BOSTON — The Duxbury mother accused of strangling her three children to death used exercise ropes to allegedly kill the kids as her husband “begged them to breathe” after discovering their bodies in the basement, a prosecutor said at today’s arraignment.
“She killed the kids!” husband Patrick Clancy cried out at the scene the evening of Jan. 24, Plymouth Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague said.
The prosecutor asked that the mom, Lindsay Clancy, be held without bail — adding that soon after the 32-year-old woke up at the hospital she wrote on a whiteboard: “Do I need an attorney?”
Sprague also said Lindsay Clancy used mapping software to track how long it would take her husband to run errands she sent him on that evening — including a trip to a nearby CVS for stool softener for kids and take-out dinner.
That dinner, the prosecutor added, was called in by Lindsay Clancy to ThreeV Restaurant in nearby Plymouth, where she ordered a Mediterranean power bowl for her, scallop and pork belly risotto for him.
He arrived at the CVS at 5:32 p.m. and ThreeV at 5:54 p.m. and headed back home “within a minute” with the food, Sprague said.
“When he arrived home,” she added, “the first thing he noticed was the silence.”
A bedroom door was locked; there was blood on the floor upstairs; and then Patrick Clancy found his wife on the ground outside, her cuts no longer bleeding.
“What did you do?” he asked her, Sprague said.
“Where are the kids?” he added.
“In the basement,” the mom said.
“Guys?” the dad called out, Sprague said. That’s when he found them with exercise ropes still around each of their necks.
The prosecutor then spelled out how notebooks and journals on her phone, a trip to the pediatrician that day, and her spelling out precisely the dinner choices and medicine to buy showed a suspect in control.
Sprague said Lindsay Clancy “killed the kids because she heard a voice and had ‘a moment of psychosis.’” When her husband asked “what voices” Sprague said she responded that she “heard a man’s voice telling her to kill the kids and kill herself because it was her last chance.”
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington pushed back saying his client is a “paraplegic” — paralyzed from the waist down — who “can’t walk” after jumping out a second-floor window that night and who was pumped full of drugs as she coped with postpartum complications after the birth of her third child.
Reddington added the onetime labor nurse now needs someone in the hospital room “24/7” out of “concern she will commit suicide.”
Reddington is asking she be sent to Spaulding Rehab with a GPS, if the court orders more safeguards. The prosecution sought an alternative, Shattuck Hospital in JP.
At that, Reddington groaned and threw up his hands calling Shattuck “dismal and dank … like something out of Iran.”
Judge John Canavan ordered that Clancy be held at the unnamed hospital she’s at now and said she will “likely” be sent to Spaulding Rehab once she is cleared by her doctors to do so. But, he added, she needs to keep receiving mental health care and is due back in court May 2 — a date that will probably be moot once the case is bumped up to superior court.
The mom was arraigned in Plymouth District Court on two counts of juvenile murder and three counts each of strangulation or suffocation and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
Clancy appeared for the hearing over the internet teleconferencing client Zoom from a hospital bed. The horrific tragedy at the home at 47 Summer St. in Duxbury was discovered when Patrick Clancy called 911 at 6:11 p.m. Jan 24 to report that his wife had tried to commit suicide.
Two children, Cora, 5, and Dawson, 3, would be pronounced dead that night at area hospitals. A third, 7-month-old Callan, was flown to Children’s in Boston and would succumb to his injuries early on Jan. 27.
Reddington has said Lindsay Clancy had been prescribed an “unbelievable” amount of medication that “were turning her into a zombie.”
He said Tuesday holding her without bail is an “inhumane order” for a woman in her condition.
“She was so bad she turned herself into McClean Hosptial,” Reddington added, rattling off all the drugs she was on. “This is really a tragedy, this case.”
A GoFundMe drive organized to help Patrick Clancy “pay for medical bills, funeral services, and legal help” in the wake of the tragedy has sailed past its goal of $1 million to reach $1,052,540 by 5 p.m. Tuesday.
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(Joe Dwinell contributed to this report.)
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