Transcript of Lindsay Clancy trial | What jurors heard about her thinking

Tonight, a look into Lindsay Clancy's mind as her cell phone notes are read aloud in court.

I'm sad and depressed because I am not able to parent my third child like my first.

Her concerns about medications front and center.

I'm on the fence about starting a new med or not. I want to feel happy, but it would be nice to feel authentically happy and not fake.

Did this help the prosecution's case? Plus, a retired judge joins us live to talk state law and when it's required to step in and protect children. Commonwealth Confidential: The Lindsay Clancy Trial starts right now.

Lindsay Clancy's digital footprint— that was the focus of most of today's testimony. Good evening, everyone. I'm J.C. Monahan.

And I'm Glenn Jones. We learned about her Google searches leading up to and on the day of the murders, but it was self-written notes on her phone that brought the prosecution's case into question once again.

NBC 10's Mary Marcos joins us live outside Plymouth Superior Court. Mary, court ended early today and now the jury gets a long weekend.

That's right, and the judge reminded the jury that they can't talk to anyone about what happens in court, and that includes what investigators found on her phone. The day started with building a snowman.

Patrick Delindsey, you're a good mama.

It ended with a bloodstained bedroom.

Did you or any of the other officers know that the defendant had crushed up pills and, and taken them that night?

No.

3 state police troopers took the stand Thursday, focusing on what investigators found in Lindsay Clancy's phone leading up to January 24th, 2023.

Did you come across a search on Safari, how to slit your throat to die?

I don't recall.

Searches about psychosis symptoms and hallucinations just days before she strangled her 3 children in their Duxbury home.

Did you come across a search, can you turn airbags off on A Kia Sorento?

I don't recall.

Did you know that she had a Kia Sorento?

I did not.

At the same time, there were also searches many parents would recognize.

Unicorn picture free coloring, Chuck E. Cheese, children's Motrin.

Before Clancy started Googling ways to kill herself, she was writing about a better life.

I still really, really want a fourth child, but I need a really good therapist before then.

A trooper reading notes he found on her phone out loud in court.

I'm terrified of something happening to my kids or doing something wrong to mess up their development.

And text messages between Clancy Clancy and her mother asking how she's feeling.

About the same, period, period, period. Hanging in there and waiting for the day I wake up and feel me.

One more note from today: the judge is allowing prosecutors to get more information about a psychiatrist who has been seeing Clancy in court. He will ultimately likely take the stand in her defense. Live in Plymouth, Mary Marcos, NBC 10 Boston.

Okay, Mary, thank you. Joining the conversation now is defense attorney Morgiatta D'Orsia and NBC 10 courtroom insider Sue O'Connell. Welcome to you both. Many Many of us were under the impression the prosecution would rest today. That didn't happen. Court resumes Monday, as Mary reported. It certainly seemed like they were done. I mean, maybe even saving the lead investigator to go last. Um, Sue, what was it like in court? Was it a surprise that this thing wasn't sort of officially ended?

It's been a surprise since Tuesday, basically, because people who have been involved in the case have been sharing— like, when we started Monday morning, we think they'll wrap by Tuesday, we think they'll wrap by Wednesday. And, you know, some folks who know a lot more than me are saying the leading questions by the prosecutors are making things go a lot longer, especially when Redington is not— for the defense is not crossing. So on many of the, the, the, their witnesses. So, yeah, it has been a very long week, obviously, with a lot of disturbing testimony. And there was a lot of relief that at least this week is done. But again, they didn't officially rest. We'll see what happens Monday.

The one thing that's still lacking though from the prosecutor's case is the premeditation by Clancy to murder her children. I'm still waiting for that because in their opening they implied she didn't want to be a mother anymore, she didn't love her life, and, and so that's why all of this happens. And it contradicts what we heard today when some of her notes on her phone were read aloud in court. Again, take a listen to a few of those.

I think I sort of resent my other children because they prevent me from treating Cal like my first baby. I still don't want Cal to be our but I have a lot of figuring out to do before I have another. I'm on the fence about starting a new medication for anxiety/depression. I just want to feel happy. I want to be able to relax and take care of my kids.

Okay, here's a woman talking about the person she wants to be, the efforts she's putting in to be that person, how much she wants to take care of her kids, that she's in a really dark time. Once again, that feels like testimony going to the defense and not the prosecution. And Morgeeta, we're still on the prosecution side of the case.

