3.Closing Argument — Commonwealth
42 linesTHE COURT: Alright. Commonwealth.
MS. SPRAGUE: There's no dispute that Lindsay Clancy was suffering from mental illness and that she tried to kill herself. There's no dispute about that. All of the evidence that you've heard, even the experts that the Commonwealth put before you, say that she was suffering from mental illness and she tried to kill herself. That's not the issue in this trial. The issue is whether at the time she killed Cora, Dawson, and Callan, she knew the difference between right and wrong, and whether she could conform her behavior to the requirements of the law. This case is not about our mental health system or how it treats women or what's in the DSM5 and what's not. That's a distraction to get you angry and passionate about an important issue, but an issue that's not on trial here. What's on trial here, what the issue is here, is what Lindsay Clancy did the night of January 24th, 2023, and what her mental state was at the time.
And you can use her psychological history and records, the treatment records, to look at, both before and after she killed the kids, to look at how she got to that point, what her thought process was, what her motivation was. But it's not the system or the DSM or any of that that caused her to strangle her kids. In fact, she had more access to treatment and care and support than a lot of people do. She had health insurance that covered multiple doctors, multiple specialty programs, treatment at South Shore, at Mass General, her stay at McLean. She had prescription coverage to cover the different trials she went through. She had support at home. She had 18 weeks of maternity leave, with the opportunity to extend that as much as she needed, which is excellent, which is what all women should have. But she had that. She had support from both sides of her family, hers and Patrick's. The two older kids, Cora and Dawson, were in preschool three and a half days a week, and she had the nanny, Elaine, who helped with Callan in, three mornings a week, and she also helped her with housework and with food prep.
MS. SPRAGUE: This wasn't a woman suffering from a lack of care, a lack of resources. She had an abundance of help, an abundance of care. She had all of that and more. And, you know, this doesn't mean that she wasn't struggling, that she wasn't dealing with mental health issues. She was. She had depression. And whether that's from bipolar or major depressive disorder or postpartum depression, it all boils down to she was depressed, right? And she was trying to deal with that, trying to get help for that. But it wasn't the fault of the providers that she was struggling with this or that she wasn't getting better. They were doing the best they could. You have the records. You heard the testimony. They were doing the best they could with the information she provided them, and that wasn't always accurate information. That wasn't always the full picture. And they were doing the best they could with her level of cooperation and compliance with the plan. Take her medications.
You know from the records and from the pill bottles what she was prescribed and how she was supposed to take those medications, and you know from the pill bottles what she actually took. And sometimes those two things didn't align with what she told her providers, what she told Patrick, what she told her mother. You take the Zoloft, for example. The prescription was for one twenty-five milligram pill a day for seven days and then to go up to the fifty milligrams after seven days. She told Dr. Tufts that she took the pills as prescribed for seven days, went up on the eighth day to fifty milligrams, and that's when she had the insomnia and the other side effects and symptoms. She told Patrick that she took the pills for seven days and they had no effect, so she called Dr. Tufts, who then told her to increase the dose. Well, you know what she told Patrick is not accurate, because the pill bottle says take it for a week and then increase it. That was the plan from the beginning.
That wasn't the result of a phone call to Dr. Tufts. And you know what she told Dr. Tufts isn't accurate either, because only seven pills were taken from the bottle. So that leaves you two options. Either she took the medication as prescribed, one pill a day for seven days, and then didn't increase it, which she says is what caused, you know, the side effects and the insomnia, or what she did was not take it as prescribed. She didn't do it seven days and ease into it and then increase it. She either missed a dose or increased it early, before she was supposed to. Either scenario is not good. She knows as a nurse the importance of following the instructions of your medications.
MS. SPRAGUE: She knows how important it is to follow the plan and do what's on the bottle and do what your provider tells you, and to give that accurate information to your provider. She didn't say, "I went up a dose, went up to fifty too early." Maybe they could have adjusted that and tried the twenty-five milligram for longer and eased her into it. But no, she told her that she did what she was told and then went up and had these problems. So you can see that in a lot of the medications she has. You have the pill bottles that were turned in by Patrick, and a lot of them don't even have many pills missing from the bottles. Some of them have none. Abilify prescription, the first one, there's only two pills missing. The second prescription, no pills missing. The Lamictal, she never took those pills at all until the night she tried to kill herself.
