PLYMOUTH, Mᴀss — Lindsay Clancy was a “darn good mother” before she stranged her three kids to dєatᩚh, her defense attorney told a jury just before they started deliberating on her high-stakes triple murder case.
“You know from looking at the objective evidence in this case, this young lady did nothing wrong in her life,” defense attorney Kevin Reddington said. “She was a nurse, a daughter, a wife, and a darn good mother.”
Clancy — a 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse — killed kids Cora, 5, Dawson, 3 and 8-month-old Callan before attempting to take her own life on Jan. 24, 2023, at her Duxbury, Mᴀss. home.
Lindsay Clancy, 32, strangled her daughter Cora, five, and son Dawson, three, 8 month old son Callan to dєatᩚh.
But prosecutors said that Clancy coldly choked each of her children to dєatᩚh after getting her husband out of the house — strangling them one-by-one for one to two minutes before she left them “discarded on the basement floor like broken toys.”
Clancy is asking the jury to find her not guilty by reason of insanity, arguing she was experiencing severe postpartum psychosis and heard a man’s voice telling her to kill the kids and herself.
Jurors deliberated for about four hours on Thursday before being sent home without reaching a verdict. They will return Friday.
Reddington tried to blame Clancy’s psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Tufts — who prescribed her psychiatric meds in the fall of 2022, just months before the killings — for the mom of three’s descent into psychosis.
“This woman lived for her kids until she had the pleasure of going into see Dr. Tufts,” the defense attorney said. “After she went to Dr. Tufts it was not a wonderful life anymore.”
Reddington said that by December of that year Clancy’s “mind is gone” evidenced in part by a daily journal she kept of her medications and her moods. Many entries that month detailed her “horrible instrusive thoughts.”
Clancy sent her mother a text in October asking her to come stay at her house because she was “very sick,” which Reddington told the jury showed “the depths of despair” she was in.
Lindsay Clancy listens to the testimony of Dr. Gregory Saathoff at her murder trial in Plymouth Superior Court on August 26, 2026.
He admitted Clancy’s “horrible, horrific act” but said the powerful psychiatric medications she was prescribed that fall were to blame — along with negligent care from Tufts and the other providers Clancy saw during that time.
Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague, however, told jurors that Clancy’s attempts to blame the health care system were simply “a distraction.”
Sprague acknowledged that Clancy sought mєntal health treatment but the prosecutor claimed she didn’t follow medical advice, including refusing to take certain meds she was prescribed, because she wanted to do things “on her own terms.”
Clancy also jumped around getting treatment from Tufts, then entering a perinatal clinic where a nurse pracтιтioner doled out prescriptions to her and also checking herself into a mєntal insтιтution — all while failing to keep each provider in the loop about her other treatments, the prosecutor said.
Lindsay Clancy, 32, allegedly strangled her daughter Cora, 5, and son Dawson, 3, to dєatᩚh and attempted to kill her seven-month-old baby before jumping from a window of their Duxbury, Mᴀssachusetts, home on Tuesday. Her husband, Patrick, 34, discovered Clancy lying unconscious outside their home when he returned from work and called 911.
“There is a lack of compliance there, a lack of follow-through, a lack of communication with her providers,” Sprague said.
The prosecutor also noted that none of the people who treated Clancy from September 2022 until the killings “ever saw signs of psychosis, ever. So they are all wrong?”
Instead, Sprague said Clancy made up hearing the voice to try to get out of culpability and that she was actually cold and calculating that day, carefully planning how she would slay the children to “end her misery.”
“Those kids were her protective factor, they were keeping her from ending her misery,” the prosecutor said. “So she had to remove the protective factor, and I’m not saying she was happy about it. I’m saying it was what she had to do to end her misery. It was choice.”
The prosecutor also brought up Andrea Yates, the mother who was famously found not criminally responsible for drowning her five children because of postpartum psychosis, to tell jurors how the two 𝘬iᩚll mom’s cases differ.
“Andrea Yates, she heard voices to kill her children for months,” Sprague said. “She committed herself five times, she tried to kill herself twice.”
Judge William Sullivan cut in and told Sprague to move on from the topic.
“Counsel, counsel. Let’s move on from that,” the judge said.
“Lindsay Clancy hears a voice one time and does it?” Sprague said. “She doesn’t try to lock herself in the bathroom. She doesn’t try to leave, leaving children alone for 20, 30 minutes not the greatest option but it’s better than killing them.”
Lindsay Clancy sits at the defense table during closing arguments in her triple murder case in Plymouth Superior Court on August 27, 2026.
Clancy viciously strangled the kids with elastic exercise bands, standing “over their limp bodies” and holding the bands for one-to-two minutes as they went unconscious and stopped breathing, Sprague said.
Then Clancy left the tiny trio where she strangled them in the basement of her home.
“She left them discarded on the basement floor like broken toys because she was done playing the game,” Sprague said. “You know to a moral certainly she is guilty.”
After the killings, Clancy cut her wrists and neck, downed some pills and threw herself from a second-floor window in her house. She injured her spine in the fall and is now paraplegic and wheelchair bound.
The jury — composed of nine women and three men — were let out of the courtroom shortly after 12:30 p.m. to begin deliberating.
If Clancy — who has been held at Tewksbury Hospital during her case — is found guilty she faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison.
If the jury is persuaded by her defense and finds her not criminally responsible, then Clancy would be insтιтutionalized indefinitely at a 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.
