinical social worker, is “available, ready, willing and able to testify about an employee’s opinion as to what a woeful environment McLean offers, especially on holidays … nobody was there,” Reddington told
Lindsay checked into the hospital in Belmont, Mᴀssachusetts on New Year’s Eve in 2022, and checked out on January 5.
Lindsay checked herself into McLean Hospital and stayed for four days
Lindsay has pleaded not guilty to three murder charges in connection to her kids’ deaths
“[Jurors] are left with the impression that McLean was this wonderful place and [Lindsay] didn’t have any interest in utilizing what was available to her,” Reddington said in court on Tuesday.
Prosecutor Shanan Buckingham argued against adding Thorndike as a witness, noting how she didn’t work at the hospital while Lindsay was a patient and because she’s been following the case online.
Buckingham also called out the late notice and how Thorndike thinks the case is “an abomination.”
“I can’t imagine that witness would be allowed to give her review of McLean,” Judge Sullivan said.
“This is not TripAdvisor. I wouldn’t allow that.”
“It seems to me it would be a very simple solution to get the staffing records or somebody at McLean who can testify to this,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan took the matter under advisement, and said he might allow some questioning of Thorndike about what staffing was like on holidays without the jury present to see if she would be allowed to testify.
In his motion, Reddington wrote that Thorndike was “incensed” over Patrick’s cross-examination, where the prosecutor “intimated that McLean Hospital was one of the best hospitals in the country and that Lindsay Clancy was offered a number of therapeutic and counselling type interventions while at McLean …”
Reddington said Thorndike wants to testify about the facts of staffing and “the repeated use of clay, coloring books and purported group therapy sessions, supervised by unqualified individuals who have no psychiatric or social work experience.”
Thorndike wanted to “talk about the prosecution lies” in a on July 29.
She claimed there are around 23 patients at the facility at a time, and there is usually one doctor ᴀssigned to three to four patients, but on holidays, one doctor tends to all of the patients.
The prosecutor asked if he was aware one-on-one therapy was offered at the hospital’s unit, which Thorndike claims is not true.
Patrick Clancy was asked about Lindsay’s stay at McLean during his testimony
The Clancy children pictured weeks before their deaths
Thorndike claimed these meetings were “check-ins” where workers would ask patients how they were doing, what they ate that day, if they talked to their family and what their treatment plan is.
She also shut down the prosecution’s claims that Lindsay saw her doctor every day she was there, claiming Lindsay wouldn’t have seen “her” doctor at the facility until the Tuesday that she was there because she came in on a weekend and that Monday was a holiday.
“McLean Hospital is committed to providing high-quality mєntal health care for individuals and families across the lifespan through inpatient, residential, and outpatient services,” a hospital spokesperson said in a statement to The U.S. Sun.
“This includes advancing the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of mєntal health conditions that uniquely affect women, including postpartum mєntal health conditions.
“Due to privacy laws, we cannot comment on any specific patient. We mourn the tragic loss of three children and the allegations in this case.”
The U.S. Sun has reached out to Thorndike for comment.
As Lindsay’s trial continues, more witnesses are expected to be called to the stand as her attorney
On the other side, the that Lindsay “was not a woman in the throes of psychosis” and instead “coldly and efficiently executed” her three children.
If Lindsay is convicted of murder, she faces life in prison without parole, but if she is found not guilty because of a lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mєntal health facility.
💔 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.
