By
Erica Schwiegershausen,
a senior writer at The Cut covering parenting and health.
Previously, she spent four years as senior news editor for The Cut.
On the evening of January 24, 2023, Patrick Clancy went to pick up takeout for dinner for his wife and their three young children. When he got back to their house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, less than an hour later, it was unusually quiet, and the bedroom door was locked. Eventually, he found his wife, Lindsay, lying in the backyard, barely conscious. She had slit her wrists and neck and jumped from the second-story window, and she told him she had tried to kill herself. When the paramedics arrived, Patrick found the couple’s three children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — in the basement, where they had been strangled with exercise bands. They were later pronounced dead.