So there's a lack of compliance there, a lack of follow-through, a lack of communication with her providers about what was happening with her and how she was taking the medications. And defense wants you to believe that this is a woman who's begging for help and willing to do anything and everything her providers tell her to do to get better. And she was asking for help. She was. She wanted help. She wanted to get better. But she wanted to get better on her own terms, doing things her way, the way she thought she should do them. And as a nurse, she knew that's not the right way to approach it. She knew that an accurate medical history, accurate information about your side effects and symptoms, what your thoughts are, that's important for your providers to know, and she didn't do it. And it seems that the reason that she's not necessarily fully compliant and she's doing what she wants to do is she has this desire to be herself again.
She just wants to go back to who she was, and she wants it now. And she doesn't want any side effects. She just wants to be herself again and wants it now. And that's understandable, that's relatable, to wanna get that magic pill that will fix you immediately, and you can go back to being yourself. But she knew that's not how it worked. And you know that's what she was thinking, because in the searches on her phone, she's searching for things like, "Which antidepressant works the fastest?" "How fast does Wellbutrin work?" And she's searching all of these different medications for the side effects and symptoms, some of them that she never even discusses with her doctors.
MS. SPRAGUE: And, you know, again, it's relatable that she wants to get back to where she was, but she had discussions with her providers about how these medications work, and that it takes time for them to get into your system, and it takes time for them to work. She even texted her mother about that, about how she knew that she had to be patient, that it took weeks for the amitriptyline, for example, to get into her system and worked. And she knew all of this, and she just, she couldn't be patient. She couldn't wait. She wanted it faster. She even told Dr. Tufts—it's a note in the records—that she knew the problem was that she wasn't focusing on one provider and following one plan. She knew that going from doctor to doctor, practice to practice, South Shore to MGH to different programs, not the best way to deal with the situation. She said it in her own words to Dr. Tufts, "You need to stick with one provider and stick with one plan to see if it works."
And she actually turned down help from at least two locations at various points. We talked a lot about the Women and Infants records, and, you know, you don't have to believe what I say about them or the witnesses say about them or defense. You can look at the records themselves. Page nine, it tells that, it says right there, Patrick was the one who said overmedication was the issue, not the doctors there, not the people evaluating her. What they put was depression, RO, rule out adverse medication effects. That means they have to look into it to see if medication's a problem. But there's a difference between an adverse effect, a symptom, or a problem with a medication, and being overmedicated, taking too much of a medication or taking, you know, too many at one time. There's a difference there. And Women and Infants never says she was overmedicated. What they also don't do is turn her away. It's not that she went there and they said, "Can't help you. Go away."
They told her, it's in the records, based on the onset of her symptoms, they weren't sure if it was postpartum or peripartum. They saw she had an issue. They wanted to help her. It says there, "We offered her." They offered her three programs. They offered her the inpatient medical management program, they offered her a partial hospitalization program for general mental health, and they offered her an outpatient program. It shows they put a lot of thought into that, into offering her this care. When they gave her three separate options, considering she's a young mom, maybe she doesn't wanna be away from home, but we'll give her the option of being in the hospital and getting her medications right.
MS. SPRAGUE: But we'll also give her the option of the partial hospitalization, where she can, you know, be here during the day and go home to her kids in the evening. And then that third option of being an outpatient and being able to be at home with her kids and come in for appointments. It was very thoughtful of them. It was very well planned out to give her these three options. And it's kind of the exact opposite of just turning someone away and saying, "Go away. We can't help you." And her response, "Well, I'm gonna talk to my provider about it for guidance." And she goes to Dr. Tufts. She sees Gilada at some point. You look at the records. She never discussed those options with them. She told them that Women and Infants turned her away and said she didn't qualify for the program. She didn't discuss those three programs that they offered her. So basically, they give her this offer of help, three different forms of help, and she's just, "No." Doesn't wanna do 'em, and doesn't discuss it with her provider. And also that first time she goes to Mass General, to the emergency room, they offer her a bed at McLean, and she turns it down. She wants help. No one's saying she doesn't want help. But she's making these decisions and doing these things that aren't helping her get help, that are turning away help, because she wants the help in a certain way, in a certain timeframe.
