Mᴀssachusetts mom repeatedly Wednesday as prosecutors showed the PJs that her three young children were wearing when she killed them — and then played the harrowing 911 call her husband made after coming home to tᩚraɢedy, begging her at one point, “Where are the kids, Lindsay?”
The second day of the the murder trial included the end of husband Patrick Clancy’s testimony, as well as gut-wrenching evidence that stunned the courtroom into silence and had even a veteran journalist calling it, “truly one of the worst things I’ve heard in my 43 year career.”
Clancy is pleading insanity and arguing that she was suffering postpartum psychosis, for which she never got adequate treatment, when she killed her kids. Prosecutors say her actions betray a calculated 𝘬ill.
Plymouth County ᴀssistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague presented the tiny clothing as well as the 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan at their Boston area home in January 2023.
Clancy, meanwhile, appeared to turn her head away from the camera and dab her eyes with a tissue during the display.
was also played for the jury — though only the people in the courtroom heard the harrowing recording after Judge William Sullivan approved Patrick’s request for it to not be broadcast to the public last week.
The father could be heart pleading with his wife to tell him what happened to their children.
“Where are the kids, Lindsay?” Patrick could be heard asking her during the call. “Did you fall out the window, Linds? Did you fall? Is there something on your neck, Lindsay?”
Patrick had come home from running errands to find the house deathly quiet. He discovered his wife, a labor and delivery nurse, on her back in their backyard, below the second-floor bedroom window she threw herself out of during a sᩚuᩚiᩚcide attempt. Her wrists and neck were cut and bloodied.
He then ran inside to find the children strangled in the basement as first responders were arriving.
Patrick could then be heard screaming and saying that he needed help in the basement.
“She killed the kids!” he yelled during the call.
Lindsay Clancy was sobbing audibly as the call was played and continued to cry as she was wheeled out of the courtroom for a break.
Earlier during Patrick’s testimony, he described returning to eery silence after picking up a medication at CVS and takeout at a restaurant on the fateful Jan. 24, 2024, evening.
“The house was really quiet,” he said.
Patrick called down to the basement and no one answered, so he went upstairs thinking the kids were having a bath – but he still didn’t find anyone.
He went to his and Clancy’s bedroom but the door was locked, which was when “I knew something was wrong,” he testified.
The dad eventually unlocked the room with a key and saw “blood everywhere” and the window open.
He asked Clancy what happened and she responded, “I tried to kill myself,” he recalled from the witness stand.
Patrick then asked where the couple’s three children were.
“They are in the basement” was her response.
The father’s voice grew quiet as he testified about the gutting moment he found the children unresponsive with exercise bands around their necks.
“I saw Cora. She had a band around her neck,” Patrick said, adding that the girl was “face down” on the ground.
He said he took the band off her neck and then noticed Callan, also with a band around his neck, nearby. He eventually found Dawson, who suffered the same fate as his siblings, in Patrick’s basement office.
“I knew that he was gone,” Patrick told the jury about the moment he discovered the middle child.
He then ran back to Cora and tried to perform CPR on her and then ran back and forth between the kids trying to save them until help arrived, he explained.
Patrick admitted during cross-examination by Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington that she was a “very dedicated” mom.
“She did everything,” testified Patrick, who has moved to New York City and remarried since the murders.
The jury was shown a series of Clancy’s Facebook posts of her and her cheerful children but a pH๏τo of an eerie book found in the family’s kitchen painted a less rosy picture of Clancy’s journey with motherhood.
The book, тιтled “Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts,” was found tucked among other publications inside a kitchen cabinet, the jury learned.
Patrick said he didn’t recall ever seeing the book.
He was, however, aware that Clancy had developed severe insomnia after she was prescribed Zoloft in September 2022.
Her lack of sleep was “a huge problem,” Patrick said. “It was hard [for her] to function. I just wanted her to get sleep and feel better.”
Clancy – who had been prescribed at least 15 different psychiatric meds by five different doctors in the months leading up to the murders – meticulously wrote out the dosage of medications she took each day and her corresponding fragile mєntal health state, according to a journal page shown to jurors.
In one entry from Dec. 8, 2022, she wrote that she took 5 mg of Valium along with 75 mg of Seroquel and that she “slept well 9-5 few wake ups feeling very depressed & intrusive thoughts today.”
All the dates on the page noted troubled moods.
Reddington is asking the jury to find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity on the grounds that she was in the throes of severe postpartum psychosis, caused partly by all the prescription drugs she was on.
Patrick on Monday told the jury how Clancy had struggled with suicidal thoughts in the months leading up to the murders, and how she was hospitalized with such ideations on two separate occasions in December 2022.
He said Wednesday that Clancy had admitted to him and her mother even having thoughts of harming the kids.
The trial is scheduled to resume Thursday morning.
💔 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.
