Lindsay Clancy sobbed in court as she faced her ex-husband on Monday during t in January 2023 — as jurors saw haunting video of the former family of five enjoying a blissful vacation just days before unspeakable tᩚraɢedy.
Clancy, who is paralyzed in a wheelchair after a sᩚuᩚiᩚcide attempt, is arguing that she was and had been prescribed 15 different medications in a ham-fisted attempt to treat her before she strangled 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan with exercise bands. Her lawyers are putting up the insanity defense, arguing she was not legally in control of her actions, and is not guilty of murder.
from the family’s Jan. 15, 2023, trip to the Cape Codder indoor water park near the family home outside Boston showed Clancy playfully riding a waterslide with little Cora, as her ex-husband, Patrick Clancy, .
“Lindsay was always able to interact with our kids,”
Patrick – who has moved to since finding his kids ᴅᴇᴀᴅ in their home on Jan. 24, 2023 – said Clancy “seemed to be doing a lot better” during the vacation, despite being hospitalized twice for suicidal thoughts the month before.
He remained mostly stoic through hours of testimony — only becoming emotional when prosecutors displayed a pH๏τo of Cora smiling and posing in a shirt emblazoned with the word “Love,” a red skirt and matching bow in her hair.
Clancy, meanwhile, visibly sobbed as the heart-wrenching family pH๏τos and video.
Details of the 35-year-old’s worsening mєntal state leading up to the killings also emerged in court Monday, when attorneys on both sides revealed she had been from November 2022 to a day before the murders.
Patrick said his ex-wife’s anxiety stemmed from the idea of returning to work and leaving her children after her 18 weeks of maternity leave expired that fall.
He said Clancy revealed she started taking Zoloft, a popular antidepressant, in September 2022, but “kept getting worse and worse” — despite the family hiring a nanny to help her with the kids and chores.
By December 2022, Clancy had devolved into a “big spiral” after starting to take the unusual antipsycH๏τic medication Seroquel, Patrick recalled.
“She started to say she was suicidal” and “described thoughts of hurting the kids or them having some sort of ailment,” the father said, though he noted she promised that she did not have a plan to harm the children.
Patrick recalled rushing Clancy to the emergency room after she told her father she wanted to kill herself on Dec. 15, 2022. One doctor recommended inpatient medical treatment at McLean Hospital while two others suggested a day program called “Women and Infants” in Providence, Rhode Island.
The ex-husband dropped Lindsay off at the day program and later picked her up, when they decided it “wasn’t the right fit” for her, he said.
By New Year’s Eve, she was back in the hospital with more suicidal thoughts.
“I was exhausted,” Patrick told the jury. “I said, I think it’s time to go to McLean. We didn’t have a diagnosis so we just didn’t really know what was wrong.”
Jurors were then shown selfies Clancy took during the hospitalization — one of her wearing a medical mask in the hospital room and another of her legs underneath a blanket on the bed — that Patrick said he had never seen.
Clancy spent less than a week at McLean before requesting to be discharged so she could go to her daughter’s birthday party on Jan. 5, 2023 — also unbeknownst to Patrick, he admitted on the stand.
Earlier Monday, defense attorney Kevin Reddington argued that 19 times in the months before the killings, and was prescribed medications by five separate doctors between September 2022 and the day before the murders.
The defense also showed jurors pH๏τos of Clancy with a bloodied neck and attached to a breathing tube in the hospital, after she jumped from a second-story window in a botched sᩚuᩚiᩚcide attempt that left her paraplegic.
showing a bloodied kitchen knife beside a cup emblazoned with the message, “Because kids,” as well as pools of blood covering a bedroom floor, were also shown to the jury.
“This is a woman who dedicated her life to nothing other than helping others, being the best nurse and best mom,” Reddington argued — and added: “This is not a righteous prosecution.”
Prosecutor Shanan Buckingham, on the other hand, insisted Clancy was “not psycH๏τic” when she killed her children, and argued that her actions before the killings were deliberate and showed premeditation.
“This case is about the Lindsay Clancy on Jan. 24, 2023 — at the time of the crimes. This was not a woman in the throes of psychosis … this is a woman who acted intentionally, rationally and swiftly with a very specific goal — to kill,” Buckingham told jurors Monday.
The trial is expected to last up to two months and feature testimonies of up to 200 witnesses.
💔 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.