MS. SPRAGUE: And, you know, all during this time, between September and December of 2022, she's interacting with friends, with family, teachers, gym staff, the nanny, people at gymnastics, interacting with them in public spaces, in public ways, driving her kids around. All throughout that time, able to know the difference between right and wrong, able to conform her behavior to the law and to the requirements of society, and interacting with others and presenting herself as a functioning adult, a functioning mom. You know that she knew the difference between right and wrong during that time because she had those thoughts at the beginning of December of harming her kids, and she told Patrick and her mother about them. But who she didn't tell is important and very telling. She didn't tell a single provider, not Tufts, not Gilada, not Jennifer McAllister, not Dukes, no one at McLean, no one at MGH, no one at South Shore. Didn't tell any of them. And why? Because the police might take away her kids. That's a rational thought, that telling mandated reporters that you're having a thought of harming your kids, that they might be taken away for their safety. That's a rational thought. And it also shows she knew it was a bad thought, a wrong thought, because you don't think someone's gonna take your kids away because you're thinking something positive or neutral. It's because it's bad. It's because it's wrong.
MS. SPRAGUE: It's because it's against the law. So she knew that it was wrong, and she was able to conform her behavior to the law because she didn't tell those providers. She went in and met with them and talked about what she was experiencing and talked about her depression, and not only did she not tell them, she lied to them. They asked her, "Are you having thoughts of harming others? Do you have homicidal ideation?" She told Tufts no. She told Jollotta no. She told Dukes no. She told Goodheart no. Every day at McLean, she said no. At MGH, she said no. So not only is she hiding it, she's lying about it. She's controlling her behavior. She's controlling the presentation she presents to her providers.
MS. SPRAGUE: Then we get to her being admitted to McLean. You know up to that point, all of the drugs she's taken from September through December, they weren't given at the same time. The most she ever had at one time was two to three medications, and usually, if it was three, that third medication was the Benadryl or the hydroxyzine that's like Benadryl or the Ativan, or Valium as needed for anxiety. But most of the time it was two medications. And the way they did those medications, you heard from Dr. Saathoff, a man who's examined thousands of patients with psychosis, who's treated women with postpartum psychosis, who's treated women who have killed their children. That man who apparently has no expertise, you heard from him that the medication trials were reasonable and rational. She tried a medication, it didn't work, or they had side effects, they stopped the medication. They tried something else. They tried a different combination.
And unfortunately, with mental health, there's no blood test or CAT scan or MRI that you can do that says, "Well, you have bipolar," or, "You have schizophrenia." It unfortunately doesn't work like that. So what the providers have to do is rely on what the patient's telling them, hope that information's accurate, rely on what they're observing about the patient, and make a diagnosis. And then based on that diagnosis, have a treatment plan. And every patient reacts differently to medication. One patient could do fine on it, the next not. So they have to do that trial and error process, and it's normal. It's typical. It's reasonable. And that's what they did for her. And even if you believe that the number of different medications she took over that time or the combination of those medications affected her negatively, after McLean, they were out of her system. Some of them had been out of her system for months. Zoloft she stopped in October. Other pills she stopped in November or December. And that last one, the Seroquel, that she really had a bad reaction to, is out of her system.
