PLYMOUTH, Mass. (AP) — After an opening week of wrenching testimony and a jury trip to the home where Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children, her murder trial resumed Monday with diary entries from the months leading up to the killings in a coastal Massachusetts town in 2023.
Clancy described feeling anxious and overwhelmed with motherhood, including her struggles to get her newborn Callan to sleep and constant worries of his being sick. She also expressed concerns about going back to work as a labor and delivery nurse, not being able to breastfeed, and feeling disconnected from her children and her then-husband.
“I’m so desperate to get a mental break from taking care of everyone that my mind is trying to find something physically wrong with me,” she wrote in a Nov. 18, 2022, entry.
Clancy’s defense says she was a loving mother who was overmastered by postpartum psychosis, a dangerous psychiatric condition that afflicts a small proportion of women after childbirth and affects their hold on reality.
Prosecutors contend that she acted intentionally and should be held criminally responsible for the deaths of Callan, Dawson and Cora Clancy, who ranged in age from 8 months to 5 years.
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