PLYMOUTH — Jurors were offered a glimpse Wednesday of what Lindsay Clancy’s life has been like since she killed her three children in 2023, and how she feels about what she did.
Clancy “has bad days and worse days,” Paul Zeizel, a forensic psychologist who evaluated Clancy’s mental competency for the defense, testified during his second day on the stand at her murder trial in Plymouth Superior Court.
“She does speak about her children,” said Zeizel, who described visiting Clancy at Tewksbury Hospital, where she lives with round-the-clock monitoring and treatment. “She really loved them and misses them and thinks of them every single day, almost every moment of the day.”
Zeizel, who has visited Clancy about 60 times since February 2023 and reviewed all of her medical records, told jurors that he concluded she had bipolar disorder with postpartum psychosis and “had no appreciation for the wrongfulness” of her actions when she killed her children.
Clancy continues to receive mental health treatment, remains a suicide risk, and is on “one-to-one” supervision by hospital staff to make sure that she “doesn’t take her own life,” Zeizel said in response to questions by Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington.
During cross-examination, Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham asked Zeizel whether Clancy is continuing to refer to her situation as “my tragedy.”
Zeizel agreed that she has, but said it was “just one of the things she will say” about killing her three children.
Clancy, 36, has admitted she strangled 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan with exercise bands in the basement of their Duxbury home on Jan. 24, 2023. She then slashed her neck and wrists and jumped out a second-story window in a failed suicide attempt. She is paralyzed from the waist down and appears in court each day in a wheelchair.
Clancy has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, asserting that she should not be held criminally responsible because she was in the throes of postpartum psychosis and heard a male voice in her head telling her to kill herself and the children.
Prosecutors contend that the slayings were premeditated and that Clancy wanted to kill herself because she was tired of her life, and decided to take the children with her because she didn’t trust anyone else to care for them as she did.
Zeizel said the fact that Clancy conducted google searches about medications, treatment, psychosis, and sociopaths in the weeks before the slayings did not mean that she was not suffering from psychosis.
People in a psychotic state “can do things they’ve done before,” such as looking up information on a computer or driving a car, Zeizel said. “New things might be harder.”
In earlier testimony, Zeizel said he visited Clancy on Feb. 4 at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and needed a court order at the time because she was not being allowed any visitors. On Wednesday, he acknowledged that Clancy had been allowed a couple of visits from a lawyer who previously represented her.
During Zeizel’s second visit two days later, he said he let Clancy use his cellphone to call her then-husband, Patrick, and listened on speaker as she told him why she killed their children.
“She said she heard a male voice ordering her, telling her that she didn’t have any choice, but she had to kill her children and then kill herself,” Zeizel told jurors while testifying Tuesday.
During cross-examination Wednesday, Buckingham grilled Zeizel about the phone call, and Clancy’s claim that she heard voices.
“Did she ask [Patrick] about the kids?” Buckingham asked.
“She did not, as I recall,” Zeizel said.
“How many times has she told you since that she heard voices?” Buckingham asked.
“She has not heard voices since the event took place in 2023,” Zeizel said
Zeizel acknowledged that Clancy’s medical files showed that she never told doctors or nurse practitioners who had treated her for postpartum mental health issues between September 2022 and January 2023 that she was hearing voices. However, Zeizel told jurors that Clancy confided in at least one other person that she heard a male voice instructing her to kill herself and her children. He said he interviewed numerous people while evaluating Clancy, including Sheila Cavanaugh, a chaplain at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who relayed that after the slayings Clancy told her she had heard a male voice telling her to kill the children and herself.
Buckingham, the prosecutor, shifted the focus back to the young victims by grilling Zeizel about records from Tewksbury Hospital that detailed how Clancy has spent each anniversary of the slayings and the days that each of the children would have celebrated their birthdays.
She read entries that described Clancy’s daily activities on those dates, which included visits from her parents, who brought dinner, lunch, or snacks; “propelling” down the hospital hallway in her wheelchair, and playing dominos.
But, during follow-up questioning from Clancy’s lawyer, Reddington, Zeizel said the frequent visits from Clancy’s parents showed they loved her.
“I didn’t hear that she was laughing, partying, and having a good day,” Reddington said.
Zeizel said Clancy’s medical records showed that she desperately tried to get help for postpartum mental health issues in the months before the slayings. She made two trips to emergency rooms, was denied admission to a postpartum treatment program in Rhode Island, and was released after a five-day voluntary commitment to McLean Hospital.
Clancy called a suicide hotline twice the month before she killed her children, and both times was told she “did not meet their standard of care” because she didn’t have a plan to kill herself, said Zeizel, citing evidence presented during the trial.
At the time, Zeizel said, Clancy “was having paranoid symptoms of psychosis and she was getting more depressed.”
Zeizel said the records showed that she feared that the medications she was prescribed were making her worse.
“She was worried that her children would be removed from her and that she would never see them again,” Zeizel said.
On Thursday, the defense expects to call several more witnesses, then may rest its case. Then prosecutors will call its own mental health experts. Closing arguments could be early next week.
Shelley Murphy can be reached at shelley.murphy@globe.com. Follow her @shelleymurph. Camilo Fonseca can be reached at camilo.fonseca@globe.com. Follow him on X @fonseca_esq and on Instagram @camilo_fonseca.reports.