Lindsay Clancy’s mother took the stand Monday to testify about what her daughter was like before and in the lead up to the death of her grandchildren.
Paula Musgrove described her daughter as a good kid, an excellent student, who became “a loving mother… a fun mother.”
“I always thought it was the best thing that ever happened to her,” Musgrove told the jury. “She would do anything for her children.”
Clancy is accused of murdering her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, eight months on Jan. 24, 2023.
Musgrove became emotional talking about them.
“I love my grandchildren with all my heart,” Musgrove said, telling the jury that being a grandmother, “it was the most beautiful thing.”
Clancy sat in the courtroom crying. Her mother was one of the first witnesses called by the defense after the prosecution rested its case Monday.
The defendant’s attorney Kevin Reddington asked Musgrove when she first noticed that something was wrong with her daughter’s mental health.
Musgrove, who was living in Connecticut at the time, said that she started to notice Clancy was off some time in October. Callan, the baby, was having trouble taking a bottle, and Clancy was worried about returning to work.
Then, Musgrove got a concerning text on Oct. 20, 2022.
“Mom, will you please come up and stay with me for a bit, I’m really sick. Something is wrong,” Musgrove read the text out loud to the jury. Clancy told her mother that she’d started a medication and felt it was making things worse.
“It’s just really scary and I don’t want to be alone,” the text said.
Musgrove testified that she drove to Duxbury, where the Clancy family lived, that day. Over the next few months, Clancy appeared to get worse. Musgrove and her husband visited often. Clancy’s husband Patrick’s family was often there when they were.
“Through November, into December, it was not getting better, and into the holidays,” she said.
At one point, Clancy told her mother she was so scared of being alone, of not sleeping, that she asked to sleep with her.
In early December, Musgrove said she remembered standing in the kitchen with Clancy and her husband Patrick.
“I remember her being very nervous… ‘I just have to tell you guys something,’ and then she told us,” Musgrove said. “She told us that she had thoughts of harming the children.”
Clancy’s then-husband asked if she felt like she couldn’t be alone with the kids, and Clancy said no.
The defendant would go to the emergency room twice that month and be admitted to McLean Hospital during New Years for an inpatient program.
In January, Musgrove said that Clancy had lost significant weight and stopped wanting to drive.
“She had become during this whole time paranoid about different things that really weren’t logical…she would mention that this wasn’t her mind,” Musgrove said. “She was attempting to go through the motions of her day.”
On cross-examination, Plymouth County Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague asked Musgrove about messages with Clancy where the defendant appeared to report that she was feeling slightly better in January.
In one mid-January text to Musgrove, Clancy wrote that she was feeling better than she had weeks before as she tapered off the drug Seroquel.
The prosecutor also asked if Musgrove recalled her conversation with the police the day after the killings, and that she told them that Clancy seemed better right before the children were killed.
“I remember speaking to the police, I had just found out what happened, I was pretty much in shock,” Musgrove said.
Cellebrite testimony
Before the Commonwealth rested, prosecutors called Ian Whiffin, an employee of Cellebrite, the company that analyzed Clancy’s phone.
Whiffin, who also presented testimony at Karen Read’s trial last year, said that Clancy’s phone data showed that she’d walked two flights of stairs within a five minute period from 5:33 p.m. and 5:38 p.m. on the night of the killings, the last two such motions tracked by her devices.
During the same period, she had a missed call from Patrick Clancy and called him back, with the conversation lasting 14 seconds.
In their opening, the prosecution said that Clancy called her husband back after killing the children and before trying to kill herself, and that she appeared normal on the phone but in the middle of something.
Clancy isn’t disputing that she did the killings, instead Reddington is arguing that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time, something the Commonwealth has been trying to undermine in their own arguments.
Whiffin did add the caveat that some activities, including driving a car uphill, can mistakenly identify a flight of stairs climbed. On cross examination, Reddington asked about the accuracy of Cellebrite data and the fact that Clancy’s devices registered movement on Jan. 25, 2023, while the defendant was in a coma.
The trial will resume Tuesday morning.
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