Massachusetts Mom Accused Of Strangling Children Timed How Long Husband Would Be Away, Prosecutors Say

 The Massachusetts mother charged with murdering her three young children used her cell phone to check the time it would take for her husband to return from errands so that she could strangle the kids and try to kill herself, prosecutors say.

Lindsay Clancy, 32, allegedly sent her husband to pick up dinner and medications from CVS so she could kill their children and herself, the Daily Beast reported. While he was out of the house, she allegedly strangled her children – ages 5, 3, and 8 months – with exercise bands, killing the older children and sending the youngest to a hospital, where he died later.

“The defendant did not take advantage of the situation when her husband left the home that night,” Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague said during Clancy’s arraignment on Tuesday. “She created the situation. And she used Apple Maps to make sure she had enough time to strangle each child before her husband returned from where she sent him.”

Sprague added that it took at least four minutes to kill each child and that Clancy told a psychiatrist that she “killed the kids because she heard a voice” and “had ‘a moment of psychosis.’”

Clancy’s husband, Patrick, said during the hearing that his wife only used the word “psychosis” after speaking with a doctor hired by her defense attorney, the Beast reported.

The defense argues that Clancy was overmedicated and lacked criminal responsibility. She pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder, three counts of strangulation, as well as three counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, People Magazine reported.

Clancy appeared at her arraignment from her hospital bed, where she has been left paralyzed from the waist down after she jumped out of a window in a suicide attempt after allegedly strangling her children. She also cut her wrists and neck before she jumped.

Patrick reportedly returned home and found the house quiet. He searched for the children and found Clancy lying injured in the backyard.

“What did you do? Where are the kids?” the prosecution said he asked.

His wife allegedly responded, “In the basement.”

Patrick then called 911 and allegedly found the children in the basement with exercise bands still around their necks.

Clancy reportedly had “suicidal ideations in December of 2022 … and on one occasion had thoughts of harming her children,” the prosecution said, according to People. She committed herself to a Boston psychiatric hospital on January 1, prosecutors added but was released on January 5. On January 24, she allegedly killed her children and attempted suicide.