Jurors heard entries from Lindsay Clancy’s journal describing her anxiety and insomnia in the days and weeks before she killed her three children then tried to kill herself.
“I feel disconnected from myself, time, and reality,” she wrote at one point in the lead up to the deaths.
The journals, found in Clancy’s Duxbury home after the killings, were admitted by the Commonwealth as evidence during Clancy’s triple murder trial Monday.
State Police Trooper Cory Melo reviewed her journals, including some that tracked her medication, and took the stand to answer questions about it.
Many of the journal entries weren’t dated. Others were written between Oct. 13, 2022 and Jan. 18, 2023. The children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, eight months, were strangled in the basement the night of Jan. 24.
The defense isn’t disputing that Clancy did the killings, instead her attorney Kevin Reddington is arguing that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and isn’t criminally responsible for the deaths.
Plymouth Assistant DA Shanan Buckingham only read a few of the entries into the record.
She pointed out a page where Clancy described herself being “obsessed with [Callan’s] sleep and nap schedule, like to the minute.”
“I want to die,” Clancy reported telling her then-husband Patrick Clancy when Callan was crying for over an hour and she wasn’t able to intervene.
“I’m completely overwhelmed taking care of the three kids, I feel like I’m drowning everyday,” Lindsay Clancy wrote in another entry.
On Nov. 18, she wrote, “It’s like I’m so desperate to get a mental break from taking care of everyone, my mind is trying to make something physically wrong with me.”
Reddington kept Melo on the stand for cross examination to point out many of the other entries that Buckingham left out.
He clarified that Clancy was writing about obsessing over Callan’s sleep schedule in the context of needing to sleep train him, which required that she let him cry at night, instead of coaxing him to sleep.
She wrote that the process felt unnatural to her.
But, she tried to reassure herself, the doctors told her it was the right thing to do, other moms did it, and it was something that might be able to help her own mental health, which was starting to wane, she wrote, growing into anxiety, insomnia, and depression.
“I want help,” Clancy wrote, “I want to be well.”
Patrick Clancy testified that the defendant had been a dedicated wife and mother who started to experience anxiety as she approached the end of her maternity leave in September 2022.
Lindsay Clancy described in the journal wanting to go back to work but fearing that the “crazy brain fog” she was experiencing would prevent her from doing her job as a labor nurse at Mass General Hospital.
She felt disconnected from Callan and from her husband, who she couldn’t be intimate with, she wrote, and in addition to struggling with insomnia, she also wasn’t eating.
“I just live moment to moment, waiting until the next nap,” she noted.
Clancy saw multiple health care providers and was prescribed several medication while her mental health spiraled. In one entry, she wondered if she might be withdrawing from Ativan and Benadryl, or if the feelings were her “new baseline.”
“I feel like I’m going through the motions,” she wrote.
Clancy felt guilty that she wasn’t bringing in money to the household. When she stopped breastfeeding, she felt guilty about that, too.
But, again, doctors told her that it was okay and might improve her own worsening mental health.
In some entries, she appeared hopeful, writing about Callan, “he’s okay, he will be okay.” In another section she wrote down, “affirmations,” like notes to herself that she was going to sleep that night.
At other times, Clancy seemed to be completely unsure of what to do about her condition, writing that she couldn’t form a plan and that her mind “never shuts off.”
Jurors also heard from the health care providers who interacted with Clancy after her suicide attempt.
Brigham and Women’s psychiatrist Dr. Jhilam Biswas said that Clancy was incredibly anxious and tired when she saw the defendant, laid out in a hospital bed and intubated two days after the killings.
Clancy was paralyzed after jumping out of a two story window in her suicide attempt.
Using a whiteboard to communicate, Biswas testified that Clancy wrote her mood was “horrified.”
Clancy asked if her body was broken, if she could have visitors, and if she had a lawyer, Biswas testified.
Another hospital psychiatrist Dr. Sejal Shah said Clancy asked to switch her medical proxy from her husband to her parents.
She also asked for a DNR, or “do not resuscitate,” order. But because of Clancy’s mental health and suicide attempt, Shah said the doctors didn’t allow her to sign one.
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