The public record
Everything the public trial reference at clancytrial.org holds, in one place: where the case stands, the legal question the jury had to answer, the January 24 timeline, the evidence threads and recorded discrepancies, the witnesses, exhibits, medication chronology and search history, counsel, the post-trial log, and the 28 day-by-day accounts. There is no transcript here; the day accounts are summaries of press reporting, and where sources disagree the disagreement is recorded, not resolved. Read the record; don’t turn speculation into fact.
Snapshot of the archive built 2026-09-16 · mirrored 2026-09-17 · 28 trial days · 13 sections
Where the case stands
Commonwealth v. Lindsay M. Clancy, Plymouth County Superior Court, Massachusetts, docket 2383CR00198. This page mirrors the public trial reference at clancytrial.org; it contains no transcript, and the day accounts are summaries of press reporting.
Trial status: mistrial · accounts current through September 4, 2026 · archive built 2026-09-16T22:26:19+00:00
The jury deliberated about 38 hours over seven days without reaching a unanimous verdict on any of the three murder counts; its notes indicated an 11-1 split for acquittal. Sullivan declared a mistrial on September 4 over a defense objection, after a single justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, Dalila Argaez Wendlandt, denied an emergency stay sought on the argument that the holdout juror should have been questioned or removed. The verdict slips were never returned. Whether to retry Clancy rests with Plymouth District Attorney Timothy Cruz, who has not announced a decision. Reddington filed a renewed motion on September 10 for a finding of not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility on all three indictments, and a motion to dismiss on double jeopardy grounds is to follow, and court records show Martin Weinberg, who fought Karen Read's retrial, entered a limited appearance on September 15 to argue it. Both are to be heard on September 29.
No verdict was returned.
Raised from 5 for the post-trial window. The freshness strip measures staleness from the last written-up sitting, and the last sitting was September 4. There is no sitting to fall behind on until a retrial: current developments are compiled into data/post_trial.json instead, daily. At 5 the strip would have told readers the site had not been updated in five days on a day it had just been updated. 25 carries to the September 29 status hearing, after which the flag becomes a real signal again.
Case-reference status note (as of August 20, 2026): In progress. Commonwealth rested August 17, 2026; motion for a required finding of not guilty denied the same day. Defense case underway with criminal-responsibility experts heard 08-18 and 08-19. Commonwealth has signaled rebuttal experts. No verdict.
Sitting days on which evidence was heard. It does not include the pretrial motion hearings, the empanelment days, or any day the court sat without the jury and no outlet reported it.
proceeding_dates is the authoritative calendar, derived from dated recordings of each sitting and cross-checked against contemporaneous reporting. It supersedes 'sessions', whose 'posted' values are Rev publication dates (two pairs share a date) and cannot order the trial. Outlet 'Day N' labels are NOT used here: outlets disagree on whether empanelment counts, so their numbering runs 1-2 days behind these ordinals. A candidate date of August 9, 2026 was rejected as a Sunday. Correction August 20, 2026: July 27, 2026 was opening statements plus the first witness, not empanelment. Court did not sit July 28, 2026.
Day-by-day accounts of the trial compiled from contemporaneous press reporting of open-court proceedings. These are SUMMARIES OF REPORTING, not transcript, not testimony, and not a record of what any person said. They live in their own file and their own index table for exactly that reason, and they must never be merged into data/transcripts/ or the segments table.
Each entry states what reporting said happened on that date. Where coverage is thin the entry says so rather than filling the gap. 'coverage' is an honest confidence label: 'reported' means multiple outlets described the day's testimony; 'sparse' means only the witness list or a single detail is known; 'unverified' means the content is carried over from the original hand-built session list and has not been confirmed against reporting.
Press coverage captures a small fraction of what is said in a courtroom and skews toward dramatic moments. Absence from these summaries is not evidence that something did not happen.
The live state of the proceeding and how current this site is. This is the one file that has to be edited as the trial moves. Everything the site says about whether a verdict exists, what phase the case is in, and how stale the accounts are is driven from here, so nothing has to be hunted for in the code.
Factual index and research notes compiled from publicly televised proceedings and Rev's published transcript pages. Contains no verbatim transcript text. Source transcript text must be supplied separately by the project owner.
Session contents and witness entries added on August 20, 2026 are summarized from contemporaneous press reporting of open-court proceedings, not from any transcript. They are factual metadata and remain unverified against the record until a corpus exists.
What the jury must decide
The legal question the jury in this case has to answer, and what each available verdict would mean. This is a plain description of Massachusetts law drawn from published appellate decisions and the General Laws. It is not legal advice, and it is not a prediction about this case.
The judge's instructions to this jury are what govern. Where anything here differs from what Judge Sullivan reads in open court, his instructions control and this page is wrong.
2026-08-27
Sources: northeastern-medwed, day-summaries
A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if, at the time of that conduct, as a result of mental disease or defect, they lack substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of the conduct or to conform the conduct to the requirements of law.
Did she have substantial capacity to appreciate that what she was doing was wrong?
This is the cognitive prong. It asks about understanding, not about knowledge of the law.
Did she have substantial capacity to conform her conduct to the requirements of law?
This is the volitional prong. A defendant may understand perfectly well that an act is wrong and still lack the capacity to stop.
The prongs are independent and joined by 'either'. A failure of capacity on one prong is enough. To prove criminal responsibility the Commonwealth must therefore establish either that there was no mental disease or defect, or that the defendant retained substantial capacity on both prongs.
The word is 'substantial' capacity, not total. The test does not require that a defendant be incapable of all understanding or all self-control.
Massachusetts has no statutory list of qualifying conditions. Whether a mental disease or defect existed, and what it did to capacity, is left to the jury on the evidence.
Sources: masscases-mchoul, justia-mchoul, northeastern-medwed
The defendant must first put the issue in play by producing some evidence of lack of criminal responsibility.
Once it is in play, the burden is the Commonwealth's, at the same standard as every other element: beyond a reasonable doubt.
If the jury has a reasonable doubt about criminal responsibility, the verdict is not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility.
This is the opposite of most states, where a defendant asserting insanity carries the burden of proving it. In Massachusetts the defense never has to prove that she was insane; the Commonwealth has to prove that she was not.
Massachusetts formerly allowed juries to be told that because most people are sane, they could infer the defendant was too. Lawson eliminated that presumption. It can no longer carry the Commonwealth's burden and is no longer given as an instruction.
The Commonwealth may prove criminal responsibility by circumstantial evidence as well as expert testimony. Recognized categories include planning, a rational motive, rational decisions close in time to the act, efforts to avoid capture or conceal, conduct and statements before, during and after the offense, and evidence of malingering.
This is the frame the Commonwealth's case has been built in, and it is why the January 24 minute-by-minute conduct and the recovered search history carry the weight they do.
Sources: bostonbar-lawson, justia-lawson, northeastern-medwed
Berry draws a distinction that is easy to miss, and the two halves of it point in the same direction: taking a substance voluntarily does not, by itself, cost a defendant the defense.
Voluntary consumption of drugs or alcohol does not defeat the defense at all, and it makes no difference whether the defendant knew the substance might make the illness worse.
The defense still survives unless the defendant knew that consuming it would have that effect.
Where the Commonwealth offers evidence that the defendant knew or had reason to know how a substance would act on an active or latent mental illness, the judge gives an additional instruction that can negate the defense. Without that evidence, voluntary consumption alone does not.
The medications here were prescribed, and the contested question running through the prescriber and toxicology testimony is what the defendant was told and what she understood about their effects. That question is what makes the prescribing record and the January 24 dosage evidence legally decisive rather than merely background.
Sources: findlaw-berry, jaapl-instructions
The defense asked that the jury be allowed to consider involuntary manslaughter as well as murder. It is on the slip. Judge Sullivan charged it on August 27 as the lesser offense open to the jury, and when he held the slip up it was the fifth of the five choices, below murder in the second degree.
Opposed by the Commonwealth, and given to the jury anyway.
The defense asked for an instruction on involuntary intoxication. This is the point the Berry rule above turns on: whether medication taken as prescribed, with effects the defendant did not know to expect, is treated as voluntary consumption at all. Judge Sullivan told the lawyers on August 26 that he would not instruct on voluntary intoxication, both sides having asked him to drop it. No account of the charge on August 27 records how he dealt with the involuntary intoxication request; what the day accounts do record is that in going through manslaughter he told the jurors they could weigh whether she was mentally impaired or affected by the prescription drugs she had taken.
The Commonwealth's position is that there was no evidence of intoxication by drugs or alcohol at the time of the conduct.
What the jury is allowed to consider is decided before it is asked to consider anything. The jury has its slips now, and the list of verdicts below is the set it was actually given.
Sources: day-summaries
In Massachusetts a first-degree murder conviction receives plenary review by the Supreme Judicial Court under G.L. c. 278, § 33E, which may reduce the verdict or order a new trial.
The defense asked for this as a lesser included offense and the Commonwealth opposed it. Judge Sullivan charged it on August 27, and it is the fifth choice on each of the three verdict slips.
This is the most widely misunderstood outcome in cases of this kind. A person found not criminally responsible for a killing is ordinarily committed to a secure psychiatric facility, and that commitment has no fixed end.
Massachusetts does not have this verdict. Some states let a jury convict while recording that the defendant was mentally ill, producing a prison sentence with treatment. There is no such middle option here. Lack of criminal responsibility is a complete defense, and the jury's choice on that question is binary.
Massachusetts does not recognize diminished capacity as a distinct defense. Evidence of mental impairment may still bear on whether the Commonwealth proved a required mental state such as deliberate premeditation.
The day of the incident
The archive's reconstruction of the day of the incident, shown in the order the archive keeps it, with each entry's source as the archive gives it. An entry the case reference marks as contested is flagged here; the disagreement itself is recorded in the discrepancy index, not resolved on this page.
Two kinds of entry. Up to 18:11 the times are device timestamps and call records, accurate to the second where the source gives it. After 18:11 the record is witness testimony, which gave sequence rather than clock times, so those entries are ordered but deliberately not timed. Where a time is contested it is marked and the conflict is recorded in the discrepancy index rather than resolved here.
The Patrick Clancy lane is not a device record. Unlike the phone and watch lanes, which are extractions from the defendant's devices, his movements are reconstructed from CVS and ThreeV surveillance, from calls as they appear on her phone, and from his own testimony. No extraction from a phone belonging to Patrick Clancy has been reported. One device of his is in evidence: a Microsoft Surface Pro seized from the house and found in his office, examined by Sgt. Kyle Pavao and the subject of his August 13 testimony about an August 2022 browsing sequence. Which of them was using it that morning was contested and not resolved.
What is in evidence
The public trial reference carries 6 evidentiary threads, each with what it bears on, why the archive considers it significant, and every item the archive attributes to a report or to testimony. The contested points those items feed are indexed in the next section. Dated procedural milestones close the section.
Evidentiary threads and recorded discrepancies for Commonwealth v. Clancy. Every item is sourced to either the case reference (device forensics, toxicology, chronology) or to reporting of open-court testimony. Discrepancies are presented with both positions stated and are NOT resolved here: where witnesses or records disagree, the disagreement is the finding.
Nothing here is a conclusion about guilt, responsibility or fact. It is an index of what is in contention, assembled to make the contested points findable.
Whether conduct that afternoon was organized and purposeful, or the product of psychosis.
This is the Commonwealth's strongest factual material. Two forensic examiners testified to extractions, and the artefacts are timestamped to the second.
What was physically happening in the house between roughly 17:00 and 17:40, in the absence of any witness.
The watch is the only continuous record of the interval. It is also the most interpretively contested: the same data is read by each side to opposite effect.
The over-medication theory, and whether the injuries were a serious suicide attempt.
The quantified results cut in more than one direction, and the defense's own framing of over-medication sits awkwardly with benzodiazepine levels that came back lower than expected.
The seriousness of the suicide attempt, and by extension her state of mind.
Documented with unusual precision, and the defense's forensic pathologist addressed the mechanism separately.
Criminal responsibility under McHoul. This is the central battleground.
The defense case rests substantially on reported psychotic symptoms. The Commonwealth's answer, run consistently across three days, is that the clinical record does not document them.
Foreknowledge, intent, and awareness of her own condition.
Used by both sides. The Commonwealth points to what was searched; the defense to what was not.
Where the accounts disagree
70 recorded discrepancies (7 high, 29 medium, 34 low) from the public trial reference, each with every position the archive records and the archive's own note. Status as the archive marks it: 46 unresolved, 3 contested at trial, 1 recorded, 2 in evidence, 5 RESOLVED, 13 OPEN.
Evidentiary threads and recorded discrepancies for Commonwealth v. Clancy. Every item is sourced to either the case reference (device forensics, toxicology, chronology) or to reporting of open-court testimony. Discrepancies are presented with both positions stated and are NOT resolved here: where witnesses or records disagree, the disagreement is the finding.
Nothing here is a conclusion about guilt, responsibility or fact. It is an index of what is in contention, assembled to make the contested points findable.
The contested question is minute-by-minute conduct. A three-hour gap on the MiraLAX search is not a rounding difference, and both accounts came from Commonwealth witnesses four days apart.
MiraLAX search at 14:02; ThreeV takeaway search at 16:13; the 14-second call at 17:34.
Source: Whiffin report, Exhibit 1566, as recorded in the case reference
Children's MiraLAX search at 16:46; 3V menu search at 16:43; unanswered call from Patrick at 17:33 and a 14-second call from the defendant at 17:35.
Source: Det. Timothy Chiappini, testimony of August 13, 2026
Whiffin, testifying August 17, 2026, gave the last unlock at about 17:13 with a children's laxative search and a text to Patrick; stairs climbed between 17:33 and 17:38; Patrick's unanswered calls at 17:33 and 18:09. These match the case reference.
Source: Ian Whiffin, Cellebrite, testimony of August 17, 2026
Boston 25's contemporaneous account of the same testimony gives Whiffin's January 24 searches as Kids Miralax at 4:02 p.m., takeout 3V at 4:13 p.m. and CVS at 4:47 p.m. The 3V and CVS times match the case reference (16:13, 16:47); the MiraLAX time does not (14:02), and 4:02 p.m. sits close to Chiappini's 4:46 p.m.
Source: Boston 25 live blog, August 17, 2026, entry timestamped 10:01
East Idaho News's transcription of Chiappini's own timeline report for 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. on January 24: Apple Maps search for 3V at 4:13 p.m.; children's MiraLAX at 4:46; CVS website at 4:47; call to a CVS store at 4:48; call to Patrick at 4:53; 3V menu and Pedialyte at 5:06 with more than one tab open; calls of 11 seconds at 5:09 and 47 seconds at 5:10; Pedialax at 5:13; a message to Patrick about Pedialax at 5:15; a call from Patrick at 5:33; a 14-second call from her at 5:34. The 4:13 and 5:13 figures match the case reference's 16:13 Apple Maps entry and 17:13 PDLX entry; the 4:46 MiraLAX figure still does not match the reference's 14:02.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 13, 2026, entry timestamped 11 a.m.
The Boston Globe, reporting the same testimony live, gives 4:13 p.m. for the Apple Maps search for ThreeV, texts shortly after 4:50 p.m. about takeout and the menu, and the laxative and menu searches shortly after 5 p.m. with more than one tab open, and a text about the laxative at 5:15 p.m. It gives no 4:43 p.m. menu search.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, August 13, 2026, entries timestamped 11:10 and 11:17
JULY 29, 2026 BACKFILL, AUGUST 21, 2026. Two business witnesses called on July 29, 2026 timestamp the same afternoon from their own records rather than from a phone extraction. Saria Sweeney of the ThreeV restaurant put the defendant's takeout call at 5:10 p.m. and the pickup at 5:54 p.m. (Boston 25, CBS Boston, Oxygen). Oxygen's compilation of the timeline puts Angela Krause's CVS call at 4:48 p.m. Both figures sit with Chiappini's account as East Idaho News transcribed it — a 4:48 p.m. call to a CVS store and a 47-second call at 5:10 p.m. Patrick Clancy's own evidence the same day put him entering the Kingston CVS at about 5:32 p.m. and calling the defendant at about 5:33 to 5:35, matching the 5:33 and 5:34 calls in that account. NONE OF THIS BEARS ON THE MIRALAX TIME, which is the part still open.
Source: Angela Krause and Saria Sweeney, testimony of July 29, 2026, and Patrick Clancy, same date
PARTLY RESOLVED. Whiffin's testimony corroborates the reference timeline, which makes Chiappini's reported times the outlier. One likely explanation is two separate laxative searches, MiraLAX earlier in the afternoon and PDLX at about 17:13, which reporting conflated into one. The remaining gap may therefore be a reporting artefact rather than a disagreement between examiners. REOPENED AUGUST 21, 2026 BY THE AUGUST 17 BACKFILL. The two-searches explanation assumed Whiffin put MiraLAX at 14:02 and a separate PDLX search at about 17:13. Boston 25, reporting Whiffin live, puts the MiraLAX search at 4:02 p.m. If that is what he said, the three-hour gap is between two reports of a single witness rather than between two examiners, and the partial resolution does not hold. No outlet other than Boston 25 gives a time for the MiraLAX search on August 17, and the case reference figure has not been changed. AUGUST 13 BACKFILL, AUGUST 21, 2026. Reading the August 13 coverage in full narrows this. Both East Idaho News and the Boston Globe, reporting Chiappini live, put the Apple Maps search for the restaurant at 4:13 p.m., matching the reference's 16:13, and East Idaho News records a separate Pedialax search at 5:13 p.m. matching the reference's 17:13 PDLX entry. That supports the two-laxative-searches reading and makes Boston 25's 4:43 p.m. menu search the outlier for that item. What remains genuinely open is the MiraLAX time: 4:46 p.m. on both Chiappini accounts against 14:02 in the reference, and 4:02 p.m. in Boston 25's account of Whiffin. The day 13 entry now records both accounts and treats neither as settled.
The defense's criminal-responsibility opinion is built on bipolar disorder with postpartum psychosis. The treating psychiatrist did not make that diagnosis.
Mental disease or defect identified as bipolar disorder with postpartum psychosis; unable to appreciate wrongfulness or conform conduct to the law.
Source: Dr. Paul Zeizel, forensic psychologist, August 19, 2026
Did not diagnose bipolar disorder, and never observed signs of psychosis across fourteen telemedicine appointments ending the day before.
Source: Dr. Jennifer Tufts, treating psychiatrist, August 10, 2026
A second defense expert gave the same picture: Clancy was psychotic on the day of the killings, the condition described as postpartum psychosis, and he gave the opinion that she was not criminally responsible. The outlets do not render the underlying diagnosis identically — the Boston Globe reports bipolar disorder with major depression, CBS Boston severe depression, mild mania and bipolar disorder in the period leading up to the killings, and East Idaho News bipolar 2 with severe depression. Reported by the Boston Globe, Boston 25, CBS Boston and East Idaho News.
Source: Dr. Phillip Resnick, testimony of August 21, 2026
The Commonwealth's rebuttal psychiatrist gave the jury the opposite diagnosis. He testified to a major depressive episode running from late 2022 into January 2023, and told the jury he found no evidence Clancy was bipolar at the time of the deaths, no mania or hypomania, and no reason to diagnose bipolar disorder in the absence of manic episodes. He also said she did not present psychotic symptoms, treating her fears that medication had damaged her and that she would lose her children as worries matching things she had actually experienced rather than as fixed false beliefs meeting the definition of a delusion, and said the onset of her symptoms fell well outside the postpartum period as the DSM describes it — the Boston Globe giving that limit as largely four weeks after birth. Separately he told the jury there is no reason psychosis in itself stops a person knowing right from wrong. The no-bipolar finding is carried by five outlets: the Boston Globe, Boston 25, East Idaho News, CBS Boston and Fox News Digital.
Source: Dr. Avram Mack, Commonwealth rebuttal, testimony of August 21, 2026
On cross-examination the defense went at the no-mania finding with its own long-standing example. The Boston Globe at 14:59 reports Kevin Reddington asking Mack whether Clancy running a road race some weeks after giving birth would indicate manic behavior, and Mack answering that it would not; asked about other forms of exercise and about decluttering, Mack answered that such things would not in and of themselves indicate mania. The road race is the example Reddington put to the perinatal nurse practitioner on August 11, 2026 as possible manic behavior, and a defense expert put the 5K entered around the youngest child's delivery to the jury as bearing on an undiagnosed manic onset. Reported by the Boston Globe alone.
Source: Cross-examination of Dr. Avram Mack, August 21, 2026
A Commonwealth objection was sustained-or-overruled on a defense question about a bipolar diagnosis during Jollotta's cross on August 11, 2026; the ruling is not clear from reporting. As of the afternoon of August 21, 2026 the jury has heard two defense experts diagnose bipolar disorder with postpartum psychosis, the treating psychiatrist say she made no such diagnosis, and the Commonwealth's rebuttal expert diagnose a major depressive episode with no mania and no psychosis. This is a dispute between witnesses, not between outlets, and it is for the jury. The no-mania finding is the load-bearing part of the rebuttal case, because without manic episodes there is no bipolar diagnosis, and the defense's cross-examination of Mack on the afternoon of August 21 attacked it directly.
A command hallucination would go directly to the McHoul standard. Its absence from every contemporaneous clinical record is the Commonwealth's answer to it.
The defendant reported hearing a male voice ordering her to kill the children, relayed by a psychologist (08-18) and by a hospital chaplain who had seen her more than fourteen times (08-20).
Source: Defense witnesses, August 18, 2026 and August 20, 2026
The chaplain's own detailed notes contain no record of voice-hearing; Dr. Zeizel conceded nothing in the medical records documents voices telling her to kill, only that she wanted to die.
Source: Cross-examination, August 19, 2026 and August 20, 2026
The chaplain's account, given in full on 08-20, does not itself state the content of the command. Every outlet carries her saying Clancy alluded to having heard a persistent male voice which told her that if she did not follow the command, neither she nor her children would be safe. None quotes her saying what the command was. NBC10 Boston, ABC News, East Idaho News and Boston 25's filed story each summarize her as having said the voice told Clancy to kill the children and then herself, matching earlier defense witnesses, but that is the outlets' gloss rather than the sentence they quote. She also testified that Clancy raised the voice several times across their visits.
Source: Sheila Cavanaugh, direct examination, August 20, 2026
The cross-examination on 08-20 went entirely to the absence of the voice from the chaplain's own notes, and to how specific those notes were about everything else. ADA Jennifer Sprague established that Cavanaugh documented each interaction in the Brigham and Women's record in detail and never once wrote that Clancy reported a voice or what it said, and Cavanaugh agreed. Sprague then read entries about Clancy's fear of never walking again and of being vulnerable to others, an entry in which Clancy said she was deserving of what had happened, a request for help applying for Social Security disability benefits, entries describing her as hopeful about a Spaulding discharge and optimistic about her physical progress, and an entry about playing cards with her mother. Cavanaugh answered that her notes are not verbatim transcripts, that she is not medically trained, that she was there to bear witness to suffering rather than to evaluate a patient, and that there are limits on what she records from privileged spiritual communication. On redirect she agreed that a word such as hopeful was her own assessment rather than a quotation; LA Magazine alone reports a recross in which Sprague noted that some entries do carry quotation marks and asked whether those were Clancy's actual words. Her answer is not reported.
Source: Cross-examination of Sheila Cavanaugh, August 20, 2026
The defense's psychiatric expert placed a command hallucination on the day itself, telling the jury she was not psychotic every moment and had functioned normally earlier that day until it began, and describing an accompanying delusion of influence in which her body felt taken over by an external force. At about 11:31 he put the command directly to the jury: Boston 25 reports him saying she heard a voice commanding her to engage in the killing behavior and felt she had to obey the instructions, and CBS Boston quotes him saying she not only heard a command but felt her body taken over by an external force, in a dream state and without control of her own body. He rested his criminal responsibility opinion on it, and the Boston Globe reports him accounting for the gap in the records by saying Clancy was not fully revealing about her impulses to harm her children because she feared losing them. Reported across the morning by the Boston Globe, Boston 25, CBS Boston and East Idaho News. Still an account given to an examiner four months afterward rather than anything in a contemporaneous record.
Source: Dr. Phillip Resnick, testimony of August 21, 2026
On cross-examination the Commonwealth turned the expert's own writing against the thread: CBS Boston reports ADA Jennifer Sprague putting to Resnick an article he wrote called "Faking It", in which he said command hallucinations are easy to fabricate and that people often ignore the commands when they are dangerous. No outlet reports how he answered that line. She also pressed him on why Clancy had not resisted the voice — the Boston Globe reports him answering that patients vary, some acting on such commands and some not — and put to him that Clancy heard the voice and acted on it at once, which CBS Boston reports he rejected: he said Clancy had impulses to harm her children and did resist them until the command hallucination overwhelmed her. Sprague further contrasted Clancy with Andrea Yates, who had committed herself to hospitals five times and attempted suicide twice before killing her children (CBS Boston), and disputed that the records showed Clancy crying daily, pointing to hopes Clancy had expressed of becoming a postpartum advocate and of taking part in a wheelchair marathon (CBS Boston), a line East Idaho News independently reports at about 11:45 as inconsistencies between his testimony and the hospital documentation of her emotional state and her crying. The cross ended at about 11:51 and the defense rested; no redirect examination is reported.
Source: Cross-examination of Dr. Phillip Resnick, August 21, 2026
The Commonwealth's investigative theory that the account was coached surfaced on August 12, 2026, six days before Dr. Zeizel testified, and was disowned by the Commonwealth's own witness. Reddington asked Sgt. Daniel Lawlor whether the district attorneys contended that Zeizel told the defendant to call Patrick Clancy and say she heard voices; the Commonwealth objected, the jury was sent out for a voir dire, and when it returned Lawlor told the jury that Trooper Joshua McKelligan had described the theory to him, that it was speculation, and that there was no investigative basis for it. On voir dire, out of the jury's presence, Boston 25 and East Idaho News report evidence that the defendant used the psychologist's cell phone at the hospital to call her husband and told him she heard voices, and that he reported the call to the State Police and to the grand jury.
Source: Sgt. Daniel Lawlor, testimony and voir dire of August 12, 2026
The Commonwealth's rebuttal psychiatrist did not dispute that Clancy reported a commanding voice — he relayed her description of it to the jury himself. Boston 25 at 14:47 reports her describing it to him as male and laughing, telling her she should kill the children and that it was her last chance so she could kill herself; CBS Boston reports the same content and calls it a loud male voice, without the laughter. Boston 25 at 14:50 adds that she told him she heard it as soon as Patrick Clancy left the house, that she denied locking the bedroom door, and that after taking pills and cutting herself she said she fell through the bedroom window. His evidence went to what the report signified rather than to whether she made it: he told the jury she did not present psychotic symptoms, that there is no reason psychosis in itself stops a person knowing right from wrong, and that the killings were methodical, organized and directed at a goal, pointing to the pediatrician visit, playing with the children, ordinary conversation and her keeping to the rules of the road as evidence of organized functioning. At about 14:44 he gave the opinion that she retained the capacity for criminal responsibility for her actions (Boston 25 and CBS Boston).
Source: Dr. Avram Mack, Commonwealth rebuttal, testimony of August 21, 2026
The defense's cross-examination attacked the source of the rebuttal expert's facts rather than the voice itself. East Idaho News at 14:52 and CBS Boston both report Mack accepting that his narrative of the day the children died came from Clancy herself, and Reddington pressing whether he took her account as the truth given that he interviewed her in a psychiatric hospital while she was medicated, suicidal and under a round-the-clock watch. Both outlets also report him drawing out that the district attorney's office pays Mack. Separately, East Idaho News at 14:35 reports Mack listing inconsistencies in what she told him — her denial that she locked the bedroom door, uncertainty about the cutting of the window screen, and accounts of feeding the children that did not agree. The cross-examination was still running at the latest entries checked and no outlet reports Mack being asked about the voice on cross.
Source: Cross-examination of Dr. Avram Mack, August 21, 2026
Both reports post-date January 2023. Neither is contemporaneous with the events.
Every disputed January 24 time and every disputed search date rests on an extraction of the defendant's iPhone. If two extractions of the same device disagree, that is a reason the reported times and dates disagree, and it goes to the weight of the whole digital case.
Reddington put to Chiappini that his own extraction was an Advanced Logical extraction performed on January 30, that a Trooper Rabbit performed a Full File Extraction of the same phone, and that the two did not match. East Idaho News does not record Chiappini's answer.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 13, 2026, entry timestamped 11:57 a.m.
No other outlet read for August 13 carries the exchange at all.
Source: Boston Globe, Boston 25, CBS Boston, boston.com, NBC Boston, WPRI, CT Insider, CNN, AP
The case reference lists a Lt. Joseph Rabbitt among the people it cannot place on a confirmed date. He is not recorded as having testified.
Source: data/case-reference.json
Dr. Kirk Heilbrun was called to give the jury an alternative to the defense theory of a command hallucination, and the explanation he offered instead is the substance of the Commonwealth’s rebuttal on motive. Two outlets report him characterizing that explanation in incompatible terms within seven minutes of each other, so what the jury was told about why she killed the children is not settled by the reporting.
His evaluation showed “suicide combined with altruistic filicide,” which he glossed as “killing your kids out of love”: a highly lethal and very serious suicide attempt, preceded by months of thoughts and impulses about harming herself, in which the decision to kill the children was likely an attempt to keep them from suffering without her there to take care of them.
Source: Boston Globe day-19 live blog, Lea Skene, 3:00 p.m., August 24, 2026
That Clancy told her husband she had tried to kill herself, mentioning neither the hallucinations nor that the children were dead in the basement, leads him to think this was not a case of altruistic filicide — a mother killing her children because she fears for their safety or well-being once she is gone — and that it seemed instead like an extreme suicide attempt.
Source: NBC News day-19 live blog, 3:07 p.m., August 24, 2026
Clancy’s mental state on the day of the killings was more in line with altruistic filicide than with acute psychosis accompanied by command hallucinations. He defined altruistic filicide as “killing your kids out of love … so that they wouldn’t have to suffer”, offered it as the second of two possible explanations, and said of the choice between them: “Most of the evidence that I saw supported the second one, and not the first.”
Source: boston.com day-19 recap, Abby Patkin, updated 5:21 p.m., August 24, 2026
The psychologist described the killings as “altruistic filicide,” the act of killing one's children out of love. CNN reports that description directly after the evidence NBC News gives as his reason for rejecting the term — that the first thing Clancy told her husband was that she had tried to kill herself, where someone acting on a command hallucination might have said something to the effect of having done what she had to do or what the voice said.
Source: CNN, Eric Levenson and Nicki Brown, published 4:35 p.m., August 24, 2026
He testified that Clancy committed “altruistic filicide,” in which she believed she was sparing her children suffering by killing them before taking her own life. ABC News gives this as the explanation he offered in place of the defense's hallucination account, in a Tuesday-morning post recapping Monday.
Source: ABC News live blog, 9:13 a.m., August 25, 2026
Open, with four accounts to one. The Boston Globe, boston.com, CNN and ABC News all have him adopting altruistic filicide; NBC News has him rejecting it for an extreme suicide attempt. All five agree he called the killings a serious suicide attempt. CNN narrows the disagreement rather than settling it: it draws the name from the same evidence — Clancy's first words to her husband — that NBC News reports him using to rule the name out, so the two accounts conflict over one passage of testimony. No transcript is available and no outlet quotes the passage whole.
Whether the defendant experienced a command hallucination on January 24, or an intrusive thought she later described as a voice, is the question the criminal responsibility defense rests on. Dr. Kirk Heilbrun was asked on redirect examination how he had satisfied himself that the intrusive thoughts she began reporting in December 2022 were not hallucinations, and two outlets write his answer up in the same minute with the exception running in opposite directions.
