Boston nurse’s distressed husband Joe Strangled her three children due to postpartum depression Opened up about what led to the life-changing tragedy, insisting she “didn’t marry a monster” before the horrific murders.
Patrick Clancy, father of Cora, 33, Dawson, 5, and Callen, 8 months, left his Duxbury, Mass., home on Jan. 24, 2023, to pick up medicine for one of his children and pick up dinner for her. family, he said the new Yorker In an interview published on Monday.
His wife, Lindsay Clancy, had been struggling with anxiety and insomnia caused by her pregnancy with Callan since mid-November, but things were getting back to normal at the family home.
Lindsay had sought help from several postpartum-mental-health specialists, but Patrick said, to his knowledge, she never received more than a serious diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder.
A few weeks before the tragedy, Lindsay was brought to the hospital on New Year’s Eve after she told her husband that she was having “thoughts of dying”, feeling “numb”, and that she Admitted having “intrusive thoughts” of causing harm.
The next morning she was admitted to an inpatient program at McLean Hospital, just outside Boston — but days after arriving, she texted Patrick, “I don’t belong here.”
Five days after admission, she denied having any intrusive thoughts and was discharged with a prescription for an anti-depressant.
Two days after being discharged, he hosted a party at a trampoline park for his daughter Cora’s fifth birthday. Patrick noted that Lindsay’s mood during the party gave him “hope” that things were getting better, noting that she was sleeping better and her mood was noticeably improving.
“I think it gave her hope too,” he told the outlet.
On the morning of January 24, 2024, Patrick said he woke up next to Lindsay and asked her the same questions he had been asking her as she struggled with her mental health struggles.
“How are you feeling? How do you sleep?” She recalled him asking her, to which Lindsay replied that she was feeling “good” and had slept “very well”.
Patrick, who had a busy day at work, left Lindsay in charge of their children and even allowed her to take their daughter Cora to the doctor because of stomach pains.
He hoped the visit would help his wife “come back to reality” after several weeks of recovery.
But tragedy struck that evening, when Lindsey asked him to pick up medicine for Cora and for dinner, he was at CVS when he suddenly realized something was wrong.
Patrick said he called Lindsay to confirm the brand of the drug, but she did not answer the phone.
A few minutes later, he called her back and instructed her to pick up Pedia-Lax for Cora — but 14 seconds into the call she seemed distracted by something.
When he returned home around six in the evening, there was silence in the house.
Patrick ran to the master bedroom and found the door was locked and had to force his way inside, where he saw the window open, blood splattered on the floor and a bloody knife on the nightstand, he told the outlet.
He then ran outside and found Lindsay lying barely unconscious on the ground, who had jumped out of the second floor window of her home in a suicide attempt.
“What have you done?” she asked him, to which he replied, “I tried to kill myself.”
Then he asked where their children were, and she said, “In the basement.”
He was already calling 911 when he found Cora, Dawson, and Callen wearing exercise bands around their necks, while Lindsay had allegedly killed them before trying to take her own life.
When paramedics arrived, they could be heard yelling from the basement, “He killed the children!”
Despite the best efforts to save them, Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead at the scene, and Callen later died in hospital.
After the tragedy, Patrick was living with his parents after burying his children, and a few days before Lindsay was to be convicted, he received a call from Lindsay.
“She didn’t seem like my wife,” Patrick told The New Yorker, adding that he noticed she looked terrified and she told him that a voice had ordered her to kill her children. After talking on the phone for a minute he ended the call.
Six months after the murders, Patrick called Lindsay on her 33rd birthday at the suggestion of her father, who told him she was “in a tough spot and going downhill.”
During their call, she told him that “every day was the worst day of her life” and “she misses her kids,” Patrick recalled.
“I know (it) sounds crazy to some people. But that’s the reality,” he explained.
After he said this, they started talking regularly.
Eventually Patrick asked her some questions about what happened that day.
“I think the first thing I asked was, ‘Did you plan this? Is that why you sent me out?'” he told The New Yorker.
“He said, ‘No, it was just a snap of the fingers.'”
He said he asked Lindsay why she kept track of how long it would take her to get dinner, to which she replied that she was worried about him getting stuck in traffic.
“Then I said, ‘Have you googled ways to kill?And she said, ‘Yes, for myself, because I was suicidal for two months.'”
Patrick has made only a few public statements since the tragedy.
A few days after the murder, he asked people to “search deep within themselves” to forgive him, as he had done.
In April, Clancy ran Boston Marathon to honor their children And raised more than $73,000 for the hospital where their youngest, Callan, was treated before her death.
Patrick said he decided to talk to The New Yorker to stop the “lies and misinformation” that has spread because of the interest surrounding his upcoming murder trial.
“I wasn’t married to a monster — I was married to someone who was sick,” she told the outlet.
Lindsey has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder, three counts of strangulation, and three counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
His defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, has indicated that he plans to seek an insanity defense.
However, prosecutors believe that since Lindsay had previously been evaluated by mental health professionals and told she did not have postpartum depression and research into the killings on her cell phone led to the murders Had it happened, it could be proven that it was premeditated.
His trial date has not yet been set.
(TagstoTranslate)US News(T)Boston(T)Children(T)Crime(T)Massachusetts(T)Homicide(T)Nurses(T)Postpartum Depression