MS. SPRAGUE: The only medication she's on leaving McLean is Trazodone for sleep and Valium for anxiety, and that's it when she leaves there. And why does she leave there? She wants to go to Cora's birthday party, and that's, that's relatable. That's understandable. She wants to be that mom again who can throw her daughter a party and enjoy it. It's completely understandable why she would want to leave. But she also knew she wasn't there. She knew how she was feeling. She knew she was depressed. She knew she needed help. But she wanted to be that mom she was more, and there was nothing McLean could do to keep her there. She said she denied suicidal ideation. She denied homicidal ideation. She said she wasn't hearing voices or seeing anything. They saw the entire time she was there no signs of psychosis. In fact, every doctor she saw, from Tufts in, in September all the way through Tufts at, like, January 23rd, none of them saw any signs of psychosis ever. So they're all wrong?
All these different doctors at all these different practices, they're all collectively together wrong? That doesn't make sense. And she shows when she's leaving McLean no signs of psychosis. And they even give her a test, a task to do to see if she can manage her mental health outside of the hospital. Make an appointment. Pick a doctor. Make an appointment. And she does it. She decides on Dr. Tufts. She makes the follow-up appointment. She gets the documentation and gives it to them, showing she can manage her mental health. They have to let her go at that point. She's there voluntarily. There's no grounds to keep her if she's not showing she's a danger to herself or others, so they let her go home. And at home, again, all throughout January, she's showing her ability to know right from wrong and to conform her behavior to the requirements of the law in all the activities she does in January. First, there's the birthday party. She's throwing the birthday party. She's monitoring the kids, making sure... You know, typical mom birthday party stuff. Everyone's eating, getting cake, singing Happy Birthday. You saw her in the video. She appeared happy and smiling, normal. Everyone that interacted with her said, "Seemed a little tired, but okay."
MS. SPRAGUE: The Museum of Science. You have that video. The Museum of Science in Boston can be crowded and overwhelming on a good day, and she's there with three kids under five with her husband. You see her monitoring them, caring for them, doing the exhibits, showing them what to do with the exhibits. If you watch that video, and you didn't know who the Clancy family was, and we asked you, "Pick out the woman who is depressed. Pick out the woman who wants to kill herself. Pick out the woman who's about to kill her kids," you couldn't pick her out. She's completely calm.
MS. SPRAGUE: C- all her behaviors are typical and normal, because she's able to control her behavior. She's able to be suicidal and feel those things, but control her behavior, control her thoughts, and present that image to the world. She's able to do it at the Cape Codder as well. Similar scenario. She's able to watch the kids when Patrick goes to brunch. She's able to watch the boys when Patrick and Cora go skiing on the 16th. She's able to interact with the Carney's on January 22nd. Again, they at, both initially said she was quiet, but then they both admitted she was always kind of quiet. But she was able to interact with them, chat with them in the kitchen, seemed okay. In between January 7th and January 21st, her mother never comes to the house to intervene. Her sister, a licensed social worker, a mandated reporter, never comes to the house to intervene or help, never makes a report, and they're in contact with her every day.
Texting with her, calling with her, almost every day, and never see any signs that they should be concerned or worried or intervene. And you have those text messages between the defendant and her mom, and her mom obviously was very attentive, very caring, asked very pointed questions. "How are you doing? How are you sleeping? How are the medications?" Obviously a very concerned, loving mom. How does Lindsay answer? "I'm getting a little better. I'm sleeping better." She said the only time her sleep was interrupted is if Cora had a bellyache or one of the kids was up, but she's doing better every day. She's sleeping better. She's feeling better. She still says, "I'm not myself. I'm not where I want to be," but she's moving in the right direction. And we have that text from her mom, the day she leaves on the 22nd, headed back home, "I'm glad to see you're doing so much better."
Now, her mom now wants you to believe that she lied to her, that she wasn't doing better, and she just is trying to encourage her. But there are so many things you can say to your daughter who's struggling with mental health, other than lie to her, if you want to encourage her. You know, "You've got this. Take it day by day. I'm here for you. We're gonna get through this." But she wants you to think she lied to her when she said she was doing better. But you know that wasn't a lie. You know that she was doing better, or seemed to be, and that her mom said, "I'm glad you're doing so much better," because Patrick said the same thing. He said she was doing better in January. Every day was better. The 24th was the best day. They had hope, because that's what she wanted to show them.