And I think we're gonna still be waiting for that information because text messages are subjective. It's how the person who's reading it is going to interpret it. I think the prosecution, even though in their opening they were leading us to premeditation, has really tried to create this fakeness or the fact that she was, you know, trying to avoid this different life. But these text messages show that she wanted a better life. She wanted to live. She wanted her fourth child. I mean, those go to somebody that wants to thrive and continue to be in her children's life. So very subjective, and I don't think that worked for them.

Can I just jump in here? One thing that they're not doing that it just occurred to me that did so much in the Karen Reed case is denying or trying to whittle away at when she wrote those notes. And you know what I'm saying? Like, didn't we all have like lesson in being able to manipulate timestamps on things? And they're not even trying to do that, as if she backtracked and tried to lay the groundwork.

Right. And I think the reason for that is, let's not forget, Lindsay Clancy made stipulations already in this trial as to what actually happened.

Right.

What they're trying to get at is her state of mind. Right. And that's something that we will never know. She's not going to take the stand. I'm going to put it out there again. And I think everybody feels the same. She's not going to. So the text messages and the phone calls she made and all of these other angles are what the prosecutor is going to try to do to get into her state of mind that it was premeditated. But so far, I will say that I don't think it's being very effective.

Let's get to a viewer question. It comes from Rebecca in Florida. She used to live in Boston, by the way. She wrote, after losing the Karen Reed case, is the Commonwealth using this case to get a high-profile win regardless of the outcomes for women's mental health? Now, the two cases have different DAs, of course, different counties, but the general question, Sue, is a good one. Do DAs overprioritize what people might think about their county or their DA style in other places around the country?

Do they make it political?

Yeah, I mean, this DA is known to overcharge and to really— not just big high-profile cases, but all levels of cases— like a very anti-crime, go-get-'em, lock-'em-up viewpoint, as we can see. And I think that we probably can say in almost every level, it doesn't always work that way. Uh, you know, I— again, you know more than I do on this. I don't know what options they had regarding charging, but murder clearly is not the best fit for this case here. And again, around the world, people are watching Massachusetts, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, overcharge a woman with very little evidence to sustain a murder charge, to support a murder charge. And again, it's just kind of gobsmacking me that we are in this same situation where, uh, we, we, in this case, we have an admission You killed your children and there could have been a path to a plea deal of some sort that might have been manslaughter, might have been murder too. And here we are having this high-profile case, which I got to tell you, I will be shocked if there's a guilty verdict here.

You know, I guess the big risk here is that a big swing comes with a big strikeout. The prosecutor here took the biggest possible swing going for first-degree murder.

And I think the reality is, is that the public opinion, the court of public opinion wants justice to be had, right? But what really is justice in a case where you have a woman who was pleading for help, asking for help, and unfortunately her children are gone? How do you rectify that? How do you rectify that for Patrick? So back to Sue's point, we have to look at what were the options that the district attorney had to give to Lindsay. They could have stipulated to not having a lot of these things, you know, put out in the public during the trial. They could have, you know, strategized differently, but that didn't happen here. And I think that's what's really frustrating people at the end of the day, the options that they could have soften how this presentation went or offered her a plea deal. She already admitted to, you know, unfortunately killing the children. So that's the hard part that we're dealing with.

Well, we talked a lot about this in terms of that Kevin Reddington hasn't even started his defense, right? But we sort of feel like we've already seen his side of things. Murgieta, is the prosecution's case that weak, or is Kevin Reddington that good?

I think it's a little bit of both, because I think I said this before on the show, the prosecution is being very methodical. They're making sure they check off every single box, every single line. They have to prove each and every element about each and every charge in the case. But sometimes you have to do it in a particular way. I think people are like Reddington and his style, and it's working and it's winning over the jury. And even though juries are supposed to look at all the facts, they look at the players too, and they look at how the presentation goes. And so I think Reddington is very confident and the Commonwealth is too methodical.

All right. What about the videos? Can somebody, both of you, explain to me why we saw video of the family? Here they are at Boston's Museum of Science, and they had to have the state trooper on the stand point to who is who in there. And then we had to see inside the bedroom. We have Brian in Lexington who is asking, was it to show that the defendant was of normal cognition and not be distracted as if to be in a state of psychosis? At the time. So let's answer this question. Yeah, I mean, somebody help me.

They continue to want to show that Lindsay Clancy was operational and functional as a parent, right? She was able to feed her children, take her children out, go to the museum, which we all know is a crazy thing to do when you have 3 kids, and appear to be normal. So therefore, in their argument, she couldn't have been psychotic. She could not be— have been suffering such a severe mental illness, even though we have all of this testimony from their witnesses telling us she did, and ignoring what everyone knows, that you could be completely appearing normal and be suffering from deep, deep mental illness that might even result in you taking your life the next day. We know, we hear these stories all the time. So they're on this path, as Margetta said, they're trying to make the point that she was faking being ill and was normal, but they're also just reinforcing the defense's argument that she was doing her best to be normal, doing her best to take care of her kids, so therefore she must have had a psychotic break, and that's what led to killing her children.

