The day the defense gave away the Commonwealth's forensic case, and the first day the public heard Lindsay Clancy's voice. A long, dry sitting of eight witnesses, seven of them from the Massachusetts State Police, that nonetheless contains the single most consequential procedural event of the trial.
THE STIPULATION. Court opened at about 9:15 with the lawyers at sidebar; East Idaho News notes Clancy greeting the judge. With the jury still out, Clancy was sworn and answered a series of questions from Judge William Sullivan about a stipulation of facts she had signed. The Boston Globe describes her as calm and competent, answering "yes, your honor" over and over in an even voice; CNN, writing at the end of the week, noted that the subject matter was unremarkable but that this was the first time the public had heard her speak in the trial. Sullivan asked whether she understood she was relieving the Commonwealth of having to prove those facts, whether she had consulted her attorney and whether she wanted more time to think about it. He then found that she was stipulating knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily, that she was competent to do so, and that she understood the consequences. Kevin Reddington told the court that the defense is not contesting the government's case in chief, and that the stipulation spares the prosecution from calling dozens if not more witnesses to prove the chain of custody of blood, fluids, the exercise bands and DNA, and days of testimony with it. CBS Boston reports one specific term: both sides agreed the crime lab's toxicology testing on the three children was done correctly. Boston 25's court reporter stamps Sullivan's acceptance at 9:45, and the jury came in.
THE TREATING SURGEON. Dr. Cristina Carpio of South Shore Hospital, who treated Clancy on the night of January 24, 2023, was the first witness, called at about 9:53. She described the cuts to the neck and both wrists as superficial and not requiring treatment; the report she reviewed had them going through skin into exposed fat but not reaching muscle, artery or tendon. Clancy arrived hypothermic and with low blood pressure and was wrapped in a forced-air warming blanket, and as her temperature came up the lacerations needed nothing further. She also had serious damage to the cervical and thoracic spine, which is why she was flown to Brigham and Women's Hospital. ON CROSS THE SAME WITNESS CUT THE OTHER WAY. East Idaho News, the only outlet with these figures, records Reddington establishing that Clancy was a Level 1 trauma patient needing a higher level of care, that her core temperature was 82 degrees and that she had a spinal transection at T5-T6 with instability. Asked whether she knew her patient had coded shortly after arriving at Brigham and Women's, or had needed massive transfusions there, or had had tubes placed to drain blood from her chest, Carpio said she did not. On redirect she said Clancy was stable before the transfer.
THE PILL BOTTLES. Lt. Joseph Rabbitt of the State Police, called at about 10:14, executed the search warrant at the house that night and found four prescription bottles in an upper kitchen cabinet, along with a bottle of Pedia-Lax. On February 6, 2023, Patrick Clancy came to the Plymouth district attorney's office with his lawyer, David Meier, and turned over a bag of further bottles; CBS Boston says it was a CVS bag and the Boston Globe counts nine. The prosecutor put them in front of Rabbitt one at a time and had him say how many pills each had been filled with and how many were left. MassLive is the only outlet that published the counts, and they are recorded here in full. The Commonwealth's point is that the bottles were mostly full; against that, already in the record, is Patrick Clancy's earlier testimony that these were discontinued prescriptions he had been told to get rid of. On cross-examination Reddington had Rabbitt agree that the prescriptions had been issued within about a three-week period, and returned to the nightstand drawer beside the bed - Rabbitt agreed the warrant authorized seizure of prescription medication and said he did not know why nobody had seized the bottles in the drawer.
THE CRIME LAB. Maureen Hartnett went to South Shore Hospital that night, noted red-brown stains on Clancy's hands and took her clothing, then worked the house: a stain on the basement floor where Cora was found and four stains in the upstairs bedroom all tested positive for blood, and she took samples from the floor, the mirror and the window sill along with fingernail swabbings. She swabbed both ends and the center of each of the three exercise bands. She tested the inside of the second-floor bedroom window but not the outside, though exterior photographs show a red-brown stain on the same sill, and she went back on June 15, 2023 to sample the shingles below it. WHAT THAT RETURN VISIT FOUND IS REPORTED TWO WAYS: the Boston Globe says the samples were negative for blood and that Hartnett acknowledged five months of weather would have degraded them, while Boston 25 stamps her identifying three shingles removed from the house that contained blood stains for further analysis. Both are recorded; neither is resolved. Trooper Jonathan O'Loughlin, called at about noon, had collected the exercise bands, pajamas, a pink robe, a cellphone and the knife; the knife and the bands were of no value for fingerprint comparison.
THE TOXICOLOGY, IDENTIFIED BUT NOT MEASURED. Hilary Griffiths tested the blood and urine drawn from Clancy at South Shore Hospital for benzodiazepines and found them in both, listing four substances of which one, diazepam, breaks down into the other three. Lisa Yelle ran a general screen on the same samples. Both told the jury the crime lab identifies drugs but does not say how much of them is present, and both agreed that samples routinely go out for quantification - here to NMS Labs, several of whose employees MassLive reports were on the Commonwealth's witness list. On cross Griffiths confirmed there was no alcohol, and no amphetamines, cocaine, fentanyl, methamphetamine, marijuana or opiates. After the lunch break Judge Sullivan read the parties' post-mortem toxicology stipulations for the three children into the record as Exhibits 184, 185 and 186, and Alicia Zimmerman testified that the testing on the children's blood detected no substances at all. The defense did not cross-examine her.
THE BLOOD PATTERNS, AND WHAT THE DEFENSE GOT OUT OF THEM. Sherri Crook, the supervisor of the Crime Scene Response Unit, spent the last hour of the day walking the jury through bloodstain pattern analysis - size, shape and distribution, and the tail on a stain that shows direction - and then through the scene, working from photographs and Hartnett's reports rather than from the house. A saturation stain on the basement carpet near where Cora and Callan were found, with lighter transfer stains around it. Circular drip stains on the bedroom floor, overlapping where bleeding continued, with smears where something moved. A drip pattern in front of the full-length mirror and elliptical stains on the mirror itself. A transfer stain on the window sill. Two kinds of stain on the nightstand where the knife lay: drips, and a linear transfer from the knife's bloody edge showing it had been moved. She could not say in what order any of it happened, and the stain in the snow below the window was too diluted to tell her anything. ADA Jennifer Sprague asked whether a bloody print could have reached the sill and the shingles from someone leaning on the sill before going out, or hanging from it; Crook agreed it could, which is the Commonwealth's alternative to a jump. Reddington then took the same witness through the other readings: that the sill stain is equally consistent with bloody hands placed on the sill, that the drips at the mirror are consistent with cast-off from a knife drawn across a throat, and that anyone who went down the side of the house in contact with it the whole way would have left a smear running all the way down. Crook agreed to each. She stepped down and court finished at about 3:39, with Wednesday set for 9 a.m. and, the bench indicated, a half day.
NOTHING WAS OBJECTED TO. CBS Boston reports Reddington telling the court there was no objection to any of the physical evidence, and describes the day's scientific testimony as visibly frustrating him; he has said repeatedly that Clancy admits what she did and that the question in this trial is why. No outlet read for this day reports a single objection made or ruled on.