MS. SPRAGUE: The only person during that time that she gave even a little glimpse of maybe she wasn't doing that much better was Dr. Tufts, and she told Dr. Tufts that she was feeling depressed, which is why Dr. Tufts prescribed the 10 milligrams of amitriptyline a day. Very low dose. And then she told Dr. Tufts again, still not helping, and so Dr. Tufts raised it to the 20 milligrams. Again, a very low dose, a dose a child could take, and that shows how cautious and conservative Dr. Tufts was being in the treatment of this patient, who had had those interactions with medications previously. She was being cautious and conservative and acting with care for the patient by slowly increasing the medication. But even with Dr. Tufts, she still denied having a suicide plan, denied wanting to hurt anyone else, denied voices, denied visual hallucinations, showed no signs of psychosis, all the way up to January 23rd. Nothing.
MS. SPRAGUE: And if you look at their journal, you look at this journal that defense counsel showed you, she's very detailed, excuse me, about when she took medication, what she took, the amount she took, what the effect was, for months, starting in October, and going all the way up to January. And where it stops, January 18th. Someone who's been so meticulous about everything, all the way up to January 18th, and it just stops. And it's as if she's decided she's done trying. She's decided that it's too much, and she doesn't wanna do it anymore, and so she just stops keeping track of the prescriptions.
MS. SPRAGUE: And then we get to January 24th. Everything that happened that day, every person she interacted with, every situation she was in, shows you she knew the difference between right and wrong, and she could conform her behavior to the law.
MS. SPRAGUE: A doctor's appointment first thing in the morning. She's able to drive there. She's able to interact with medical professionals. She's able to see him absolutely fine and normal. And this is a doctor who's treated the kids since Cora was a baby. This is a pediatrician who's known the family and has known Lindsay for almost five years. A woman who's trained, trained in recognizing the signs of postpartum depression. She told you, she looks for flat affect, she looks for teariness, and some other things that she told you. She saw none of that. She was able to control herself and interact with her in a perfectly normal, concerned mother way. Able to get home from that appointment. She plays with the kids. She takes them outside. She's sending those messages and photos to her mom and to Patrick, basically saying, "Look, this is a good day. I'm having a good day. Everything's good. I'm getting better. Here's proof. This is what I'm doing." You start to see the planning at about 4:00 in the afternoon. And this is on her phone.
MS. SPRAGUE: You can see her search for MiraLAX, Kids MiraLAX, at 4:02. And then a little while later, at 4:13, you see her search for takeout from 3V. And then immediately after, she does the Apple Map search to see how long it takes to get to 3V. Well, defense wants you to believe that, you know, she was checking that because she didn't want him gone for too long. She wanted him home. She was in distress. If you're in distress, don't send him anywhere. Make food at home, have him cook, get delivery, get DoorDash. Go to the one of the other restaurants that Patrick mentioned that were two minutes down the road. And she didn't have to look up on Apple Maps to see where this restaurant was. You heard from Patrick, they had been there at least three times in the months before. She had lived in that area for four years. She knew where it was. She knew generally how long it would take to get there.
What she needed to know was how long specifically on that night it would take to get there, because she knew she would have a limited amount of time to do what she wanted to do. And what she had decided to do was to kill the children and then kill herself. And so she needed to know, not generally, but exactly, how much time will I have? And then obviously sees that that's not enough time, so then she searches CVS. And not only does she search CVS, she calls them. Calls them and asks them if they have Kids MiraLAX, and they say no, but they have Pedialax and one other medication. And then she asks, "Is it in stock?" Because she needs to know not only what they have, but is it in stock? Because she's adding to this errand that she's sending Patrick out on, and she has to make sure she's not interrupted. She doesn't want that call at 5:33. She wants him to go to CVS and have the medication there and get it, and then go on to 3V, so she has time to do what she needs to do.