He asked her whether what she experienced reached her as voices from outside her or as thoughts inside her own head, and she set January 24 apart from the rest: “She said except for on Jan 24, what she was experiencing were thoughts.” On this account the carve-out is hers, and January 24 is the day she did not describe as a thought.
Source: Boston Herald day-20 live file, entry timed 12:45 p.m., August 25, 2026
He told the jury that a thought, however vivid, is not the same as hearing a voice and is not by itself a sign of psychosis, and that what she described experiencing at the time of the killings was thoughts rather than auditory hallucinations. On this account January 24 falls inside the thoughts and not outside them.
Source: Boston Globe day-20 live blog, entry timed 12:45 p.m., August 25, 2026
Open. Both accounts are of the same minute of the same answer, and the difference may be one of summary rather than of substance: he may have been relaying what she told him about the December thoughts while separately giving the jury his own conclusion about January 24. No outlet quotes the question and the answer together, and no other account of the redirect examination reaches this exchange. Recorded unresolved.
Whether the trial has ended in a mistrial or is still paused mid-declaration is the difference between the case being over and the case continuing, and the site must not assert either outcome without certainty.
A mistrial was declared, full stop.
Source: CNN, live blog post timed 11:25 a.m. September 4
Sullivan said he believed he had no option but to declare a mistrial and the jury was brought in to be told, but Reddington then won an hour's pause to seek a stay from the SJC before a mistrial is declared, leaving finality unresolved as of this writing.
Source: Boston Globe, live blog posts timed 11:26 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. September 4
CNN revised its account seventeen minutes later, now reporting Sullivan said he intends to declare a mistrial and has given the defense an hour to seek an emergency SJC appeal -- matching the Globe's framing rather than its own earlier one.
Source: CNN, live blog post timed 11:42 a.m. September 4
Resolved. A single SJC justice heard and denied Reddington's stay motion by about 2:20 p.m.; Sullivan then denied a further defense request, and both the Boston Globe and CNN reported the mistrial was declared shortly after, with the jury brought into the courtroom. The trial has ended without a verdict.
It affects the sequence of events at two hospitals and which physician's account attaches to which child.
Cora was pronounced deceased at 19:28 at Beth Israel Deaconess Plymouth.
Source: Case reference, attributed to Dr. Snyder
Dawson was declared dead at 7:28pm after more than forty minutes of combined paramedic and hospital resuscitation.
Source: Dr. Mark Tenerowicz, testimony of July 31, 2026
AUGUST 3 BACKFILL, AUGUST 21, 2026. Boston 25's live blog of Dr. Snyder's testimony records that after about half an hour of treatment Cora Clancy was declared dead at 7:28 p.m. on January 24, 2023 - the same time Dr. Tenerowicz gave for Dawson at the same hospital. That is the account this note previously relied on boston.com to rule out.
Source: Boston 25 live blog, August 3, 2026, entry timestamped 9:31 a.m., of Dr. Michael Snyder's testimony
boston.com, covering the same testimony, has roughly thirty minutes of CPR and Cora's death declared around 7:30 p.m. East Idaho News's account of Snyder's testimony carries no time of death at all.
Source: boston.com live blog and East Idaho News live blog, August 3, 2026
REOPENED BY THE AUGUST 3 BACKFILL OF AUGUST 21, 2026. The earlier resolution rested on a single outlet's around 7:30 p.m. for Cora against Tenerowicz's 7:28 p.m. for Dawson. Boston 25, covering the same testimony contemporaneously, puts Cora's declaration at 7:28 p.m. exactly. Two children were pronounced at Beth Israel Deaconess Plymouth within minutes of each other and both physicians testified, so the accounts are not necessarily inconsistent - but no source read establishes which child the 7:28 p.m. in the case reference belongs to, and the two outlets covering Snyder do not agree. Recorded unresolved. The resolution note in data/case-reference.json and the key point on the July 31, 2026 day entry were written on the earlier reading and have not been rewritten; that is out of scope for the day being backfilled.
The defense theory is that prescribing made her worse. The quantified levels do not straightforwardly support a picture of saturation.
Medication burden was severe enough that a Rhode Island partial hospitalization program declined her over it, and she believed the drugs were destroying her mind.
Source: Case reference, December 20, 2022/22; her mother's testimony, August 17, 2026
Only quetiapine was elevated, at roughly double expected and neither toxic nor lethal; diazepam and lorazepam were LOWER than expected; the quantities were not consistent with an overdose attempt.
Source: Dr. Justin Brower, August 5, 2026
The therapist who made the referral testified she did not know why Women and Infants declined the defendant and that it would surprise her to hear the reason was over-medication. The Boston Globe reports the program citing concerns about her prescription regimen.
Source: Latiesha Dukes, August 12, 2026
Arguing against an intoxication instruction at the charge conference, the Commonwealth characterized the regimen at the time of the killings as 10 milligrams of amitriptyline recently increased to 20, with no real evidence the defendant took the increase, plus a low dose of trazodone and a low dose of Valium, and said the medications the defense relies on were prescribed before the McLean admission and had been out of her system for at least three weeks by January 24, 2023. The defense's answer was that over-prescription, side effects, titration and abrupt cessation against normal medical advice are together the involuntary intoxication. This is argument of counsel, not evidence.
Source: ADA Jennifer Sprague and Kevin Reddington, charge conference, August 20, 2026, reported by the Hearst Connecticut live blog
The defense case is that the family saw a woman in crisis and sought help. The Commonwealth drew out that the person best placed to escalate did not.
The defendant's sister, a licensed social worker, testified the defendant reported suicidal ideation every day for a month by late December 2022, and that she had a gut feeling something was wrong.
Source: Allison Ozga, August 17, 2026
On cross she acknowledged she filed no report, despite being a mandated reporter. The defendant's mother testified she was not concerned for the children's safety because she was present.
Source: Cross-examination, August 17, 2026
The defense used it to question the thoroughness of the investigation into her medication use.
Capt. Santos testified he did not search the nightstand drawer, suggesting another searcher had probably already covered that area.
Source: Capt. John Santos, August 3, 2026
Reddington produced the drawer's contents in court, empty prescription bottles, an Apple Watch and sleep aids. Santos could not say why they were not seized.
Source: Cross-examination, August 3, 2026
Trooper Joshua McKelligan, the case officer, testified on the Commonwealth's direct examination that Patrick Clancy told investigators he had found further medication in a nightstand drawer while walking through the house with Reddington and had given it to Reddington rather than to the police. Sprague asked whether he had said why; McKelligan said he had not, and agreed that neither the pills nor the bottles were ever turned in to the State Police.
Source: Trooper Joshua McKelligan, August 13, 2026
On cross-examination Reddington put to McKelligan that the first thing he did after taking the medication was to contact the Plymouth County District Attorney's office and tell them they could come and collect it. East Idaho News records McKelligan answering that he did not know what Reddington had said; boston.com and the Boston Globe report him saying he was not aware of the contact. Neither account has been tested against the other.
Source: Cross-examination of McKelligan, August 13, 2026
Lt. Joseph Rabbitt, who executed the search warrant, agreed on cross-examination that the warrant authorized investigators to seize prescription medication in the home, and said he did not know why none of the officers involved had seized additional bottles prescribed to Lindsay Clancy that were in a drawer of the nightstand beside her bed. boston.com describes Reddington hammering again at the drawer, which he says held additional empty pill bottles; East Idaho News records the defense point that the nightstand was not searched although the warrant was executed in the early morning, and the point being put again through Trooper O'Loughlin.
Source: Lt. Joseph Rabbitt, cross-examination, August 4, 2026
The slides are the defense's visual account of how the fall from the window produced the spinal fracture, which goes to whether the fall was a genuine suicide attempt. Whether half of that exhibit reached the jury is not a detail.
Judge Sullivan disallowed defense slides 1 to 3 and permitted slides 4 to 6.
Source: Boston 25 live blog, August 18, 2026
Judge Sullivan permitted slides 4 to 6 and raised concerns about slides 1 to 3 but ultimately allowed all of them, with a recess taken to modify them.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 18, 2026
The argument is reported — Buckingham saying the window well is drawn in the wrong place and that slide four puts the defendant landing where the window well actually is, Reddington saying the measurements are accurate — but no ruling is stated.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, August 18, 2026
The argument took place with the jury out. Two of the three live blogs describe an outcome and they do not agree; the third describes none. No exhibit numbers were reported for the slides.
The Commonwealth used prior testimony of hers from a 2011 Rhode Island case to attack her consistency. How long she said unconsciousness and death take under ligature as against manual strangulation is the substance of that attack and bears on how long the killings took.
Manual strangulation: unconsciousness in 10 to 20 seconds, with a further 2 to 3 minutes of pressure before death — the figures from her 2011 testimony. Ligature strangulation: unconsciousness within 4 to 10 seconds, death within 5 to 10 minutes.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 18, 2026
In ligature strangulation unconsciousness comes in 5 to 20 seconds, with death after continuous pressure of up to five minutes.
Source: Boston 25 live blog, August 18, 2026
The Boston Globe reports the confrontation with the 2011 case and her answer that the two cases involved distinct forms of strangulation, but gives no intervals. Neither set of figures should be quoted as hers on the strength of a single outlet.
The killings were on January 24, 2023 and the whole device timeline is built on that afternoon. A voice heard the previous day would be a materially different fact, and the account is already contested because no contemporaneous clinical record contains it.
Dr. Paul Zeizel testified that on the February 6, 2023 speakerphone call the defendant told Patrick Clancy she had heard a voice on January 23 telling her she had no choice but to kill her children and then kill herself. The same account has her saying she had not been in contact with him since January 23.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 18, 2026
Zeizel testified she told Patrick Clancy she heard a male voice ordering her, telling her she did not have any choice but that she had to kill her children and then kill herself. No date is attached to the voice.
Source: Boston Globe, Boston 25 and CBS Boston, August 18, 2026
Three outlets give the account without a date and one gives January 23. The January 23 date is not carried into the January 24 timeline in the case reference on the strength of this. It may be East Idaho News's error, or it may be what the witness said; nothing read settles it.
The opinion that the defendant could not appreciate the wrongfulness of her act and could not conform her conduct to the law is the defense's central affirmative evidence on the only live issue in the case. Whether it came from the defense's own questioning or was drawn out by the Commonwealth changes how the day reads.
Reddington was still on direct examination through Wednesday morning; direct ended at about 10:17 to 10:20 with the criminal-responsibility opinion, and cross-examination began after it.
Source: Boston Globe, Boston 25, ABC News, East Idaho News and the Patriot Ledger, August 19, 2026
The forensic psychologist completed his cross-examination to start the day.
Source: CBS Boston day-16 recap, August 19, 2026
Five outlets against one, and the five include three timestamped live blogs whose entries show Reddington asking the questions up to the opinion. The August 19 entry follows the five and records CBS Boston's framing as a conflict rather than adopting it. CBS Boston's own detail elsewhere in the same story is consistent with the majority account.
The Commonwealth's case on the last fortnight is that the defendant was improving. A family member who told investigators the day after the killings that her sister had seemed OK two weeks earlier is direct support for it. Whether she adopted that statement on the stand or declined to recall it changes what the jury can do with it.
Asked whether she recalled telling police the day after the killings that the defendant had seemed OK, Ozga said yes, and added that her sister's texts had seemed to indicate she was better.
Source: Patriot Ledger live recap, August 17, 2026
Asked whether she told investigators the defendant seemed to be getting better, Ozga answered no, that she did not recall, and that she had been in complete shock.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 17, 2026, entry timestamped 12:40
Sprague pointed out that Ozga had previously told investigators the defendant seemed OK when they saw each other at the birthday party. Neither outlet reports the answer.
Source: CBS Boston and boston.com, August 17, 2026
The questions the two outlets record are not identical — seemed OK at the party as against seemed to be getting better — so they may be two exchanges rather than one. Her mother was asked a materially identical question on the same afternoon and answered that she did not recall. Not resolved.
The defense case is that the treatment was uncoordinated and that the over-medication concern raised by an outside program never got back to the person prescribing. Whether the call was made and not returned, or never arrived, is the difference between a missed handoff and a failed one.
No call from Women and Infants ever reached her, and she would certainly have returned one had it come.
Source: Rebecca Jollotta, cross-examination of August 11, 2026
Put to the therapist twice on August 12, once by the defense on cross and once by the Commonwealth on redirect, in the form that Women and Infants reached out to Jollotta about the medications on the day of the December 20 interview and got no response. Dukes said she was unaware of it either way.
Source: Reddington's cross-examination and the Commonwealth's redirect of Latiesha Dukes, August 12, 2026, as reported by Boston 25 and East Idaho News
Dukes did not know why Women and Infants declined the defendant; the Boston Globe reports the program citing concerns about her prescription regimen, and Dukes said it would surprise her to hear the reason given as over-medication.
Source: Latiesha Dukes, August 12, 2026
Recorded by the August 12 backfill of August 21, 2026. Two Commonwealth witnesses on consecutive days. Nothing read reports the Women and Infants side of it — no witness from that program has testified, and the assertion that a call was made reaches the record only as a question put by counsel, which is not evidence. Not resolved here.
The note is the defendant's own account of her state of mind and the most quoted piece of evidence from August 13. October 2022 puts it before the psychiatric treatment chronology gets under way; late December 2022 or January 2023 puts it in the middle of the medication changes the defense says caused the deterioration. The date changes what the note is evidence of.
The note was created on October 25, 2022.
Source: Boston 25, CBS Boston and boston.com, August 13, 2026
The note was written in October 2022, without a day.
Source: AP and WPRI, August 13, 2026
The note was created in December 2022 and modified in January 2023.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 13, 2026, entry timestamped 10:27 a.m.
The note was last updated on December 26, 2022.
Source: CT Insider live blog, August 13, 2026
CNN describes two notes: one containing the parenting passages and the affirmations, last modified in early November 2022, and a second created in late December 2022 and last modified on January 23, 2023 about prescription medication.
Source: CNN, August 13, 2026
The likeliest explanation is that more than one note was read and that some outlets merged them, with the December-into-January dates belonging to the medication note rather than the parenting note. Nothing read states that, and it is not recorded here as resolved.
These are the searches the defense relies on to show she recognized what was happening to her, and the Commonwealth relies on to show she knew what psychosis was. The difference between January 15, 19, 20 and 23 is the difference between a week before and the night before.
Schizophrenia searched on January 15, 2023; psychosis as both a keyword and a Google search on January 20; intrusive thoughts on January 23.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 13, 2026, entry timestamped 12:28 p.m.
Schizophrenia searched on January 19, 2023, with psychosis the following day.
Source: boston.com, August 13, 2026
Reddington asked about the term intrusive on January 20, 2023, and the Boston Globe headlines the hallucinations search as five days before the killings, which is January 19.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, August 13, 2026
Hallucinations searched on January 19, 2023; bipolar disorder on December 29, 2022 and January 13, 2023.
Source: CT Insider live blog, August 13, 2026
On redirect the Commonwealth established that the January 19, 2023 search was specifically for psychosis symptoms; the case reference records January 19 searches for symptoms of postpartum psychosis and for psychosis symptoms from the Whiffin report.
Source: Chiappini redirect, August 13, 2026; Whiffin report as recorded in the case reference
The case reference records the charges as three counts of murder and nothing else, which is what the trial judge told the jurors on the first day. Two outlets add a second set of three counts on top of that and they do not name the same offense.
Three counts of murder under Mass. G.L. c. 265 s.1, with no other counts recorded. Judge Sullivan told the jurors on 07-27 that Clancy faced three counts of murder.
Source: Case reference; Judge William Sullivan's preliminary instructions, July 27, 2026
Three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of assault and battery.
Source: Hearst Connecticut live blog, August 20, 2026
Three murder counts and three strangulation counts, the latter carrying up to five years each.
Source: Newsweek, August 20, 2026
Recorded because it is a conflict with data/case-reference.json, not resolved here. Neither extra set of counts is reported as having been put to the jury, and the verdict slip was still being argued over on 08-20.
The defense told the court, in open session, that the prosecutors trying a murder case had mocked the defendant as she was wheeled out of the courtroom sobbing. The district attorney's office denies the words and has given two different accounts of who spoke them. The judge made no finding either way and issued a general warning instead, so nothing on the record settles it.
Prosecutors were picked up on a hot microphone saying shut her up, referring to the defendant, during Thursday's autopsy testimony as she was wheeled sobbing from the courtroom.
Source: Kevin Reddington, in open court with the jury absent, August 7, 2026, as reported by the Boston Globe, boston.com, CBS Boston, Boston 25 and WJAR
The office reviewed the courtroom video. What was said was shut it off, meaning the screen displaying the autopsy photographs, not shut her up.
Source: Beth Stone, spokesperson for Plymouth District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz, August 7, 2026, as reported by the Boston Globe and boston.com
The district attorney's office first attributed the remark to one of its own prosecutors and then corrected that. boston.com describes the correction as attributing it to an unidentified person in the courtroom; CBS Boston describes it as an unknown court employee rather than a prosecutor.
Source: boston.com and CBS Boston, August 7, 2026
Attribution of the Handmaid's Tale remark differs. The Boston Globe attributes to Judge Sullivan the statement that this is not The Handmaid's Tale where you tape her mouth shut and that he is not doing that at all. CBS Boston attributes the same image to Reddington, as an argument that the defendant's mouth cannot be taped shut.
Source: Boston Globe and CBS Boston, August 7, 2026
The recording itself has not been reported as played in court, produced, or made an exhibit. Judge Sullivan's response was an admonition to the whole courtroom — no inappropriate or disruptive comments, microphones everywhere, immediate ejection and a bar for the rest of the trial, no warnings and no yellow cards — and no outlet read reports him finding that anything was or was not said. Recorded as two accounts, unresolved.
This is the appointment at which the defendant, on Remeron, reported intrusive thoughts described as a feeling that she was going to die, said she was close to suicidal and felt very hopeless, and told Tufts she kept reaching out to different people and then not sticking with the plan. It is also the appointment at which Tufts raised bipolar disorder and set it aside. Where it sits in December changes how fast the deterioration ran in the three weeks before the McLean admission.
December 1, 2022.
Source: Dr. Jennifer Tufts, August 7, 2026, as reported by CBS Boston and East Idaho News
December 21, 2022.
Source: Dr. Jennifer Tufts, August 7, 2026, as reported by the Boston Globe
On cross-examination the same witness was taken through the December 1, 2022 appointment and agreed that the defendant reported depression, numbness and intrusive thoughts including the feeling that she was going to die, denied being suicidal but said she was close to it, and used the word hopeless. Every outlet read on the August 10 cross places this material on December 1.
Source: Dr. Jennifer Tufts, cross-examination of August 10, 2026, as reported by the Boston Globe
All three outlets place the Massachusetts General emergency room visit at a separate appointment on December 16, 2022, which sits between the two candidate dates. Whether Tufts described two December appointments or one is not clear from any account read. Not resolved. NARROWED BY THE AUGUST 10 BACKFILL, AUGUST 21, 2026. The Boston Globe's account of the August 10 cross-examination places the going-to-die evidence squarely on December 1, 2022, alongside the hopelessness and the close-to-suicidal answer, and no outlet's account of that cross puts it in late December. That leaves the Globe's own August 7 report of December 21 as the outlier. Left open rather than resolved: no outlet has reconciled the two dates, and the possibility of two December appointments described in similar terms has not been excluded.
Three defense witnesses turn on it, including the forensic pathologist who testified on August 18. Whether the judge admitted them outright, or admitted two and reserved a competency determination on the third, and whether he reserved a voir dire on the two, changes what was still open going into the defense case.
Judge Sullivan allowed the defense to add three doctors to its witness list. He allowed the two who would describe the injuries the defendant suffered jumping from a second-story window, Dr. Elizabeth Laposata and Dr. Michael Vulfovich, but said he would hear their testimony first before deciding what the jury would be exposed to; Reddington may also call a third doctor, Dr. Donald Condie. The ruling runs three pages and finds the late addition was not an attempt to ambush the prosecutors and shows no bad faith.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, August 10, 2026, entry timestamped 10:14
The judge allowed two of the three. The third would be questioned by the judge at the end of Monday or on Tuesday to determine his competency as a witness.
Source: Boston 25 News, August 10, 2026, and its live blog; CBS Boston reports from the bench that Tuesday's start would be delayed for a matter with counsel
The two accounts agree on the three names and on the finding of no bad faith, and disagree on which witnesses the reserved determination attached to. All three doctors did eventually testify for the defense: Dr. Vulfovich on August 17, 2026, and Dr. Condie and Dr. Laposata on August 18, 2026. Not resolved.
The stains on the shingles below the bedroom window are the physical basis for the competing accounts of how the defendant left the window - a jump, or a lowered descent. Whether the re-collected samples were blood at all bears on what the DNA result the following day was drawn from.
Maureen Hartnett returned to the Duxbury house on June 15, 2023 to collect samples from the red-brown stains on the shingles at the exterior back of the house, below the window. Those samples tested negative for blood, and she acknowledged the stains would have degraded over five months of weather.
Source: Boston Globe, Maureen Hartnett, August 4, 2026
Hartnett identified three shingles removed from the Clancy home that contained blood stains, taken for further analysis.
Source: Boston 25 live blog, 11:40 a.m., August 4, 2026
Blood recovered from the house shingles and from the ground below the bedroom window matched the defendant.
Source: Katarina Stashyn, MSP DNA, August 5, 2026
boston.com reports only that Hartnett went back because investigators requested additional testing of the shingle stains, and does not say what the testing showed. The three accounts may be reconcilable - a presumptive screen and a DNA analysis are different tests, and stains collected on the night of the killings are not the stains collected in June - but no source read says so, and nothing here is resolved.
Whether the cuts to the wrists were a serious attempt on her own life or a gesture is one of the Commonwealth's routes to arguing that the suicide was staged. The two medical witnesses the Commonwealth called on consecutive days described the same wounds in terms that do not sit together, and neither was asked about the other.
The report she reviewed described cuts that went through skin into exposed fat but did not reach muscle, artery or tendon. She saw no deep cuts on the wrists, and once the defendant's body temperature was brought up the lacerations needed no further treatment.
Source: Dr. Cristina Carpio, South Shore Hospital, testimony of August 4, 2026
No cut on either wrist penetrated into the subcutaneous fatty tissue. One laceration on the right wrist, about three centimeters, was deep enough to require three sutures, and one on the left, about two centimeters, required a single suture; the rest were cleaned, dressed or taped.
Source: Eitan Negri PA, Brigham and Women's Hospital, testimony of August 5, 2026, as reported by the Boston Globe, Boston 25 and boston.com
Only one laceration, on the right wrist, required sutures, and it was about three centimeters deep.
Source: ABC News filed story, August 5, 2026
On cross-examination Negri agreed with another clinician's notation putting the right wrist wound at three and a half centimeters rather than three.
Source: Boston Globe and CBS Boston, August 5, 2026
The two clinicians saw her at different hospitals on different days - Carpio at South Shore on the night of January 24, 2023, Negri at Brigham and Women's on January 25 - and a wound described as needing no treatment on one night can be sutured the next day without either account being false. But the descriptions of depth are opposite in terms, and no outlet read reports either witness being asked about the other's account. Nothing here is resolved.
This is the only account read of the defendant describing a medication side effect in her own words to a friend, and the defense theory is prescribed-medication-induced psychosis. Whether she said it days before the killings or two months afterwards in a rehabilitation hospital is the difference between contemporaneous evidence of drug effect and a retrospective remark.
The defendant texted her a few days before the children were killed to say a medication had caused dark thoughts, that she was being weaned off it and trying new ones, and that the tone was hopeful. On cross-examination Bevins placed the exchange toward the end of January.
Source: Amy Bevins, testimony of August 6, 2026, as reported by East Idaho News, Boston 25, the Boston Globe and NBC Boston
Bevins stated the defendant mentioned the medication causing dark thoughts during a March 2023 visit at a rehabilitation hospital.
Source: turnto10, August 6, 2026
Bevins described both a text before the killings and a March 2023 visit at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in the same testimony, and turnto10's single paragraph may simply have merged them. Four outlets place the remark in the text. Nothing is resolved here; the day account records both.
The length of the postpartum window is the hinge of the cross-examination of the Commonwealth's rebuttal expert. Clancy's youngest child was eight months old on January 24, so whether the diagnostic period runs four weeks or four months from the birth changes what Dr. Avram Mack's own authority allows him to call postpartum.
Mack gave the guidelines as putting postpartum onset within four weeks of the birth, and postpartum psychosis within six, while Reddington cited guidelines allowing longer periods. The same blog repeated four weeks at 10:11.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, 10:05 and 10:11, August 24, 2026
Mack said he uses the DSM definition of the postpartum period as four months after the birth, and that making a diagnosis in psychiatry requires an authority, which for him is the DSM.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, 10:30, August 24, 2026
Reddington put to Mack that he has opined postpartum depression must begin within four weeks of the birth in accordance with the DSM-5, and said it could occur within a year; Mack answered that the DSM-5 is what is used in the United States. Recorded as counsel's characterization of the witness's opinion rather than as the witness's own figure. The same file separately reports Mack saying Clancy had a major depressive episode within four to five months of the birth, which measures when her episode began and not the diagnostic window.
Source: Patriot Ledger day-19 live file, entry posted 11:04, August 24, 2026
Mack testified that the DSM defines the postpartum onset specifier as four weeks after the birth, and acknowledged on cross-examination that the World Health Organization's system uses a different window and that a proposed revision to the DSM uses six weeks. Hearst Connecticut separately renders his evidence on the postpartum window as four to six weeks.
Source: Fox News Digital day-19 live blog, post timed 11:00, August 24, 2026, with Hearst Connecticut's News-Times day-19 file, untimed, updated 1:08 p.m.
Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, the Commonwealth's second rebuttal expert, told the jury that medical guidelines put the onset of postpartum symptoms at one to two months after giving birth. Recorded here because it is a figure for the same window from the other Commonwealth expert; the outlet reports neither the question that produced it nor what he drew from it, and does not name the guidelines.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, 2:50 p.m., August 24, 2026
Heilbrun expressed skepticism about whether Clancy's mental health conditions were connected to her having given birth about eight months earlier, saying he adheres to a shorter timeframe when considering the postpartum period. Recorded as the second Commonwealth expert's own position rather than as a figure for the DSM window.
Source: Boston Globe day-19 live blog, Lea Skene, 2:55 p.m., August 24, 2026
Open. Four renderings of what Dr. Avram Mack gave as the DSM postpartum window — four weeks, four months, four to six weeks, and counsel's four weeks with a year put to him — stand unreconciled; the Globe's four-months entry at 10:30 is still uncorroborated. The Commonwealth's second expert, Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, has since told the jury that medical guidelines put postpartum onset at one to two months and that he adheres to a shorter period, doubting a connection to a birth eight months earlier. His figures are recorded here alongside Mack's, not as corroboration of any of them. Unresolved.
The defense case is that a psychotic illness developed on prescribed medication in the months before January 24. When Clancy first reported intrusive thoughts about harming herself, and when those thoughts first extended to the children, fixes how long that deterioration ran and how close to the killings the thoughts about the children began. Five outlets summarize the same passage of Dr. Kirk Heilbrun's direct examination, and they give four different datings.
The horrible intrusive thoughts about harming herself began in late November 2022 and continued into December, and in January she began to have thoughts about harming her children.
Source: NBC News national live blog, entry posted 12:33, August 24, 2026
In December 2022 Clancy reported horrible intrusive thoughts about harming herself and at times her children, which she described as her own thoughts rather than a voice from outside her head.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, 12:30, August 24, 2026, with Boston 25 at 12:29 and boston.com's untimed narrative, stamped 1:30 p.m., both giving the same December dating
The horrible intrusive thoughts began in early December, and continued through December and January, occasionally about the children.
Source: Patriot Ledger day-19 live file, entry posted 12:46, August 24, 2026
The terrible intrusive thoughts about harming herself began in late November and early December, and later they would occasionally be about harming her children; no date is given for when they turned to the children.
Source: CBS Boston day-19 page, untimed narrative, page updated 1:29 p.m., August 24, 2026
Open. All of these are paraphrases of one stretch of direct examination and none quotes the witness on a date, so the conflict may be summarizing rather than substantive. What is unresolved is whether the thoughts about the children began alongside those about herself, in December, or only in January. boston.com, read in the afternoon, puts both in December, with the Boston Globe and Boston 25; CBS Boston sits between NBC News and the Patriot Ledger on the onset and leaves the children undated. No outlet reports him being pressed on the dates.
The Commonwealth's case is that the killings were the deliberate act of a woman who knew what she was doing, and the defense has built its case on a mother with no history of harming her children. Whether the Commonwealth's own rebuttal expert accepted, in front of the jury, that the February 2023 Department of Children and Families records contain no earlier instance of Clancy abusing her children is the difference between a concession and a refusal to concede on that point. Two outlets summarize the same exchange in ways that do not sit together.
Mack described reviewing Department of Children and Families records from February 2023 that included an interview with Patrick Clancy and recorded no earlier instance of Lindsay Clancy abusing her children.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, entry at 9:36 a.m., August 24, 2026
Asked directly by Reddington whether there are no such records showing that Clancy was abusive to her children, Mack answered that he did not think that was necessarily the conclusion of that report.
Source: boston.com day-19 page, untimed narrative stamped noon, page updated 2:24 p.m., August 24, 2026
Open. The Globe's entry is a paraphrase of what Mack said he reviewed; boston.com quotes his answer to the question put to him. They may describe different moments in the same passage rather than one moment two ways, and neither outlet reports whether Reddington pressed it further. No other outlet carries the exchange.
Heilbrun gave the length of the watch as part of his evidence that Clancy was and remains at risk of suicide, which is the ground on which he told the jury the killings were a serious suicide attempt rather than acute psychosis. How long she has been held at the highest level of risk is part of that reasoning, and the outlets do not agree on the figure.
Clancy has been on a one-to-one suicide watch at Tewksbury State Hospital for three years and still is.
Source: Boston 25 day-19 live blog, Bob Ward, 2:20 p.m., August 24, 2026
Clancy was on a one-to-one suicide risk, described by the outlet as the highest risk level, for three years and remains at risk of suicide; he noted that is a long time to remain at an elevated risk.
Source: NBC News day-19 live blog, 2:25 p.m., August 24, 2026
Clancy has been on a one-on-one suicide watch for the past three and a half years, according to Heilbrun's testimony.
Source: Hearst Connecticut News-Times day-19 file, untimed, updated 2:46 p.m., August 24, 2026
Not a position on the watch, recorded to keep the two figures apart: boston.com quotes him saying what really convinced him is that Clancy has been at Tewksbury Hospital for more than three and a half years with bipolar disorder as the diagnosis of record. That measures the length of her stay, not the watch.
Source: boston.com day-19 page, untimed narrative, updated 2:24 p.m., August 24, 2026
Open. Two outlets give three years and one gives three and a half, all reporting the same witness on the same afternoon. boston.com's three and a half years attaches to the length of her stay at Tewksbury rather than to the watch, so it does not settle the conflict either way. No outlet reports the question that produced the figure. Recorded as reported, unresolved.
The pattern of the voice is the center of Heilbrun's case against the command hallucination: Clancy reported hearing it only during the roughly 18 minutes of the killings, and he told the jury that does not match how a genuine hallucination behaves. Two outlets report the comparison he drew in opposite terms, so what the jury was told a genuine hallucination looks like is not settled by the reporting.
Genuine psychotic hallucinations can be intermittent, where Clancy reported the voice speaking to her constantly for 18 minutes and never emerging before or since.
