The Husband Didn't Do It

The Husband Didn't Do It

A hung jury is not a dismissal. TikTok is not a police report. Three murder counts still stand.

By Everett Kane

Plymouth has a jury that could not agree on Tuesday. That is not a verdict. It is not a dismissal. It is twelve people sent back to work.

Lindsay Clancy still faces three counts of murder in the deaths of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, on and after Jan. 24, 2023, in Duxbury. Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz took those counts to a grand jury. The grand jury indicted. In July, prosecutors dropped the strangulation counts as redundant. They did not drop the murders. Cruz, asked about a lesser charge while the jury sat hung, said he was waiting for the verdict.

That is the case. The rest is noise.

The noise arrived late. After testimony started this summer, TikTok and Reddit decided the husband did it. Clothing. Body language. A remarriage. A move. A CVS stop that looked too perfect. Some invented a body double. CNN, Boston.com, and the Patriot Ledger reported the theories. They also reported what the courtroom actually holds.

Patrick Clancy has not been charged. Prosecutors have not said he played a role. The defense, which would have every reason to point at him if the facts allowed it, does not dispute that Lindsay Clancy caused the deaths. It argues she lacked criminal responsibility. That is an insanity defense under Massachusetts law. It is not an accusation against the father.

The public record of that afternoon is not mysterious. He left the house after 5 p.m. for medication and dinner. Pharmacy and restaurant video and a receipt put him away from 47 Summer Street. He called 911 after he came back. The call was played at trial. He found his wife outside. She had jumped from a second-story window. She is paralyzed. She has been held at Tewksbury State Hospital. She attends court in a wheelchair. She did not testify.

None of that is a cliff, a police plot, or a stand-in at CVS. Those lines are online inventions. Court filings do not carry them. Reputable coverage treats them as baseless.

If you need a motive for the online story, look at the one they already had. A labor-and-delivery nurse. Three small children. Postpartum talk. A husband who wrote, days later on a family fundraiser, that people should forgive her, as he had. Later he told The New Yorker he had been married to someone who got sick, not a monster. Soft words. The internet heard an invitation to empty the docket

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Mental illness is not in dispute in the way the comment section thinks. Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague told the jury there is no dispute Clancy was suffering from a mental illness and that she tried to kill herself. The question, Sprague said, is whether she knew right from wrong. Killing them, the Commonwealth argues, was a choice. Planned. Husband sent out. Premeditation and extreme atrocity alleged in the district attorney's own October 2023 statement.

Defense psychiatrist Dr. Phillip Resnick called her frankly psychotic that day, a puppet with someone else pulling the strings, unable to conform her conduct to the law. Prosecution psychiatrist Dr. Avram Mack described a major depressive episode, not the bipolar psychosis the defense sold, and said psychosis does not, by itself, erase knowledge of right and wrong. Those are competing expert opinions. They are not a court finding that she had postpartum psychosis. Judge William Sullivan has not found her incompetent to stand trial. Her lawyer said competency was not the issue.

Massachusetts does not treat a diagnosis as a pardon. Lack of criminal responsibility under the McHoul standard requires a mental disease or defect that left a person unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of the conduct or unable to conform it to the law. The Commonwealth still has to prove responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt. Illness alone is not enough. A not-responsible verdict is commitment to a state hospital with review. It is not a ride home.

The chorus on the sidewalk wants something cheaper than even that. Drop the charges. Blame the man who called 911. Treat a hung jury as proof the state should fold. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington, with the panel stuck, said Cruz drives the bus and should be asked why he would not reduce to second-degree. First-degree murder in this state is life without parole. Cruz has not reduced it. He should not.

Three children are dead. Their mother is the defendant. The father is a witness, not a co-defendant. A grand jury already did its work. A trial already did its work. Sympathy is not a legal standard. Neither is a pink crowd on the courthouse steps, nor a TikTok that cannot read a surveillance timestamp

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Let the jury finish. Do not pretend the charges were a clerical error. They were not.

Capitol and Cleats staff — Camille Reid

The husband-did-it cut of Lindsay Clancy is not a theory. It is a coping mechanism with a ring light. After the Duxbury labor-and-delivery nurse was charged in the January 2023 deaths of her three children, a true-crime crowd on TikTok and Reddit decided the file was too ugly, so the ex-husband must have framed her. That story does not survive what is already public. Her lawyers have told the jury she caused the deaths and are asking for not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. Patrick Clancy has not been charged, is not on trial, and police have cleared him. He testified he was at a CVS. Boston.com described the framed-husband line as baseless accusations; the Globe called it a baseless conspiracy. His later remarriage and move to New York are gossip, not a second indictment.

Letting her off the charges because an online sisterhood finds the mother more usable than the record is not compassion. It is a refusal to let a jury do adult work. Postpartum mental illness is a real defense, and it has to be proven in Plymouth Superior Court, where a panel of nine women and three men told Judge William Sullivan on Tuesday they could not yet agree and were sent back Wednesday. Murder is still on the table. So is lack of criminal responsibility. What is not on the table is a social-media pardon. Illness, if the evidence shows it, is an argument. It is not a rewrite of who sat at the defense table.

Capitol and Cleats staff — Mara Ellis

The husband didn’t do it. Patrick Clancy was at a pharmacy. Associated Press coverage of his testimony says his last look at 3-year-old Dawson was the boy on the couch with chicken nuggets and green beans, after Lindsay Clancy sent him out for takeout and medicine. He came home to silence, then to the deaths of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan in their Duxbury house on Jan. 24, 2023. I have a baby in the next room when I write this. Empathy for a sick mother is not a pass for three dead children.

CBS Boston reported the Plymouth jury told Judge William Sullivan on Tuesday it could not reach a unanimous verdict. Nine women, three men, four days, more than 80 witnesses. He sent them back for Wednesday. That note is the whole fight: whether the defense’s postpartum-psychosis argument, lack of criminal responsibility, swallows the crime. It shouldn’t. The kids are still gone. Patrick was the 911 call. Lindsay Clancy is the defendant. Don’t move the blame onto the man who wasn’t in the house.