A state police investigator testified Thursday that Lindsay Clancy's phone was used to search, “Can you treat a sociopath?” on Jan. 20, 2023, four days before she killed her three children. The search became one of the sharpest digital details yet presented to jurors in the trial.
That testimony came from Timothy Chiappini, who said he and Kyle Pavao reviewed forensic data from Clancy's phone and Patrick Clancy's tablet. The phone search matters because the defense does not dispute that Clancy was responsible for the deaths of Cora, Dawson and Callan, but argues she should not be held criminally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time.
Clancy has pleaded not guilty to three murder charges tied to the deaths of her 5-year-old daughter Cora, her 3-year-old son Dawson and her infant son Callan. The killings happened at her family's home in Duxbury, in the Boston area, on Jan. 24, 2023, and the trial has turned repeatedly to what her phone and notes can show about her state of mind before that day.
Jurors were also shown notes Clancy wrote in October 2022 that pointed to a growing mix of anxiety, exhaustion and fear about parenting. In one note, she wrote that she was struggling because she wanted to parent each child like her first and said it was depressing that she could not. In another, she said she was trying her best, described not breastfeeding anymore, and wrote that she was on the fence about starting a new medication for anxiety and depression.
Clancy also wrote that she wanted to relax after the children went to bed, hang out with Pat and then fall into a deep sleep for eight hours. In the same set of notes, she said she was terrified of doing something wrong that might mess up her children's development, blaming that fear on reading and watching too much about parenting. Those notes give jurors a window into the concerns the defense is using to support its claim of postpartum psychosis.
The prosecution's digital evidence and the defense's mental-health theory now sit side by side in the same record. Thursday's testimony sharpened the question for jurors: whether the phone data and the notes show a mother unraveling, or whether they can be read as part of an illness that may explain her actions without excusing them.