Source: Boston Globe day-19 live blog, Travis Andersen, 2:50 p.m., August 24, 2026
Genuine hallucinations are more consistent than intermittent, where Clancy reported hearing the voice only for about 18 to 20 minutes.
Source: NBC News day-19 live blog, untimed post on a page updated 3:03 p.m., August 24, 2026
A third rendering from the same blog, recorded because it does not settle the point either: it would be very, very unusual to hear a voice during an isolated incident, and such auditory hallucinations more often come and go over a longer period of time.
Source: Boston Globe day-19 live blog, Lea Skene, 2:55 p.m., August 24, 2026
Open. Both accounts run to the same conclusion — that what Clancy described does not match the usual pattern — but the property each assigns to a genuine hallucination is the reverse of the other, and the Globe's own two posts do not read alike. The outlets also differ on the length she reported, 18 minutes against 18 to 20. No transcript is available and no outlet quotes the passage in full. Recorded as reported, unresolved.
The testimony is the subject of the only mistrial motion recorded in this trial, and Judge Sullivan struck it and told the jury it cannot be considered. What was said matters to what the jury was told about whether Clancy believed the killings were morally wrong, which is the appreciation-of-wrongfulness half of the McHoul test. No outlet gives the exchange in full, and the accounts place the doctrine at issue on different acts.
The doctrine at issue was about murder. Boston 25 reports the witness saying he asked Clancy, a devout Catholic, whether that was a mortal sin, and later describes the issue as the mention in court that the Catholic Church considers murder a mortal sin.
Source: Boston 25 day-19 live blog, Bob Ward, 2:54 p.m. and 3:23 p.m., August 24, 2026
The doctrine at issue was about suicide. The Boston Globe, reporting the defense’s mistrial argument, describes the witness saying he asked Clancy, who was raised Catholic, about her faith’s doctrine against suicide, and reports the prosecutor saying Clancy had told him she had knowledge that suicide was considered sinful in Catholicism, in the context of whether she knew the killings were morally wrong.
Source: Boston Globe day-19 live blog, Travis Andersen, 3:24 p.m., August 24, 2026
What he described was her own statements. NBC News reports him describing Clancy’s statements about her children going to God during their deaths as contrary to the belief of her Catholic religion, offered as part of his evaluation of her view of moral wrong.
Source: NBC News day-19 live blog, 3:28 p.m., August 24, 2026
The passage contained both. CBS Boston quotes the testimony itself: that part of Clancy’s expectation was that she and her children would be together in heaven with God, that she was raised as a Catholic, that as he understood Catholic considerations that is not necessarily what happens, and that he asked her “Isn’t suicide a mortal sin?” — at which point a defense objection and a sidebar cut him off.
Source: CBS Boston day-19 article, Neal Riley and Aaron Parseghian, updated 3:41 p.m., August 24, 2026
The judge described it as an opinion about heaven. On the Patriot Ledger’s account of the argument, Judge Sullivan said the witness had testified that Clancy was raised as a Catholic and had then given an opinion on the Catholic conception of heaven.
Source: Patriot Ledger day-19 live file, Peter Blandino, 3:39 p.m., August 24, 2026
NBC News publishes the same passage as CBS Boston, in the same terms, and reports the judge pausing the testimony at the point where the witness said he had asked Clancy whether suicide is a “mortal sin”. It places the passage in his account of her understanding of what is immoral.
Source: NBC News day-19 live blog, 3:51 p.m., August 24, 2026
NBC Boston’s recap of the day describes the comment that prompted the motion as one about the notion that suicide is a mortal sin.
Source: NBC Boston day-19 recap, Thea DiGiammerino and Asher Klein, August 24, 2026
A third publication of the passage, again on suicide. Hearst Connecticut’s day-19 recap reports that the witness brought up prior testimony about Clancy telling the children to “go with God” as she strangled them, and that the comments moved into the realm of the inappropriate, the judge said, when he brought up that she was raised as a Catholic and then said “isn’t suicide a mortal sin?”, at which the judge called a sidebar and sent the jury out.
Source: Hearst Connecticut News-Times day-19 recap, Peter Yankowski, Lisa Backus and Austin Mirmina, updated about 4:52 p.m., August 24, 2026
The doctrine at issue was about suicide — and this is Boston 25 itself, in its own filed story rather than its live blog. It describes Heilbrun testifying about his interview with Clancy at Tewksbury State Hospital and referencing questions he asked her about suicide being a mortal sin.
Source: Boston 25 News, Bob Ward, filed about 5:42 p.m., August 24, 2026
A different form of the words again, and the only account of what the witness was actually saying when the objection came. WHDH’s 7News quotes him beginning “When I said suicide isn’t a mortal sin,” before Reddington interrupted with an objection, after which Judge Sullivan asked to speak with the prosecution. On this rendering he is reporting what he had said to Clancy rather than a question he had put to her.
Source: WHDH 7News, Jonathan Hall, filed about 5:27 p.m., August 24, 2026
The doctrine at issue was about suicide, and this account gives the reasoning rather than the words. Los Angeles Magazine reports Heilbrun discussing Clancy's account of saying “Go to God, baby” while strangling each child and suggesting it reflected her belief that she and the children would be together in heaven; after noting she was raised Catholic, he questioned her reasoning against his understanding of Catholic teaching about suicide, at which Reddington objected.
Source: Los Angeles Magazine, Lauren Conlin, untimed day-19 narrative published on the evening of August 24, 2026
Narrowed again, and by the outlier itself. Boston 25's own filed story puts the doctrine on suicide where its live blog had put it on murder, so the only account on the murder side now stands against the same outlet's later reporting. Every other account of the words puts the question on suicide, and Los Angeles Magazine adds the reasoning behind it: his understanding of Catholic teaching on suicide, set against her expectation of being reunited with the children. WHDH alone has him reporting what he had said rather than what he had asked. No outlet gives his answer. The evidence has been struck.
The August 18 question was struck, and the defense relied on it on August 24 in moving for a mistrial, telling the court that this was the second time religion had been raised and that on the first occasion it had not moved for one. Which member of the prosecution team asked it is part of the record of conduct the defense called intentional misconduct.
Shanan Buckingham conducted the cross-examination of Susan Clancy and put the question. This is the account compiled here on the day, from the outlets that carried the exchange.
Source: clancytrial.org day-15 entry for August 18, 2026, compiled from the Boston Globe, Boston 25, CBS Boston, East Idaho News and NBC Boston
Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague mentioned mortal sin while questioning Sue Clancy, Patrick Clancy’s mother, earlier in the trial. The Patriot Ledger reports this as part of Reddington’s mistrial argument.
Source: Patriot Ledger day-19 live file, Peter Blandino, 3:39 p.m., August 24, 2026
The prosecutor is not named. NBC Boston’s article of August 19 gives the exchange and attributes it only to one of the prosecutors; NBC News, on August 24, says only that the prosecution was cross-examining Clancy’s former mother-in-law.
Source: NBC Boston, Kaitlin McKinley Becker, August 19, 2026; NBC News day-19 live blog, 3:51 p.m., August 24, 2026
Shanan Buckingham asked it. Hearst Connecticut’s day-19 recap sets the exchange out word for word and names her: Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham asked Susan Clancy whether she was an active member in the Catholic Church, Susan Clancy answered yes, and the prosecutor then asked whether she was aware that murder is considered a mortal sin, at which Judge Sullivan immediately stopped the questioning and told the jury to strike the comments.
Source: Hearst Connecticut News-Times day-19 recap, Peter Yankowski, Lisa Backus and Austin Mirmina, updated about 4:52 p.m., August 24, 2026
Shanan Buckingham asked it. Boston 25’s standalone article on the ruling reports that the earlier occasion came as a prosecutor cross-examined Patrick Clancy’s mother the previous week, names Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham, and quotes her asking whether she was an active member in the Catholic church and whether she was aware that murder is a mortal sin.
Source: Boston 25 News, Bob Ward, filed about 5:42 p.m., August 24, 2026
Shanan Buckingham asked it. WHDH’s 7News sets the exchange out word for word and names her: Buckingham asked the victims’ grandmother whether she was an active member in the Catholic church, the witness answered yes, and Buckingham then asked whether she was aware that murder is considered a mortal sin, at which Judge William Sullivan cut in and asked to speak with Buckingham.
Source: WHDH 7News, Jonathan Hall, filed about 5:27 p.m., August 24, 2026
Open, and the weight has moved further. Three outlets filing on the evening of August 24 — Hearst Connecticut, Boston 25’s standalone article and WHDH’s 7News — name Shanan Buckingham, and two of them set the exchange out word for word. That agrees with the account compiled here on the day. The Patriot Ledger, reporting Reddington’s mistrial argument six days later, is alone in naming Jennifer Sprague and gives no quotation. Nothing else about the exchange is in dispute: the question was put to an active Catholic on cross-examination, was objected to before it was answered, and was struck.
Manslaughter is the only lesser offense the jury may reach, and voluntary and involuntary manslaughter are different verdicts resting on different findings. The accounts of the same ruling at the August 26 charge conference do not describe the same instruction, and the wording was still to be settled from a fuller draft.
Judge Sullivan said he will give a manslaughter instruction and is inclined to give only one, rather than parsing between involuntary and voluntary manslaughter.
Source: Boston Globe day-21 live blog, 3:51 p.m., August 26, 2026
The judge would include an instruction about manslaughter, and had discussed wording letting the jury consider evidence of mental impairment or of taking prescription drugs, which Kevin Reddington did not object to. The account does not divide voluntary from involuntary.
Source: NBC Boston day-21 live blog, 3:54 p.m., August 26, 2026
The judge agreed to include instructions on voluntary manslaughter, but not the Bowden charge, after the defense had pushed for involuntary manslaughter as the lesser charge.
Source: NBC News day-21 live blog, 4:06 p.m., August 26, 2026
The instruction is one on manslaughter as a lesser-included offense to the three murder counts, without the two being distinguished.
Source: boston.com day-21 page, 4 p.m. update, August 26, 2026
Open as to the charge conference, but the delivered charge is now on the record. On the morning of August 27 the judge instructed the jury on a single, undivided manslaughter offense — that the Commonwealth prove she caused the deaths and that her conduct was wanton or reckless — and the verdict slip he held up offers guilty of manslaughter without separating voluntary from involuntary. No account read here has him naming either form in the charge itself, so what stays open is only what he told the lawyers on August 26 he would do.
The day page states, in our own voice, that the jury put its first question to the court before ten on Friday. Three outlets report a question; a fourth, writing later, will not say one was asked, and nothing was said about it in open court.
The jury submitted a question, and the sidebar was held to take it up.
Source: Boston 25 day-23 file, 10:04 a.m., August 28, 2026; boston.com day-23 page, 10:20 a.m. update, August 28, 2026; Boston Globe day-23 live blog, 10:29 a.m., August 28, 2026; CBS Boston day-23 file updated 11:04 a.m., August 28, 2026; Associated Press story updated 11:21 a.m., August 28, 2026; Boston 25 day-23 file updated 11:38 a.m., August 28, 2026
Court sat briefly and the judge called both sides to a sidebar, and the subject of it was never stated; a jury question is one possibility among others, including a request to review an exhibit.
Source: Boston Globe day-23 live blog, 10:03 a.m., August 28, 2026; Associated Press story updated 10:46 a.m., August 28, 2026
Reconciled. The Boston Globe reported Kevin Reddington describing the jurors' question as a request to see the prescription bottles and the knife, which makes both earlier accounts right: there was a question, and what it asked for was exhibits. The Associated Press, which at 10:46 would not say a question had been asked, carries counsel's account in its 11:21 file, and CBS Boston and Boston 25 carry it as well. Nothing about it has been said in open court. The day entry records the sequence as the outlets reported it.
The jury asked on Friday morning for the prescription bottles and the knife. Whether all of that material was in evidence decides what could lawfully be sent in to the jury room, and the two accounts of it point different ways.
The bottles and the knife were exhibits admitted during the trial that had simply not gone back with the rest when the jury first retired, the pills being narcotics and the knife a weapon, and both were sent in once the jury asked for them.
Source: Boston Globe day-23 live blog, 10:29 and 10:56 a.m., August 28, 2026
On Kevin Reddington's account to Boston 25's reporter at the courthouse, one of the bottles was found in a nightstand and was not entered in evidence, and a second had been in the console of Patrick Clancy's truck and was surrendered to the police.
Source: Boston 25 day-23 file, updated 11:38 and 11:57 a.m., August 28, 2026
The Associated Press, in the file it rewrote on Friday evening, describes what the jurors asked for as bags of empty prescription bottles found in the house.
Source: Associated Press day-23 evening file as carried by the Washington Times, August 28, 2026, and by WBUR, August 29, 2026
Open. Three descriptions of the same material. The Boston Globe has exhibits admitted at trial, held back from the jury room because the pills are narcotics and the knife a weapon. Boston 25 has counsel tracing one bottle to a nightstand and saying it was never in evidence, another to the truck console. The Associated Press has bags of empty bottles found in the house. The first two may describe different things: what the jury was sent, and the history of the medication as counsel recounted it. Nothing about the request or the answer was said in open court, so no account from the bench settles it.
These break searching and joining if silently normalized. Kept explicit.
Det. Maffeo appears as 'Marcanthony' in reporting and 'Mark Anthony' in the case reference.
Source: July 31, 2026
'NP Rebecca Gelada' in the treatment chronology is almost certainly Rebecca Jollotta, the South Shore perinatal nurse who testified 08-11 and 08-12.
Source: August 11, 2026
Dr. Springer appears as both 'Kimberley' and 'Kimberly'.
Source: August 6, 2026, August 12, 2026
'Kyle Carney' was briefly and wrongly conflated with Sgt. Kyle Pavao. They are different people: Carney is a college friend of Patrick Clancy.
Source: August 6, 2026
The medical examiner who performed the autopsies on Cora and Dawson appears as Barbara Olson (Boston Globe, boston.com), Barbara Olsen (CBS Boston) and Barbara Vidal Olsen (Boston 25's filed story). The counselor is Latiesha Dukes on August 12 and Latisha or Lateisha Dukes in August 11 coverage. Nicole Bradley of the Plymouth County Sheriff's Office is Nichole to the Boston Globe.
Source: August 12, 2026
On August 13 the country singer is Tom T. Hall to the Boston Globe and Tom Hall to every other outlet. The restaurant appears as ThreeV, Three V and 3V. The examined device is a Surface Pro laptop (CBS Boston, WPRI, East Idaho News), a laptop (Boston Globe, NBC Boston), a computer (Boston 25) and a shared tablet (boston.com). The defendant's parents are Paula and Mike Musgrove to the Boston Globe and boston.com and Paul and Mike Musgrove to CT Insider. The medical examiner is Barbara Olson to boston.com and Barbara Vidal Olson to East Idaho News. The second forensic examiner's rank is sergeant (East Idaho News, NBC Boston, WPRI), detective (CBS Boston) and trooper (Boston Globe, CT Insider); Pavao is a sergeant to Boston 25 and CBS Boston and a trooper in Boston Globe and AP photo captions. The trooper who performed the second extraction is rendered 'Trooper Rabbit' by East Idaho News and appears as Lt. Joseph Rabbitt in the case reference.
Source: August 13, 2026
On July 29 the ThreeV hostess is Saria Sweeney (Boston 25, Oxygen), Saria Shelgren (Boston Globe), Sweeney Schelgren (CBS Boston) and Saria Sweeney Shelgren (boston.com); this file uses Saria Sweeney. The product the defendant telephoned the Kingston CVS about is a stool softener (Boston Globe), medicine for the children (CBS Boston), Miralax or Pedia-Lax (CBS Boston, Oxygen) and 'Pedialight' as Boston 25's reporter rendered it. The restaurant is ThreeV, 3-V and 3V within the same day's coverage.
Source: July 29, 2026
The McLean psychiatrist is Alia Goodheart to boston.com, the Boston Globe, Boston 25, CBS Boston and WBUR, Ali Goodheart to East Idaho News, and Aliyah Goodhart in the treatment chronology in the case reference. The fitness club in Kingston is the Kingsbury Club to boston.com, the Boston Globe and CBS Boston and Kingsberry to East Idaho News.
Source: August 7, 2026
On August 4 the South Shore Hospital surgeon is Cristina Carpio (Boston Globe, boston.com, Boston 25), Christina Carpio (WJAR) and Cristina Karpio (CBS Boston), and is a general surgeon to CBS Boston and boston.com and a trauma surgeon to East Idaho News. Lt. Joseph Rabbitt is Lt. Joseph Rabbit to CBS Boston. The toxicologist is Hilary Griffiths to boston.com and Boston 25 and Hillary Griffiths to MassLive. Clonazepam is rendered Klonazepam in MassLive's list of the pill bottles.
Source: August 4, 2026
Only that the record should not attribute a contested cross-examination to the wrong advocate. The Commonwealth divides witnesses between two prosecutors and the division is otherwise consistent across the trial.
Jennifer Sprague cross-examined Dr. Elizabeth Laposata on August 18, 2026, and is named in the exchange about the absence of any injury to the top of the defendant's head.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, August 18, 2026
Shanan Buckingham cross-examined Laposata, and put to her the violations found at the Rhode Island medical examiner's office.
Source: CBS Boston, August 18, 2026
Boston 25's account of the cross does not name the prosecutor. Buckingham is separately named by several outlets as cross-examining Susan Clancy and Dr. Donald Condie on the same day, so both prosecutors were working.
The Commonwealth's cross-examination of Zeizel on August 19 went to his objectivity and to whether he was both treating the defendant and working for the defense. The extent of his contact with her is part of that.
Zeizel testified he had met the defendant more than 45 times, including after her transfer to Tewksbury State Hospital.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, August 18, 2026
Approximately 60 times over the last three years, including during the trial.
Source: ABC News and USA TODAY, August 19, 2026
More than 35 hours with the defendant over dozens of visits.
Source: Associated Press, August 19, 2026
Over 35 hours and over 50 visits.
Source: LA Magazine, August 19, 2026
Cross-examination proceeded on the footing that he had spent 35 hours evaluating her, a figure the prosecutor used twice without contradiction.
Source: CBS Boston and WJAR, August 19, 2026
The same witness on consecutive days. The hours figure is stable at more than 35 across every outlet; only the visit count moves, from more than 45 on the first day to roughly 50 or 60 on the second. The figures may both be his — a floor given on Tuesday and a fuller count on Wednesday — or the higher numbers may be a reporting convergence. The August 19 entry records the spread rather than picking one.
Emily Thorndike's proposed evidence went to whether the defendant's four- or five-day admission to McLean over the New Year holiday gave her real clinical contact. How long staff were permitted to spend with a patient is the concrete number in that account. Her evidence was excluded, so the jury heard neither figure, but the underlying staffing records were admitted.
She said McLean's guidelines discouraged providers from meeting with mental health patients for longer than 20 minutes, because there are other things to do.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, August 19, 2026
On cross-examination the prosecutor asked whether there was a rule that caretakers could spend only 5 minutes with a patient, and she said yes, her supervisors had told her that.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 19, 2026
The two figures may describe different things — a ceiling on a therapy session as against a floor on a routine check — or one outlet may have the number wrong. No other outlet read gives a figure. Neither is adopted.
The objection stopped the question, drew a sidebar and then a recess. On the Boston Globe's account the unfinished question named the Commonwealth's three retained experts in open court and asked why the district attorney's office had taken so long to engage them; on East Idaho News's account it was an unrelated hypothetical. Those are different events.
Reddington appeared to begin asking why it took the district attorney's office so long to retain three doctors of its own, presumably Kirk Heilbrun, Avram Mack and Gregory Saathoff. The prosecution objected before he could continue.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, August 19, 2026, entry timestamped 12:05
Reddington attempted a hypothetical question about a young woman who kills her children, is in a wheelchair and is indicted. The prosecutor objected and a sidebar was called.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 19, 2026, entry timestamped 11:45
Both accounts place an objection, a sidebar and then a recess in the same stretch of redirect, so they may be describing two separate blocked questions rather than one. No outlet reports how either objection was ruled on. The Globe's naming of the three Commonwealth experts here is not the only place they appear together: the same paper's pre-trial witness preview of July 27 lists Heilbrun, Mack and Saathoff among the prosecution's mental health experts, along with a fourth, Dr. Margarita Abi Zeid Daou of the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. That corroborates whom the Commonwealth retained. It does not settle which question was blocked here, and it does not identify the rebuttal witnesses, since four named experts cannot fill the three rebuttal seats the reporting describes.
The sentence — being very emotional and upset because the praise heaped on McLean was misleading — is the stated reason for Zeizel's appearance at a January 2023 news conference, which was the Commonwealth's best material on his objectivity. If it belongs to the excluded witness instead, his explanation for the news conference is unsourced.
East Idaho News prints the sentence at 11:40 as Zeizel's answer on redirect about the news conference, and again at 12:55 as Emily Thorndike's explanation for posting her TikTok video.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 19, 2026
Thorndike's explanation for the video was that what was discussed in court was not aligned with her own experience. Neither outlet reports her saying anything about praise heaped on McLean, and neither reports the sentence from Zeizel.
Source: Boston Globe and ABC News, August 19, 2026
Most likely a duplication in the live blog rather than two witnesses saying the same thing an hour apart. The August 19 entry carries the sentence for Zeizel with an explicit caution and does not carry it for Thorndike.
The Apple Watch heart rate series is the only physiological record of the defendant's afternoon. The final reading of 57 bpm at 5:23 p.m. is agreed and is what both sides argue from. The day's peak is the shape of everything before it, and a peak of 152 describes a different afternoon from a peak of 123.
The average for the day was in the 80s and 90s and the high was 152.
Source: Boston 25 live blog, August 17, 2026, entry timestamped 09:45
The readings ranged over seconds; the highest was 123 bpm and the last was at 5:23 p.m. at 57 bpm.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 17, 2026, entry timestamped 09:46
The average was in the high 80s and low 90s; no peak given.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, August 17, 2026, entry timestamped 09:47
The two figures were published a minute apart by reporters in the same courtroom. East Idaho News also reports a top heart rate of 108 bpm during a morning stair climb, so 123 may be a reading from a narrower window than the whole day. Neither is adopted, and the case reference records no peak.
Patrick Clancy is the Commonwealth's first witness and the only lay witness to the household in the weeks before January 24. Whether the defense had begun testing his account on the first day or only on the third changes which of his concessions were volunteered on direct and which were drawn out on cross.
Patrick Clancy was already under cross-examination when Judge Sullivan adjourned at about 3 p.m. on July 27, 2026, with the 911 call not yet played.
Source: Boston 25 live blog, July 27, 2026
He was still on direct examination at adjournment and would continue on direct when court resumed Wednesday, with cross-examination still to come.
Source: CBS Boston live blog and boston.com, July 27, 2026
Reddington's cross-examination ran roughly two hours and concluded at about 3:45 p.m. on July 29, 2026, the day the 911 call was played.
Source: This file's day summary for July 29, 2026, compiled from CBS Boston and CNN
JULY 29, 2026 BACKFILL, AUGUST 21, 2026. Read in full, the July 29 live blogs put the cross-examination beginning that afternoon: the witness retook the stand at about 14:14 and Reddington began at 14:16 (Boston 25), about 14:15 (CBS Boston) or 14:18 (Boston Globe). Nothing in the July 29 coverage places any defense questioning of this witness on July 27, which leaves Boston 25's July 27 entry the only support for the earlier start.
Source: Boston Globe, CBS Boston and Boston 25 live blogs, July 29, 2026
Raised by the July 27, 2026 backfill of August 21, 2026. Three of the four accounts point the same way and Boston 25 appears to be the outlier, but no outlet has been read that places any defense questioning of this witness on July 27, and the conflict is recorded rather than resolved.
Rebecca Jollotta is the Commonwealth witness closest to the seven weeks of psychiatric treatment the defense says failed, and the concessions drawn out of her on cross are among the strongest defense material in the Commonwealth's own case. Whether her evidence ended on August 11 or continued on August 12 determines which day a researcher should search for the end of it.
Jollotta completed direct, cross-examination and the Commonwealth's redirect on August 11, 2026 and stepped down before the jury was sent home that afternoon. Five outlets covering August 11 report her stepping down that day: the Boston Globe, Boston 25, CBS Boston, East Idaho News and boston.com.
Source: Live coverage of August 11, 2026, read in full during the August 11 backfill
Jollotta also testified on August 12, 2026, her evidence continuing from the previous day, on the point that the defendant complained her medications were not working quickly enough and might be making her worse.
Source: This file's companion day summary for August 12, 2026, compiled from the Boston Globe, boston.com, Boston 25, CBS Boston and PBS
The August 12, 2026 coverage has now been read in full — the Boston Globe, Boston 25, boston.com, CBS Boston, East Idaho News and the Patriot Ledger — and none of it places Jollotta on the stand that day. East Idaho News's running witness count for August 12 goes 63 to 68 (Lawlor, Dukes, Daley, Bradley, Stonebridge, Olson), following on without a gap from Jollotta as witness 62 on August 11. The PBS NewsHour piece cited by the old August 12 entry is dated August 12 but reports Jollotta's August 11 testimony, which is the likeliest source of the error.
Source: Live coverage of August 12, 2026, read in full during the August 12 backfill of August 21, 2026
Raised by the August 11, 2026 backfill of August 21, 2026. The likeliest explanation is that the August 12 outlets carried a recap of Jollotta's evidence alongside the medical examiners who testified that day, and that the recap was read as fresh testimony when the August 12 entry was compiled. That is an explanation, not a finding: the August 12 coverage has not been re-read, and the August 12 entry has not been altered. Anyone reconciling these two entries should read the August 12 live blogs in full first. RESOLVED AUGUST 21, 2026 BY THE AUGUST 12 BACKFILL. The explanation offered above turned out to be right: her evidence ended on August 11. The August 12 entry has been rewritten and no longer lists her, and the PBS source has been dropped from that day. The August 11 entry was not touched.
Callan's cause of death is the one autopsy finding on the youngest child, and a researcher searching for it needs the right sitting day.
Dr. Kimberly Springer testified between about 09:26 and 09:48 on August 6, 2026 about Callan, giving his cause of death as complications of mechanical asphyxia, with autopsy photographs shown to jurors on individual screens at 09:48.
Source: Boston 25 live blog, August 6, 2026
This file's companion day summary for August 12, 2026 also placed Dr. Kimberley Springer on the stand that day on Callan's injuries and cause of death, spelling her forename differently.
Source: The August 12, 2026 day summary as compiled before August 21, 2026
Six outlets covering August 12, 2026, read in full, place six witnesses on the stand that day and Springer is not among them. East Idaho News numbers them 63 to 68 with no gap. Boston 25's filed story of August 12 says the medical examiner evidence on Callan had been put before the jury the previous week, which fits August 6.
Source: Live coverage of August 12, 2026, read in full during the August 12 backfill of August 21, 2026
Raised and resolved by the August 12 backfill of August 21, 2026. Springer testified once, on August 6. The August 12 entry has been rewritten and no longer lists her; the August 6 entry was not touched, and it already recorded that autopsy evidence spanned both dates — which it did, but through Stonebridge and Olson on August 12, not through Springer.
Her evidence is the last clinical contact of any kind before the January gap, so the date it stops is the date the treatment record stops.
Four contacts — in person December 2, 2022, then December 5, December 12 and December 19 — plus a call on December 27 about the Women and Infants referral and a call with Patrick Clancy the same day.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 12, 2026
Four meetings between late November and early December 2022.
Source: CBS Boston and the Patriot Ledger, August 12, 2026
The last encounter was a virtual visit on December 9 in one entry and December 19 in another, in the same live blog.
Source: Boston 25 live blog, August 12, 2026
The intake was on December 2, 2023.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, August 12, 2026
The referral to Women and Infants was made on December 20 and the program declined after interviewing her.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, August 12, 2026
The referral was made on December 12 and the interview at Women and Infants was on December 20.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 12, 2026
Recorded by the August 12 backfill of August 21, 2026. The December 2 to December 19 sequence is carried by East Idaho News in full and is consistent with the Boston Globe's and CBS Boston's account of four visits and a December 19 last visit; the 2023 intake year and the December 9 last visit are each carried by a single outlet and each conflicts with that outlet's own other entries. Nothing here is treated as settled and no date has been carried into the treatment chronology in the case reference.
The outlet's running Commonwealth witness number is the only continuous count of the prosecution case in any coverage, and this file cites it witness by witness. If it slips by one, every number after August 12 is off, and so is any attempt to say how far through its list the Commonwealth was on a given day.
East Idaho News numbers August 7's four witnesses 57 (Kimberlee Hardy), 58 (Sarah Carney), 59 (Alia Goodheart) and 60 (Jennifer Tufts). CBS Boston independently calls Sarah Carney the 58th prosecution witness, which agrees.
Source: East Idaho News and CBS Boston, August 7, 2026
East Idaho News numbers August 12's six witnesses 63 through 68, ending with Dr. Barbara Olson as witness 68.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 12, 2026
East Idaho News numbers August 13's three witnesses 68 (Kyle Pavao), 69 (Timothy Chiappini) and 70 (Joshua McKelligan).
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 13, 2026
CBS Boston reported at the end of August 13 that seventy witnesses had testified so far, which fits 68-69-70 for this day and not 69-70-71.
Source: CBS Boston, August 13, 2026
East Idaho News numbers Ian Whiffin, the Commonwealth's last witness on August 17, as its 71st.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 17, 2026
If August 13 begins at 68 and August 17's Whiffin is 71, then 68, 69, 70, 71 is internally consistent and the August 12 count is one high from some point in that day. Nothing read identifies where. No day's entry has been renumbered; each records the number the outlet gave on the day. AUGUST 7, 2026 BACKFILL, AUGUST 21, 2026. A second outlet corroborates the running count on August 7: CBS Boston independently numbers Sarah Carney 58, matching East Idaho News. The slip of one is therefore somewhere between August 7 and the end of August 12, and not before.
The Commonwealth's account of that morning is a chain of clicks ending at a page about suicide methods and then at a page about a bridge people jumped from. If the timestamps do not run in the order the chain requires, the chain as described cannot be read off the timestamps alone.
Facebook at 9:40 a.m., Spotify shortly after, a Google search for Tom Hall at 9:44 a.m., his Wikipedia page, the suicide methods page, then a click to the Grafton Bridge page at 9:48 a.m.
Source: boston.com, August 13, 2026
Facebook at 9:40 a.m., a Spotify search for Tom Hall at 9:44 a.m., a Google search, the Wikipedia death section, then the suicide methods page accessed at 9:54 a.m., with the Grafton Bridge hyperlink clicked after that.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, August 13, 2026, entry timestamped 9:54 a.m.
On redirect Sprague fixed the Grafton Bridge visit at 9:48 a.m.; Boston 25 records the last activity on the machine that morning at 9:48 a.m. and Reddington putting the whole sequence between 9:40 and 10 a.m.
Source: Pavao redirect and cross-examination, August 13, 2026, as reported by East Idaho News and Boston 25
A DATE VARIANT FROM THE JULY 29, 2026 CROSS-EXAMINATION OF PATRICK CLANCY. Reddington put the Tom Hall sequence to him that day and Boston 25 dated the search August 22, 2022, one day before the August 23, 2022 date the forensic evidence of August 13, 2026 gives. The Boston Globe's account of the same cross says only August 2022. The device also differs within that day: a shared tablet to the Boston Globe, his laptop to Boston 25, against the Microsoft Surface Pro identified on August 13.
Source: Boston 25 and Boston Globe live blogs, July 29, 2026
East Idaho News's 9:54 a.m. for the suicide methods page sits after the 9:48 a.m. Grafton Bridge click it is supposed to have produced. One of the two figures is likely a live-blogging slip, but nothing read says which.
