Editor's Note: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.
Lindsay Clancy searched online about hallucinations, psychosis, and the side effects of several drugs she was prescribed in the weeks before she strangled her three young children in January 2023, according to an analysis of her phone data presented at Thursday's murder trial in Massachusetts.
Clancy, who had been a labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, looked up suicide methods, bipolar disorder, and insomnia at the end of December 2022 and, in January, went in search of information on postpartum depression. She also wrote a detailed note in October 2022 expressing doubts about her parenting choices, second-guessing her decision to stop breastfeeding her 8-month-old, and reconsidering plans for a fourth child.
The defense says she was in the grip of bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis, a rare condition that can alter a woman's sense of reality after childbirth. A forensic psychiatrist diagnosed Clancy with those conditions following the killings.
In her note, the 36-year-old seemed most concerned with not being able to give her youngest child the same attention as her first two, ages 3 and 5.
