As a jury decides the fate of the Mᴀssachusetts mother who strangled her three children, her parents and ex-husband adjust to their new lives.
Paula and Michael Musgrove were ready for retirement when their world turned upside down on Jan. 24, 2023. Michael, 70, a school pH๏τographer in the last semester of his career, and Paula, 73, who had worked at Weight Watchers, learned in a phone call that their oldest daughter, Lindsay Clancy, 36, had been hospitalized after attempting sᩚuᩚiᩚcide and that two of their grandchildren—Cora, 5, and Dawson, 3—were ᴅᴇᴀᴅ and another, Callan, 8 months, was then on life support. The couple immediately drove from their home in Wallingford, Conn., to their daughter’s side at a Boston hospital and, on Feb. 3, joined her husband, Patrick Clancy, 38, at the funeral for the three children at St. Mary of the Nativity in Scituate, Mᴀss. Instead of planning for retirement, they spent the next months grieving and preparing for Lindsay’s triple murder trial in Plymouth. Says Brandee Mulligan, who launched a GoFundMe for the couple: “They love their daughter, and they’re living through the unimaginable. They’re doing what parents do—you show up for your kid.”
Millions watched as the family’s nightmare was presented in detail at Lindsay’s five-week trial for murder in the deaths of her three children. The dramatic court proceedings spawned heated debate about postpartum mєntal health and the treatment of women in psychiatric crises as well as who was to blame for the tragic deaths. Lindsay, who pleaded not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility and now uses a wheelchair because of injuries from jumping out of her bedroom window, cried as lawyers argued her fate, exclaiming during autopsy testimony, “I can’t do this!”
As jurors deliberated whether she suffered from postpartum psychosis and was not responsible for her actions, one trial observer expressed hope that, whatever the verdict, society would not lose sight of all the lives shattered by the tᩚraɢedy. Says Dr. Susan Hatters Friedman, a Case Western Reserve University professor of psychiatry and editor of Family Murder: “With postpartum depression, it absolutely affects the whole family.”
Patrick Clancy’s mother, Susan, 64, a nurse, was the first member of the immediate family to meet Lindsay, when they both worked at South Shore Hospital in 2013. Eventually introduced by Patrick’s sister and a cousin, the couple married in 2016. Patrick, an executive at Microsoft, and Lindsay, who landed a job at Mᴀss General Hospital, had three children and settled into what seemed like an idyllic life in a new home in Duxbury, Mᴀss. The couple prioritized time with both sides of their family. In 2022 they spent Christmas morning at church with Susan, then drove to the Musgroves’ house in Connecticut for the rest of the holiday.
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Lindsay Clancy holding son Dawson and Patrick Clancy holding daughter Cora in 2021.
That fall, Lindsay had developed anxiety and depression after the birth of the couple’s youngest child, Callan. On Oct. 20 Lindsay texted her mother: “Mom will you please come up and stay with me for a bit. I’m really sick.” Paula traveled to Mᴀssachusetts to help out. “She was afraid to be alone, and she actually asked if she could sleep with me,” Paula testified on Aug. 17 while recalling her daughter’s mєntal outlook. Paula would make more than a half dozen trips to be with Lindsay as her mєntal health deteriorated.
The home where Lindsay strangled her three children in Duxbury, Mᴀss.
Susan was also gravely concerned about her daughter-in-law’s health. She went to the ER at South Shore Hospital when Lindsay sought treatment there on Nov. 16 and often did the family’s shopping. On Thanksgiving 2022, “I approached and asked her how she was doing,” Susan testified on Aug. 18. “She said, ‘I’m trying hard to get better. I’m still working at it.’ ” After leaving the stand, Susan nodded sympathetically to Lindsay.
Just before Lindsay’s birthday in 2023, Patrick was in contact with Lindsay’s parents when Michael called to tell him that Lindsay, then hospitalized at Tewksbury Hospital, was not doing well. Patrick called her, and Lindsay, who had previously told him she’d heard a voice telling her to kill Cora, Dawson and Callan, said she desperately missed the kids and was despondent. By then he had already released a statement forgiving Lindsay, saying, “I took so much pride in being Lindsay’s husband and a dad.” Within a year he had filed for divorce, started a new position in New York and was dating a Brooklyn fertility specialist, Dr. Rachel Danis, 37, whom he married in 2026.
As the first witness at Lindsay’s trial, Patrick tearfully described her spiral into mєntal illness and his efforts to help her seek treatment. After two days on the stand, he returned to his new life in New York and seemed resolved to move on from his devastating loss. In recent days he has been pH๏τographed with a real estate agent while apartment hunting and lounging with his new wife on the roof deck of their building in Manhattan. On Aug. 31, as jurors continued to weigh the trial’s possible outcomes, he was not in the courtroom. According to her lawyer, Lindsay has already accepted her fate. “She knows that she killed these children,” Reddington said at the beginning of the trial. “She’s living her own hell.”
💔 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.