The defense's answer to the suicide-methods browsing is that the defendant was out of the house taking a child to the doctor while it happened. Whether the appointment was at 9:45 or 10:15 decides whether she could have been at home for a sequence that ran from 9:40 to 9:48 or 9:54.
Reddington put the appointment at 10:15 a.m., saying the two-year-old was examined then for ear pain.
Source: boston.com and East Idaho News, August 13, 2026
The calendar entry itself, made on August 14, 2022, was a 9:45 a.m. ear check for Dawson and a 10 a.m. vaccination for Callan.
Source: Chiappini cross-examination, August 13, 2026, as reported by East Idaho News and CT Insider
Boston 25 records the two sides disputing whether the appointment was at 10 or 10:15, and Sprague establishing on redirect that the drive from the house to the doctor's office in Kingston takes about four minutes.
Source: Boston 25 and boston.com, August 13, 2026
Whether the defense has had at the Commonwealth's only named rebuttal expert decides whether his opinion has been tested in front of the jury, and it bears on whether the evidence can close in time for closing arguments on Monday.
A contentious cross-examination of Dr. Avram Mack by Kevin Reddington followed his direct testimony. No time, question, answer or length is given.
Source: CBS Boston, August 21, 2026
Were still reporting the Commonwealth's direct examination of Mack at their latest entries when this was first recorded — the Boston Globe at 14:43 and Boston 25 at 14:50 — with no cross-examination mentioned. East Idaho News labeled the questioning after the lunch recess cross-examination at 14:20 while describing the Commonwealth as the questioner, which did not fit its own account, since Mack is the Commonwealth's witness.
Source: Boston Globe, Boston 25 and East Idaho News live blogs, August 21, 2026
RESOLVED the same afternoon. The Boston Globe reached the cross-examination at 14:50 and East Idaho News at 14:52, both reporting Reddington questioning Mack on his compensation and on his reliance on Clancy's own account; the Boston Globe adds his road-race question on mania at 14:59. CBS Boston was ahead of the other blogs, not at odds with them, which is the pattern these live blogs have shown against each other all day. Boston 25 had not reached the cross at 14:50, its latest entry. Nothing here was wrong; one outlet was simply first.
How long the Commonwealth has had its rebuttal psychiatrist bears on the defense's suggestion that the opinion was bought, which is the line Kevin Reddington opened at the end of the cross-examination before the prosecution objected. The two dates sit close together and may well describe two different events, but no outlet says so.
Mack's first communication with the prosecution came in late 2024, through a retention firm, Park Dietz & Associates.
Source: East Idaho News live blog, 15:05, August 21, 2026
Mack was retained by the government in early 2025. The same outlet reported at 15:22 that Mack acknowledged the Plymouth district attorney's office had contacted him through a retention firm called Park Dietz and Associates, corroborating the firm but attaching no date to that contact.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, 15:02, August 21, 2026
Both dates in a single answer. Los Angeles Magazine reports Mack testifying on redirect that discussions about retaining him began in 2024 and that he was formally retained in 2025.
Source: Los Angeles Magazine, Lauren Conlin, untimed day-19 narrative published on the evening of August 24, 2026
A first approach and a formal retention are not the same event, and one outlet now reports both in one answer: Los Angeles Magazine has Mack saying discussions began in 2024 and that he was formally retained in 2025, which would let East Idaho News's late 2024 and the Boston Globe's early 2025 both be right. That is a single untimed account, and no outlet says the earlier reports describe different events, so this is recorded, not reconciled. The route is corroborated: the Globe has Mack acknowledging the district attorney's office reached him through Park Dietz and Associates.
The weight of her account of a reported command hallucination turns partly on how close and how sustained the contact was, and the same number is reported as two different things.
Fourteen visits at Brigham and Women's Hospital, further visits at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, and about 200 at Tewksbury State Hospital.
Source: Boston 25 live blog, ABC News, Rolling Stone and LA Magazine, August 20, 2026
More than 200 visits in total since the killings, across all of the facilities, with visits continuing at the state hospital.
Source: Boston Globe and Associated Press, August 20, 2026
About 200 meetings over roughly three years.
Source: East Idaho News day-17 recap, August 20, 2026
The day-summary for 08-20 records both readings. Neither is treated as the figure.
Whether the jury was told to disregard the chaplain's description of continuing grief bears on what the defense actually got in through this witness.
The Commonwealth objected to the characterization and Judge Sullivan ruled that it be stricken from the record.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, August 20, 2026, entry timestamped 10:31
Prosecutors objected, Judge Sullivan sustained the objection and directed Reddington to move on.
Source: LA Magazine, August 20, 2026
Prosecutors objected to the characterization but the judge permitted it.
Source: Newsweek, August 20, 2026
Two outlets have the objection succeeding and one has it failing. No outlet reports the ground stated for the objection or any response from the defense.
Whether the Commonwealth got a redirect examination, and what it covered, decides whether the defense's concessions on the medication diary and on the days he was away stood unanswered when the Commonwealth's first witness left the stand.
Reddington concluded his cross-examination at about 3:45 p.m.; ADA Jennifer Sprague began a redirect at about 3:49 p.m., in which the Commonwealth suggested the defendant was the more likely source of the clicks that reached the suicide-methods page; the defense finished its questioning at 3:59 p.m.; the testimony ended at 4:15 p.m. and the judge dismissed the jurors at 4:17 p.m.
Source: CBS Boston live blog, July 29, 2026
Redirect examination by the prosecutor began at 3:48 p.m. and included putting the drop from the bedroom window to the ground at twelve feet rather than the twenty the witness had given the 911 dispatcher. The witness finished at 4:12 p.m. and the court day ended at 4:13 p.m.
Source: Boston 25 live blog, July 29, 2026
The blog marks no end to the cross-examination and no redirect at all, and runs the afternoon's questioning through to the witness stepping down at 4:19 p.m.
Source: Boston Globe live blog, July 29, 2026
Raised by the July 29, 2026 backfill of August 21, 2026. Two outlets have a redirect and one does not distinguish it; CBS Boston's 3:59 p.m. entry implies a recross that no outlet describes. The three end times span seven minutes and are not reconciled here.
The recording is the Commonwealth's most powerful exhibit and cannot be released publicly, so its length is one of the few checkable facts about it on the public record.
About six minutes.
Source: CBS Boston live blog, July 29, 2026
Seven minutes.
Source: WBUR, East Idaho News and ABC7, July 29, 2026
Recorded by the July 29, 2026 backfill. Nothing read reconciles the two figures, and the recording is under a court order barring reproduction, so neither can be checked against the exhibit.
The neck wound is one of the two injuries the Commonwealth calls superficial and the defense calls a genuine suicide attempt, and it was photographed at South Shore Hospital. Two officers who saw the same untreated wound within minutes of each other put it on opposite sides.
Cuts to both wrists and to the LEFT side of her neck.
Source: Ofc. Stephen Hall, July 30, 2026, as reported by CNN
Cuts to the wrist and to the RIGHT side of her neck, bleeding but not profusely.
Source: Ofc. Brian Josephine, July 30, 2026, as reported by CNN and East Idaho News
Superficial cuts on the neck around the collar, side unspecified.
Source: Robert Costanzo and Daniel Dougherty, July 30, 2026
No outlet remarks on the difference and neither officer was cross-examined. Later evidence describes a cut running the full width of the neck (Det. Maffeo, July 31, 2026), which may make the point moot, but the two July 30 accounts are recorded as given.
Hardy is one of the last people outside the family reported as seeing Cora and Dawson before January 24, and her account of them as their usual selves is part of the Commonwealth's picture of an ordinary household in the final week.
The children were dropped off at the club on January 13 and January 17, 2023, and were their usual selves, playing with dolls and coloring.
Source: Kimberlee Hardy, August 7, 2026, as reported by the Boston Globe and boston.com
The last club visit was January 19, with Hardy describing Cora drawing pictures before pickup.
Source: Kimberlee Hardy, August 7, 2026, as reported by East Idaho News
No outlet remarks on the difference and the point was not contested on cross-examination. Both accounts are recorded as given.
It fixes the start of the South Shore perinatal treatment, and therefore how long the defendant was under two prescribers at once. The fluoxetine start date and the November 25 medication switch are both counted from it.
A screening telephone call in November 2022 with the intake appointment booked for the following day, November 21, 2022. The Boston Globe's live blog reports the call and the next-day intake; East Idaho News gives the intake as beginning November 21; and the prescription record has fluoxetine 10mg started on November 21.
Source: Julie Paul, testimony of August 10, 2026, as reported by the Boston Globe and East Idaho News
An initial screening on November 22, 2022.
Source: Boston 25 live blog, August 10, 2026
This file's August 10, 2026 entry previously carried the November 22 date. November 22, 2022 is separately and independently the date of an appointment with Dr. Jennifer Tufts at which the defendant told Tufts she was being seen at the South Shore perinatal clinic, which is a possible source of the conflation. Not resolved; the entry now records the screening call and the next-day intake and flags Boston 25's date.
Only that the record should not attribute an examination to the wrong advocate. The Commonwealth divides witnesses between two prosecutors, and the same two outlets disagree the same way on the following day.
ADA Jennifer Sprague conducted the redirect examination of Dr. Jennifer Tufts on August 10, 2026.
Source: boston.com and Boston 25, August 10, 2026
ADA Shanan Buckingham conducted it, and put the sertraline suicide warning to the witness as applying really to adolescents.
Source: CBS Boston, August 10, 2026
The Boston Globe says only that it was the prosecution's redirect. The identical disagreement between the same outlets recurs on August 11, 2026 over who conducted Rebecca Jollotta's direct examination, where the Boston Globe and the Patriot Ledger name Buckingham and CBS Boston names Sprague. See also laposata-cross-examiner. Not resolved.
Only that an examination should not be attributed to the wrong advocate. The same two prosecutors are swapped by the same outlets on other days.
ADA Shanan Buckingham conducted the direct examination of Lt. Joseph Rabbitt and put the bottles in front of him one at a time.
Source: CBS Boston, boston.com and MassLive, August 4, 2026
Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague began running through the various bottles with Rabbitt identifying the counts.
Source: Boston Globe, August 4, 2026
The identical disagreement between the same outlets recurs on August 10, 2026 (Dr. Tufts's redirect) and August 11, 2026 (Rebecca Jollotta's direct). See tufts-redirect-prosecutor. Not resolved.
Which child's DNA was on which band is the sort of fact a reader carries away as settled. One outlet's account of the same testimony carries a qualification that the others drop, and the qualification is the difference between an identification and an inclusion.
Dawson appeared to contribute to the DNA profile taken from the middle of the yellow band, with Callan and Patrick Clancy also appearing as inclusions - but under the stated assumptions those individuals cannot be present in the mixture together, because relatives share a great deal of DNA. The black band was a complex mixture of three contributors with strong support for Cora.
Source: Katarina Stashyn, MSP DNA, as reported by the Boston Globe, August 5, 2026
Stashyn matched the DNA from the middle of each band to one child: Dawson to the yellow band, Cora to the black band, Callan to the blue band.
Source: Boston 25 live blog, 11:28 a.m., and CBS Boston, August 5, 2026
The blue band carried DNA from every member of the family, with Callan the major contributor in its middle section. This came in by the parties' stipulation rather than by testimony.
Source: DNA stipulation read to the jury, August 5, 2026, as reported by Boston 25 and East Idaho News
Not necessarily a conflict about what the witness said - a one-line summary of a mixture interpretation will lose the assumptions - but the two renderings support different degrees of certainty and both are recorded. Separately, a photograph identified on July 30, 2026 shows a yellow exercise band beside Dawson's body, which is physical placement rather than DNA identification.
Cora telling her teacher that her mother was in the hospital and that she missed her is the only account read of how the McLean admission looked to the children. The date fixes which admission it was.
Cora made the remark at the end of December or the beginning of January, and the defendant was admitted to McLean Hospital in early January 2023.
Source: Boston 25 live blog, August 6, 2026
Cora reported that her mother was hospitalized at McLean Hospital in December 2022.
Source: CBS Boston, August 6, 2026
Cora told her that her mother was in the hospital and that she missed her; no date given.
Source: Susan Bertolo, testimony of August 6, 2026, as reported by East Idaho News
This project's treatment chronology places the McLean inpatient admission in the first days of January 2023, discharged January 5. CBS Boston's December 2022 date is not corroborated by any other outlet read for that day. Recorded, not resolved.
The roster is used to attribute testimony, so two spellings of one name can look like two witnesses. These are recorded rather than silently normalised.
Mark Anthony Maffeo, Christina Carpio, Latisha Dukes, Kimberly Springer.
Source: The original hand-built roster in case-reference.json
Marcanthony Maffeo, Cristina Carpio, Latiesha Dukes, Kimberley Springer.
Source: The day accounts, compiled from the live blogs
The roster spelling is retained as the primary form; both are listed here so a reader searching either finds the person. Not yet checked against the docket.
This page records what the court has actually scheduled rather than what reporters expect. Two outlets attribute two different pairs of days to Judge Sullivan, and the site should not pick one.
Closing arguments could begin Monday, August 24 if all the testimony finished on Friday, August 21, and would likely fall on Tuesday, August 25 if it ran into Monday. Counsel had been told earlier that closings were likely Monday or Tuesday.
Source: CBS Boston, day-17 and day-18 pages
Judge Sullivan indicated that closing arguments could happen Tuesday or Wednesday, and said he would be open to giving the parties time between the end of testimony and closings. The report does not say on which day he said it.
Source: Colleen Cronin, Boston Herald, August 23, 2026, read through syndication
Judge Sullivan said on Monday, August 24, after sending the jury home, that closing arguments in the case are expected on Wednesday, August 26. The same report has him saying the Commonwealth has one more witness to call after Dr. Kirk Heilbrun and that testimony resumes Tuesday.
Source: Boston Globe day-19 live blog, Travis Andersen, 3:32 p.m., August 24, 2026
The prosecution's final witnesses are likely to finish Tuesday, August 25 and closing arguments are expected to take place on Wednesday, August 26, the judge said. He cautioned that the timeline is subject to change.
Source: CNN, Eric Levenson and Nicki Brown, published 4:35 p.m., August 24, 2026
Judge Sullivan told the jurors from the bench on Wednesday, August 26, after the Commonwealth rested, that they would hear the closing arguments and his instructions on the law Thursday morning. East Idaho News has him adding that they would then get the case for their deliberations that day; NBC Boston and the Boston Globe report the closings and the charge without the deliberations.
Source: East Idaho News, Boston Globe and NBC Boston day-21 live blogs, 1:14 p.m., August 26, 2026
Judge Sullivan told the jurors on Wednesday, August 26 that they would hear closing arguments Thursday, followed by his instructions, and would then begin deliberating. The same report has him reconvening with the lawyers at 2:30 p.m. for a conference on those instructions, held without the jury.
Source: CT Insider day-21 live blog, 1:29 p.m., August 26, 2026
The jurors will begin deliberating once the closing arguments and the judge's instructions are finished on Thursday, August 27. Both accounts were written after the conference on the instructions had ended, and neither reports the judge fixing the day on the record.
Source: boston.com day-21 page, 4 p.m. update, August 26, 2026, and ABC7, filed August 26, 2026
Once the closing arguments are over the judge will give the jury his instructions, and it is possible that the jurors begin deliberating by noon on Thursday, August 27. The report does not attribute the timing to the judge.
Source: ABC News day-21 live blog, 4:16 p.m., August 26, 2026
Overtaken in part. Testimony ran into Wednesday, August 26, so the Wednesday closings two outlets had attributed to the bench did not happen. Sending the jury home that afternoon, the judge said the closings and his instructions would come Thursday morning. What is still open is the day the jury retires. Five outlets — East Idaho News, CT Insider, boston.com, ABC7 and ABC News — have the jurors getting the case Thursday, ABC News as early as midday, against NBC News's earlier report of deliberations no earlier than Friday, which now stands alone. Closes when the closings are delivered.
How long the jury had the case before it was first excused is stated on the day page and on the Friday entry. Five accounts of the same afternoon give three different lengths and two different hours, about half an hour apart at each end.
The jury had been out a little over three hours.
Source: CNN day-22 live blog, 4:11 p.m., August 27, 2026
The deliberation ran almost three and a half hours.
Source: NBC News day-22 live blog, 4:09 p.m., August 27, 2026
The jurors were called back and excused shortly after four.
Source: CBS Boston day-22 live blog, 4:10 p.m., August 27, 2026
The judge sent the jurors home shortly after four, after about three and a half hours of deliberation.
Source: boston.com day-22 page, 4:10 p.m. update, August 27, 2026
The jurors were sent home shortly before half past four.
Source: Boston Globe day-22 live blog, 4:30 p.m., August 27, 2026; Boston 25 filed story, August 27, 2026
The deliberation ran roughly four hours.
Source: Hearst Connecticut day-23 file, August 28, 2026
Open. No account read here gives an exact time for either the start or the end of the deliberation, and none is offered as a correction of another. On the length, CNN has a little over three hours, NBC News and boston.com about three and a half, and Hearst Connecticut roughly four; on the hour of the excusal, CBS Boston and boston.com have it shortly after four against the Boston Globe and Boston 25 shortly before half past. The day account records them all and does not choose.
The Friday entry states when the deliberations were to start again, and the accounts give two hours half an hour apart. One outlet gives both in the same file, so the difference is not simply a split between outlets.
The jurors return at nine o'clock on Friday morning.
Source: CNN day-22 live blog, 4:11 p.m., August 27, 2026; ABC News day-22 live blog, 4:34 p.m., August 27, 2026; Hearst Connecticut day-23 file, August 28, 2026; ABC7 day-23 file, August 28, 2026
The jurors resume at half past nine on Friday morning.
Source: Associated Press story published August 28, 2026; ABC7 day-23 file, August 28, 2026
The deliberations resume Friday morning, without an hour given.
Source: NBC News day-22 live blog, August 27, 2026; CBS Boston day-22 live blog, August 27, 2026; Fox News day-22 live blog, August 27, 2026
The jurors were in fact brought in and sent back out at 9:12 or 9:13 on Friday morning.
Source: Boston 25 day-23 file, 9:12 a.m., August 28, 2026; Boston Globe day-23 live blog, 9:13 a.m., August 28, 2026
Open as to what the court fixed. Four Thursday accounts give nine o'clock and the Associated Press half past, and ABC7's Friday file carries both hours without reconciling them. In the event the two outlets in the room timed the jurors going back out at 9:12 and 9:13, and AP's file, updated at 11:21 on Friday, still gives half past nine. No account read here reports the judge fixing the hour on the record. The day entry records all of it and does not choose.
The day entry says an alternate could still be seated and decide the case. If the six were discharged when the twelve went out, that is not so, and the difference decides what happens should a deliberating juror be unable to carry on.
The six were not sent home. They are kept nearby but apart from the twelve and told not to discuss the case, because one would have to take the seat of any juror who could not carry on, and all eighteen were brought into the courtroom together on Friday morning to answer the judge's overnight questions.
Source: Boston Globe day-22 live blog, 12:58 p.m., August 27, 2026, and day-23 live blog, 8:45 a.m., August 28, 2026; Associated Press story, August 28, 2026
The six alternates, three men and three women, were dismissed and so will not deliberate.
Source: East Idaho News day-23 file, August 28, 2026; CNN live blog, September 1, 2026, entry timestamped 10:27 a.m.
Open, and possibly a difference in wording rather than in fact: dismissed may mean dismissed from the deliberating twelve rather than sent home. The Boston Globe and the Associated Press both have the six still at the courthouse on Friday, AP with them answering the judge's questions alongside the twelve; CNN restated the dismissal claim on September 1. No account read here reports the judge discharging them. The day entry follows the accounts from inside the room and does not choose.
Dawn Light's arraignment is a collateral proceeding, not part of the Clancy trial itself, but the two accounts name different courts and neither has been withdrawn.
Light was charged with aggravated intimidation of a witness and was scheduled to be arraigned in Plymouth District Court.
Source: Boston Globe, September 2, 2026
Light was arraigned in Plymouth Superior Court, pleaded not guilty and was released on her promise to return to court October 15.
Source: CBS Boston, September 2, 2026
Open. The Globe's early account said the arraignment was scheduled for District Court; CBS Boston's account of the arraignment itself names Superior Court. The Globe's later report of the arraignment names the presiding judge as Shelby M. Smith, distinct from Sullivan, who presides over the Clancy trial itself — a detail that bears on which court sat, but neither outlet states the court explicitly in that report. Unresolved.
The two versions name a different victim class of the same statute, witness versus juror, which is a material difference in a charging document even though it does not change the underlying conduct alleged.
Light was charged with aggravated intimidation of a witness.
Source: Boston Globe, September 2, 2026
Light was charged with aggravated intimidation of a juror.
Source: ABC News, September 2, 2026
Light was charged with intimidating witnesses, jurors, or individuals furnishing information in connection with criminal proceedings, elsewhere in the same article calling it intimidation of a jury member.
Source: boston.com, September 2, 2026
Open. boston.com's fuller phrasing matches the Massachusetts statute's own title, which covers both witnesses and jurors, but no outlet has published the charging document itself. Unresolved.
Who took the stand
Everyone the archive records as having taken the stand. Each row merges the archive's entity index (entries of kind "witness": display name, role, party, days) with the case reference's witness roster (name, role, party, dates and its editorial notes), matched by name; the dates link to the day accounts. Names and roles are as the archive gives them, including its own spelling variants.
85 people who took the stand, reconciled against the day accounts on August 24, 2026. Witnesses are named in court and in reporting far more reliably than exhibits or searches, so this is close to complete for the sittings covered -- but it holds only those who have testified, and the defense case and the Commonwealth's rebuttal were still running when it was compiled. Four names are spelled differently by different outlets; see the discrepancy index.
| Witness | Role | Testified |
|---|---|---|
| Patrick Clancy | Husband of defendant; father of decedents | |
| Angela Krause | General manager, CVS pharmacy, Kingston. Took the defendant's telephone call about a children's laxative on the afternoon of January 24, 2023. | |
| Saria Sweeney | Hostess handling takeout orders at the ThreeV restaurant, Plymouth. Took the defendant's takeout order on the evening of January 24, 2023. Her surname is reported inconsistently — see her testimony entries. | |
| Stephen Hall | Patrol officer, Duxbury PD - first on scene | |
| Brian Josephine | Patrol officer, Duxbury PD - carried Dawson to ambulance | |
| PJ Hussey | Captain, shift commander and paramedic, Duxbury Fire Department; East Idaho News reports seventeen years in the department. Sixth witness of the trial. | |
| Loring "Chuck" Nudd | Firefighter and EMT, Duxbury Fire Department. Seventh witness of the trial. | |
| Keith Nette | Captain and shift commander, Duxbury Fire Department. Eighth witness of the trial. | |
| Patrick Dwyer | Firefighter and paramedic, Duxbury Fire Department. Ninth witness of the trial. | |
| Jennifer Stratton | Paramedic and firefighter, Duxbury Fire Department; Dwyer's partner that night. Tenth witness of the trial. | |
| Robert Costanzo | Firefighter and paramedic, Pembroke Fire Department, responding on mutual aid. Eleventh witness of the trial. East Idaho News and CNN spell the surname Constanzo. | |
| Daniel Dougherty | Firefighter and paramedic, Duxbury Fire Department. Twelfth witness of the trial. East Idaho News spells the surname Doughtery. | |
| Vincent Cahill | Patrol officer, Duxbury Police Department. Thirteenth witness of the trial and the last of the day. | |
| Richard Lippard | Patrolman, Duxbury PD - custody watch, MedFlight escort | |
| Mark Tenerowicz | Emergency physician, Beth Israel Deaconess Plymouth. Treated Dawson. | |
| Benjamin Kaufman | Emergency physician, Beth Israel Deaconess Plymouth. Treated Callan. | |
| Melissa Arcadipane | Laboratory supervisor, South Shore Hospital. Chain of custody for blood and urine samples. | |
| Mark Anthony Maffeo | Detective (now Patrol Sgt.), Duxbury PD - hospital evidence collection | |
| Michael Snyder | Emergency physician, Beth Israel Deaconess Plymouth - treated Cora | |
| Andrew Capraro | Attending, Boston Children's Hospital ED - received Callan | |
| David Casavant | ICU physician, Boston Children's - brain death determination | |
| Kelly McDonough | Emergency physician, South Shore Hospital - treated defendant | |
| Rose Stoffers | Sergeant, MSP Crime Scene Services. Documented the defendant's injuries. | |
| Rachelle Amedee | ICU nurse, Brigham and Women's. One-to-one suicide watch; the defendant coded on January 25. | |
| Meghan Collins | ICU nurse, Brigham and Women's. Testified to ICU delirium. | |
| Sejal Shah | Psychiatrist, Brigham and Women's. Recorded organized, goal-oriented thought on January 29, 2023. | |
| Jhilam Biswas | Forensic psychiatrist, Brigham and Women's. Saw the defendant January 26, 2023; found no documented signs of psychosis, but agreed psychosis can fluctuate. | |
| Robert Flynn | Sergeant, Duxbury Police Department. | |
| Mark Farioli | Detective, MSP. | |
| Leah O'Connell | Trooper, MSP. | |
| John Santos | Captain, MSP. Testified he did not search the nightstand drawer; its contents were never seized. | |
| Cory Melo | Detective, MSP. Read the defendant's journal entries into the record. | |
| Joseph Rabbitt | Lieutenant, Massachusetts State Police - search warrant execution | |
| Maureen Hartnett | Forensic scientist, MSP Crime Lab. Blood sample collection. | |
| Jonathan O'Loughlin | Trooper, MSP. Identified the knife; no useful fingerprints recovered. | |
| Hilary Griffiths | Forensic scientist, MSP Crime Lab. The defendant's prescribed medications present; no alcohol or recreational drugs. | |
| Lisa Yelle | Formerly of the toxicology unit, MSP Crime Lab. | |
| Alicia Zimmerman | Forensic scientist, MSP Crime Lab. Toxicology on the children: no substances detected. | |
| Sherri Crook | Crime Scene Response Unit supervisor, MSP Crime Lab. Bloodstain pattern analyzis. | |
| Christina Carpio | Trauma surgeon, South Shore Hospital / Brigham | |
| Eitan Negri | Physician assistant, Brigham and Women's - wrist laceration repair | |
| Nicholas Roberts | Forensic scientist, MSP Crime Lab toxicology unit | |
| Justin Brower | Forensic toxicologist, NMS Laboratories | |
| Katarina Stashyn | DNA analyzt, MSP Crime Lab. | |
| Elaine Rossi | Former part-time nanny to the Clancy children. Testified Clancy was open about postpartum struggles and insomnia in autumn 2022 but that she never had concerns about the children's welfare. | |
| Lindsay Rosshirt | Pediatrician, South Shore Medical; the family's pediatrician since 2019. Saw Cora on the morning of January 24, 2023 for a routine physical and suggested MiraLAX. | |
| Susan Fraone | Dawson's preschool teacher. | |
| Susan Bertolo | Cora's preschool teacher. | |
| Stephanie Williams | Preschool teacher. | |
| Andrea Hennigan | Registered nurse, labor and delivery, Massachusetts General Hospital; colleague of seven years. | |
| Bethany DeCollibus | Licensed family therapist and friend; saw Clancy weekly. | |
| Amy Bevins | Friend of defendant (~29 years); behavior analyzt | |
| Christopher Clancy | Father-in-law of defendant | |
| Kyle Carney | College friend of Patrick Clancy; Duxbury resident. Had the family over on January 22, 2023 and described Clancy as normal but quiet. | |
| Andrew Chiachio | Detective Sergeant, MSP (Plymouth DA office). Surveillance retrieval, route mapping, search warrants, DNA collection, social-media searches. | |
| Kimberley Springer | Medical examiner. Testified to Callan's injuries as consistent with ligature strangulation; cause of death complications of mechanical asphyxia. | |
| Kimberlee Hardy | Former child services director, Kingsbury Club; supervised the children at daycare. | |
| Sarah Carney | Friend of Patrick Clancy. Saw the defendant at a bonfire on January 22, 2023. | |
| Alia Goodheart | Psychiatrist, McLean Hospital. Testified to the 3-January 5, 2023 admission and discharge; had never treated a postpartum psychosis patient. Appears as 'Aliyah Goodhart' in the treatment chronology. | |
| Jennifer Tufts | Psychiatrist; prescriber. ~14 telehealth appointments over roughly four months, the last the day before the killings. Testified Clancy never presented as psychotic. | |
| Julie Paul | Nurse practitioner, South Shore perinatal behavioral health | |
| Rebecca Jollotta | Psychiatric nurse; treated defendant late 2022. Testified defendant reported medications were not working quickly enough and might be worsening her condition. NOTE: possibly the same person as 'NP Rebecca Gelada' in treatment_chronology - surname unverified, do not merge without checking. | |
| Daniel Lawlor | Sergeant, Massachusetts State Police; evidence officer for the January 25, 2023 search of the Duxbury house. East Idaho News numbers him witness 63. | |
| Cameron Daley | Patrolman, Duxbury Police Department. East Idaho News numbers him witness 65. | |
| Nicole Bradley | Plymouth County Sheriff's Office; the Boston Globe gives her as a deputy superintendent and East Idaho News places her in the field services division. Her forename is spelled Nichole by the Boston Globe. East Idaho News numbers her witness 66. | |
| Renee Stonebridge | Director of cardiac and neuropathology, state chief medical examiner's office. Testified to eye injuries consistent with asphyxial strangulation and that brain death follows roughly six to eight minutes without oxygen. | |
| Barbara Olson | Medical examiner. Performed the autopsies on Cora and Dawson; findings from Cora's autopsy consistent with ligature strangulation. | |
| Kyle Pavao | Sergeant, MSP; Cellebrite-certified examiner. Computer extractions. | |
| Timothy Chiappini | Detective, Massachusetts State Police - read journal entries into the record | |
| Joshua McKelligan | Trooper, MSP; case officer. Scene observations and crime-scene video. | |
| Ian Whiffin | Digital forensics, Cellebrite - Apple Health, calls, searches | |
| Avram Mack | Psychiatrist, called by the Commonwealth as its first rebuttal witness. The Boston Globe describes him as currently practicing and teaching in Philadelphia and gives his expertise as forensic psychiatry; Boston 25, Fox News Digital and boston.com name him as a psychiatrist without further detail. | |
| Kirk Heilbrun | Forensic psychologist, called by the Commonwealth as its second rebuttal witness. | |
| Gregory Saathoff | Forensic psychiatrist, the Commonwealth's third and last rebuttal witness |
| Witness | Role | Testified |
|---|---|---|
| Margaret Hamp | Labor and delivery nurse, Massachusetts General; former colleague. Testified the defendant had asked about the Andrea Yates case and wept. | |
| Allison Ozga | Sister of the defendant; licensed social worker and mandated reporter. Testified the defendant reported daily suicidal ideation for a month by late December 2022; acknowledged she filed no report. | |
| Paula Musgrove | Mother of the defendant. Testified to an October 2022 request that she come and stay, frightening medication side effects, and a December 2022 disclosure of thoughts of harming the children. | |
| Michael Vulfovich | Emergency physician, Newton-Wellesley Hospital; defense expert on the injuries. Not cross-examined; barred from opining on whether the suicide attempt was genuine. | |
| Susan Clancy | Mother-in-law; L&D nurse 38 yrs, South Shore Hospital | |
| Donald Condie | Clinical and forensic psychiatrist specializing in psychotic and mood disorders. Admitted over Commonwealth objection; barred from opining on standard of care. Cross-examined on reliance on a New Yorker article in his affidavit. | |
| Elizabeth Laposata | Forensic pathologist, appearing by video. A former Rhode Island state medical examiner — CBS Boston gives twelve years as chief medical examiner there, a Brown University professorship, and work on the 1999 EgyptAir 990 crash and the Station nightclub fire — now in independent practice. She was a defense expert in the Karen Read case, where the Boston Globe notes her evidence about dog-bite injuries was controversial and was ultimately disallowed. NBC Boston spells the first name Elisabeth. | |
| Paul Zeizel | Forensic psychologist. Met defendant ~60 times over ~35 hours. Opined she was not criminally responsible: mental disease or defect (bipolar disorder with postpartum psychosis), unable to appreciate wrongfulness, unable to conform conduct to the law. Cross-examined on report errors and on combining treating and forensic roles. | |
| Emily Thorndike | Licensed clinical social worker, formerly of McLean Hospital. Heard on voir dire before the judge only, not before the jury. | |
| Sheila Cavanaugh | Board-certified chaplain, Brigham and Women's Hospital. Visited Clancy 14+ times since January 2023; testified Clancy reported a male voice commanding her to harm the children. Her own notes record no voice-hearing. | |
| Phillip Resnick | Forensic psychiatrist, placed at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland by the Boston Globe, which gives his specialty as violence risk assessment; known for work on postpartum mental disorders and filicide, and a defense expert in the 2006 Andrea Yates trial. Boston 25 describes him instead as a forensic psychologist, as does the Boston Globe's own day-18 headline, though the Globe's entries call him a psychiatrist. |
| Witness | Role | Testified |
|---|---|---|
| Latisha Dukes | Social worker; her notes were in evidence during Rebecca Jollotta's testimony. Did not testify as far as is known. |
What was marked in evidence
The exhibit ranges the archive has indexed: its exhibit entities merged with the case reference's exhibit index, with the case reference’s own note on how much of the numbering that covers. It is not the court's exhibit list.
