Jurors walked through the Massachusetts home where Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children, a rare visit on Friday that let them see first-hand the place where an outwardly ordinary family life unraveled into tragedy.
After being driven past two businesses relevant to the narrative of the January ۲۰۲۳ killings, jurors were escorted in groups of six to view the inside of the house, including the basement where the children died.
During the roughly ۴۰-minute visit, the jury also saw the yard where Clancy was found after jumping from a second-story window.
Journalists were kept away by a police barricade, but court officers could be seen through the trees escorting jurors to and from the bus along the site of the Clancy family’s former driveway. The home now has a new owner.
Clancy herself did not attend the visit to the home, which she has not seen since the day of the killings. Her lawyers say Clancy was in the grip of postpartum psychosis, a rare mental illness linked to the stress, sleep deprivation and hormonal changes that follow childbirth.
Jurors in US criminal cases often are expressly told not to visit the scene of the events in question. There are a number of rationales for not doing so – among other things, the site may have changed in the interim between an alleged crime and a trial.
But courts sometimes allow juries to make a supervised excursion as a group, for reasons that can include assessing distances or features not thought to come across fully in photos.
Such excursions have happened in a number of high-profile cases, including the ۲۰۲۳ murder trial of South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh; the ۲۰۲۲ sentencing trial of Parkland, Florida, school shooter Nikolas Cruz; the ۲۰۱۵ Massachusetts murder trial of former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez; and the ۱۹۹۵ murder trial of OJ Simpson.
Jurors in Clancy’s trial retraced the route her ex-husband, Patrick Clancy, took when she asked him to pick up takeout food and medicine for Cora on the night of the killings. He returned to find the children dead and Clancy badly injured and bleeding in the yard.
The panel was driven past the restaurant – about ۵.۵ miles from the family’s former home in Duxbury, a town south of Boston – and the pharmacy, about a mile from the house.
Prosecutors say the errands were a ruse to get her husband out of the house. They say Lindsay Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, acted intentionally and is criminally responsible for the deaths of children Cora, five; Dawson, three; and Callan, eight months.
Her lawyers do not dispute that Clancy killed the children, but they say she had bipolar disorder and her condition worsened when she took antidepressants prescribed after the birth of her third child. Clancy believed a voice was telling her to “kill the children so you can kill yourself”, according to her lawyers.
Lindsay Clancy is paralyzed from the waist down after trying to kill herself that night.
Clancy faces life in prison without parole if convicted of murder. If found not guilty due to a lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility.
