Patrick Clancy, husband of Duxbury mother accused of killing her 3 children, speaks out in New Yorker interview - The Boston Globe (2024)

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Prosecutors said Clancy researched ways to kill on her cellphone before the slayings and that she asked her husband to pick up food from a restaurant farther from their home so she’d have time to commit the murders.

In February 2023, a prosecutor said the planned attack demonstrated “extreme atrocity and cruelty,” challenging the defense’s assertion that her postpartum mental condition and her regimen of prescription medications drove her to kill.

Here are several major revelations from the Oct. 14 article.

Clancy didn’t contact his wife after the killings

A couple of days before the arraignment, Clancy “got a voice mail from a number that he didn’t recognize,” the article stated.

“It was Lindsay, calling from a psychologist’s cell phone to say that she loved him,” the article stated.

She called back the next day and he picked up. In a “quick, panicked clip,” she said she had heard a voice telling her to kill the children, and then herself, because it was her “last chance.”

“She did not sound like my wife,” Patrick Clancy told the magazine. He ended the call after about a minute, according to the article.

They went six months without speaking. Last August, on her 33rd birthday, Patrick Clancy called her at the suggestion of her father, who told him that she was in “tough shape and going downhill,” according to the article.

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She said “every day was the worst day of her life,” the article said.

“She misses her kids,” Patrick said. “Which I know sounds crazy to some people. But that’s the reality.”

As time passed, they began to speak more often

On the first anniversary of the children’s deaths, Patrick Clancy and his parents returned to Duxbury for a memorial service, the article stated. On his way back to New York, where he now lives, Patrick called her to “relay well-wishes from their old neighbors.”

“Over the following weeks they started talking more frequently, which allowed each of them, Pat told me, to ‘fill in the gaps,’” the article stated.

“I think one of the first things I asked was, ‘Did you plan this? Is that why you sent me out?’” Patrick Clancy told the magazine. “She said, ‘No, it just was, like, a snap of the fingers.’”

Patrick Clancy asked why she had looked up how long it would take him to pick up their dinner, and Lindsay explained that she had been concerned about him getting stuck in traffic, the article said.

“Then I said, ‘Did you Google “ways to kill”?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, for myself, because I was suicidal for two months,’” he told the New Yorker.

None of Lindsay Clancy’s medical providers warned him about the possibility of postpartum psychosis

“I never even heard the term until after the kids died,” he told the New Yorker.

At the end of December 2022, Lindsay said she needed to be admitted to a hospital, telling Patrick, “I have thoughts of wanting to die, and I feel numb to them,” the article stated.

Related: Experts, advocates worry Lindsay Clancy’s case may further stigmatize postpartum mood disorders

He took her to the emergency room at Massachusetts General Hospital on New Year’s Eve. By the next morning, Lindsay had been transported to an inpatient program at McLean Hospital, the article stated.

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When Patrick Clancy visited her that week, “Lindsay seemed to have it together,” he said. He recalled her texting him, “I don’t belong here.”

“Lindsay was discharged from McLean after only five days, with a prescription for the antidepressant amitriptyline, Pat recalled — her thirteenth medication in a span of four months,” the article stated.

Related: It’s hard to be a new mom. For some, a lonely struggle can spiral into mental illness.

Patrick Clancy recalls the day his children were killed

Around 5 p.m., Lindsay Clancy texted Patrick to ask if he would pick up Pedia-Lax for Cora, plus a takeout order for dinner, the article said.

“I didn’t cook anything,” she wrote. “It’s been a long day.”

A few weeks earlier, he would have been reluctant to leave her alone. But that day “seemed like a really good one,” he recalled.

“If I could go back in time, I’d have called McLean and said, ‘Take her away, lock the door. Keep her in there for a year if you have to.’” Patrick told the New Yorker.

He called Lindsay from CVS about a half-hour after he left the house to confirm which brand of medicine to buy, the article stated. She missed his call but responded a minute later and sounded like herself. Their conversation lasted 14 seconds.

“Pat noticed only, as he later told the police, that she seemed to be in the middle of something,” the article stated.

He returned home at about 6 p.m. and went upstairs, thinking that Lindsay might be giving the kids a bath, the article said. The door to the bedroom was locked, so he forced his way in and discovered the window had been left open. There was blood on the floor and a bloody knife on the nightstand. He ran back downstairs and “found Lindsay lying outside, barely conscious,” the article said.

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“What did you do?” he said, shining his phone’s flashlight into her eyes. She replied, “I tried to kill myself.”

When he asked where the kids were, she said, “In the basement,” the article said.

Adam Sennott can be reached at adam.sennott@globe.com.

Patrick Clancy, husband of Duxbury mother accused of killing her 3 children, speaks out in New Yorker interview - The Boston Globe (2024)
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