So that's why she's calling to see what they have and make sure it's in stock. It's a level of planning there and thinking and decision-making that Dr. Shattock referenced. And then after that, she texts Patrick, "You know, it's been a long day. Can we do 3V?" And he's on board with that. And she's like, "Okay, check out the menu. Let's get on this." And he asks her what she's getting. She tells him the Mediterranean power bowl. He says he's getting the pork tender lodo. 5:10 PM, she's calling that order in. She's talking to the hostess. She gets the order accurate. She is able to answer questions about how she wants her food.
MS. SPRAGUE: She's able to recall and give Patrick's phone number, and his name as the person picking up. And then Patrick's leaving to go get the food, and as he's leaving, the kids are in the living room on the couch eating. The defendant's in the doorway near the basement door, and she says to him, "Oh," basically, "Oh, by the way, can you go to CVS?" Acting like it's this last-minute thought, like, "Oh, by the way, can you get this?" And not something that she's been planning for over an hour. She knew about the Pedialax, and she knew about 3V, and she knew all of that before she even asked him about dinner. But it's like, "Oh, can you go to CVS on your way and get Kids Pedialax?" And he, of course, is like, "Sure, I'll get that." And he heads out the door at 5:15, and you know that's the time he leaves because he says to her, "Yeah, just text it to me." And that's such a normal kind of interaction that we have in your common sense of life experience.
You're headed out the door to run an errand, and someone in your home says, "Oh, while you're out, could you get me X, Y, and Z?" And you're like, "Yeah, sure, just text it to me," because you don't wanna get there and be like, "Ugh, what did they want me to get?" It's such a normal interaction, right? "Can you get this for me?" "Sure, text it to me." And he heads out the door, and she texts it to him at 5:15 PM. And then he goes to CVS. Even though she's told him what to get and they have it, he still makes that call at 5:33. She calls him back at 5:34, and then he heads out to 3V and then comes home. And when he gets home, puts the things on the counter, and it's quiet. It's quiet in a way that a house with three kids under five should not be during waking hours. So he calls out to them. No answer. He goes to the basement door and opens it and yells down, and no answer. And he closes the door. He calls her phone, no answer. He goes upstairs and is able to unlock the door, and see the blood, and see the window open, and go down to her. And when he goes down to her, she's no longer actively bleeding. He doesn't have to put pressure on any of her wounds. And he says to her, "What did you do?" And her response is, "I tried to kill myself." And then it's, "Where are the kids?" "In the basement." It's not "I heard a voice, I was compelled to do this, I didn't wanna do this. Go help the kids, they're hurt, they're in the basement, go save them." No.
MS. SPRAGUE: It's “I tried to kill myself,” and “the kids are in the basement.” And defense wants you to believe that conversation couldn't have happened because of how she sounded on the 911 call, but you heard from the doctors, people can deteriorate over time. When he first gets there, she's able to talk to him, and as that progresses, she's losing the ability to talk. And there's nothing in the medical records about her throat being crushed or her thyroid being crushed. You can look at that. Her thyroid was bruised, her vertebrae were broken, but her throat wasn't crushed. She had the ability to make sound and to communicate. And if you listen to the 911, he's talking to her, and then he's answering the 911 dispatchers about what she said. So even if we can't hear her clearly, and we can't understand what she was saying, he could.
MS. SPRAGUE: You know from all of the evidence that you have, putting aside the experts, but all the evidence you have in terms of crime scene photos and videos, and the—
MS. SPRAGUE: Witness testimony, and all the medical records, you know how she killed them, where she killed them, what time she killed them, and the order that she killed them in. Even without what she told the doctors about the order, that's something you can infer from the evidence. Because you know in order to bring the kids to the basement, and strangle each one of them, and then come upstairs and get a knife, and have a phone call, and then go upstairs to the second floor and either take handfuls of pills or crush them, however she did it, take the pills, and then cut herself, and it's not just one, three cuts, it's the hesitation marks, and then the cuts themselves. And then you know she bled in a couple spots for a little, little while because you heard from Sherry Kirk how the pooling in front of the mirror is someone, basically the blood dropping down and someone there for a period of time, and then over closer to the window, the same thing. So she's bleeding in front of the mirror for a period of time, over by the window for a period of time, and then she goes out of the window. And whether she dove out or climbed out and slid down, whatever you think that evidence shows from the shingles and everything you've seen, whatever happened, she goes out of the window, and she's on the ground, and by the time Patrick gets there, she's no longer bleeding. So for all of that to happen in that short amount of time while Patrick's gone, she had to have started killing the kids immediately after he left. Now, defense wants you to believe that it was after the phone call, that after the phone call she heard the voice and killed the children.
