Lindsay Clancy's defense rests at trial over whether postpartum psychosis drove her to kill her kids

Lindsay Clancy's defense rests at trial over whether postpartum psychosis drove her to kill her kids

By LEAH WILLINGHAM and MICHAEL CASEY. Published 2026-08-21T16:01:05Z. Cox Media Group syndication of the Associated Press report. Page URL slug retains the spelling "lindsey-clancys".

BOSTON - The defense rested its case Friday in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial after eliciting several days of testimony about her mental state before and after she strangled her three young children.

Prosecutors then began calling rebuttal witnesses in the trial, which is likely entering its final days. Closing arguments are expected next week.

Clancy, 36, has pleaded not guilty to murder charges in the deaths of her children Callan, Dawson and Cora Clancy, who ranged from 8 months to 5 years old.

Clancy jumped from a second-story window after strangling the children and remains paralyzed from the waist down.

Clancy's lawyer, Kevin Reddington, hasn't disputed that she killed the children but says she should not be held criminally responsible because she had postpartum psychosis, a rare mental illness linked to the stress, sleep deprivation and hormonal changes that follow childbirth.

For his final witness on Friday, Reddington called Dr. Phillip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist and expert in filicide, or the killing of a child by a parent.

Resnick testified that Clancy was "clearly psychotic" on the day she killed her children and was not in control of her actions.

"It was almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings," said Resnick, who testified for the defense in the 2006 trial of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children in 2001.

Resnick said he spent hours interviewing Clancy four months after the killings and believed she tended to minimize rather than exaggerate her symptoms. He said she suffered from severe depression, showed evidence consistent with bipolar disorder and reported hearing a voice commanding her to kill her children.

Resnick described several categories of filicide, including killings involving abuse. Others involve psychosis or what he calls "altruistic" filicide - a killing committed "out of love rather than hostility." He said he found Clancy's case involved both of the latter categories, but he didn't find evidence of abuse.

Resnick said Clancy had a delusional belief that if social services took the children or she killed herself, her children would suffer without her, and believed that they would be better off dying with her and going to heaven.

"She believed that she was doing what was right for her children," he said.

"So it's better to kill them than have them taken away?" Sprague asked.

The judge struck the question.

Prosecutors argue that Clancy contrived to get her husband out of the house the day of the killings. They have attempted to show that while she was getting treatment for anxiety, insomnia and depression, she wasn't suffering from psychosis.

The spelling of Clancy's first name has been corrected in the headline to Lindsay instead of Lindsey.