Lindsay Clancy is accused of killing her three young kids before trying to kill herself on Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2023.
Accolades are rolling in for the Massachusetts mother accused of strangling her three young children to death before a failed suicide attempt last month, in dozens of letters filed by her defense attorney.
“I do not know a better mother than Lindsay Clancy,” nurse Erika Sevieri, a former co-worker at Massachusetts General Hospital, wrote in a letter submitted to the Plymouth County District Court. “She lived and breathed for her children.”
The letters were not publicly available through the court at the time of publication on Tuesday. But the letters were obtained by The Patriot Ledger and sent to Clancy’s defense attorney from people around the world who knew the mother well.
Clancy, 32, pleaded not guilty in her arraignment last week from her hospital bed. She faces murder charges in the deaths of two of her children, Cora Clancy, 5, and Dawson Clancy, 3. She is also accused of killing her 7-month-old son, Callan Clancy, though charges have not been filed over the infant’s death. She faces additional charges, including strangulation and assault and battery with a deadly weapon.
They were killed at their home in Duxbury, Mass., a suburb about 35 miles southeast of Boston, on Jan. 24. Each child was strangled with exercise ropes tied around their necks in the basement, prosecutors said.
In court, Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague painted a picture of a cold, calculated murder-suicide attempt. Prosecutors said she sent her husband on a lengthy errand so that she knew exactly how much time she would have to kill her children and then kill herself – first with a few cuts from the glass of a broken mirror, then by jumping out of the second-story bedroom window.
Her defense attorney Kevin Reddington said she cannot be held responsible for the slaughter of her children in the basement of their house.
“I am heartbroken that this beautiful young woman, her loving husband, and their precious children have been destroyed because they were not provided with the essential medical care that they deserved. Please know that if our Lindsay had proper treatment, this family would still be together,” another fellow nurse, Stacey Kabat, wrote. “Please know that she deserves no further punishment since they will suffer an unbearable grief for the rest of their lives.”
Nearly 40 such letters were filed by Clancy’s defense attorney, according to West Hartford, Conn.-based NBC affiliate WVIT.
According to the Ledger, only two of the 39 letters submitted to the court do not directly support the defendant. One letter reportedly asks if the vouching will be made public. Another suggests that Clancy’s husband should be considered a suspect in the slayings.
The letters rallying to the mother’s side note the numerous prescription drugs she was prescribed in the months leading up to the deaths of her children.
“Our society fails miserably in treating women with postpartum depression or even postpartum psychosis,” Reddington said last week. “It’s medicate, medicate, medicate. Throw the pills at you, and then see how it works. If it doesn’t work, increase the dose – or decrease the dose – then end up trying another combination of medications.”
Clancy had suicidal thoughts, Sprague said last week, but those had gone away after a recent stay at a mental health facility.
She was never on more than four to five medications at one time, the prosecutor said. On the day of the killings, she was allegedly on three medications.
“Her husband asked her in mid-January, ‘Are you still having suicidal thoughts?’ and she said, ‘No,'” the prosecutor said. “No one at all described her as acting like a zombie on the day of the murder or in the days leading up to the murders.”
But Clancy’s friends and co-workers insist her postpartum depression and how she was treated for it should shoulder the blame.
“I could have been Lindsay,” nurse Susan Davison wrote in another letter. “Anyone of us could have been. She and her husband worked so hard to get help and persevered through so much. How could prison be the answer for this family? They have already lost so much.”