This index is not complete and cannot be. It holds the exhibits that reporting happened to identify by number, which is only those a witness was asked about on the record while a reporter was writing the number down. The numbering runs to at least 1566, the Whiffin digital forensic report, and the index accounts for 86 numbers within that span. The largest unbroken gap is 268 to 1565. The complete exhibit list exists only on the docket held by the Clerk of Courts, Plymouth County Superior Court.
Ranges are the archive's own groupings, sorted by their leading number. The individual numbers are the ones the archive enumerates for a range; where the case reference describes a range differently, both descriptions are shown.
Stipulation of facts (chain of custody, DNA, bands) - marked for identification
CVS receipt and video, ThreeV video and receipt, area map
Exterior of 47 Summer Street; mudroom; kitchen island
Basement stairway; master bedroom, bed, window, blood; defendant's phone
Basement rooms, exercise bands, child locations, exterior window and blood marks
Defendant's neck and wrist injuries at South Shore Hospital
Clothing cut from defendant; scene blood documentation
Master bedroom detail: blood, knife, cups, deep sleep pillow spray, nightstand
Boston Children's Hospital records for Callan Clancy
Kitchen; upper cabinet with prescription bottles; four bottles seized
MSP Crime Lab toxicology report
Post-mortem toxicology stipulations for the three children, read into the record by Judge Sullivan: 184 Cora, 185 Dawson, 186 Callan.
source (case reference): Day account, August 4, 2026
Sutured wrist lacerations, right and left
Agreed chart of brand/generic drug names
A May 2021 post by the defendant in a Facebook group for parents.
source (case reference): Day account, August 6, 2026
Geolocation / significant-location data from defendant's phone
Whiffin digital forensic report
Treatment, prescriptions and toxicology
The prescriber chronology the archive indexes (26 events) and the 18 medications it names, with the toxicology findings from the case reference. Every field is shown as the archive carries it; the page adds nothing from outside it.
26 events from 2022-09-12 to 2023-01-23, in the archive's order; 13 name a prescriber. Dates are as the archive records them.
Lamotrigine (Lamictal) was found in the defendant's blood and urine and quantified at 6.1 micrograms per millilitre, and Dr. Jollotta's August 11 testimony lists it among the medications tried. No prescribing event for it appears anywhere in the reporting, so the chronology has no entry and the toxicology chart shows a drug the prescriber record cannot account for.
Clonazepam (Klonopin) appears in the same August 11 list of medications tried and in the August 4 testimony, again with no reported prescribing event.
Olanzapine is the defendant's current medication as described by Dr. Mack on August 21, 2026. It is deliberately absent: this chronology ends the day before the killings.
The chronology records 26 events, 13 of them with a named prescriber. A blank prescriber means none was reported, not that none exists.
| Generic | Brand names | Class | Archive entry |
|---|---|---|---|
| amitriptyline | elavil | tricyclic | med:amitriptyline · listed as “amitriptyline (elavil)” · n: 0 |
| bupropion | wellbutrin | antidepressant | med:bupropion · listed as “bupropion (wellbutrin)” · n: 0 |
| buspirone | buspar | anxiolytic | med:buspirone · listed as “buspirone (buspar)” · n: 0 |
| clonazepam | klonopin | benzodiazepine | med:clonazepam · listed as “clonazepam (klonopin)” · n: 0 |
| diazepam | valium | benzodiazepine | med:diazepam · listed as “diazepam (valium)” · n: 0 |
| fluoxetine | prozac | ssri | med:fluoxetine · listed as “fluoxetine (prozac)” · n: 0 |
| hydroxyzine | vistaril, atarax | antihistamine anxiolytic | med:hydroxyzine · listed as “hydroxyzine (vistaril)” · n: 0 |
| ketamine | — | anesthetic / off-label | med:ketamine · listed as “ketamine” · n: 0 |
| lamotrigine | lamictal | mood stabilizer | med:lamotrigine · listed as “lamotrigine (lamictal)” · n: 0 |
| lorazepam | ativan | benzodiazepine | med:lorazepam · listed as “lorazepam (ativan)” · n: 0 |
| mirtazapine | remeron | antidepressant | med:mirtazapine · listed as “mirtazapine (remeron)” · n: 0 |
| nordiazepam | desmethyldiazepam | benzodiazepine metabolite | med:nordiazepam · listed as “nordiazepam (desmethyldiazepam)” · n: 0 |
| oxazepam | serax | benzodiazepine metabolite | med:oxazepam · listed as “oxazepam (serax)” · n: 0 |
| polyethylene glycol | miralax, pdlx, pedialax, pedia-lax | laxative | med:polyethylene glycol · listed as “polyethylene glycol (miralax)” · n: 0 |
| quetiapine | seroquel | antipsychotic | med:quetiapine · listed as “quetiapine (seroquel)” · n: 0 |
| sertraline | zoloft | ssri | med:sertraline · listed as “sertraline (zoloft)” · n: 0 |
| temazepam | restoril | benzodiazepine metabolite | med:temazepam · listed as “temazepam (restoril)” · n: 0 |
| trazodone | desyrel | antidepressant | med:trazodone · listed as “trazodone (desyrel)” · n: 0 |
What was searched
Two lists, mirrored from the archive as it carries them: 15 queries across 5 days from the case reference, and 10 items from the archive's search-and-browsing evidence thread. The case reference's own note on what its list does and does not cover is kept with it below.
Fifteen queries across five days, drawn from what witnesses were asked about in open court and what reporters recorded. It is not the device's search history: the extraction in evidence covers far more, and a search only appears here if counsel put it to a witness and an outlet wrote it down. Read the gaps between these dates as gaps in the reporting, not as days without searching.
Foreknowledge, intent, and awareness of her own condition.
Used by both sides. The Commonwealth points to what was searched; the defense to what was not.
A website concerning suicide methods was visited on August 23, 2022, five months before, and three weeks before the first entry in the treatment chronology.
A search on December 5, 2022 about what to do when a psychiatrist over-prescribes.
Searches on January 19, 2023 for symptoms of postpartum psychosis, and for psychosis symptoms.
A search on January 20, 2023 at 20:28 asking whether a sociopath can be treated.
No searches for ways to kill were recovered. The laptop examined belonged to Patrick Clancy.
The MiraLAX search of January 24 is accounted for: the family pediatrician saw Cora that morning for a routine physical and suggested it.
The suicide methods page of August 23, 2022 was reached from a Facebook visit at 9:40 a.m., a Spotify search for the country singer Tom Hall, a Google search for Hall and a link on his Wikipedia page about his self-inflicted gunshot wound, and was followed by a click to a Wikipedia page about the Grafton Bridge in New Zealand, in a section about jumping. The device was a Microsoft Surface Pro belonging to Patrick Clancy, signed into his Google account.
Further searches on the same device in December 2022, drawn out by the defense: what to do when a psychiatrist overprescribes; whether bipolar disorder can be temporary; whether benzodiazepines can reveal bipolar disorder; how long detox programs run; what dialectical behavior therapy is; what mania is; ketamine for benzodiazepine withdrawal; ketamine therapy.
On the phone, drawn out by the defense on cross: schizophrenia, psychosis, hallucinations, intrusive thoughts, postpartum depression, insomnia, sleep, suicide, bipolar disorder, McLean Hospital, and a long list of prescribed medications including Seroquel, trazodone, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Lamictal, ketamine, Ativan, amitriptyline, benzodiazepines and, per NBC Boston, Klonopin under its generic name. None of it was raised on the Commonwealth's direct examination.
Searches Chiappini did not recall finding and could not confirm came from the defendant's phone, which Reddington said the records show: where the carotid artery is, how to slit one's throat to die, and whether the airbags on a Kia Sorento can be turned off.
The court and the trial lawyers
The court and the trial lawyers appearing in Commonwealth v. Clancy. Written from public professional records and reporting, in our own words. No text is reproduced from any source; each entry lists where its facts came from.
These are living people involved in an active proceeding. Entries are limited to professional record: education, admission, employment, and cases already matters of public record. Prior cases are listed as career context and imply nothing about this one.
Bar discipline history has not been checked against Board of Bar Overseers records; nothing here should be read as a statement about standing.
A search result concerning a judicial appointment in Essex County refers to a different person of the same surname and is deliberately excluded.
Compiled September 16, 2026
Came to the bench from the defense side after a career trying criminal cases in the Superior Court, having earlier prosecuted for Norfolk County.
Sources: ballotpedia-sullivan, wikipedia-sullivan, bc-law-sullivan, canton-citizen, mass-superior
Has described this case as among the most difficult of his career.
Sources: actl-reddington, superlawyers-reddington, nbc-reddington, reddington-firm
Entered the case after the September 4 mistrial. Only the professional record the two accounts report is recorded here; education and bar admission have not been compiled.
Sources: aol-prosecutors, plymouth-da
Sources: aol-prosecutors, plymouth-da
What is still unsettled
What the archive says it has not settled: the case reference’s open and resolved questions, the conflicts and data-quality issues it records against itself, the two blocks it retired but kept for provenance, and the day-account gaps the compilers listed date by date. The count is the open questions plus the known gaps.
The case reference keeps two superseded blocks and says why. They are shown here because the archive shows them; nothing on this site reads them.
The original 'sessions' array was keyed to Rev publication dates, two pairs of which shared a date, so it could not order the trial. Superseded by proceeding_dates on August 20, 2026. Kept for provenance; nothing should read it.
| # | Label | Posted (Rev publication date) | Slug | URL | Coverage | Contents |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Opening Statements | 2026-07-29 | ma-v-linsday-clancy-opening-statements | https://www.rev.com/transcripts/ma-v-linsday-clancy-opening-statements | full-fetch-partial |
|
| 2 | Day 2 | 2026-07-30 | ma-v-linsday-clancy-day-2 | https://www.rev.com/transcripts/ma-v-linsday-clancy-day-2 | partial |
|
| 3 | Day 3 | 2026-08-02 | ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-3 | https://www.rev.com/transcripts/ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-3 | partial |
|
| 4 | Day 4 | 2026-08-02 | ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-4 | https://www.rev.com/transcripts/ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-4 | partial |
|
| 5 | Day 5 | 2026-08-04 | ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-5 | https://www.rev.com/transcripts/ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-5 | partial |
|
| 6 | Day 6 | 2026-08-05 | ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-6 | https://www.rev.com/transcripts/ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-6 | partial |
|
| 7 | Day 7 | 2026-08-06 | ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-7 | https://www.rev.com/transcripts/ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-7 | partial |
|
| 8 | Day 8 | 2026-08-10 | ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-8 | https://www.rev.com/transcripts/ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-8 | partial |
|
| 9 | Day 9 | 2026-08-10 | ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-9 | https://www.rev.com/transcripts/ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-9 | minimal |
|
| 10 | Day 10 | 2026-08-11 | ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-10 | https://www.rev.com/transcripts/ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-10 | minimal |
|
| 11 | Day 11 | 2026-08-12 | ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-11 | https://www.rev.com/transcripts/ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-11 | minimal |
|
| 12 | Day 12 | 2026-08-13 | ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-12 | https://www.rev.com/transcripts/ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-12 | minimal |
|
| 13 | Day 13 | 2026-08-17 | ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-13 | https://www.rev.com/transcripts/ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-13 | minimal |
|
| 14 | Day 14 | 2026-08-18 | ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-14 | https://www.rev.com/transcripts/ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-14 | partial |
|
| 15 | Day 15 | 2026-08-20 | ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-15 | https://www.rev.com/transcripts/ma-v-lindsay-clancy-day-15 | partial |
|
These described defects in Rev's machine transcripts. No Rev transcript is used or published here, so they no longer describe anything on this site. Retained because they remain the reason the project does not ingest that source.
Outlets number trial days inconsistently. Some count from empanelment, some from opening statements, and some count only days on which testimony was heard. A day described in the press as the twelfth day of testimony corresponds to August 12, 2026, which is this file's ordinal 12 by coincidence rather than by construction. Use dates, never day numbers, when joining this file to anything else.
Days with 'witness_detail' are broken out witness by witness with their own testimony points, plus separate exhibit, ruling and procedural tracks. The prose 'summary' is retained for search and for days not yet restructured.
After the mistrial
What has happened since the jury was discharged, as the archive records it from press reporting: 136 dated entries across 10 dates from September 4, 2026, newest date first. The next status hearing the archive lists is September 29, 2026. These are dated developments, not sitting accounts; the trial days themselves are in the day accounts that follow.
What happens after the mistrial, compiled from press reporting: filings, hearings, and the district attorney's retrial decision. These are not trial days -- the trial itself is data/day-summaries.json, and it ended on day 28 (September 4, 2026) without a verdict. Most calendar days in this window have no court session at all, so entries here are dated developments rather than sitting accounts.
Same sourcing standard as day-summaries.json: record only what a named, citable source actually reported. Where outlets disagree, record both and say so in data/evidence.json rather than here.
Patrick Clancy has given his first interview since the trial, to "60 Minutes." CBS News announced on Wednesday afternoon that he sat down with correspondent Ross Douthat and that the segment will air on Sunday, September 20, at 7 p.m. Eastern on CBS and Paramount+; the network said he speaks about his grief, his memories of Cora, Dawson and Callan, and the conspiracy theories about him that spread on social media after the mistrial. Until now he has said nothing publicly himself: the two statements issued since September 4 came through his lawyers, the second of them Howard Cooper's warning of legal consequences for the online claims. He was the Commonwealth's first witness at the trial, and his 911 call was played to the jury but never broadcast. NBC10 Boston carried the announcement within the hour, and boston.com followed at 2:19 p.m., noting that he has since moved to New York and remarried and that the district attorney has still not said whether the case will be retried, reduced or resolved by agreement. What he said in the interview has not been reported: the New York Post, which watched the teaser the network released, said it shows him walking in and taking his seat as the crew starts rolling, and nothing of the conversation. CBS News, 1:18 p.m.; NBC10 Boston; boston.com, under Abby Patkin, 2:19 p.m.; New York Post, 2:21 p.m.
Sources: cbs-patrick-60-minutes, nbcboston-patrick-60-minutes, bostoncom-patrick-60-minutes, nypost-patrick-60-minutes
A further impoundment order covers the jurors' confidential questionnaires. The Boston Herald reported on Wednesday afternoon that, besides sealing the jury list indefinitely and the venire list for ten days, Sullivan has ordered the confidential juror questionnaires impounded for ten days as well. The paper said the order is written in much the same terms as the other two and rests on the same facts: the intensity of the coverage, and the threats made against at least one juror who sat. The Herald did not give the date of the order, and no other outlet has yet reported it. The Herald also confirmed that the case is next in court on September 29, the first hearing since the mistrial. Boston Herald, 5:07 p.m.
Sources: herald-weinberg-appearance
The fundraiser for the holdout juror passed $150,000. Boston 25, in a Tuesday piece on the scrutiny jurors in high-profile cases now face, reported that the GiveSendGo appeal titled "Stand with the Juror" stood above $150,000 as of Monday night, up from the $115,000 Fox News had reported on Monday morning. The station also noted that the court's sealing of the jury list had not stopped his apparent identity from being posted by bloggers, some of whom call him a hero. Pierre Bergeron, a retired Ohio appellate judge, told Boston 25 that targeting jurors makes people less willing to serve, and that a juror should not go into a courtroom expecting to be rewarded or punished for a verdict. Boston 25, 6:40 a.m.
Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, whose critical posts after the mistrial Fox News had already gathered, went further in an interview with TMZ on Monday, reported by the New York Post on Tuesday morning. The Post quoted her calling Clancy a serial killer, saying she should receive the death penalty and that the execution should be public, as a warning to women not to kill their children, and dismissing Reddington's request for a presidential pardon as a publicity stunt. New York Post, under Patrick Reilly, 6:46 a.m.
Sources: nypost-mace-execution
Governor Healey tied a spending request to the case. At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center on Tuesday she said she will ask the Legislature, in a supplemental budget, for $2 million to expand Welcome Family, the Department of Public Health program that sends a maternal and child health nurse for one free home visit in the weeks after a birth, and $250,000 more for MCPAP for Moms, the Department of Mental Health program that supports clinicians treating pregnant and postpartum patients. The visiting program now reaches about 3,000 of the state's roughly 68,000 annual births and, the Globe reported, gets no state money at present; the public health commissioner, Robbie Goldstein, said he hopes the addition would let it serve every family that opts in. The MCPAP money would, in the governor's office's account, pay for tracking postpartum psychosis data and for educating providers and families about its warning signs, and the public health department intends to widen its screening regulations beyond postpartum depression. Healey said postpartum illness is nothing new but that the Clancy trial had raised the conversation to a new level, nationally and internationally. CBS Boston's evening account added that eleven mothers told their own stories at the event, and quoted Goldstein saying the $2 million would let the visiting program reach every delivery in every community. The Associated Press, in a Wednesday morning account, set the proposal against the state's own figures: its maternal mortality review committee found mental illness, counting substance use disorder, to be the leading underlying cause of death among pregnant women and new mothers in Massachusetts from 2019 through 2024, at 38 percent, and judged 85 percent of those deaths preventable, more than half of them falling between a week and a year after the birth. The AP also recalled that Healey signed a maternal health law in 2024 that widened access to doulas, midwives and birth centers and required insurers to cover postpartum depression screening. NBC10 Boston, from the State House News Service, 10:16 a.m.; Boston Globe, 12:45 p.m.; CBS Boston, under Louisa Moller, 7:57 p.m.; Associated Press, under Leah Willingham, via boston.com, 10:05 a.m. Wednesday.
Sources: nbcboston-healey-postpartum-funding, globe-healey-postpartum-funding, cbs-healey-postpartum-funding, ap-healey-postpartum-funding
A brother of the holdout juror gave the New York Post the first extended account from the juror's own family. Interviewed in Brockton, he said religion had nothing to do with the vote, answering online speculation that the juror's Catholic faith had overridden the instructions: his brother had simply weighed the case and made his decision, which was good for some people and not for others. None of the family had known he was serving, the brother said, and since the mistrial they have been unable to leave the house, with notes left at their mother's home and constant calls. The Post, which is not printing the juror's name, also noted from the court file that the nephew's restraining order against him lapsed during the trial, consistent with the Globe's reading of an August 11 expiry, and quoted the owner of a local garage who described the juror as a church-going regular who had recently paid a stranger's fuel bill and whose family had gone into hiding. The Post put the GiveSendGo fundraiser at nearly $190,000 and described it as launched on Monday, which does not match Fox News's Monday-morning report of $115,000 raised over several days. Fox News carried the brother's remarks in its own piece at 12:09 p.m. New York Post, under Marie Pohl and Alex Oliveira, 11:15 a.m.; Fox News, 12:09 p.m.
Sources: nypost-holdout-brother, fox-holdout-brother
A second order, also dated Monday, seals the venire list for ten days. The Boston Globe, in its Tuesday account of the main order, reported that Sullivan had separately impounded for ten days the names of everyone who came to the courthouse for jury selection in the week of July 20, and quoted his finding that threats and concerns over juror safety make immediate and irreparable injury to jurors and to the administration of justice real and present. NBC10 Boston, boston.com and CBS Boston carried the same second order later in the day: NBC10 gave the selection dates as July 20 to 24 and noted the order's reference to at least one juror having received threats, and CBS quoted its reasoning without giving the duration. The Monday-night accounts of the main order, and the Epoch Times and Fox News pieces on Tuesday morning, had not mentioned it. Boston Globe, 11:11 a.m.; NBC10 Boston, 12:07 p.m.; boston.com, 12:36 p.m.; CBS Boston, 12:55 p.m.
Sources: globe-jury-list-impounded, nbcboston-jury-list-impounded, bostoncom-jury-list-impounded, cbs-jury-list-impounded
Two jurors from Karen Read's trials, speaking to CBS Boston anonymously, said the reaction to the Clancy mistrial shows why jurors' identities need protecting. One, who deliberated in Read's first trial, said that if jurors cannot be shielded, verdicts risk being driven by what is safest in the court of public opinion rather than by the evidence and the Commonwealth's burden, and described keeping quiet after that trial mainly to spare their family. The other, from the second trial, called jury service a duty rather than a choice, said they felt horrible that the Clancy jury had hung, and recalled staying at a friend's house for several days after bloggers turned up at home. Victoria George, an alternate on Read's first jury who later worked with the defense, said she expects judges in high-profile cases to impound jurors' names indefinitely from now on. CBS Boston, under Kristina Rex, 6:44 p.m.
Sources: cbs-read-jurors-protections
A second lawyer has joined the defense for the double jeopardy fight. Fox News reported, from a Plymouth Superior Court filing it had obtained, that Martin Weinberg, the veteran Boston defense lawyer who tried to block Karen Read's retrial after her first trial hung in 2024, entered a limited appearance on Tuesday to file and argue the forthcoming motion to dismiss on double jeopardy grounds and to handle related matters. The filing does not say when the motion will be submitted; the case is next due in court on September 29. Fox recalled that Weinberg's argument for Read, that jurors had privately agreed to acquit on two counts, was rejected by the trial judge and then in state and federal court before she was retried and acquitted of the most serious charges in 2025. The Boston Globe confirmed the notice of limited appearance from court records on Wednesday morning, and added that Weinberg argued before the Supreme Judicial Court in 2024 for Read's bid to dismiss the charges left pending after her mistrial, that he won an acquittal this month for Suffolk Sheriff Steven Tompkins on two federal extortion counts, and that he represented Richard Vitale, acquitted of federal corruption charges in 2011 in the case that ended Speaker Salvatore DiMasi's career. The Globe also noted that prosecutors have still not said whether they will retry Clancy. Boston 25 reported the same filing on Wednesday afternoon and quoted its operative line: Weinberg "files his appearance of counsel for the purpose of representing the defendant in regard to filing and litigating a forthcoming Motion to Dismiss for Double Jeopardy and related matters." The Boston Herald, late Wednesday afternoon, also described the notice as filed Tuesday and recalled that Reddington had cited the Read case in court on September 4, arguing before the mistrial was declared that the jurors might all have agreed she was not guilty of first- or second-degree murder even though they could not agree on the counts. NBC 10 in Providence carried the same filing Wednesday afternoon, adding nothing beyond the September 29 status hearing and the district attorney's pending retrial decision. Fox News, under Stepheny Price, 6:49 p.m. Tuesday; Boston Globe, under Travis Andersen, 9:23 a.m. Wednesday; Boston 25, under Frank O'Laughlin, 3:25 p.m. Wednesday; NBC 10 (WJAR), 3:42 p.m. Wednesday; Boston Herald, 5:07 p.m. Wednesday.
Sources: fox-weinberg-appearance, globe-weinberg-appearance, boston25-weinberg-appearance, herald-weinberg-appearance, wjar-weinberg-appearance
The Boston Globe traced how the holdout juror could have been seated despite his record, from the parts of the selection process that are on the public file. In February both sides moved for early access to the list of prospective jurors, with names, dates of birth and addresses, and Sullivan granted the motions in April; neither the district attorney's office nor the defense would say whether they used the list. Prospective jurors first fill out the standard confidential form, which asks under penalty of perjury about arrests, charges, convictions and court orders, and which the court destroys after use. When they reported the week of July 20 they answered a second, case-specific questionnaire that asked, among other things, whether they or a family member had been diagnosed with postpartum depression, depression, generalized anxiety disorder or bipolar disorder; the questions put to them also covered whether they could be fair to a woman defendant and whether they considered the insanity defense legitimate. Individual questioning by the judge and counsel followed at sidebar, out of the public's hearing; one juror told the paper they were asked about criminal history there. The Globe noted that state law disqualifies only a person convicted of a felony in the past seven years or with an open felony case, so a dismissed misdemeanor charge and a civil abuse-prevention order would not have barred the holdout from serving, though he would have been required to disclose them. How he answered, and what the court and the lawyers knew, is not in the public record, and none of them has said. Boston Globe, under Sean Cotter, 7:41 p.m.
Sources: globe-jury-selection-questions
Boston-area defense lawyers not involved in the case told the Globe the record should have prompted more questions. Keith Halpern said any sign of a possible bias against women should have been enough to exclude the juror, and that he wants to know whether the district attorney's office knew of the record and kept him anyway. Shannon Dale said she would have asked about the charge, the restraining order and his dealings with the courts, but that defense lawyers rarely seek to strike someone for a record alone; the question is whether the person can weigh the evidence without bias. Patrick Noonan of Plymouth County said the calculation usually cuts the other way, since it is prosecutors who assume a person with a record distrusts police, and that trial lawyers make these calls quickly and with little certainty. The paper noted that each side has a set number of peremptory challenges and that beyond those the seating decision rests with the judge, who has wide latitude. Boston Globe, under Sean Cotter, 7:41 p.m.
Sources: globe-jury-selection-questions
Paula Devlin, 65, one of the eleven jurors who voted for a finding of not criminally responsible, told Boston 25 she was overcome on learning of Governor Healey's postpartum proposal, saying she had imagined that change of that kind might be discussed a decade from now, not within weeks. She repeated that the evidence had shown Clancy in a psychotic break, which under Massachusetts law is a ground for finding her not responsible, and said the three children would still be alive had their mother received the right help. She added that she does not want anyone summoned for jury duty to avoid it because of what happened to this panel, and that if something good comes of the case, that is justice for the children. Boston 25, under Daniel Coates, 10:29 p.m.
Sources: boston25-devlin-healey
Paula Devlin gave a second CBS interview, on Saturday's "CBS Saturday Morning" with Shanelle Kaul, and Fox News on Monday picked out one remark from it. The jurors, she said, understood even inside their bubble that the case was a turning point that could change things for other women and other families, and that justice for the children meant this never happening again; had the holdout shown the panel some evidence, she added, they would all have accepted it. Neama Rahmani, a Los Angeles trial lawyer, told Fox the remark was a problem because a jury's job is to decide the case in front of it, not the effect of its verdict on other women or other cases -- though with a mistrial already declared and deliberations generally shielded from inquiry, he saw little that could be done about it. CBS News video, Saturday 7:12 a.m.; Fox News, 11:13 a.m.
Sources: cbs-devlin-saturday, fox-devlin-other-women
Fox News reported that a GiveSendGo fundraiser for the holdout juror had taken in more than $115,000 in a few days, which its organizer said was for security, lawyers and lost work. The juror had not answered Fox's attempts to reach him and, as of Monday, had not spoken publicly about the case. Fox News, 11:13 a.m.
Sources: fox-devlin-other-women
Paula Devlin answered the bias charge in person. Interviewed by Fox News Digital in Whitman on Monday, the juror, 65, said her weekend remark about the case starting a conversation on women's mental health had been taken as proof the panel came in with an agenda, and rejected that reading: the jury went by the evidence, she said, and the prosecution's case had gaps in it. Because only women give birth and only women get postpartum depression or psychosis, she argued, weighing that evidence is not bias but fact. She said Clancy had asked for help again and again without getting it, and that she believes the three children would be alive had that help come. The weakest point in the Commonwealth's case, in her view, was that it produced no one -- not even Patrick Clancy -- with anything bad to say about Lindsay Clancy, and she said she is sure prosecutors looked. She added that she is still haunted by the children's faces and by the thought that the jury might have missed something, and that not finishing the task feels like failure whatever people tell her. Fox News, 4:51 p.m.
Sources: fox-devlin-denies-bias
The man believed to be the holdout juror has been named on social media. WJAR, the NBC station in Providence, reported Monday afternoon that a name and photograph said to be his were circulating online; it is not printing them, because the court has neither released nor confirmed his identity, and he has still not spoken publicly. The station's legal analyst, Austin Dana, said that simply stating who sat on a jury is not a crime, but doing it recklessly or to threaten or harass someone is, and that if the domestic violence history NBC10 Boston reported had been disclosed on the juror's questionnaire, it would probably have kept him off the panel. When WJAR published, the jury list was still due to become public on September 18. WJAR, 5:54 p.m.
Sources: wjar-holdout-identified
The Boston Globe became the first major outlet to publish the holdout juror's name, saying it had confirmed his identity from photographs posted online, court records and an interview with one of the other jurors. This index does not repeat the name: the court has found a real and present risk of harm in the jurors' identification, and he has not spoken publicly. The paper described him as 48 and living in Bridgewater, said its repeated attempts to reach him failed, and quoted a brother who said he had never been violent toward him, had not known of the assault allegations, and took his seating on the jury as proof he was qualified to serve. Boston Globe, under Shelley Murphy, Chris Serres and Shannon Larson, 10:12 p.m.
Sources: globe-holdout-record
The Globe's own reading of the court file added dates and terms to what NBC10 Boston had reported. The restraining order was issued in August 2025 by a Brockton District Court judge, who found a substantial likelihood of immediate danger of abuse; it barred the juror from contacting his teenage nephew, kept him away from the nephew's Bridgewater home and required him to give up any firearms, and it ran until August 11, 2026, the third week of testimony. The nephew's affidavit described an argument over a blocked parking space that ended with him on the floor, punched twice in the face and threatened with death. The 2021 assault charge involving the juror's then wife was dismissed after the couple divorced; he was never convicted. In Housing Court, the paper found no rent paid since March, a court date of his own missed in early August while he sat on the case, and a judgment of more than $12,600 entered for the landlord during deliberations, with an eviction now going forward. Boston Globe, 10:12 p.m.
Sources: globe-holdout-record
Reactions gathered by the Globe on Monday. Paula Devlin, the juror who has given several interviews, said a pending court order is different from a past mistake and that he should have been kept off the panel; she said jurors had been asked about their criminal backgrounds. A spokesperson said District Attorney Cruz would not comment on the jury selection process, and Reddington also declined to comment. Daniel F. Conley, the former Suffolk district attorney, said most judges would have granted a challenge for cause on that record. Jack Lu, the retired Superior Court judge, said the standard questionnaire is short and easy for a layperson to misread, and that a civil order or a dismissed charge does not take away the right to serve. David Rossman of Boston University said the disclosures strengthen the defense's argument against a second trial: a juror cannot be removed for an unusual view of the evidence, he said, but can be for willfully ignoring the definition of reasonable doubt, and the judge might have looked further into the juror's conduct before declaring a mistrial. Boston Globe, 10:12 p.m.