MS. SPRAGUE: But there's a few things about that that don't make sense. First is what she told Dr. Saathoff, that when she gets the call, she's at the fridge getting chicken nuggets out of the fridge to make dinner. You heard from Patrick, when he's leaving, Dawson is sitting on the couch eating chicken nuggets and green beans out of a bowl. There's the crime scene photo of two bowls on the couch. Yes, the pink one seems to have some vegetables in it, but there's the blue one there as well. And Patrick saw Dawson eating the chicken nuggets and green beans. So why would the defendant make that up? Why would she say she's doing that during the phone call? Because if she's already killed the kids because of a voice and being compelled and it being against her will, and she's like a puppet, then she can't get a call and miss it, and then call the person back, and have a conversation, and then hang up. A puppet can't do those things. Those are decisions, and choices, and actions that she's controlling.
So she has to explain away the phone call because her behavior and her ability to have a phone call don't make sense if she's being compelled by a voice, if she's not in control. And you, further on that, you have the phone. You have the flights climbed. There were two flights climbed. You can see, you have in within's report, you can see there were two flights climbed. The first ends at 5:33. So it makes sense that she has killed the kids in the basement, and she has come up the stairs, and at 5:33 she's in the kitchen, and she's getting the knife, and then Patrick calls. Everything she's done, everything from the research, to making sure what they have, to telling him to get it, to making sure it's in stock, all of that, and he still calls her. He still interrupts her. And then she gets the knife, and she goes upstairs, and she's at the top of the stairs by 5:38. So the phone call's from 5:33 to just before 5:35.
So if you wanna believe that the voices happened, the voice happened after the call, and the killing of the kids happened after the call—between 5:33 and 5:38, she doesn't go down and come back up, and come back up, and come back up. There's nothing on that phone about that, and there wouldn't be enough time for her to bring those kids down to the basement and strangle each one in three minutes. You heard from the doctors, and Dr. Laposata included, it could take up to 30 seconds for each child to go unconscious, and then strangulation would have to continue for another one to two minutes to cause death. And Dr.
MS. SPRAGUE: Laposata wanted you to believe that the band could just stay there around their necks by themselves, but you have the bands. They're exercise bands. You pull them, they resist. You let go, they snap back. I had to hold them up to show her in circles, like, around someone's neck, and when I let go, they expanded. They don't stay around someone's neck on their own. You have to pull them. And you know they weren't knotted. Patrick never testified that there's no- they were knotted, so I'll take this one. He testified that he didn't have a clear memory, but he remembered that they were possibly looped. And I asked him, like, "When you're tying your shoe, that first loop before you do a bow?" And he said, "Yeah, kind of like that." So not knotted, not tied, but even his memory wasn't the best. You heard him on that call, and that's why we had to play the call for you, because you could hear him. You could hear when he found each kid, and you knew that he had the phone with him when he found each kid because his voice, it never sounded like he was in another room. It always sounded so painfully right there. And so you know he's holding the phone, and he's not untying knots, and he wouldn't have had the time to untie knots in that short amount of time. And then you have the firefighters looking in the window, seeing him with Dawson, and he's not untying a knot or unlooping something. They say they see him in an unwinding motion, unwrapping. That's why you had to listen to the 911, to show that she did stand over their limp bodies and strangle them for one to two minutes after they went unconscious, because those weren't knotted. They weren't tied. They don't just stay there on their own.
