Lindsay Clancy Trial: Prosecution's Psychologist Just Undercut the Insanity Defense

Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, a forensic psychologist called by the prosecution, took the stand today in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury, Massachusetts mother accused of strangling her three children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 7-month-old Callan — with exercise bands inside the family's Summer Street home on January 24, 2023. Clancy faces three counts of murder and three counts of strangulation. She's pleaded not guilty, and her attorney Kevin Reddington is building an insanity defense around severe postpartum psychosis and psychiatric overmedication.

Heilbrun evaluated Clancy three years after the killings, and testified she tended to underreport or minimize her own symptoms — which, coming from a rebuttal witness, is not a throwaway line. He didn't dispute that her suicide attempt was serious; he said the opposite, noting she remains on one-to-one suicide precautions at Tewksbury and is still considered at risk. What he disputed is the cause of the children's deaths. Heilbrun testified he doesn't believe psychosis was behind it — he believes Clancy killed her children to spare them from suffering after she died. He said the symptoms only showed up during the offense itself, with no related delusions, and that the voice telling her "this is your last chance" reads to him as intrusive thoughts, not a command hallucination. He also pointed to her first words to her husband after the attempt: "I tried to kill myself" — not that she'd followed a voice's instructions.

Prosecutors are expected to lean on that distinction hard. The trial continues in Plymouth Superior Court, where Judge William F. Sullivan is presiding over what's shaping up to be a battle of competing psychiatric narratives, not competing facts.

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