Sources: globe-holdout-record
The Globe described the September 29 hearing as one Sullivan has scheduled to set a trial date, a firmer reading than other outlets, which have called it a status hearing on how the case proceeds. Cruz has still not said whether he will seek to retry Clancy on first-degree murder, which would require a new jury; the paper noted that if the charges were reduced to second-degree murder she could waive a jury and have a judge decide. Boston Globe, 10:12 p.m.
Sources: globe-holdout-record
Sullivan extended the impoundment of the jury list indefinitely. In an order issued Monday, he accepted that jurors' names are ordinarily public but found a real and present risk of harm to the jurors, and to the integrity of their work, if the list were released now. He pointed to the significant and divisive attention the case continues to draw, to jurors having been identified and their personal details published without permission, to the arrest of one person charged with secretly recording jurors as they left the courthouse, and to a request from at least one juror that the sealing be made open-ended. Some jurors have given interviews since the mistrial, he wrote, but most, alternates included, have chosen to stay anonymous despite repeated requests. The names remain sealed until the court orders otherwise; jurors stay free to identify themselves. The order replaces the September 4 impoundment, which would have lapsed on September 18. The Boston Globe, reporting the order on Tuesday, quoted it as keeping the names sealed "until and unless otherwise ordered by the Court" and as finding "a risk of immediate and irreparable injury" if the list were released now. WJAR, which ties the extension to the online identification of the presumed holdout, 11:41 p.m.; the Epoch Times and Fox News reported the order on Tuesday morning, and Boston 25, the Boston Globe, NBC10 Boston, boston.com and CBS Boston by Tuesday midday; the Boston Herald, under Colleen Cronin, at 3:56 p.m.
Sources: wjar-jury-list-impounded, epoch-jury-list-impounded, fox-jury-list-impounded, nbcboston-jury-list-impounded, bostoncom-jury-list-impounded, cbs-jury-list-impounded, boston25-jury-list-impounded, globe-jury-list-impounded, herald-jury-list-impounded
CNN's Eric Levenson put the holdout's position to people who study the defense, and they said it is a familiar one: a juror who accepts that the Commonwealth left doubt but will not sign a slip that says a woman who killed her children is not responsible. Joni Johnston, a forensic psychologist, said some people hold as a matter of conviction that there can be no explanation for killing one's children that does not call for punishment; Gary Galperin, a former prosecutor who works on forensic psychiatry, said the whole system is built on holding wrongdoers liable, so the reluctance is what one would expect from reasonable people. Margaret McLean, a former prosecutor who followed the trial, said the public does not understand mental illness and the defense sits in a gray area most jurors have never had to think about. Reported by CNN, Sunday 6:30 a.m.
Sources: cnn-insanity-defense-analysis
The same piece set the case against Reddington's own history with the defense. In 1989 he persuaded a jury that Therese Rogers was temporarily insane when she stabbed her abusive husband, one of the earliest uses of what was then called battered woman syndrome; in 2002 a jury rejected the same defense for Michael McDermott, the Wakefield workplace shooter, and convicted him of seven counts of first-degree murder. CNN also noted the Massachusetts allocation of the burden -- once the defense is raised, prosecutors must prove criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt, where many states make the defendant prove insanity -- and that the Supreme Court upheld a state's abolition of the defense in Kahler v. Kansas in 2020. Reported by CNN, Sunday 6:30 a.m.
Sources: cnn-insanity-defense-analysis
CBS News checked the holdout juror's record for itself. Citing the Brockton Police Department, it reported that he was accused of domestic violence in September 2021 after his wife's 13-year-old nephew called 911 about an argument; the report alleged he had grabbed his wife by the throat and thrown her into a dresser. He was charged with one count of domestic assault and battery, pleaded not guilty, and the charge was later dismissed, according to court records. CBS said it had reached out to the juror and his family without reply, and that it was not publishing his name because the jury list has not been made public. CBS News, 3:15 p.m.
Sources: cbs-holdout-record
Caroline Polisi, the network's legal analyst, said the real question is whether the juror made purposeful misrepresentations during selection, which would be a crime, while an arrest by itself does not disqualify a person from a jury. The questionnaires are sealed in the court record, so she doubted the answer would come out without a court-ordered inquiry. As for the case, she said a false answer would ordinarily be grounds to attack a guilty verdict, and with a mistrial already declared it was unclear what it would change. CBS News, 3:15 p.m.
Sources: cbs-holdout-record
President Trump, asked on Sunday before boarding Air Force One at Shannon Airport in Ireland about Reddington's appeal for a pardon, said he had heard it and called the case a very sad situation with no winner: three children are dead. It was, he said, a state situation and not a federal one. Asked whether he would call the district attorney, as Reddington had hoped, he said he appreciated that the lawyer felt that way, that he had heard Reddington was a very good attorney, and that he hoped they could work it out -- "that's something they have to work out." Fox News, 3:58 p.m.; Boston Herald, 7:30 p.m.; Boston Globe, Monday 8:29 a.m.; CBS Boston, Monday 9:20 a.m; boston.com, Monday 3:18 p.m.
Sources: fox-trump-state-situation, herald-trump-pardon, globe-trump-pardon, cbsboston-trump-pardon, bdc-trump-pardon
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida took the holdout juror's side against the NBC10 Boston report on his court record. In a post on X on Friday, September 11, the Boston Herald reported, DeSantis wrote that a man had objected to letting a woman kill her three young children and get away with it, and that the station was trying to smear a juror whose identity ought to be protected. If the juror was being harassed, he added, Florida would provide him asylum. The Herald noted that the station's post on X had drawn a Community Note citing the Massachusetts statute on harassing jurors. Boston Herald, 7:56 p.m.
Sources: herald-desantis-asylum
The Herald also gathered two Massachusetts reactions to the report on the juror. Jack Lu, the retired Superior Court judge, called the broadcast unwise and ill-considered given that jury service is compulsory, and said a lone juror is entitled to hold out without becoming a public spectacle, whatever one makes of the vote. Gregory V. Sullivan, president of the New England First Amendment Coalition, put the question the other way: whether the juror had been truthful during selection, since he could not imagine the man being seated had he disclosed an outstanding restraining order out of Brockton District Court. Boston Herald, 7:56 p.m.
Sources: herald-desantis-asylum
Paula Devlin sat with Gayle King on CBS Mornings on Friday and described where the panel stood at the start, which no juror had yet set out. When deliberations opened, eight were for not criminally responsible, two were undecided and two were for murder. The twelve were nine women and three men, aged from 22 to about 70, and one of them was not white: a Black man in his 30s, the juror who became the holdout. Devlin's own position never moved. She had been leaning toward not responsible on the evidence, she said, went in with a list of things she wanted to look at again, and found that every point made in the room pushed her further the same way. CBS News, under Mark Osborne's byline, at 9:42 a.m.
Sources: cbs-devlin-mornings
Devlin thought the weight of the room was part of why the last juror would not move. By the time the count stood at 10-2 the majority was working as much to satisfy itself as to bring anyone across, she said, and the two still on the other side felt attacked -- something she did not see a way around. "Even in normal conversation, when it is pointed at you and you have to defend yourself, it's a hard thing to do," she told King. CBS News, at 9:42 a.m.
Sources: cbs-devlin-mornings
Two witnesses settled the question for her. Resnick's evidence on altruistic filicide, Devlin said, offered a reason for something that until then had none: every witness had described a devoted mother, and the photographs taken inside the house that night showed the same thing everywhere she looked, down to a sign reading "It's a wonderful life." The other was Patrick Clancy. "I think the prosecution tried to nudge Patrick to say something derogatory and he wouldn't," she said, and that a man who had lost his three children still would not speak badly of their mother stayed with her. CBS News, at 9:42 a.m.
Sources: cbs-devlin-mornings
Devlin does not want the case thrown out, although she believes Clancy was not criminally responsible. Asked about Reddington's motion for a finding of not guilty -- which CBS said lawyers outside the case regard as a long shot -- she said she did not feel good about it. What the jury was reaching for, as she understood it, was a verdict that would commit Clancy to treatment rather than let her walk free, and that was how the panel meant to do right by the children. "Those children never left that room. They've never left our hearts," she said. None of it would have happened, she added, had Clancy not been lost in the system and failed by it. CBS News, at 9:42 a.m.
Sources: cbs-devlin-mornings
The Boston Globe put the retrial question to lawyers with no part in the case, and several of them said the deadlock ought to give Cruz pause about charging murder in the first degree a second time. David Yannetti, who defended Karen Read at her 2024 trial and again at the retrial that followed a hung jury, said a prosecutor reading this result should conclude the case is barely alive. The test he would apply is whether the office can ever get a conviction, and if it cannot, he said, it should not try again. He thinks Clancy would be harder to retry than Read was, because this panel divided so lopsidedly against the Commonwealth and reached an impasse on every count open to it -- murder in the first degree, murder in the second, and manslaughter. Boston Globe, under Sean Cotter's byline, at 7:39 a.m.
Sources: globe-retrial-analysis
Greg Connor, a former Norfolk County prosecutor who has tried homicides, told the Globe that his old office would ordinarily have charged a mother accused of killing her children with murder in the second degree rather than the first. The difference is procedural as well as penal: the lesser charge can be tried to a judge sitting without a jury, which would mean a shorter case and no second deadlock, one judge having no one to hang with. He raised the family too. Patrick Clancy called the prospect of a retrial extraordinarily painful in the statement he issued hours after the mistrial, and Connor's point was that a prosecution the victims' relatives are not behind invites the question of who it is for. Boston Globe, at 7:39 a.m.
Sources: globe-retrial-analysis
Other lawyers gave the Globe reasons Cruz would press on. Audrey Mark, formerly chief of the child-abuse unit in the Suffolk district attorney's office, said a hung jury does not ordinarily move a prosecutor who believes the evidence is there: sometimes you lose, and the case is still worth bringing. What settles it, she said, is whether the office regards bringing the case and winning it as justice. Cruz has said since the mistrial that he still regards Clancy as a murderer. The Globe also set out the advantage a second trial conventionally gives the Commonwealth -- the jurors' accounts show where the case failed, and the defense has now shown its hand. Boston Globe, at 7:39 a.m.
Sources: globe-retrial-analysis
Elyse Hershon, a Boston defense lawyer who handles homicide cases, cautioned the Globe against reading the jurors' accounts too literally while the holdout has said nothing publicly. What they describe may be exactly what happened, she said, or it may be how it looked to eleven people who did not like his decision. The Globe added a qualification of its own: one juror has said several of the panel started out leaning toward conviction and moved later, which leaves open that another twelve might hear the Commonwealth's case differently. Boston Globe, at 7:39 a.m.
Sources: globe-retrial-analysis
The Globe set the decision beside a South Shore case that deadlocked the other way. Emanuel Lopes, who shot a Weymouth police sergeant and a bystander in 2018 and also contested criminal responsibility, went to trial in 2023 and drew a jury divided eleven to one -- for conviction. Norfolk County retried him, swapping out its mental health experts for others who said he did not meet the standard, and the second jury convicted him, the Globe reported, of murder in the first degree on one count and the second degree on the other. Connor led that prosecution, and said he bought his office lunch after the first trial and asked his colleagues what they had seen so he could do it better. Boston Globe, at 7:39 a.m.
Sources: globe-retrial-analysis
The Globe also priced the comparison it had drawn. Read's first trial cost more than $700,000 in public money, most of it security, by the paper's earlier reading of the records; the district attorney's office there then spent more than $560,000 again on the retrial, including a special prosecutor, and $1.4 million on that second trial in all. It did not buy a better result. The first Read jury was reported to have leaned toward manslaughter; the second acquitted her of everything but a drunken driving count. Boston Globe, at 7:39 a.m.
Sources: globe-retrial-analysis
In a survey of what the jurors have said since the mistrial, the Globe carried one voice the others had not: a woman on the panel, who would not give her name, told WBZ-TV she would defend the holdout to a point. Nearly everyone in that room, whichever side they were on, had been firm from the start, she said, and he was not the only one unwilling to look at it from the other direction. There were, as she put it, some big personalities in the room, and in the end it came down to an inability to move past one's own convictions. Boston Globe, under Travis Andersen's byline, at 12:17 p.m.
Sources: globe-juror-roundup
NBC10 Boston reported that the juror who held out against the other eleven has a record of domestic violence allegations in Massachusetts courts. Ryan Kath's investigative piece traced a criminal charge brought against him in Brockton District Court in September 2021, after his wife's 13-year-old nephew called 911. The police report on that call says the juror took his wife by the throat and threw her against a dresser. The couple divorced afterward and the charge was later dismissed. The station is not naming him: the jury list is impounded and he has not spoken publicly. NBC10 Boston, at 4:00 p.m.
Sources: nbcboston-holdout-record
Two of the matters NBC10 Boston found were live while the juror was sitting on the case. The same nephew, by then a teenager, obtained a restraining order against him last year on an allegation that the juror knocked him down and punched him in the face repeatedly; the station reported that the order was still in force when he was seated and for weeks while he heard evidence. In the housing court, a landlord's case over rent unpaid since March produced a judgment against him for more than $12,000 last week, while the jury was out, and an eviction is pending. NBC10 Boston, at 4:00 p.m.
Sources: nbcboston-holdout-record
What that record means for how he came to be seated is not answerable from the public file. Michael Coyne, the station's legal analyst and the dean of the Massachusetts School of Law, said the questionnaire Massachusetts gives jurors asks about arrests, charges and court orders, and that he does not see either side accepting this juror had those answers been given accurately. Whether they were cannot be checked: juror questionnaires are not public records and may since have been destroyed. Relatives who spoke to the station were estranged from him and had not known he was on the jury; one called him a narcissist who should not have been trusted with a case of this weight. The station asked the Plymouth district attorney's office and Clancy's defense about the findings and reported no answer from either. NBC10 Boston, at 4:00 p.m.
Sources: nbcboston-holdout-record
NBC News gave a reason the 2021 assault charge against the holdout juror was dismissed. His former wife told NBC10 Boston this week that she had not wanted to testify against him, because she was afraid of losing custody of her daughter. Michael Coyne, the station's legal analyst, also said that a juror who does not answer the questionnaire truthfully commits a crime. NBC News, under Ryan Kath's byline, at 4:51 p.m.
Sources: nbcnews-holdout-record
NBC10 Boston reported overnight that Cruz has a second decision about a parental murder prosecution to make at almost the moment he decides what to do about Clancy. The Supreme Judicial Court last month vacated the conviction of Latarsha Sanders, a Brockton mother sentenced in December 2022 to two life terms without parole in the killings of her two young sons, and the court's order reached the docket at Plymouth Superior Court on Tuesday. That set running the twelve months the district attorney's office has to decide whether to try Sanders again on murder in the first degree or to proceed on reduced charges. The office has said it is reviewing the opinion and working out its next steps.
Sources: nbcboston-cruz-two-cases
The same report set the two prosecutions beside each other. Sullivan was the trial judge in both, both mothers were charged in Plymouth County with killing their own children, and both defended on criminal responsibility. Where they parted was the psychiatric record: Sanders's mental health records were kept from her jury, while Clancy's were at the center of hers. The SJC was unanimous, and Justice Frank M. Gaziano wrote that "the exclusion of the defendant's relevant medical records relating to the diagnoses or treatment of mental illness constituted prejudicial error," so that Sanders is entitled to a new trial. NBC10 Boston's own view is that the district attorney's office may face pressure to treat the two cases the same way.
Sources: nbcboston-cruz-two-cases
Reddington told Fox News's Bryan Llenas, in his first interview with that network since the jury deadlocked, what he wants for his client if the case goes on: not prison. He said he would not in a million years have her sent to the state prison at Framingham, and that what he would look for instead is probation with psychiatric treatment ordered in a secure facility. He repeated that he will challenge a second trial on double jeopardy grounds, that the route he hopes Cruz takes is a reduction to murder in the second degree, and that he would then have the case tried by a judge rather than a jury.
Sources: fox-reddington-strategy
In the same interview Reddington took back something else he had said about the district attorney after the mistrial. He had accused Cruz of not knowing the names of the three children; he had no right to do that, he told Fox News, and he regrets it. He also went over his boast that he had crushed Cruz at trial, as he had two days earlier, saying he probably should have picked different words and should have said only that he thought the defense had put on the stronger case and that the burden of proof lay with the Commonwealth.
Sources: fox-reddington-strategy
NBC10 Boston wrote up the Good Morning America interview after it aired. Dargie, a military veteran who was serving overseas when the children were killed, said the panel was left feeling defeated: seven weeks of their lives had gone into the trial and it ended without a decision. Several jurors leaned toward guilt early on, he said, and the room came together once the evidence had been laid out in front of everyone -- everyone but one.
Sources: nbcboston-dargie-juror, abc-dargie-juror
Dargie described the holdout as often disengaged, scrolling on his phone while other jurors were talking to him. What frustrated him most, he said, was hearing the man say outright that he did not know whether the prosecution or the defense had proved its case, and vote to convict all the same. The votes moved from day to day, Dargie said, and by the end the whole room had been brought to the same place except for that one juror. Reported by NBC10 Boston.
Sources: nbcboston-dargie-juror
One moment in the jury room has stayed with him. The holdout, Dargie said, took one of the exercise bands out of its bag, tied it around an empty water bottle and pulled. Dargie said he was shocked, that it made no sense to him, and that he asked the man what he was doing: the jury was not there to play detective, and "it's not a game of Clue. This is serious." Reported by NBC10 Boston and, in an account by Rebecca Cohen timed 10:26 a.m., by NBC News.
Sources: nbcboston-dargie-juror, nbcnews-dargie-juror
Like the jurors who spoke earlier in the week, Dargie named Patrick Clancy's 911 call as the hardest thing he heard. He had never heard a scream like it, he said, and will not forget it. He was asked about the claims circulating online that Patrick Clancy was responsible for the deaths and said he does not believe them -- and that anyone who heard the 911 call would change their mind. Reported by NBC10 Boston.
Sources: nbcboston-dargie-juror
Asked about a second trial, Dargie said he expects it would end the way the first one nearly did. If the case were tried again the same way, he told NBC10 Boston, nine juries out of ten would return not guilty by reason of insanity, and he said he had no doubt about it. Cruz has still not said whether he will retry the case or when he will decide.
Sources: nbcboston-dargie-juror
The Boston Globe carried the same interview under Bryan Hecht's byline and placed Dargie on the panel: he sat as juror No. 10, and came to the case knowing nothing about it, having been overseas with the military when the children were killed. He said the jury's count moved from one day to the next, and that as the evidence was laid out in front of them most of the panel came round to not guilty by reason of insanity. The Globe gives no hour for the piece.
Sources: globe-dargie-juror
The Boston Globe turned to a part of the case the criminal trial left untouched: the two medical malpractice suits the Clancys filed in January, and what a deadlocked jury does to them. Sarah Rahal reported that neither suit is resolved or stopped by the mistrial. Patrick Clancy's, brought on January 20 for himself and for the estates of Cora, Dawson and Callan, is pending in Norfolk Superior Court with a first hearing set for October 28. It names Dr. Jennifer Tufts, the nurse practitioner Rebecca Jollotta, Aster Mental Health Inc. and South Shore Health System, and puts the killings down to negligent treatment of Clancy and to the providers never grasping how far her mental health had fallen.
Sources: globe-civil-suits
Lindsay Clancy's own suit, filed within days of her former husband's, names the same providers and adds McLean Hospital and Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island. Her claim is that they did not identify bipolar disorder with postpartum onset and that the medication she was given made her worse. Nothing has been scheduled in it, and Leonard Kesten -- a longtime Boston trial lawyer in civil practice, with no part in either case -- told the Globe nothing will be until the criminal case is finished. Civil and criminal cases over the same events run alongside each other often enough, he said, and the mistrial's likely effect on these is delay rather than anything more than that.
Sources: globe-civil-suits
Both malpractice suits have been specially assigned to one judge, Michael Doolin. Kesten told the Globe that is unremarkable where two suits rest on the same allegations, and that a single judge hearing both of them does not mean the two are to be heard together.
Sources: globe-civil-suits
Clancy's lawyers in the malpractice case told the Globe the mistrial changes nothing on their side of it. Andrew Meyer Jr. of Lubin & Meyer, her lead lawyer there, said the criminal case and the civil one are separate proceedings involving different parties. Rosemary Scapicchio, who also acts for her in that suit and who spoke to reporters outside court on the day the mistrial was declared, said the civil case will follow the same course whether or not the criminal case had reached a resolution.
Sources: globe-civil-suits
Boston.com carried Dargie's account under Abby Patkin's byline and added one thing to it. Dargie said he asked the holdout several times to point to a piece of evidence, or to something a witness had said, that supported the position he was taking, and that the man could not do it.
Sources: bostoncom-dargie-juror
Reddington has filed the motion. In papers entered in Plymouth Superior Court on Thursday he asks Sullivan to enter a finding of not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility on each of the three indictments. It is a renewal, under Rule 25, of the motions for a required finding he made when the Commonwealth rested and again at the close of all the evidence, and it is to be heard at the September 29 hearing. Reported by NBC10 Boston (Kaitlin McKinley Becker), by CT Insider's Lisa Backus in an account timed 12:29 p.m., and by CBS Boston. WBUR's Deborah Becker reported the filing at 5:17 p.m. the same day.
Sources: nbcboston-motion-required-finding, ctinsider-motion-acquit, cbs-motion-required-finding, wbur-motion-not-guilty
The argument in the motion is about the expert evidence. All six forensic experts who testified, three called by each side, agreed that Clancy was seriously mentally ill on January 24, 2023, and the Commonwealth's rebuttal experts took issue with the diagnostic labels rather than with the illness itself. On that record, the motion says, there was nothing from which a juror earnestly seeking the truth could find each element of the offenses proved. NBC10 Boston quotes the papers: "No rational jury could find beyond a reasonable doubt that she had no mental disease or defect when the Commonwealth's own proof established that she did."
Sources: nbcboston-motion-required-finding
The motion also sets out what it says would follow. A finding entered under Rule 25 is an acquittal, so it would bar a second trial, and the rule exists so that a case the evidence does not support is not tried twice. That is a separate line from the motion to dismiss on double jeopardy grounds that Reddington told reporters on September 9 he would bring at the same hearing. Reported by NBC10 Boston.
Sources: nbcboston-motion-required-finding
The papers recite the deliberations as the defense understands them: seven days of them, eleven jurors prepared to find Clancy not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility and one who was not, and a note from the foreperson saying the holdout had acknowledged doubt but was refusing to apply it to the case as the law states. They also recite the defense's petition asking the Supreme Judicial Court to have the juror's conduct looked into, which a single justice denied the same day, after which the mistrial was declared. Reported by NBC10 Boston, and by CT Insider, which gives the deliberations as about 38 hours over seven days.
Sources: nbcboston-motion-required-finding, ctinsider-motion-acquit
CNN went at the question of a negotiated end to the case and reported that none of the routes open is straightforward. Reddington said he wants to hear what Cruz has to say and hopes he will revisit his position now that the trial is over, but repeated that he would not agree to any resolution that had Clancy serving time in jail: what she needs, he said, is to be treated for her mental health condition, with good physicians and good medication. Cruz has still not said whether he will retry her, and has repeated that a charge of murder in the first degree was warranted and appropriate. Reported by CNN, under Nicki Brown's byline, in an account timed 5:30 a.m.
Sources: cnn-legal-options
On the mechanics, CNN reported that an ordinary plea ends in a sentence of imprisonment or probation and not in a hospital placement, so the one route that would keep Clancy in psychiatric care is for both sides to agree that she is not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility and for Sullivan to accept it, which would begin the process of having her committed. Carol Erskine, a former Massachusetts juvenile court judge, told CNN that outcome is highly unlikely, because it is the very thing the Commonwealth has been contesting all along. Reported by CNN.
Sources: cnn-legal-options
CNN also put the retrial decision to lawyers with no part in the case. Janice Bassil, a Massachusetts defense lawyer, said the district attorney holds all the cards and that she does not see him compromising. Elyse Hershon, a Boston defense lawyer, said she does not see Cruz backing off the position he has taken, and that a plea to manslaughter would be "a big walk down for the district attorney." Daniel Medwed, who teaches law and criminal justice at Northeastern University School of Law, said the family's wishes, the politics and the cost of a second trial ought to come second to whether justice would be served, and that a prosecutor who doubts a conviction is achievable at trial may start to think about lesser charges. Reported by CNN.
Sources: cnn-legal-options
boston.com's own account of the two malpractice suits added the defendants' side of them, which the Globe's did not reach. All four defendants in Patrick Clancy's suit -- Dr. Jennifer Tufts, the nurse practitioner Rebecca Jollotta, Aster Mental Health and South Shore Health -- moved together in April to have it dismissed, on the ground that they owed no duty of care to the children and were covered by the state law that governs when a mental health clinician has to warn someone who may be at risk. Aster's lawyers wrote that Clancy never told Tufts she was having hallucinations, or that she had thoughts of harming herself or her children. Reported by boston.com, under Abby Patkin's byline, at 12:53 p.m.
Sources: bostoncom-civil-suits
The providers have also demanded a medical malpractice tribunal, the screening step Massachusetts puts in front of a claim of this kind. boston.com reported two separate demands filed last month: one by Tufts, and one by Jollotta and Julie Paul, of South Shore Hospital's perinatal behavioral health program. South Shore Health's lawyers wrote that Jollotta had started appropriate, evidence-based drug treatment and that both clinicians met the standard of care. Reported by boston.com.
Sources: bostoncom-civil-suits
boston.com counts eleven defendants in Lindsay Clancy's own suit, and names them: alongside Tufts, Jollotta, Aster Mental Health and South Shore Health, they are the psychiatrist Dr. Alia Goodheart, the nurse practitioner Julie Paul, the counselor Latiesha Dukes, McLean Hospital, Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, Dr. Zobeida Diaz and Dr. Elizabeth Madva. Her lawyers in that case are Andrew Meyer Jr., Rosemary Scapicchio and Bill Thompson. Scapicchio said of it: "We plan on holding each and every doctor and each and every hospital responsible." Reported by boston.com.
Sources: bostoncom-civil-suits
boston.com added a qualification to the renewed motion. Reddington, who has been openly critical of the holdout juror, says the motion does not rest on how the jury voted. It puts the question as one for the court -- whether the record, taken most favorably to the Commonwealth, could support the finding the Commonwealth needed -- and says it could not, and that every juror who applied the reasonable doubt standard reached that conclusion. The Commonwealth, the papers say, had to prove that a woman all six experts agreed was mentally ill nonetheless kept the capacity the law demands, and it did not. The district attorney's office has not said whether it will retry her, reduce or drop the charges, or resolve the case by agreement. Reported by boston.com, under Abby Patkin's byline, at 2:33 p.m.
Sources: bostoncom-motion-required-finding, nbcboston-motion-required-finding
The Boston Globe recorded the mistrial being invoked in another Massachusetts case. At a hearing in Dedham District Court on Thursday morning, Joseph Krowski Jr., who acts for Janette MacAusland -- charged with killing her two children, Ella and Kai, at their home in Wellesley in April -- pressed the district attorney's office there to take a different approach where a mother's mental illness is at issue. "There's been a discussion, a discourse opened up in this country about whether or not we want to criminalize mental illness," he said, adding that his client is "not Lindsay Clancy 2.0." MacAusland is due back in court on October 29. Reported by the Boston Globe, under Camilo Fonseca's byline.
Sources: globe-wellesley-comparison
The Boston Globe's account of the renewed motion set out how far it has to reach. A motion of this kind asks the judge to look at the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution, the Globe reported, and is rarely granted. The papers put it that no "rational jury could find beyond a reasonable doubt that she had no mental disease or defect when the Commonwealth's own proof established that she did." Prosecutors had filed nothing in answer to it by Thursday afternoon. Reported by the Boston Globe, under Travis Andersen's byline.
Sources: globe-motion-acquittal
Boston 25 News read the motion for the part of it that answers the Commonwealth's case about what Clancy was able to do on January 24. The papers list what the prosecution leaned on -- that she drove, called the pediatrician, sent her husband out on errands, ran internet searches and worked through a sequence of steps -- and answer that being able to carry out everyday tasks does not rule out severe mental illness. The same account gives the labels the Commonwealth's experts used for her condition: a major depressive episode, or bipolar II disorder with dissociation. Reported by Boston 25 News, under Frank O'Laughlin's byline, at 2:29 p.m.
Sources: boston25-motion-acquittal
CBS Boston covered the same Dedham hearing and carried more of what Krowski said outside it. He asked that the courts not fall back on what he called the default position, in which a woman who is plainly mentally ill is prosecuted criminally as far as the law allows. CBS puts MacAusland's age at 49, reports that her requests for bail have been denied, and says the case cannot move until the medical examiner settles the cause and manner of the two children's deaths. She is due back in court on October 29. Reported by CBS Boston, under Neal Riley's byline, at 4:14 p.m.
Sources: cbs-wellesley-comparison
ABC News took the renewed motion to the prosecution and came away with nothing. A spokesman for Timothy Cruz was asked on Thursday what the district attorney's office made of it and declined to comment, and Cruz has still not said publicly whether he intends to try the case a second time. ABC reports that the motion is to be argued on September 29, the date already set for the two sides to come back before Sullivan. Reported by ABC News, under the bylines of Peter Charalambous, Katie Kindelan and Vera Drymon, at 3:22 p.m.
Sources: abc-motion-required-finding
The Boston Globe opened Thursday by putting its trial reporters in front of readers' questions and answering them on the record through the morning. On how a second trial could be run: only a jury can convict on murder in the first degree, so charging that again would mean seating a new one, while a lesser charge -- murder in the second degree or manslaughter -- would let Clancy give up her right to a jury and leave the case to Sullivan alone. Prosecutors dropped three strangulation counts before the first trial, and adding a new felony such as child abuse would mean going back to a grand jury for an indictment. Boston Globe, in a reader session published at 5:00 a.m.
Sources: globe-reader-questions
Asked whether a second jury could be found in a county saturated with the case, the Globe said the test is not that jurors hold no opinions but that they stand indifferent between the parties, and quoted Supreme Judicial Court rulings by Chief Justices Ralph Gants and Paul Liacos to that effect. The tools open to Sullivan, it said, are closer questioning about what a prospective juror already knows of the first trial and what they think about mental illness, moving the trial to another county, or summoning far more people than usual: a thousand were called for Karen Read's second trial in Norfolk Superior Court. Boston Globe, in the same session.
Sources: globe-reader-questions
Asked what can be done about the holdout, the Globe's reporters said nobody has moved to do anything. Sullivan had questioned each deliberating juror at sidebar once the foreperson raised her concern, and found this one fit to keep deliberating and able to follow the law. What his fellow jurors have said since -- that he conceded a reasonable doubt and still would not vote to acquit -- does not amount to clear evidence of misconduct, and judges are reluctant to reach into a jury room without a showing of tampering or of bias concealed at empanelment. Karen Read's lawyers tried after her first trial, and her appeal failed. Boston Globe, in the same session.
Sources: globe-reader-questions
On where the mistrial leaves Clancy: she is still held without bail on three pending murder counts, so the deadlock opens no route out, and she remains in treatment at the state-run Tewksbury Hospital. Were the providers there to decide she no longer needed their care, the Globe said, she would be turned over to the custody of the Plymouth sheriff's department. On either ending -- a conviction or a finding of lack of criminal responsibility -- a judge would be likely to commit her to a hospital for further treatment, and people found not criminally responsible for a killing commonly spend decades in state psychiatric care, some of them the rest of their lives. Boston Globe, in the same session.
