Forensic psychologist Paul Zeizel testified Tuesday about the first time he met Lindsay Clancy at the hospital after she killed her children, then tried to kill herself.
She wasn’t intubated, but she was connected to medical equipment by tubes and wires, he said. A handcuffed held her to the bed, but couldn’t move anything below her waist after a two-story fall from her bedroom window paralyzed her.
Zeizel was called by Clancy’s attorney Kevin Reddington to testify for the defense as Clancy stands trial for the 2023 murder of her children: Cora, 5, Dawson, and Callan, eight months.
Reddington had to get a court order to allow Zeizel into the hospital Feb. 4, 2023, 11 days after the killings.
“She told me she remembered what happened, but it was fuzzy… foggy,” the psychologist testified. Clancy hadn’t been allowed any visitors and she asked Zeizel about her husband Patrick Clancy and whether she could call him.
Using Zeizel’s phone, which the psychologist told her she had to put on speaker, Clancy left a message telling him that she loved him.
Two days later, during another visit, Zeizel allowed Clancy to borrow his phone to call Patrick again. During that call, Zeizel said, he first heard Lindsay Clancy reference the auditory “hallucinations,” the defense says precipitated the killings.
“She told Patrick that she loved him very much. She was unable to express a lot of emotion, but she expressed love for him,” Zeizel said on the stand. “She had said she had heard a male voice ordering her, telling her, that she didn’t have any choice but she had to kill her children and then kill herself.”
Reddington asked if Zeizel had asked Clancy about voices or suggested it in any way before the call, and the psychologist said he hadn’t.
Clancy isn’t disputing that she did the killings – instead, Reddington is arguing that his client was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she strangled the three children in the basement of her Duxbury home on Jan. 24, 2023.
Before Zeizel’s testimony on Tuesday, jurors also heard from forensic pathologist Elizabeth Laposata and Susan Clancy, Patrick Clancy’s mother.
Laposata, who also testified in the Karen Read trial, told jurors that Clancy must have gone out her bedroom window head first, falling 13 feet, landing on her head, causing a Jefferson fracture of her first cervical vertebrae and the other injuries on her lower spine and ribs.
How Clancy landed on the lawn, paralyzing herself, has been a point of contention between the prosecution and the defense.
Plymouth Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague questioned how Clancy could have fallen so far onto frozen ground without any damage to her skull, which was not fractured in the fall, if she landed on her head, according to medical records. But Laposata maintained her findings.
Sprague also questioned Laposata’s affidavit, which said that it had likely taken five to ten seconds for the Clancy children to become unconscious from strangulation by exercise bands.
The prosecutor brought up a 2011 case that Laposata testified on where a mother was accused of manually strangling her child.
Then, Laposata had testified it would have taken ten to 20 seconds for the child to become unconscious and at least a few more minutes of sustained pressure to die.
The doctor testified that because the Clancy children were killed using a ligature it would have taken less time and there wouldn’t have been a need for the sustained pressure from the perpetrator because the bands stayed wrapped around the children’s necks.
Clancy cried during the whole portion of testimony, including when Sprague brought out the exercise bands to test if they would hold a circle.
She coiled one of the bands and it unfurled on a desk.
“It fell apart, correct?” Sprague asked.
“Yeah, what you just did,” Laposata replied.
The defense also called Susan Clancy to the stand.
The defendant’s former mother-in-law said that Lindsay Clancy was a “nurturing mother” and that the two had a close relationship.
Susan Clancy described how her son’s wife’s mental health started to decline in the fall of 2022 and her own attempt to connect her with help. Susan Clancy was also a labor and delivery nurse and knew someone who worked at a postpartum clinical at South Shore Health.
On cross examination, ADA Shanan Buckingham asked Susan Clancy more about the months leading up to the killings.
Then, she inquired whether the witness was an active member of the Catholic Church. Susan Clancy said yes.
“Are you aware that murder is considered a mortal sin?” Buckingham asked.
It’s not clear if Reddington had time to object before Judge William Sullivan banged his gavel and called the attorneys over to his bench.
That question was stricken from the record, Sullivan said. “You are not to consider it for any reason.”