Lindsay Clancy’s final words to her three children before their deaths revealed
Warning: This article contains discussion of suicide and child loss which some readers may find distressing.
The last words Lindsay Clancy spoke to her children as she killed them have been revealed by a forensic psychologist as her triple murder trial comes to a close.
Clancy, 36, is on trial for three counts of first-degree murder after admitting to killing her three children: Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months in 2023.
If convicted, she faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.
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During court proceedings for the trial, Dr. Kirk Heilbrun mentioned the words the former labour and delivery nurse said to her three children before allegedly strangling them and attempting to take her own life.
During his testimony on 24 August, Dr. Heilbrn testified that Clancy experienced what he referred to as ‘altruistic filicide’, saying she believed her three children would suffer without her, and that killing them would allow them to be ‘together in heaven’.
According to Dr. Heilbrun, she told her children before they died: "Go to God, baby. Go to God."
The psychologist also testified that when Clancy’s husband at the time, Patrick Clancy, returned home and asked what she had done, Clancy told him: "I tried to kill myself."
Dr. Heilbrun said that Clancy’s response to her husband’s question when he found her was inconsistent with psychosis, explaining that someone experiencing hallucinations would likely have replied differently.
However, he also said that Clancy shared with him that she heard a male voice about 18 minutes before the murders, which said: "Kill the kids so you can kill yourself."
He testified: “The way she described this as happening is that she heard a voice that she’d never heard before, experienced a hallucination and she’s never experienced it since.
"But she only experienced it for the 18 minutes or so that it took to kill the children. To put it mildly, that would be a very, very unusual pattern or manifestation of how this kind of thing comes about.
"Very unusual."
The forensic psychologist told the court he diagnosed Clancy with Bipolar II disorder, noting that she experienced both manic and depressive episodes.
He said the diagnosis was challenging to reach, ‘because of all the diagnoses in the records and all the symptoms that she experienced’.
Clancy did not dispute strangling her three children to death in January 2023, before attempting to take her own life by jumping out of a second-story window. Her injuries left her paralysed from the waist down.
While she admitted to killing her three children, Clancy has pleaded not guilty for criminal responsibility in their deaths due to her mental health at the time of the incident.
Her legal team insist that she had been suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time, and should not be held criminally responsible for the children's deaths.
Clancy's lawyers claim she had been prescribed several different psychiatric medications in the weeks prior, and had even admitted herself to hospital for treatment.
It is expected the jury will begin deliberations at the end of the week, and it has been predicted it may take several days for a verdict to be reached.
Greg Harris