Sources: globe-reader-questions
The Globe also gave a measure of the case's effect outside the courtroom. Postpartum Support International has reported that calls to its Massachusetts helpline rose by about half after the trial began. A bill on Beacon Hill that would require a mental health evaluation for anyone charged with a crime within a year of giving birth, and let postpartum depression or psychosis bear on how the case is handled, did not advance this session, and its advocates intend to file it again. The paper said it knew of no statewide education campaign begun because of the case. Boston Globe, in the same session.
Sources: globe-reader-questions
The Boston Globe published a long interview with Paula Devlin, one of the jurors who had already spoken to NBC10 Boston, and she described a piece of evidence the public has never seen. Partway through deliberations the jury watched a recording of Clancy being interviewed at Tewksbury Hospital in April by a psychiatrist and a psychologist who were evaluating her for the prosecution. It had been marked as an exhibit but was never played in open court and has not been released. What it showed them, Devlin said, was a woman who was delusional and did not believe she was doing anything wrong. Boston Globe, under Shelley Murphy's byline, at 8:43 p.m.
Sources: globe-devlin-interview
Devlin said the recording changed what the panel understood by altruistic filicide, the term for a parent who kills a child out of a delusional belief that it is best for the child. It convinced her that Clancy was deeply depressed and wanted to die, and that in that state, as Devlin put it, "her delusion was, her kids would be better off if she had to be gone, then they had to be gone." One of the three men on the jury, the same man who later refused to acquit, said after watching it that it made him step back from murder in the first degree and that he no longer thought the killings were premeditated. Boston Globe, at 8:43 p.m.
Sources: globe-devlin-interview
Devlin also said that jurors who have spoken publicly are being threatened. She does not know the full extent of it -- "I don't even know what all the threats are" -- but said enough have arrived that some of her fellow jurors are frightened, and are holding back from the subject they most want to raise, which is the mental health system and how it failed Clancy. She faults medicine in general and mental health care in particular, she said, for a system that has no answer for someone who keeps asking for help and keeps getting worse. Boston Globe, at 8:43 p.m.
Sources: globe-devlin-interview
Asked about a retrial, Devlin said she doubted twelve people could be brought to agree that Clancy is guilty of murder at any level: the defense's case was very strong, she said, and the panel did not reach 11-1 easily. A verdict of not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility would have been just, in her view, because it would have committed Clancy to a state psychiatric hospital, to be reviewed from time to time and released only if a judge found she was no longer a danger. Boston Globe, at 8:43 p.m.
Sources: globe-devlin-interview
Newsweek took the proposal up two days later and measured it against the standard it would narrow. Nothing has been filed and no bill carries a number, and Fuller has not said when one will. The federal test, 18 U.S.C. section 17, already puts the burden on the defendant to show by clear and convincing evidence that a severe mental disease or defect left them unable to appreciate the nature or the wrongfulness of the act; Massachusetts, where Clancy was tried, applies its own test of criminal responsibility. Kay Levine, a law professor at Emory University, told Newsweek the announcement reads to her as grandstanding, because insanity claims almost never succeed, and said scholars have treated the availability of the defense as a question of due process. Newsweek, at 10:31 a.m.
Sources: newsweek-fuller-insanity-bill
Reddington answered the senator six days later, in a statement his spokesman Dan Nardo released on Thursday and which was posted on X. He called the remarks despicable and dismissed them as rage bait. To call a woman who had asked for help over and over in the depths of postpartum depression, mania and psychosis a monster was reprehensible, he said, and Cruz did not come close to understanding what postpartum psychosis is, or the condition of medical and psychiatric care in this country. Instead of a rational observation, Reddington said, the senator had called for her execution. He closed with an invitation: any time Cruz wished to debate a question of that importance to the country, he knew where to find him. The rage-bait line was aimed at a particular part of what the senator had said: his remarks about the jury, which Reddington called ignorant. Reported by boston.com, under Abby Patkin's byline, on Friday at 9:14 a.m., by CT Insider, under Peter Yankowski's byline, and by the Boston Globe, under Kaitlin Lewis's byline, on Friday at 11:52 a.m.
Sources: bostoncom-ted-cruz-response, ctinsider-ted-cruz-response, globe-ted-cruz-response
A juror who gave her first name as Paula, and her age as 65, told WCVB that the deadlock still sits with her. Jurors are told they are not supposed to feel they failed, she said, but the task they were given was to come out unanimous and they could not, and everything the eleven tried did not move the twelfth: "I feel like we let down Lindsay." What the majority took from the evidence, she said, was that the medical community failed Clancy and with her the whole family, since an illness like that reaches everyone in a house, and that educating people better about it would help the family as a unit. Fox News, under Landon Mion's byline, at 9:53 p.m.
Sources: fox-juror-wcvb
She also gave a count of what the jury was sent out with: 297 pieces of evidence, among them Patrick Clancy's 911 call, which she said some jurors found hard to sit through again in the jury room. The panel polled itself as soon as it began -- eight for not criminally responsible, two for guilty, two undecided, the same figures she would give CBS the following morning. "We did not start out 11 to one," she said. "Everybody had different opinions and different reasons and different ways that they got there." The hard part, she said, was holding the children apart from the task, and the room worked at helping each other do it. Fox News, at 9:53 p.m.
Sources: fox-juror-wcvb
On the holdout, she said the majority could not follow his reasoning. He acknowledged at different points that he had doubt about the case the Commonwealth had put on, she said, and as the rest of the panel read the judge's instruction, doubt meant they could not convict on murder in the first degree, on murder in the second degree or on manslaughter. Sullivan then asked each juror whether they could apply the law as he had given it, and each said yes. "The judge has to believe that people are telling him the truth. And so, you know, 11 people told the truth and one maybe didn't. And I will never know why." Fox News, at 9:53 p.m.
Sources: fox-juror-wcvb
What would have changed things, on her account, was evidence. Had the holdout given the room anything to support his position, she said, the jury would not have sent the judge the note it sent. And had the court taken him off the panel, she would have thought it worth putting an alternate in his place and starting the deliberations over rather than ending the trial where it ended. Fox News, at 9:53 p.m.
Sources: fox-juror-wcvb
The New York Times, under Maia Spoto's byline, carried the jurors' account nationally, with more from Farina on how the two sides came across from the box. She called the prosecution harsh and the defense compassionate, and said the Commonwealth put on a great many medical experts but nobody who said Clancy had been a bad mother, which weighed with the jury. Devlin said the holdout brushed aside what the nurses on the panel told him about the medical evidence. Everything proved she loved her children, one of them said, so she had to have snapped.
Sources: nyt-juror-frustration
The Associated Press, under Jessica Hill's byline, also carried the juror accounts, and boston.com published them in the morning. Carlson gave the fullest version of the verdict slips: there were three to fill out, she wrote her signature on each one, and only then did the holdout say he still would not find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity. Farina called Patrick Clancy's 911 call the most horrific thing she heard. Devlin described the holdout as arrogant and said he dismissed what the rest of them told him. He has not publicly explained his position, and no outlet has named him.
Sources: ap-jurors-speak
Reddington told CBS Mornings he will ask Sullivan on September 29 to throw the case out rather than set it down for a second trial. The motion will be made on double jeopardy grounds, he said, on the argument that there was no manifest necessity for the mistrial. A judge has to have manifest necessity to discharge a jury, he said, for reasons that include the time the jurors, the court, its staff, the defendant and the prosecution all put into the trial. On September 4, NBC Boston reported that the hearing would take up a different motion, under Rule 25(b)(2), asking Sullivan to enter a required finding of not guilty.
Sources: cbs-motion-dismiss
In the same interview Reddington drew a line between a juror who holds out and one who will not follow the law. He would defend anybody's right to hold out for a month, he said, because that is what the system is for. What angered him was that the foreperson's note said plainly that the juror had reasonable doubt -- as the jurors have since confirmed publicly -- and that he then refused to follow the judge's instruction on the law. Reported by CBS News.
Sources: cbs-motion-dismiss
Asked how his client is, Reddington said she is not well. She is disappointed and sad, he said, and carries the same affect she has had for three and a half years. He said she is receiving psychiatric and medical care at Tewksbury and called the treatment good. Reported by CBS News.
Sources: cbs-motion-dismiss
NBC10 Boston published a written account of the juror interview in the morning, and Sue O'Connell's summary of it corrects a common reading of the deadlock: the panel did not begin at 11-1, and did not begin by taking a vote at all. It split in different ways across the three charges it had to consider -- murder in the first degree, murder in the second degree, and manslaughter. The jurors said they sent the judge three notes reporting they could not reach a unanimous decision, and that Carlson sent a further note of her own about a juror who would not follow the court's instruction on reasonable doubt. O'Connell described a panel that organized the evidence, asked questions and argued with each other, and that came out of it feeling it had failed.
Sources: nbcboston-jurors-deliberations
Carlson named the evidence that settled it for her: Clancy's journals, and the testimony of her former mother-in-law, who called her a nurturing and loving mother. The question in front of the jury was never whether she killed the children, Carlson said, because she admitted that; it was whether she knew right from wrong at the time. Everything in the case pointed to how much she loved them, and to Carlson that was proof she had snapped and had not known what she was doing.
Sources: nbcboston-jurors-deliberations
The jury played Patrick Clancy's 911 call again inside the deliberation room, Farina said, and the jurors cried. It is something she will never not hear if she thinks about it, she said. Carlson said it was horrible and that it made her feel sick.
Sources: nbcboston-jurors-deliberations
Reddington also faulted the bench for how the holdout was handled. Sullivan, he told CBS Mornings, should have put further questions to the juror about whether he was able to keep to the oath he had taken. Reported by CBS News.
Sources: cbs-motion-dismiss
Asked in the same interview about ending the case by agreement, Reddington said the route open to Cruz is to reduce the charges to murder in the second degree, and repeated that he would not agree to anything that had Clancy serving a day in jail. Reported by CBS News. He made the same point to WBZ-TV the day before, when CBS Boston noted in its own voice that second-degree murder is the charge that would give Clancy the choice of a trial before a judge.
Sources: cbs-motion-dismiss, cbs-pardon-strategy
CBS News put the planned motion to its own legal contributor, Caroline Polisi, who called it significant but a long shot. A hung jury is ordinarily followed by a second trial rather than a dismissal, she said, and if Sullivan were to allow the motion Clancy would go free. Reported by CBS News.
Sources: cbs-motion-dismiss
Reddington spoke up for Patrick Clancy in the same interview, more sharply than the day before, when he had said only that his client was Lindsay Clancy and no one else. What Patrick Clancy has been through is horrific, he said; he is entitled to move on with his life and to be left alone by the speculation and the conspiracy allegations, and the fact that he has moved on and still stands with Lindsay Clancy on the legal issues tells its own story. Of the 911 call Patrick Clancy made that night, Reddington said: "The gut-wrenching horror that is in his voice, no actor in California could ever imitate that." Reported by boston.com, under Abby Patkin's byline, at midday.
Sources: bostoncom-motion-dismiss, cbs-motion-dismiss, globe-reddington-patrick
Reddington gave NBC News's Laura Jarrett a fuller account of his client's condition than he had given CBS earlier in the day. She is not very good, he said, and is kept on a one-to-one suicide watch around the clock at Tewksbury. He worries about her every day, he said, though her family has stayed close to her. She talks about the children constantly, repeating that she wants her babies. He put the killings down to postpartum psychosis together with the medications she had been prescribed. Reported by NBC News and NBC10 Boston.
Sources: nbcnews-reddington-mental-state, nbcboston-reddington-interview
In the same interview Reddington said Clancy herself rejects what has been said online about her former husband. She certainly does not agree with it, he said, and he described their relationship as a strong one. Patrick Clancy has been set upon, he said, and his life turned into a nightmare he does not deserve. Reported by NBC News and NBC10 Boston.
Sources: nbcnews-reddington-mental-state, nbcboston-reddington-interview
WBUR asked lawyers with no part in the case what a second trial would take, and both told Deborah Becker that seating a jury would be the hard part of it. Jack Lu, a retired judge who teaches at Boston College Law School, said selection would be more intense than the first time and might run twice as long, and put the reason down to social media, which he said "seems to really have grabbed hold of this case." He does not accept the defense's account of the mistrial as an injustice, and described it instead as the system doing what it is meant to do. Keith Halpern, a defense attorney, expected candidates to be questioned closely about what they do on social media, and said a second jury would again hear Clancy described as a devoted mother who had gone looking for help. He does not believe twelve people will ever convict her of murder, and called the Commonwealth's case "probably the most inept prosecution of a significant case." Both spoke as outside observers, and neither has any role in the proceeding. WBUR reports that Cruz has still not said whether he will retry Clancy, on these charges or on lesser ones.
Sources: wbur-retrial-jury-selection
A fifth juror broke his silence, and the first man among the twelve to do so. Nick Dargie, 25, sat down with ABC News's Aaron Katersky on Wednesday for an interview the network trailed on Wednesday evening and put out on Good Morning America on Thursday morning. His account of the deadlock turns on what the holdout could not produce: Dargie said he asked him more than once to point to a piece of evidence, or to a witness, that supported the position he was taking, and that he could not do it. That, Dargie said, is why the note went to Sullivan. Reported by ABC News.
Sources: abc-dargie-juror
Dargie was careful to separate a juror who disagrees from a juror who will not explain himself. There is nothing wrong with holding a completely opposite opinion, he told ABC News: that is a hung jury, and that is the justice system working. What he objected to was that no evidence and no testimony was ever offered for the view being held. Reported by ABC News.
Sources: abc-dargie-juror
Reddington went on Good Morning America and appealed to President Trump directly, asking him to weigh the kind of person Clancy is and what she has been through and "consider a pardon." NBC Boston reported that the appeal has nowhere to go: the president's clemency power reaches federal charges only, and the three murder counts against Clancy were brought under Massachusetts law. CNN made the same point and added that on a state charge the clemency power belongs to the governor of Massachusetts, and that Clancy has been convicted of nothing to be pardoned from. Reported by ABC, NBC Boston, WJAR, CNN, the Boston Globe and boston.com.
Sources: abc-pardon-gma, nbcboston-pardon-gma, wjar-pardon-gma, cnn-plea-deal, globe-pardon-gma, bostoncom-pardon-gma
In the same interview Reddington said he would take a call from Cruz about ending the case without a second trial. He said he has known the district attorney for thirty years, is "willing to listen" to him, and hopes that after sitting through six or seven weeks of evidence from both sides Cruz will revisit the charges so the two can "work something out." Cruz has still not said whether he will retry the case. Reported by NBC Boston.
Sources: nbcboston-pardon-gma
Reddington also took back his own language from the day the mistrial was declared, when he had said outside court that he crushed Cruz. He called that bravado, spoken after the fact with emotions high at the end of a six- or seven-week trial, and said that on reflection he could have been more circumspect and claimed only that he had done a good job. He maintained that the defense case had been a strong one. Reported by NBC.
Sources: nbcct-pardon-gma
Asked to respond to the pardon appeal, the White House offered nothing new and referred back to what the president had already said about the case on Friday, when he told reporters he had been following it. Reported by NBC News.
Sources: nbcnews-pardon-gma
Howard Cooper, a lawyer for Patrick Clancy, issued a statement on behalf of Clancy and his family aimed at people who have claimed online that Patrick had a hand in his children's deaths. Cooper described months of what he called a relentless and escalating defamation campaign run by "minor celebrities, so-called influencers, and outright conspiracy theorists," said "enough is enough," and warned that "there will be consequences" and that every appropriate measure, including legal ones, would be used to hold those responsible to account. The statement said the claims have produced "real life threats to his reputation, livelihood, and life," and that they have not slackened since the mistrial. He said law enforcement had been notified. Patrick Clancy did not speak himself; the statement was released through Cooper and a publicist. Reported by the Boston Globe, CBS Boston, WBUR and boston.com, none of which gives the hour the statement was released.
Sources: globe-patrick-statement, cbs-patrick-statement, wbur-patrick-statement, bostoncom-patrick-statement
Reddington, asked about the online claims against Patrick Clancy, kept his distance from them. He said he had already said what he wanted to say on the subject during the trial, and that his client is Lindsay Clancy and no one else. The Boston Globe, which reported the remark, noted that Patrick Clancy has since remarried and moved to New York City; WBUR put the move only as out of Massachusetts. He was the first witness the Commonwealth called at the trial.
Shortly after the Good Morning America appearance, Reddington sat with WBZ-TV's Kristina Rex and was asked why he had appealed to a president who has no power over a state prosecution. He said the goal was simply to seek help: if Trump thought the case warranted that kind of intervention then, federal case or not, he "certainly has an awful lot of clout," and were he to reach out to Cruz -- both men are Republicans -- Cruz might listen and consider it. Any help at all, he said, would be helpful. CBS Boston published the account at midday and updated it in the evening.
Sources: cbs-pardon-strategy
The Plymouth County district attorney's office, asked by WBZ-TV to react to the pardon appeal, declined: "We have no comment on Reddington's comments," a spokesperson said. It is the office's first response to the appeal, and Cruz has still not said whether he will retry the case.
Sources: cbs-pardon-strategy
In the same WBZ-TV interview Reddington ruled out any negotiated outcome that put his client behind bars. Asked whether he would consider a plea, he said, "I would not plead Lindsay Clancy to a day in jail," that she does not deserve jail because she was sick, and that he could not live with himself if she served one. CBS Boston noted that no plea is available on the charges as they stand -- murder in the first degree in Massachusetts carries a mandatory sentence of life without parole and must be tried to a jury -- and that Cruz could instead go forward on second-degree murder, which would let Clancy choose to be tried by a judge.
Sources: cbs-pardon-strategy
Three of the jurors, all women, sat down with NBC10 Boston's Sue O'Connell, and the station published the interview in the afternoon. It names them, and they spoke on the record: Roni Carlson, a retired fifth-grade teacher, who served as foreperson; Kellie Farina, a chef; and Paula Devlin, who works for a defense contractor. Carlson, whose note out of the jury room during deliberations had told the court that a juror was conceding reasonable doubt and would still not join a verdict, described the moment he conceded it: "He admitted he had reasonable doubt and I started filling out the forms, I was so excited." He then added, she said, "But I'm still not going to say that she's not guilty by reason of insanity." All three described a holdout who would not listen to the rest of them, and the station says it has tried to reach him. The interview ran more than an hour, and the three described a jury room loud enough that the six alternates could hear the arguing and took it for fighting; they were set on reaching a verdict all the same. Reported by NBC Boston, and carried by NBC News later in the afternoon.
Sources: nbcboston-juror-interview, nbcdfw-juror-interview, nbcnews-juror-interview
CNN carried the NBC10 Boston interview under Nicki Brown's byline, with more from the two jurors who sat alongside the foreperson. One said the holdout could not get past that Clancy had killed her children, and that the panel kept turning him back to the judge's instruction on reasonable doubt; in their frustration, she said, jurors would get up and walk the room because they could not sit any longer. The other said he waved off what fellow jurors -- nurses among them -- told him about the toxicology evidence. "He was very arrogant," she said. "He really did not take anything that anybody said." CNN put the panel at nine women and three men.
Sources: cnn-juror-interview
A fourth juror spoke, separately and to a different station. A woman who sat as juror No. 5 talked to WBZ-TV's Kristina Rex on condition that she not be named, and said the case never resolved for her: "At the end of the day, there was so much doubt." The Commonwealth, she said, had no figurative smoking gun, and there was no moment in the case where she could say she was certain either that Clancy did it or that she did not. Neither report makes clear whether she is one of the three women who spoke to NBC10 Boston earlier in the afternoon.
Sources: cbs-juror-interview
Juror No. 5 declined to lay the deadlock on one man. The majority were firm in their positions from the beginning whichever side they were on, she said, and the holdout was not the only juror unwilling to see it another way; there were big personalities in that room, and what it came down to was an inability to move past your own convictions. Where she did fault him was on the law: if you acknowledge that reasonable doubt is there, she said, you cannot morally or legally convict, and a jury is there to give a defendant a fair trial by her peers. She did not think Clancy got that with him on the panel, not because he thought her guilty but because he could not back it up with any logic.
Sources: cbs-juror-interview
Juror No. 5 also said she had gone into deliberations thinking Clancy was guilty and criminally responsible, and that in a certain way she may still think it, while describing a woman who was not mentally healthy and was so deep in a mental health crisis that she could not see her way out of it.
Sources: cbs-juror-interview
The hardest thing she heard, juror No. 5 said, was Patrick Clancy's 911 call, played to the jury but never broadcast: "I will never be the same after that 911 call." She said she had since seen the online claims that Patrick was responsible and had convinced his wife otherwise, and that anyone who had heard that "visceral, blood-curdling scream" could not believe them -- she could not name an actor who could have performed it. To imagine living through it, and being the one to find the children, she said, shakes you.
Sources: cbs-juror-interview
The Boston Globe wrote up the NBC10 Boston interview and put a piece of evidence behind the holdout's concession: it was after the panel watched the videotaped interview the Commonwealth's forensic psychologist had conducted with Clancy, Carlson said, that he allowed he had reasonable doubt. She had signed all three verdict slips before he took it back. Devlin said the jurors went at the legal definition of reasonable doubt with him again and again, highlighting it and reading it back, and that he would not engage with them. Reached at their homes afterward by the Globe, Carlson and Farina would not add anything to what they had said on television.
Reddington told the Boston Globe he would like to thank the jurors for the time and effort they put in, but would not want to get into their deliberations. He also described what has come to his own door since the mistrial: exercise bands taken to his house -- the exercise bands were the means of the killings, and were in evidence at the trial -- and what he called nasty, vile voice messages left on his phone.
Sources: globe-reddington-jurors
A member of Congress said the mistrial had persuaded him to go after the insanity defense. Clay Fuller, a Republican who represents a Georgia district, wrote on Facebook that he is introducing federal legislation to limit the defense in federal crimes, and put his reasoning in two sentences: "Mental illness is not a get out jail free card. Lindsay Clancy is a monster." Local 3 News in Chattanooga, which covers Fuller, reported the post and set it beside the deadlock that prompted it, eleven jurors for a finding of lack of criminal responsibility and one against. Local 3 News, September 8.
Sources: local3-fuller-insanity-bill
A Sinclair station report the same day made the limit of the proposal plain: Clancy was charged under Massachusetts law, not federal law, so a federal bill would have changed nothing about her trial. Two Tennessee lawyers were quoted against the idea. Bill Speek, a defense attorney in Chattanooga, called it foolish and read it as the work of someone who has not tried cases. Jad Johnston, a public defender, made the point that an insanity acquittal is not a release: a defendant found not guilty on that ground is committed to a state psychiatric hospital. WJLA and other Sinclair stations, September 8 at 6:27 p.m.
Sources: sinclair-fuller-insanity-bill
Governor Healey, asked on Tuesday whether she would pardon Clancy, said the question is not hers to reach. Clemency in Massachusetts attaches to a conviction and there is none here: "I don't have the authority to pardon" without one, she said, and "I don't have authority to consider anything." The Globe set the answer against her own record, which is an unusually active one -- more than two dozen pardons since she took office, thirteen of them in her first year, and a blanket pardon in 2024 covering simple marijuana possession, but no commutation in nearly four years in office. A pardon or a commutation also needs the approval of the Governor's Council, and applicants are vetted first by an advisory board drawn from the Parole Board. Boston Globe, under Samantha J. Gross's byline, at 3:37 p.m.
Sources: globe-healey-pardon
A spokesperson for Michael Minogue, the Republican candidate for governor, was asked the same question and gave the same answer as the sitting governor, that the power does not exist without a conviction. "Simple no from us," Elizabeth Hopkins wrote to the Globe. Boston Globe, at 3:37 p.m.
Sources: globe-healey-pardon
Sullivan set the September 29 hearing for 9 a.m., to cover both a retrial date and Reddington's Rule 25(b)(2) motion for a required finding of not guilty, which must be filed within five days of the jury's dismissal. Sullivan said he'd rather try the case "sooner rather than later" and floated late fall as a rough window, while Cruz said only that he would decide on a retrial "shortly."
Sources: nbcboston-retrial-timing
Governor Maura Healey, asked about the mistrial, answered about the children rather than the jury. She said the case was "about the death of three innocent, beautiful little beings," that she continues to "mourn for them and for all impacted by this," and that the situation was horrific and tragic. She added that the trial had at least given people some understanding of maternal health and of postpartum illness. Reported by CBS Boston.
Sources: cbs-mistrial-live
Clancy went back to Tewksbury Hospital after the mistrial, to the same custody she has been held in since February 2023. CBS Boston described the place she is held: a 370-bed hospital run by the state Department of Public Health, with doctors on site, nursing around the clock, rehabilitation, psychology and social services and its own dialysis clinic. Dr. Avram Mack, the psychiatrist the Commonwealth called at trial, had testified that she told him she was not much interested in the physical therapy there, or in the food.
Sources: cbs-tewksbury-hospital
In the same report CBS Boston's I-Team set out the hospital's record of violence, drawn from its own reporting on the facility: a nurse who was choked in 2021, a stabbing in 2024, and attacks on staff in April of this year in which a pregnant employee was hit with a chair. Police have been called to the hospital thousands of times over the years. The state took nonlethal security equipment away from staff there and put it back after they objected.
Sources: cbs-tewksbury-hospital
Postpartum Support International, a national nonprofit for perinatal mental health with no part in the case, called for changes in the law the day the mistrial was declared. It said it was "disappointed but not surprised" that the jury could not reach a verdict, and that "the United States continues to prosecute mothers for the consequences of a severe, poorly understood, temporary, and treatable mental health condition related to childbirth." It pointed to more than two dozen countries, England, Canada and Australia among them, whose infanticide laws let a mother's mental state in the year after a birth bear on whether she is criminally responsible. Untreated postpartum psychosis, it said, carries a documented infanticide risk of roughly 1 to 4 percent. The organization said it would keep pressing for education, for emergency perinatal psychiatric care, and for laws in every state that treat these mothers as patients.
Sources: psi-reform-statement
Sullivan ordered the jurors' names withheld from public release until September 18, unless he directs otherwise for good cause. He wrote that the case had drawn significant and divisive attention in Massachusetts, nationally and internationally, that the trial had been carried live on local and national channels, and that social media posts had raised issues about how people might react to a verdict; he also pointed to the woman charged with recording jurors as they left the courthouse. The order leaves any juror free to come forward and to speak publicly about serving. The Boston Globe, which reported the order on Tuesday, does not say who sought it or whether anyone did.
Sources: globe-juror-impoundment
A lawyer for the Boston Globe asked the court to open up the questioning of jurors -- by the bench, by the Commonwealth and by the defense -- to the public. Jurors were questioned at sidebar during empanelment, and again during deliberations after the foreperson reported that one juror was declining to follow the law while expressing some doubt about Clancy's criminal responsibility. The motion argues the public's right of access reaches jury selection, the trial itself and post-verdict inquiries into influences on jurors. No ruling on it has been reported. Reported by the Boston Globe, which filed it.
Sources: globe-juror-impoundment
National politicians began commenting on the outcome within hours of it. President Trump, asked about the case on Friday, called it a shame, said Clancy had done a horrible thing, that a price would be paid -- "a mental institution, or jail, or something" -- and that he expected her to be tried again. boston.com took the remarks from a clip the White House posted on social media; Fox News placed them in an Oval Office gaggle. Fox also gathered criticism from Republican officeholders elsewhere, chief among them Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who called the mistrial a miscarriage of justice and said the victims had deserved better than a "kangaroo court," and cited critical posts from Representatives Nancy Mace and Michael Rulli and Senator Mike Lee. Reported by boston.com, under Abby Patkin's byline, on September 4, and by Fox News, under Elaine Mallon's byline, on September 5 at 12:55 p.m.
Sources: bostoncom-trump-mistrial, fox-gop-reaction
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas -- a different Cruz from Timothy Cruz, the Plymouth district attorney deciding whether to bring the case again -- took the mistrial up the same evening on the Newsmax program Finnerty. He called the outcome infuriating and heartbreaking, described it as the intersection of ideology and lawlessness, and said it was the modern version of the O.J. Simpson trial. There was no dispute, he said, that "this monster of a mother" had murdered all three children, and he put her conduct as a deliberate, systematic strangling of one child after another. Whatever was said about her mental state, he argued, anyone who kills three children should at a minimum spend the rest of their life in prison, "if not go to death row." Newsmax, in an account published late on September 4.
Sources: newsmax-ted-cruz, bostoncom-ted-cruz-response, ctinsider-ted-cruz-response
Day by day
Every sitting day the archive has dated, in calendar order, with the phase of the trial, the archive's coverage label and the witnesses reported on the stand. Each date opens a page that mirrors the archive's full account of that day: key points, witness by witness, rulings, the procedural sequence, exhibits and the prose account. These are summaries of press reporting, not transcript; use dates, never day numbers, to join them to anything else.
Day-by-day accounts of the trial compiled from contemporaneous press reporting of open-court proceedings. These are SUMMARIES OF REPORTING, not transcript, not testimony, and not a record of what any person said. They live in their own file and their own index table for exactly that reason, and they must never be merged into data/transcripts/ or the segments table.
Each entry states what reporting said happened on that date. Where coverage is thin the entry says so rather than filling the gap. 'coverage' is an honest confidence label: 'reported' means multiple outlets described the day's testimony; 'sparse' means only the witness list or a single detail is known; 'unverified' means the content is carried over from the original hand-built session list and has not been confirmed against reporting.
Press coverage captures a small fraction of what is said in a courtroom and skews toward dramatic moments. Absence from these summaries is not evidence that something did not happen.
2026-09-04 5:20 p.m. ET
Outlets number trial days inconsistently. Some count from empanelment, some from opening statements, and some count only days on which testimony was heard. A day described in the press as the twelfth day of testimony corresponds to August 12, 2026, which is this file's ordinal 12 by coincidence rather than by construction. Use dates, never day numbers, when joining this file to anything else.
Days with 'witness_detail' are broken out witness by witness with their own testimony points, plus separate exhibit, ruling and procedural tracks. The prose 'summary' is retained for search and for days not yet restructured.
Jury sworn, preliminary instructions including the criminal responsibility standard, and opening statements from both sides, followed by the Commonwealth's first witness, Patrick Clancy, who was still on direct examination when the judge ended the day about an hour early. Court did not sit the following day; testimony resumed Wednesday.
Patrick Clancy's second and final day: the January 24 errand minute by minute, the discovery of the scene, the 911 call played with the cameras off, two five-minute corroboration witnesses from the CVS and the restaurant, and a long defense cross-examination on the prescribing record and on the days he had left her alone with the children.
First responders, ten of them, in roughly the order they reached the house. Eight went unchallenged; the two the defense did cross-examine were the paramedics who had described the defendant's own wrist and neck wounds as superficial.
A morning jury view of the Duxbury house, the CVS and the restaurant, then a half sitting of hospital evidence: two custody officers whose cross-examinations built the defense's suicide-attempt record, two emergency physicians the defense did not cross at all, and the toxicology chain of custody.
Fourteen Commonwealth witnesses, East Idaho News's numbers 19 through 32: the emergency and intensive care physicians who treated Cora and Callan, the South Shore emergency physician and the crime scene technician who documented the defendant's own injuries, the two Brigham and Women's intensive care nurses and the two psychiatrists who saw her during her admission, the Duxbury sergeant who swept the house, the chain of custody on her blood and urine, the trooper who searched the bedroom, and the trooper through whom both sides read her journals to the jury.
