Lindsay Clancy spoke for the first time in court Tuesday during her triple murder trial.
Clancy strangled her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan eight months, on January 24, 2023. Then, she slit her wrists and neck, took pills, and landed in her backyard after coming out of a second story window, leaving her paralyzed.
The defendant spoke up in court to answers question from Judge William Sullivan about whether she understood the impacts of agreeing to certain stipulations in the trial.
“You are basically relieving the Commonwealth of its burden to prove those certain facts,” Sullivan said. When the judge asked Clancy if she understood that, she said, “yes, your honor.”
Clancy’s attorney Kevin Reddington isn’t disputing that Clancy did the killings, instead, he’s arguing that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis during the incident and can’t be held criminally liable.
With the stipulations agreed upon, Reddington said that the Commonwealth no longer needs to prove “chain of custody… the bands, DNA, all of that.”
When the jurors returned to the courtroom, Sullivan read some of those stipulations regarding the children’s postmortem toxicology reports. He said the defense is agreeing the sample were properly collected and the testing was properly done.
A forensic scientist also briefly testified those reports came back negative for drugs.
Jurors also heard from Heather Griffiths, a MSP crime lab toxicologist, who described the drugs found in samples of Clancy’s blood and urine from the night of the deaths.
Testing found that she had the anti-depressant Trazadone, the anti-psychotic quetiapine, and benzodiazepines in her system. The tests were negative for alcohol, cannabis, opioids, and amphetamines.
Prosecutors also called a blood spatter expert to the stand to examine blood spatter on and below the window sill where she fell from the night of the killings.
Whether Clancy jumped or hung out of the window before landing was at the center of the testimony.
Prosecutors have sought to paint Clancy as a manipulator who planned the killings. They’ve also highlighted testimony that sought to downplay the injuries from her suicide attempt.
Sherri Cook, a forensic scientist at the Mass State Police Crime Lab, and the prosecution’s expert blood stain pattern witness, said that “sometimes” analyzing a blood stain can provide information about how it got there.
Using photos from the scene, she testified that there were dropped and smeared blood stains on the master bedroom’s floor and side table, but blood found on the window sill was harder to analyze.
“This blood stain didn’t give us too much information,” she said, explaining to the jury that she could only confirm that it was a transfer stain, meaning that the blood got there from making contact with something else that had blood on it.
Blood found on the outside of the sill and on some of shingles in between the second and first story window were also transfer stains, she said.
A photo showed what Crook called a “droplet” of blood that had formed on a single shingle.
On cross-examination, Reddington asked whether the stains on the window sill could have come from someone with blood hands gripping it from the inside, acting out the motion for the jury.
Crook answered that could be the case.
Then, Plymouth County Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague stood up to redirect, acting out her own scenario and asking if the blood could have gotten on the sill from someone hanging onto the ledge from the outside, with blood getting on the shingles as the person slid down.
Again, Crook said that was also possible.
Reddington got up to ask one more question: “So, if somebody was going to climb out the window and hang on the ledge and, what, do a spider man and go down the side of the shingles, they would leave a smear going all the way down?”
“If they came in contact the entire way down, yes,” Crook answered, “there would be a transfer all the way down.”
The trial will resume Wednesday morning.
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