Patrick Clancy Forgives Wife on 60 Minutes After Mistrial

Patrick Clancy came back from the errands his wife had asked him to run and found her outside the Duxbury house, bleeding from cuts to her neck and wrists after she had thrown herself from a second-floor window. When he asked where the children were, Lindsay Clancy told him they were in the basement. He went down and found Cora, five years old, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months, with exercise bands around their necks.

Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead that day. Callan still had a heartbeat and was airlifted to Boston Children’s Hospital. Patrick later said that night he truly believed the infant might live. He remembered thinking just give me one, just give me one kid, and he would raise him as best he could and tell him about his brother and sister. At the hospital the look on the doctor’s face told him otherwise. Callan had suffered significant brain damage from lack of oxygen and was brain dead. Patrick spent four days at the bedside. He got to hold him. He got to lay down next to him. The boy died in his arms.

In the 60 Minutes interview that aired after the mistrial, Patrick told correspondent Ross Douthat he had asked Lindsay whether she remembered what happened. “She said it was like a dream. And she remembered it much in the way you would remember after waking up.” He said the headlines that called her killer mom and monster were not accurate. “I believe that it was her mental illness that caused that.” Days after the killings he had issued a public statement asking people to forgive her as he had. Asked on camera whether she had ever sought his forgiveness, he answered, “No. But I gave it to her.” He said he felt that if he did not reach forgiveness he would be eaten up inside forever.

Lindsay Clancy, then 36 and a former labor and delivery nurse, did not deny strangling the three children on January 24, 2023. Her defense argued she was not criminally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, a rare condition that can shatter a new mother’s sense of reality and is treated as a psychiatric emergency. She said she heard a voice commanding her to kill the children and herself. She remains paralyzed from the jump and under one-to-one suicide watch. Prosecutors countered that she had been deliberate, that she planned the acts and sent her husband out so she could carry them out, and that no clinician had documented psychosis in the months she sought help for insomnia, intrusive thoughts, and suicidal ideation.

Patrick took the stand for two days as the prosecution’s first witness. He described how her mental state had deteriorated despite psychiatrists, medication changes, and doctors, and how he had never seen her harm the children before. Earlier on the day of the killings she had seemed to be having one of her best days; she took Cora to a doctor’s appointment and later built a snowman with the children. During a break in his testimony, just before jurors were to hear the 911 call he made that night, he went to a back room and suffered a massive traumatic panic attack. His heart was pounding. They put him in an ambulance and offered medication. He declined it. He wanted to go back and finish so he could be done with it. He returned and completed his testimony. The recording itself has never been released.