And I think that's what the defense is going to really just have very little to prove, because they've already proven that she can do these normal activities. They just have to focus again on that short window of time on that day what happened and was there a psychotic break at that time. And because of that, I think, you know, we'll see that coming out on their side.

All right. Morge Addersoo, thank you so much. Stick around, though. We have a retired judge joining us live, and our focus is state law and its requirement for handling mental health. But as always, we want to focus on what's most important here, and that's remembering the young victims of the case, Cora Dawson and Kallen Clanton. Commonwealth Confidential will be right back.

She met with an Aspire clinician, uh, virtually, and was told that she did not meet the criteria for inpatient treatment due to not having an SI plan. We're back now with retired Massachusetts Judge Carol Erskine, who has been tweeting about what she sees as gaps between the state's Health System and the Law. Welcome, Carol. Stand by. We want to give the audience a look at one of your tweets. You write, "A lot is being made of the testimony that Lindsay Clancy did not have a specific suicide plan. That is not the Massachusetts legal standard," you write. "Neither the statute nor the SJC requires a patient to articulate a specific suicide plan." So, Carol, explain what's going on here, because I think what you're saying is that Lindsay was a likelihood of serious harm under the law. So what does that mean when we apply it to this case and who is supposed to step in and how? Right.

And those are great questions. I think there's a lot of confusion because I think people have the notion that there has to be a suicide plan in order for a hospitalization. But that's not how the law works. And, and I've represented two hospitals litigating these cases and doing commitments as a judge and as a lawyer. And the law is the same and it remains the same today. It is, as you said, a likelihood of serious harm. There's nothing in the law that says anything about a suicide plan. Nothing. There are 3 prongs to the likelihood of serious harm statute, and the first one involves suicide, and that's whether or not there's a substantial risk of physical harm, meaning that someone is essentially suicidal. And the way that's evaluated is not not just by, oh, there's, there's no suicide plan, so this person can't be committed. Just doesn't work that way. I mean, the fact of the matter is, is the law, and looking at Commonwealth versus Rosenberg, makes clear that there are a number of factors to consider. It's not just, it's threats or attempts of suicide, which is mentioned in some of the case law.

There's a very, very broad interpretation of what that means. So in a case like this, Those considerations are she called a crisis hotline a number of times. She told people she was feeling suicidal. The physical— the psychiatric diagnoses, the prior hospitalization, all of those things have to be included. And those were the kinds of things that I asked on direct exam to the many psychiatrists that I had on the stand for hospitals. And so I wrote that because I wanted to clear up the confusion. Nowhere in the law—

you can look at the entire law, under Chapter 123, and you'll never find the words "suicide plan." You've also said when an adult is in a mental health crisis, a safety plan should be created for the kids in the home. But, I mean, whose responsibility would that be?

Yeah, I've been pretty adamant about that. And I think, you know, when I first said that, people wanted to know exactly what I meant by that. But I heard hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of child abuse cases, many of them with parents who had mental illness. And the mental illness was serious and deteriorating. And what either the Department of Children and Families, if they stepped in, we could create a safety plan. We'd ask the department to create a safety plan. And there were times that I would, if DCF was involved, I would grant custody to a grandparent and not necessarily DCF. But when mental health, mental health providers are mandated reporters, and when you have someone who's calling a crisis hotline for suicidal ideation who has a deteriorating mental health condition, and it's not in the forefront of your thinking as a mandated reporter whether or not you should contact DCF. And I'm not saying that it always has to be DCF, but they can keep DCF out of it strictly by saying, you know, we need a safety plan. Can your parents take the children for a while? That's the thing that's missing in this case.

No one seemed to really care about the status of the children until this horrific tragedy happened.

All right. What you're saying rings so true, because we know in this case there were 4 grandparents who were sort of very attentive. And if the safety plan could have included putting those kids with them, we might be having a very different conversation right now. Retired Massachusetts Judge Carol Erskine, thanks very much for joining us tonight. I really appreciate your insight. It is so timely.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Thank you, Carol. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also check out 988lifeline.org.

And a reminder, if you're pregnant or a new mother and are struggling or in emotional crisis, the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline provides free confidential support 24/7 in English and Spanish. Call or text text the hotline at the number on your screen.

And if you have a question, we do want to hear from you. You can submit questions to Commonwealth Confidential at NBCUNI.com.