Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. On January 24, 2023, their mother Lindsay Clancy strangled all three of them in the family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts. On Friday, after five weeks of testimony, 80 witnesses, and 36 hours of jury deliberation, the Plymouth County Superior Court produced a mistrial.
President Trump weighed in Friday without hesitation. "She did a horrible, horrible thing. Can't be worse," he told reporters. When asked about what comes next, Trump said, "There'll be a price. It's going to be mental institution or jail or something." He called the prospect of another trial "too bad" and acknowledged the case had been impossible to ignore: "It's on television so much, it's hard not to follow it."
The split that caused the mistrial was 11 to 1 — for acquittal. Eleven jurors were prepared to find Clancy not criminally responsible due to postpartum psychosis. One juror looked at three dead children and said no.
The defense never disputed that Clancy killed her kids — her own attorney admitted she did. The argument was that she didn't understand what she was doing when she did it. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington told the court she had been "overmedicated," suffering from severe postpartum psychosis, and heard a male voice ordering her to kill her children and then herself. Prosecution expert Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, a forensic psychologist, countered that it would be "very, very unusual" for a psychosis patient to hear commanding voices only once. Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague argued the jury should focus on "the straightforward reality that Clancy committed three acts of deliberate, sequential violence against her own children."
The jury deliberated for 36 hours across seven days, then sent Judge William Sullivan a note: "It is with a heavy heart that we report we are unable to come to a unanimous decision." Sullivan declared a mistrial.
Clancy survived her suicide attempt following the killings but is paralyzed from the waist down. She has been confined to a state hospital for over three years and did not testify at trial. Her ex-husband Patrick Clancy did.
Reddington, after the mistrial, said "It's repulsive what happened here" — referring not to what his client did to her children, but to the medical care she received beforehand. He filed an emergency stay petition with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. It was declined.
Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz has not announced whether he will retry the case. The next court date is September 29.
Three dead children. Five weeks of testimony. Eighty witnesses. Thirty-six hours of deliberation. The result: a note from the jury saying they couldn't agree, and a next court date that only the living get to attend.
Trump called it a horrible tragedy. He's right. The question now is whether Cruz will try again — and whether the next jury can manage to say what this one couldn't.