Accused Duxbury child killer Lindsay Clancy’s husband speaks out: ‘I wasn’t married to a monster’
Patrick Clancy, whose wife Lindsay Clancy is accused of strangling their three young children to death last year in their Duxbury home, has spoken out for the first time since shortly after the tragedy to say that he “wasn’t married to a monster.”
“I wasn’t married to a monster — I was married to someone who got sick,” Patrick Clancy, 36, who now lives in Midtown Manhattan, told The New Yorker for an article published Monday.
It was a similar message to what he had to say just days after the horrors at his Duxbury home on Jan. 24, 2023. He wrote a letter to accompany a GoFundMe drive for medical expenses and funeral services that would eventually amass more than $1 million. In it, he wrote that he is “completely lost without” his children and has forgiven his wife.
“The real Lindsay was generously loving and caring towards everyone — me, our kids, family, friends, and her patients,” Patrick Clancy wrote then. “All I wish for her now is that she can somehow find peace.”
That terrible January 2023 evening, Plymouth County prosecutors contend, Lindsay Clancy, a labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, sent Patrick Clancy out for an errand and to pick up dinner. While he was away she strangled her three children to death with exercise bands.
He returned to a silent home and had to break open his own locked bedroom door where he found it splattered with blood and the window open. His wife was on the ground outside from a suicide attempt that would leave her paralyzed. The barely conscious woman said the kids were in the basement.
Patrick Clancy, according to police and court records, would find his children where his wife told him, each with a colored exercise band around their necks. Cora, 5, and Dawson, 3, were pronounced dead that night at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Plymouth. Callan died three days later at 8 months old.
The case has been nearly as silent as Patrick Clancy has been. Its docket shows a total of 31 entries, with only nine so far this year — with three of those being hearings continued to later dates. A status conference was held in July but nothing new since then other than establishing a track for the case: Track C — Most Complex.
Lindsay Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, did not respond to Herald requests for comment on the case’s status.
New details
While much of The New Yorker piece delves into the already-reported details of the case for a wide audience, Patrick Clancy did share some unreported things.
One is that whereas prosecutor Jennifer Sprague has used the idea that Lindsay Clancy took her daughter out for a pediatric appointment that morning as signs of her mental clarity and lack of insanity — as Reddington has appeared to be mounting an insanity defense — Patrick Clancy said that it was not an ordinary checkup.
“Cora had a stomach ache, and Lindsay had become fixated on the idea that something could be wrong with her liver,” The New Yorker piece states. “Pat had hoped that a visit to the pediatrician would ‘bring Lindsay back to reality.’”
Another is that Lindsay called Patrick Clancy a couple days before her arraignment with an eerie message: “that she’d heard a voice commanding her to kill the children, and then herself, because it was her ‘last chance.’”
Several clues indicate that interviews for the piece took place months ago. In the article, Patrick Clancy mentions that he had just learned the Duxbury house had sold. Public records show the tragic family home selling on Jan. 5.