Jurors in Lindsay Clancy murder trial visit home where children were killed

Jurors in the Massachusetts murder trial of Lindsay Clancy visited the house where she killed her three children, making a rare on-site inspection on Friday. The group was taken past a restaurant and a pharmacy linked to the events of January 2023 before entering the home in Duxbury, south of Boston, in small groups. During the roughly 40-minute stop, they saw the basement where the children died and the yard where Clancy was found after jumping from a second-floor window. Police kept reporters away, but court officers were seen escorting jurors to and from a bus near the former driveway. The house has since been sold to a new owner.

Clancy did not take part in the visit. It was her first time seeing the property since the day of the killings. Her defense has argued she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, a rare condition linked to stress, sleep deprivation and hormonal changes after childbirth.

US juries are usually told not to visit crime scenes, partly because locations may change before trial. However, courts sometimes permit supervised group visits to help assess distances or features that are hard to capture in photographs. Such trips have been allowed in several high-profile cases, including the murder trials of Alex Murdaugh, Nikolas Cruz, Aaron Hernandez and OJ Simpson.

Jurors also retraced the route taken by Patrick Clancy, Lindsay’s now ex-husband, on the night of the killings. She had asked him to pick up takeout and medicine for their daughter Cora. When he came back, the children were dead and Clancy was badly injured and bleeding in the yard. The restaurant is about 5.5 miles from the home, and the pharmacy about a mile away.

Prosecutors say the errands were a trick to get Patrick out of the house. They argue Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, killed Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, intentionally and should be held criminally responsible. The defense does not deny she caused the deaths, but says she had bipolar disorder that got worse after taking antidepressants following her third child’s birth. Her lawyers say she believed a voice told her to 'kill the children so you can kill yourself.' Clancy is paralyzed from the waist down as a result of her suicide attempt that night.

If convicted of murder, she faces life without parole. If acquitted for lack of criminal responsibility, she would be placed in a state mental health facility.