The usually quiet town of Plymouth, in the northeastern United States, is witnessing this Tuesday one of the final days of the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the nurse who on January 24, 2023, killed her three children, aged between 5 years and eight months, with rubber bands in the basement of her home, and then attempted to take her own life. Before the closing arguments are heard and the jury retires to make a decision on a case that has shocked the country, a prosecution witness seemed to break the defense’s strategy with a description of Clancy’s mental ailments very different from that given by the defense witnesses in recent weeks in this court. “My clinical opinion is that she is responsible for her actions from a criminal standpoint,” said forensic psychologist Kirk Heilbrun bluntly.
But such a categorical opinion was soon challenged by lawyer Kevin Reddington, who subjected the witness to a harsh cross-examination in which it became clear, among other things, that Heilbrun is not an expert in postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis, the two mental disorders central to a trial that has also shown how ideological division spreads even to the most gruesome cases.
According to testimonies in recent weeks, the accused was a loving and devoted mother. She is even defended by two people who might have reasons to attack her for having suffered the brutal loss of Cora, 5 years old, Dawson, 3, and Callan, eight months: her ex-husband and father of the children, and her mother-in-law and grandmother of the little ones.
The prosecution witness did not dispute any of this. But he did describe her as someone capable of having rational thoughts during the 18 or 20 minutes that the horror lasted in which she killed her children: such as answering a call from her husband, whom she had sent to run some errands, or even, as he said, “deciding who to kill first and how to keep the rest from panicking in the meantime.” At that moment, it seemed as if the dozens of journalists and onlookers attending the session at the Plymouth Superior Court had to swallow hard to continue with the narration of the horror.
According to Heilbrun, Clancy’s condition resembled more a bipolar disorder, accompanied by depression, suicidal thoughts, and the idea that the children would suffer if she left. And not so much a postpartum psychosis that would have led her to hear voices demanding that she carry out the macabre task. The distinction is important because in the first case she would be criminally responsible, thus spending the rest of her life in prison, and in the second she would be considered innocent and sent to a psychiatric facility where she would try to recover.
To achieve acquittal, Massachusetts law requires the defense to convince the jury that Clancy was incapable of understanding that her actions were illegal or of conforming her conduct to the demands of the law. Well, according to this criterion, Heilbrun considers the accused guilty because he believes she was aware of the illegality of her actions while committing them. Another prosecution witness, psychiatrist Avram Mack, also testified last week that he considered Clancy responsible because, he said, she knew her actions were wrong.
After the prosecutor’s questions, it was lawyer Reddington’s turn. And there was no mercy. He cornered him. On some occasions when Heilbrun let out a nervous chuckle, he asked if all this seemed funny to him. And when he went off on tangents, he insisted that he limit himself to answering yes or no.
But the most devastating were the doubts he raised about the psychologist’s capacity to testify in this trial. Because it became clear that he only saw Clancy three years after the crime occurred. That in his very long professional career he had specialized in issues such as juvenile violence and drug abuse, but not in postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis. And the situation bordered on the comical when, of all his publications, he only found one from 1982, almost half a century ago, in which he addressed that topic.
In these four weeks of trial held in the idyllic coastal city of Plymouth, near the famous Cape Cod vacation area, it has been detailed how the accused’s mental health deteriorated significantly after her third childbirth. Defense experts also said that Clancy had heard a male voice demanding that she kill her children. But Heilbrun doubts that this is the most plausible explanation.
The idea of hearing a voice during a psychotic episode, the expert said on Monday, offered Clancy “a convenient way to lighten her own guilt.” Heilbrun considered the accused’s account “very unusual,” who said she had never heard that male voice before the fatal day. And that she never heard it after strangling her children in her home in the town of Duxbury. Although it is a “possibility” that someone hears hallucinatory voices only once, according to the expert it is very rare. “She experienced it only during the 18 minutes it took to kill the children. And to put it mildly: this would be a very, very unusual pattern of how these things arise,” the prosecution expert said.
After more than four weeks of trial, the closing arguments of the defense and prosecution are still to come. It will then be when the jury can retire to deliberate whether it considers Clancy guilty, in which case she will spend the rest of her life in prison, or if, in view of the serious mental illness she suffered, it is appropriate to confine her in a psychiatric institution.
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