Eight witnesses, seven of them State Police, and one procedural event that reshaped the trial. Before the jury was seated, Lindsay Clancy was sworn and stipulated to the Commonwealth's chain-of-custody, blood, DNA and exercise-band evidence - Exhibit J - and Judge Sullivan accepted it at about 9:45 after finding her knowing, intelligent, voluntary and competent. It was the first time the public heard her voice. What followed was the forensic case nobody was contesting: the South Shore Hospital surgeon who called her neck and wrist cuts superficial and then conceded on cross that she had not known her patient later coded at Brigham and Women's; the lieutenant who counted the pills left in nine bottles and could not say why the nightstand drawer was never emptied; the crime lab toxicologists who identified her prescribed medications but were not equipped to measure them; the analyst who found no substances at all in the three children; and the bloodstain supervisor who agreed with the Commonwealth that the window sill could have been gripped and with the defense that the mirror drips could be cast-off from a knife.
A half day, scheduled as one, that finished the Commonwealth's forensic case in under three hours. The physician assistant who stitched her wrists put the cuts at three centimeters and two, said none went through into the fat, and then agreed on cross that she was critically ill and could not have walked out. The outside toxicologist gave the jury the numbers the crime lab could not: four psychiatric medications, one of them - the antipsychotic quetiapine - about double expectation and nowhere near a suicidal concentration, and two benzodiazepines at or below what he would have expected, which is the Commonwealth's answer to the over-medication theory; on cross he agreed the numbers alone do not tell the story. The DNA on the blue band and the basement stain came in by the parties' agreement; the analyst who testified to the rest was interrupted by an objection that her evidence was DNA gobbledygook, which was overruled. And the family's former nanny, called 45th by the prosecution, told the jury she was a wonderful mother who loved her children, that she knew about the postpartum illness and the insomnia and the weight loss, and that she saw nothing else at all.
Eleven witnesses, Commonwealth numbers 46 through 56. The morning opens with the autopsy of the youngest child and closes the Commonwealth's death evidence for him; the rest of the day is the people who saw the family from the outside — a pediatrician, three preschool teachers, a nursing colleague, two friends, the father-in-law, a family friend — and every one of them says she looked like a good mother. After the jury goes home the lawyers argue the defense's three late expert witnesses.
The two clinicians who were actually treating her take the stand: the McLean psychiatrist who discharged her nineteen days before, and the psychiatrist who saw her fourteen times by video and last saw her the day before. Both say they saw no psychosis; the cross-examination of the first is the defense's best hour of the trial so far.
The treating psychiatrist is cross-examined for most of the day on her inexperience, her telemedicine-only practice, the records she never obtained and the medication she increased the day before the killings; on redirect she tells the jury she saw no psychosis and no mania at any point, and the Commonwealth produces a pill bottle that undercuts the medication theory. The perinatal nurse practitioner who treated Clancy in November begins her evidence late in the afternoon.
A near-single-witness day, and the fullest account the jury has had of the seven weeks of psychiatric care before January 24. The perinatal nurse practitioner who took over Clancy's care in late November told the jury she saw no mania and no psychosis, that Clancy never disclosed a plan or a thought of harming her children, and that she had no concern about postpartum psychosis — and, on cross, conceded she never spoke to the treating psychiatrist, never learned why a Rhode Island program would not take Clancy, and never followed up after Clancy was admitted to a locked ward at McLean. The day opened with an unresolved argument over adding a former McLean social worker as a defense witness.
Six witnesses: the State Police evidence officer and a contested voir dire over the defense psychologist, the counselor who saw the defendant four times in December, two hospital guards, and the two medical examiners on Cora and Dawson.
Three State Police forensic and investigative witnesses on the Surface Pro, the iPhone and the scene — and a cross-examination that left the Commonwealth's own witnesses unable to say who was behind either device.
The Commonwealth rests after its Cellebrite forensic examiner, the motion for a required finding of not guilty and the alternative request to reduce the charge are both denied, and the defense opens with a former colleague, the defendant's sister and mother, and its first expert.
The defense expert case opens: the former mother-in-law, a psychiatrist admitted over objection, a forensic pathologist fought to a standstill on cross, and the first account of the voice.
The defense's criminal-responsibility opinion, an hour and a quarter of cross-examination aimed at the expert rather than the diagnosis, a TikTok witness excluded but her subject matter admitted in documents, and an unexplained early end.
A single defense witness on the stand for well under an hour, a jury polled one by one under oath before evidence began and sent home before eleven, and then, with the jury gone, the first sustained fight over the jury instructions. Sheila Cavanaugh, the Brigham and Women's chaplain who met Lindsay Clancy the morning after the killings, gave the jury a second account of a reported command hallucination and then conceded on cross-examination that her own detailed chaplaincy notes never mention it. In the afternoon session the Commonwealth asked for a criminal responsibility charge with no intoxication component and opposed any lesser included offense; the defense asked for involuntary intoxication and involuntary manslaughter. The judge decided nothing and undertook to circulate a draft charge on Friday. Outside, several hundred supporters in pink held a silent standout that the jurors drove past on their way in.
The defense's psychiatric expert, testifying by video after a thirty-five minute connection failure, told the jury Clancy was psychotic on the day she killed her children, that she heard a voice commanding the killings and felt her body taken over by an external force, and — in an opinion three outlets carry — that she was unable to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law. On cross-examination the Commonwealth put his own writing on faked symptoms to him and contrasted Clancy with Andrea Yates. The defense rested at about 11:52. The Commonwealth's rebuttal case opened minutes later with a psychiatrist of its own, Dr. Avram Mack, who held the stand through the afternoon and gave the jury the mirror image of the defense case: a major depressive episode rather than bipolar disorder, no mania, no psychotic symptoms, an onset outside the DSM's postpartum window, and conduct on January 24 he called methodical and goal-directed. At about 14:44 he gave the opinion the Commonwealth called him for — that Clancy retained the capacity for criminal responsibility — and outlets now carry him on both limbs of the McHoul standard. Kevin Reddington's cross-examination began at about 14:50 and went at the finding that there was never any mania, and at Mack's reliance on an account he took from Clancy herself in a psychiatric hospital. Late in the afternoon the cross reached how the Commonwealth came to retain him — through a firm called Park Dietz and Associates — and the prosecution's objection to that line was sustained; by 15:28 Reddington had turned to whether a psychiatrist whose work has been in child and adolescent mental health and addiction is qualified to speak to postpartum conditions at all. His evidence was still running at the latest reporting.
Reddington's cross of the Commonwealth's rebuttal expert ended some time between 10:43 and 10:47 — NBC News's national live blog is the only outlet to describe how it closed, on a last question about whether Clancy's thyroid should have been checked by blood work while her doctors were prescribing her a number of psychiatric medications; Mack agreed in general terms but resisted the framing, and Reddington answered "I don't care" and told the judge he was done. It came after Dr. Avram Mack said he found no evidence of psychosis in Clancy's record and that he takes no position on the care she was given. On redirect the Commonwealth had him say he is paid whatever opinion he reaches, and offered the videotape of his two interviews with Clancy at Tewksbury Hospital into evidence; Judge Sullivan took counsel to sidebar and no ruling is reported. After the sidebar the Globe reports him acknowledging that a Florida court had struck his opinion in a separate case, where earlier in the morning he said he did not believe it was. NBC News adds that the Commonwealth spent its last minutes with him seeking to reaffirm that Clancy had been diagnosed with postpartum depression and not postpartum psychosis, and that Reddington interjected over Mack's evidence that he had had a difficult time seeing Clancy while she was hospitalized. He stepped down at about 11:08, on the same major-depressive-episode diagnosis he arrived with. NBC News also carries a morning the other outlets only partly recorded: the judge telling Mack to listen to the question and answer it after Reddington pressed him on his annual earnings, and directing him again during the exchange in which Reddington told him postpartum is not a disease; the Commonwealth objecting that he had answered a question repeatedly; and the name of the instrument behind the sharpest exchange of the morning, the K Scale. The jury came back from the morning recess at about 11:51 and the Commonwealth called Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, the forensic psychologist who ran the psychological testing at Tewksbury and diagnosed the bipolar II that Mack declined to adopt. Jennifer Sprague took his direct, which by 12:15 had covered his publications, some 330 appearances as a witness mostly for the defense, the retention and confirmation biases he says he works to guard against, and the three days he spent with Clancy at Tewksbury in April over 180 hours of work on the case. Asked about working with Mack, he said the two of them interviewed her at the same time but wrote separate reports and did not agree on the diagnosis. At 12:13 he set out the evaluation itself — about ten hours with Clancy, interviews with her former husband and former mother-in-law, and a documentary record he has been reading since January 2025 — and the Patriot Ledger, summarizing the direct at 12:28, gives both time figures together as about 180 hours on the case including about 10.5 hours of interviews. By 12:22 he had reached her history: a fairly limited mental health record before September 2022, anxiety tied to achievement and to leaving her children, no childhood abuse or trauma reported, and then an autumn in which she became very anxious about going back to the night shift while her youngest would not take a bottle, was prescribed Zoloft in October 2022, and, in his words, found things getting very difficult from that point. From there the direct followed the record forward: her former husband's account that her anxiety worsened on Zoloft, a text to her mother-in-law from an emergency room in November 2022, and her own belief that the medications were causing the reactions; a December of numbness, weight loss, hopelessness and what she called horrible intrusive thoughts about harming herself and at times her children, which Heilbrun said she described as her own thoughts rather than a voice from outside her head — an important distinction, he told the jury at 12:31, because an external voice would likely be a psychotic symptom. At 12:34 he said a Rhode Island postpartum program found in late December that she did not meet its criteria, and that she admitted herself to McLean Hospital on January 1, 2023 on suicidal thinking; Boston 25 has her leaving McLean with no psychosis and no suicidal or homicidal thinking, and the suicidal thoughts back a week later. By 12:38 he had put the McLean admission at five days, with insomnia her primary complaint, her mood numb, and her telling staff that her children and her mother were the reason she would not kill herself. At 12:37 the Globe has him aiming the intrusive-thought distinction squarely at the defense case, contrasting what she reported before the killings with the auditory hallucinations the defense says she experienced while she strangled the children. At 12:43 he said she told her providers the medications were making her worse, and listed the diagnoses she was given between the fall of 2022 and January 2023 as generalized anxiety, sleep deprivation, postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis — the last of them a diagnosis Mack said this morning he found no evidence of anywhere in her record. The Patriot Ledger, posting at 12:46, names South Shore Hospital as the emergency room she went to in mid-November, dates her doubts about the medications to mid-October, and runs the intrusive thoughts through December and into January. Then, at about 12:49, he gave the jury his diagnosis: bipolar II, reached, he said, only after long consideration, because he could not find a manic episode in her history before the killings and would not call the cleaning out of a garage mania. What settled it, on the Globe's 12:54 account, was that Clancy is now being treated for bipolar disorder at Tewksbury Hospital and that taking her off a mood stabilizer had produced a response in her straight away; the Patriot Ledger has him calling bipolar disorder the diagnosis of record there and writing that he declined bipolar 1 because he saw no clear example of manic behavior until January 24, 2023. He said the disorder typically emerges in a person's twenties or thirties, that he was focused on evaluating criminal responsibility, and at 12:57 that he had run psychological testing looking at her response style and checking for hallucinations, delusions and a lack of focus. The Patriot Ledger, filing at 1:28 p.m. after the court had risen, names the instruments — the MMPI, screening her response style for exaggeration, minimization or fabrication of symptoms, and a second test measuring tangential speech and cognitive disorganization — and has him going on to review her symptoms around January 24, 2023, including depression and suicidal thinking, before the recess was called. That is the first report of his direct reaching the day of the killings; no outlet reports what the testing showed, or what he concluded about that day. It is a diagnosis the Commonwealth's first expert declined to make. He has not yet been asked what he concluded about her mental state on January 24. Judge Sullivan sent the jury out for lunch just before 1 p.m., with testimony to resume at 2 p.m. NBC News's own account of the diagnosis, posted at 12:57, is the fullest reported statement of his reasoning: bipolar II is a classification not associated with mania, and the diagnosis was difficult because Clancy had depressive episodes but described nothing that seemed to him like mania — the periods when she was higher in energy looked to him like her simply feeling good, feeling close to her husband and her children and getting back into exercise. NBC News also carries a stretch of the autumn the other outlets did not: racing thoughts, lost appetite and difficulty sleeping through the fall of 2022, a fear that she had become addicted to or dependent on benzodiazepines, and her sense by late fall that she had reached what she herself called the end of her rope. It dates the intrusive thoughts about harming herself to late November and those about the children to January, where the Globe puts both in December and the Patriot Ledger dates the onset to early December; CBS Boston, whose account of Heilbrun's evidence appeared later in the day, gives a fourth version, late November and early December, with the thoughts about the children undated. The conflict is logged unresolved. CBS Boston also carries his history evidence in terms close to the Globe's, dates the Zoloft to mid-October, and describes his roughly 330 appearances as cases about competency to stand trial where the Globe puts the same number on cases dealing with mental health issues in adults and juveniles. Two outlets read for the first time in this compilation, Hearst Connecticut's News-Times and Fox News Digital, add to his direct examination that he does contract work for Park Dietz Associates — the firm through which the Commonwealth engaged Mack — that Clancy had about six months of treatment for anxiety in nursing school, that she got the Zoloft prescription from Dr. Jennifer Tufts and did not begin it until October, and that he settled on bipolar II because it was the diagnosis of the hospital holding her. Hearst Connecticut states flatly that the lunch recess came before he gave any conclusion on criminal responsibility. Court resumed at about 2:15 and the direct examination is still running. The first evidence filed from the afternoon is the result of that psychological testing: the Boston Globe has him saying it showed a slight tendency to underreport symptoms, calling Clancy a bright woman, and saying it showed she was and remains at risk for suicide, and Boston 25 has him putting her one-to-one suicide watch at Tewksbury State Hospital at three years and continuing. Shortly after half past two he reached the day itself. He told the jury the ordinary motives for killing did not fit Clancy, that acute psychosis with command hallucinations was one possible explanation, and that people also sometimes kill their children when they are about to end their own lives believing they are sparing them further suffering — and he placed Clancy in the second category, even though she had told him a voice told her to kill her children and herself. Boston 25 files the same answer as a belief that she killed the children as part of a serious suicide attempt, wanting them with her so they would not suffer when she was gone, and NBC News quotes him giving both explanations in one answer. From about 2:35 p.m. he turned to why he does not accept the command hallucination. Four outlets have him telling the jury that Clancy heard the voice only across the 18 minutes or so the killings took, never before that night and never since, a pattern he called very, very unusual to put it mildly; that she gave different people different versions of what it said, and that the more inconsistency there is the harder it becomes to credit any one account; and — the Boston Globe alone — that genuine psychotic hallucinations can be intermittent where hers was constant, and that she never reported trying to stop it or distract herself from it as people in the throes of psychosis often do. NBC News and the Patriot Ledger have him saying he treats with caution a symptom said to have appeared only while an offense was being committed, since that timing conveniently reduces the blame. NBC News also has him allowing that if she truly heard the voice as described, that would be a command hallucination and a symptom of psychosis. He told the jury he had weighed a second motive, that she feared the children would be taken from her and knew as a mandated reporter that saying so could cost her them, and no outlet reports what he made of it. From about 2:55 p.m. he stopped listing reasons to doubt the command hallucination and gave the jury something in its place. The Boston Globe reports him saying his assessment suggested Clancy was describing exaggerated or fabricated hallucinations, and NBC News reports the count behind it — about three points on which her account more closely resembled an exaggerated or fabricated hallucination, one on which it looked more genuine, and one mixed. The point in her favor was that she described the voice as external rather than as something inside her own mind; against it, on his evidence, were the absence of any accompanying delusion, which he put at about 88 percent of command hallucinations and which the Patriot Ledger also carries, the brevity of the episode, and her failure to report any attempt to stop it, which the Ledger reports him illustrating with praying or listening to music. What he offered instead was an unwelcome intrusive thought of the kind she had been reporting for months, an explanation four outlets carry, and he used her own answer to her husband as a test of it: asked what she had done, she said she had tried to kill herself, where he said someone acting on a command hallucination would more likely have been vague. The Boston Globe also has him doubting that her conditions were connected to a birth eight months earlier at all, and calling the postpartum psychosis explanation appealing and a convenient way of lessening culpability. At 2:58 p.m. he told the jury that months of thoughts and impulses preceded a serious suicide attempt, that she was in pain, suffering and even desperate, that she was convinced her children would suffer without her, and that she said “Go to God, baby” to each child expecting to be reunited with them in heaven; the Patriot Ledger states the conclusion flatly as a suicide attempt rather than a psychotic episode. The same post carries the first line in his evidence to touch the legal test — that Clancy told him the wrongfulness of what she was doing had not been in her mind at all — and it is her statement, not his opinion. The lawyers were then called to a sidebar. At the time of this compilation, about 15:09, that is as far as his evidence has been reported: an opinion on why she did it, his reasons for rejecting the explanation the defense relies on, and nothing yet on whether she could appreciate that it was wrong or conform her conduct to the law. In the minutes after that, two outlets diverged on the central point. The Boston Globe at 3:00 p.m. has him naming the killings “suicide combined with altruistic filicide,” or killing your kids out of love, describing a highly lethal suicide attempt preceded by months of thoughts and impulses about harming herself, in which the decision to kill the children was likely an attempt to keep them from suffering without her. NBC News at 3:07 p.m. has him saying that her first words to her husband — that she had tried to kill herself, with no mention of the voice or of the children — lead him to think this was not altruistic filicide but an extreme suicide attempt. The site records both and resolves neither. Boston 25’s courtroom posts corroborated the pain and suffering testimony, the exchange with Patrick Clancy and the “Go to God” evidence, and added one thing no other outlet has: that he told the jury he had asked Clancy, a devout Catholic, whether that was a mortal sin, and that an objection and a sidebar followed. At 3:04 p.m., after a sidebar, Judge Sullivan sent the jury out for a brief recess. The direct examination was unfinished when he did, cross-examination has not begun, and Heilbrun has still not been reported being asked whether Clancy could appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or conform it to the law. The afternoon did not end with the evidence. At about 3:04 p.m. the judge sent the jury out after a sidebar without giving a reason, and what followed, out of the jury’s hearing, was a defense motion for a mistrial — the first this compilation has recorded in the trial. The subject was the defendant’s religion. Boston 25 had reported at 2:54 p.m. that Heilbrun told the jury he had asked Clancy, a devout Catholic, whether that was a mortal sin, and that an objection and a sidebar followed; NBC News reports him describing her statements about the children going to God as contrary to the belief of her Catholic religion, offered as part of his evaluation of her view of moral wrong; the Boston Globe, reporting the argument, describes the question as concerning her faith’s doctrine against suicide. Reddington called it intentional misconduct by prosecutors. Sprague said her question had nothing to do with religion and that Clancy had told Heilbrun she “had knowledge” of Catholicism treating suicide as a sin, and that this went to whether she knew the killings to be morally wrong; prosecutors said the witness had not intended to be inflammatory and asked for a curative instruction rather than a mistrial. That is what the judge gave. He refused to declare a mistrial, told the Commonwealth to tell its witness he could not go into that, said he would try to minimize the damage, and instructed the jury in emphatic terms that the religion the defendant was raised with is an absolutely inappropriate area of testimony, that it is to be stricken and cannot be considered, and that Heilbrun’s understanding of Catholic teaching is irrelevant and immaterial. The jury was then sent home for the day. Heilbrun returns Tuesday with his direct examination unfinished; he has still not been reported answering the criminal responsibility question, and no cross-examination has begun. The accounts filed in the half hour after the adjournment fill in the argument and the refusal. The Patriot Ledger and CBS Boston quote Reddington saying the testimony was “just over the top” and “the same thing again — talking about religion, talking about heaven”, and report that religion had come into the trial once before, when Sprague mentioned mortal sin while questioning Patrick Clancy’s mother; Reddington objected then and did not move for a mistrial, and CBS Boston reports that earlier question struck. Sprague answered that she had asked no question about religion and that there was no intentional misconduct, and told the court she did not think the witness meant to do any harm. Judge Sullivan, on the Ledger’s account, said the witness had testified that Clancy was raised Catholic and had then given an opinion on the Catholic conception of heaven, asked “How is any of that proper?”, refused the mistrial and told the prosecutors to make clear to the witness that he could not go into it. CBS Boston published the passage itself, which contains both her expectation of being reunited with the children in heaven and his question about whether suicide is a mortal sin. After the jury had been instructed and sent home the Boston Globe reports Sullivan saying the Commonwealth has one more witness after Heilbrun, that testimony resumes Tuesday, and that closing arguments are expected Wednesday — the first date for closings this compilation has attributed to the bench — before calling the lawyers back to a sidebar with the jury gone. After the courtroom emptied the Associated Press filed the wire account of the day, which in the version filed at about 2:36 p.m. leads on the diagnosis rather than the mistrial motion and quotes Heilbrun in his own words on why bipolar II was a hard conclusion to reach and on the manic episode he could not find. NBC News published the passage of testimony that caused the motion, matching CBS Boston, and put the earlier religion incident on the record as the prosecution’s cross-examination of Clancy’s former mother-in-law last week — the exchange recorded here on August 18, in which the question was whether she was aware that murder is considered a mortal sin. Which prosecutor asked that question is now itself in dispute between outlets. Fox News Digital, filing at about 4:10 p.m., reported the judge calling the testimony “problematic”, a word no other outlet attributes to him. By then the Boston Globe and NBC Boston had both closed their live blogs and turned their pages into accounts of the day, and no outlet had added anything further to what Heilbrun told the jury. The last post of all, from NBC News at about 4:20 p.m., describes the room instead of the evidence: Reddington throwing down his pen as the witness began on mortal sin and Clancy’s Catholicism, Clancy and her parents not visibly reacting, and the gallery whispering through the argument until a court officer quieted it. Later still, at about 4:34 p.m., NBC News reported the first words from counsel outside the courtroom. Reddington told reporters he believes the jurors will follow the judge’s instruction to put the religion testimony out of their minds, said it had been a good trial and that the evidence had come out, and would not say whether the episode might give a ground for appeal — an appeal, as NBC News notes, that could only follow a conviction. Asked about his client he said she does not have a mindset at the moment and that she sits and listens. No other outlet carries any of it, and nothing filed since the adjournment has added a word to Dr. Kirk Heilbrun’s evidence.
THE WIRE WAS REWRITTEN AT ABOUT 4:54 P.M., AND IT IS THE FIRST FILING SINCE THE ADJOURNMENT TO ADD TO THE EVIDENCE. The Associated Press replaced Michael Casey’s earlier story with a longer one that leads on the conclusion rather than the diagnosis — Clancy was not acutely psychotic when she killed the three children, and that she took their lives so they would not “suffer” once she had taken her own — and that carries the mistrial motion, the refusal and the instruction, none of which the earlier version had. It gives the reason he ruled out acute psychosis with command hallucinations: he did not credit her account of a voice telling her to “kill the children so you can kill yourself”, which is the wire’s direct quotation of the version NBC News reported at 2:47 p.m. It carries the eighteen-minute answer in full and the “Go to God, baby. Go to God” quotation, both already on this page from other outlets, and it reports the jury being told to disregard the reference to “the religion that the defendant was raised with”, which the judge called “an absolutely inappropriate area of testimony”. Two minutes before the wire moved, Hearst Connecticut turned its day-19 file into a recap. It quotes the instruction at greater length, is the first outlet to name the prosecutor the judge told to speak to his witness — Sprague, who had been conducting the direct examination — and sets out the August 18 mortal sin exchange word for word, with Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham asking it. That is a second account against the Patriot Ledger’s, which named Sprague, and the conflict is logged in the evidence file rather than resolved. Neither filing adds anything to where Heilbrun’s direct examination stopped.
An eleventh outlet filed on the sitting after five o’clock. ABC News had carried nothing of day 19 until this evening; its live file, updated at about 5:02 p.m. under the bylines of Peter Charalambous, Mason Leib and Katie Kindelan, is a further account of the mistrial motion and adds three things to the record here. It is the first to report Kevin Reddington explaining why the August 18 mortal sin question did not draw a motion at the time: he told the court that not moving then had been a “tactical decision”, and that this second instance was too much. It is the first to give Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague’s answer whole — that there was no intentional conduct by the Commonwealth, that the questioning was not where she had intended to go, and that she did not think the witness intended to do any harm either but was explaining his rationale — where the Patriot Ledger and Hearst Connecticut had each carried part of it. And it is the first to give the time the sitting resumes, 9 a.m. Tuesday with Dr. Kirk Heilbrun still on the stand. Its account of the direct examination adds his evidence that the brief January 2023 inpatient stay left Clancy with “a small shred of hope” before she worsened again, and his own explanation of why the diagnosis was hard, that a lot of providers had offered a lot of diagnoses between mid-October 2022 and late January 2023 with a lot of complicating considerations. Its account of the morning quotes a passage of the cross-examination of Dr. Avram Mack that no other outlet has published, in which Mack said he saw no signs of psychosis or delusions in the records and Reddington told him he was being asked about the young lady sitting in the courtroom whom he was testifying against. That post is stamped 12:37 p.m. and has the redirect examination still running, where the outlets compiled here have Mack stepping down at about 11:08; it is treated as a late filing and the times on this page are unchanged. Nothing in the ABC News file bears on where Heilbrun’s direct examination stopped. Late in the evening boston.com rewrote its page into a recap of the whole sitting and became the fullest single account of the afternoon. It supplies the question Heilbrun was answering when he said Clancy had not been thinking about the wrongfulness of what she was doing — he had asked her whether she was aware at the time that it was illegal or immoral — and quotes her answer as he reported it: “No thoughts, no decisions, none of that. It was just all action.” It quotes him choosing between his two explanations in his own words, gives the psychological testing in fuller form, sets out the mistrial argument at greater length on both sides, and quotes the judge saying he did not want the jury leaving with the last thing they heard being this witness's understanding of Catholic teaching. None of it changes what is still missing: his direct examination is unfinished, the criminal responsibility question has not been put to him, and cross-examination has not begun. CNN filed a written story at about 4:35 p.m., under the bylines of Eric Levenson and Nicki Brown, and it is the twelfth outlet on the day. It adds little to the narrative the live blogs have already built, but it goes to both of the conflicts left open at the adjournment. On the first, it reports Heilbrun describing the killings as altruistic filicide, which it glosses as killing one's children out of love — and it draws that description from the very evidence NBC News reported him using to reject the term, that the first thing Clancy said to her husband was that she had tried to kill herself. Two outlets now take that evidence one way and one the other; nothing here settles it. On the second, it reports the judge saying the Commonwealth's remaining witnesses are likely to finish Tuesday and that closing arguments are expected Wednesday, and it is the only account to add that he cautioned the timeline is subject to change. It also gives Heilbrun's meeting figure in a form that fits both of the figures already on this page, and it is the only outlet to describe what the jurors did while the judge was striking the evidence. Two further filings came in after six o’clock, both from outside the pages this compilation tracks. WHDH’s 7News, the thirteenth outlet on the day, filed a story by Jonathan Hall at about 5:27 p.m., and Boston 25 filed a standalone article by Bob Ward at about 5:42 p.m. alongside the live blog it had run since the morning. Neither adds to the evidence the jury heard, and both are shorter than the recaps already on this page, but between them they touch two of the conflicts left open at the adjournment. WHDH gives the words the witness was speaking when Reddington objected — a fragment no other outlet carries, and one in which Heilbrun is reporting what he told Clancy rather than what he asked her. Boston 25, whose live blog had put the Catholic doctrine at issue on murder where every other account put it on suicide, now describes it in its own filed story as suicide. And both name Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham as the prosecutor who asked the struck question on August 18, WHDH quoting the exchange in full, which leaves the Patriot Ledger’s account of the mistrial argument alone in naming Jennifer Sprague. Nothing here is resolved on this page; the positions are recorded as the outlets filed them. WHDH is also the first outlet to describe Tuesday as the expected last day of testimony, and a third to give Wednesday for closing arguments, although it does not say the judge set the day. A sixth filing came in after six o’clock, and unlike the two before it, it came from a page this compilation already tracks. Fox News Digital added a post to its day-19 live blog, its first since 4:10 p.m., and it is a second outlet on the remarks Kevin Reddington made after the mistrial motion was refused. It has him saying he expected the refusal — which no earlier account carries — and it quotes him on the jury in stronger terms than NBC News used, as having no doubt the jurors will be able to overlook the testimony about Clancy’s Catholic faith. Nothing in it touches the evidence the jury heard, and no outlet has added anything to Dr. Kirk Heilbrun’s unfinished direct examination since the wire account. He returns Tuesday with the criminal responsibility question still unasked and cross-examination not begun.
Heilbrun's direct ends on criminal responsibility; the cross goes at his credentials, then at the medication year and the care she was given, and ends past noon on what psychosis did to her mind and how long after a birth it can begin. The Commonwealth's redirect follows at about half past twelve, first on how the opinion was built, then on the two things the cross had taken from it — the voice and the medication — and finally on the proposition the whole rebuttal rests on, that a mental disorder does not by itself answer the question the jury has. A short re-cross closes his evidence just after one, and the jury goes to lunch with one Commonwealth witness left.
The Commonwealth's last witness finished, the prosecution rested and the evidence in the trial closed shortly after one o'clock. Dr. Gregory Saathoff gave the jury the opinion the rebuttal was built toward — that the defendant was criminally responsible on January 24 — and was crossed through the morning on what he is paid, how late he came to the case and everything the record does not show. The jurors were sent home to come back Thursday for the closing arguments and the judge's instructions. What is left before they are asked to decide is the charge: two defense requests from August 20, whether involuntary manslaughter goes on the verdict slip and whether the jury is instructed on involuntary intoxication, have never been reported resolved.
Closing arguments from both sides, Judge Sullivan's charge on the law, and the case handed to the jury just before one o'clock. The twelve deliberated a little over three hours and were sent home for the day without a verdict.
A second day of deliberating ended with no verdict, the jurors sent home shortly before four to come back on Monday. Before ten they had put their first question to the court, which the judge never disclosed; counsel later said they had asked for the medication bottles and the knife.
The jury deliberated a third day, passed roughly seventeen hours total, and was sent home Monday evening with no verdict on any of the three counts, to return Tuesday morning. Outside the courthouse, defense counsel criticized the television coverage of the case.
The jury opened a fourth day of deliberating at 9:14 a.m., told Judge Sullivan around 10:09 it could not reach a unanimous verdict, and recessed at day's end without one, to resume Wednesday.
In a fifth day of deliberating, the jury told Judge Sullivan for a second time it could not reach a unanimous decision. He read them the Tuey-Rodriguez charge, urging one final attempt before a mistrial. Jurors continued until being sent home around 4 p.m. with no verdict and return Thursday.
The jury deliberated a sixth day, including a mid-afternoon dispute over a holdout juror that Sullivan resolved by re-instructing the panel rather than removing anyone. Jurors were sent home without a verdict and return Friday.
The jury deadlocked after a seventh day of deliberations; a single Supreme Judicial Court justice denied an emergency defense bid to stay the mistrial, and Judge Sullivan declared a mistrial Friday afternoon, ending the trial without a verdict.
Attribution
This page is a mirror of the public trial reference at clancytrial.org, reproduced with its own cautions intact. The official record is the transcript prepared by the court reporter and held by the Clerk of Courts, Plymouth County Superior Court. Corrections: [email protected]. Nothing here is a conclusion about guilt or responsibility; the defendant is presumed innocent, and the only contested issue at trial was criminal responsibility.
