The Mᴀssachusetts father of three kids who were strangled, allegedly by their mother, will be running the Boston Marathon Sunday in memory of his slain children.
Patrick Clancy, of Dexbury, is also taking part in the 26.2 mile trek to raise money for Boston Children’s Hospital, where his infant died.
“My kids brought me so much joy and couldn’t have made their dad prouder,” he wrote in a post on Boston Children’s Hospital’s website.
“It goes without saying that losing them has been devastating and it’s a heartbreak that I’ll live with forever, but I’ve committed myself to honoring their memory by trying to bring positive change.
“In many ways, I’m just trying to be more like them. Their pᴀssion in life was infectious.”
Clancy’s kids — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and seven-month-old Callan — were killed in January 2023. Their mother Lindsay Clancy, who was reportedly suffering from postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis, allegedly strangled them at their home before jumping out a second-story window.
As of Friday evening, Clancy had raised $48,310 of his $50,000 goal for the hospital. He will be running the marathon wearing his “Happy Callan” bracelet and with a resin of his children’s handprints, he said in a statement.
Clancy remembers his children as “brave” and said his daughter loved “playing with little ones” and “loved babies.”
“She would always say that one day she wanted to be a ‘doctor and a mama,’” he wrote.
He recalled Dawson being “one of the friendliest toddlers you’d ever meet,” who loved “fire trucks, Paw Patrol, and his family,” and could always “bring smiles to people’s faces.”
Clancy remembered his youngest as a “happy baby” and missed his laugh.
Callan had spent his last moments in his dad’s arms inside Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dexbury native said he was “grateful” that the hospital had given him “a little more time with my boy.”
The infant died three days after the tragedy, while his sister and brother were pronounced ᴅᴇᴀᴅ upon arrival at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital-Plymouth.
“I know he would have done great things in this world,” the father said of Callan.
Clancy had raised concerns about his wife’s mental health to friends prior to the murders. He had told a college friend that he thought Lindsay was being “prescribed too many medications,” court documents showed.
He also pleaded with the public to “forgive” his wife, saying that she was not that person and was “generously loving and caring toward everyone.”
💔 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.