MS. SPRAGUE: And even if you wanted to believe that at 5:38, she goes upstairs and puts the phone on the bed, and then she goes down and kills the kids, and she does everything, 5:38 to just after 6:00 PM, 'cause he's making the call to her at 6:09, there's not enough time between 5:38 and just after 6:00 PM to kill all three kids, to get the knife, to take the pills, to cut herself, to bleed, to go out of the window, to stop bleeding, and Patrick to get there. In 20-odd minutes, it's not enough time. So you know she killed those kids as soon as he left, and when she got the call from him, she had already strangled them. And she didn't tell him. She didn't ask for help. She didn't say, "Oh my God, what have I done?" She's a nurse. She didn't go down and try to do CPR and help them. No. She lied. She stayed calm. She presented herself as normal.
MS. SPRAGUE: She had complete control over her behavior and her emotions. She had a normal conversation with him, because she didn't want him coming home, because she needed to finish her plan. She still had to kill herself.
MS. SPRAGUE: So why did she do it? You know, defense would have you believe that a mother who was this good, who loved her kids this much, which we're not denying, would never harm her kids this way, unless she was so mentally ill that she was hearing these command voices and had no choice. But you know that's not the world we live in. Dr. Resnick told you, most women who kill their children do it in child abuse. Most women who kill their children don't do it because of mental illness. Mothers kill their children, and it's horrible, and it's awful, but it happens. So why did she specifically do it? She was depressed. She was exhausted. She was done. She didn't wanna try anymore. She felt damaged. But those kids, those kids were her protective factor. Those kids were keeping her from ending her misery, and so she had to remove the protective factor. And I'm not saying she was happy about it. I'm saying that it was what she had to do to end her misery. But it was a choice. It was a choice. She could have kept trying. She could have, you know, moved down to her mother's. She could have just... She could have killed herself and left her kids alive, but it was a choice to take them with her. It was a horrible choice, and it's a choice that we don't wanna think about that a mother could make, because that doesn't make us feel safe or comfortable in this world, but it's a choice she made.
MS. SPRAGUE: She knew it was wrong because she sent Patrick out to do it. She could conform her behavior because she waited until he was gone and didn't tell him what was going on on those phone calls, didn't call 911 for help, didn't lock herself in a bathroom upon hearing this voice, this voice. She knew it was wrong. She didn't take advantage of this situation. She created this situation, this opportunity to do what she wanted.
MS. SPRAGUE: And when she woke in the hospital, and she knew she was alive and the kids weren't, she knew what she did was wrong. She said she felt horrified. And then, while still with a tube in her throat, she's asking, "Do I have a lawyer?" And it's not what defense said: it was after surgery and she's delirious. Look at the records. She had surgery on the 27th. She's asking if she has a lawyer on the 26th. "Do I have a lawyer?" Because she knows what she did was wrong. And then, then we get the justification, the excuse of the voice, and there are a few reasons why the voice doesn't make sense.
MS. SPRAGUE: The first is she immediately obeyed it. Dr. Resnick, their expert, the one who knows everything about postpartum psychosis, he teaches other psychiatrists and psychologists, he writes books and chapters and articles about how this is a huge red flag if someone immediately obeys a voice. You heard him talk about Andrea Yates, about how she heard voices to kill her children for months. And what did she do? She committed herself five times. She tried to kill herself twice to avoid harming her children.
THE COURT: Counsel—counsel—
MS. SPRAGUE: The nurse said that was all accurate.
THE COURT: Let's move on from that.
MS. SPRAGUE: Lindsay Clancy hears this voice one time and does it, doesn't try to lock herself in the bathroom, call Patrick, call 911. Doesn't try to leave. You know, yeah, leaving little children alone for 20, 30 minutes, not, not the greatest option, but it's better than killing them. She doesn't try any tactics to avoid the voice. She just obeys. Another red flag that Resnick was asked about and teaches and writes about is that she only heard the voice one time. She never heard it before, and she hasn't heard it since. Somehow that works. It's a red flag that she's making up the voice. Another one is that what she said the voice told her isn't consistent. At the hospital, she says the voice said, "You have to kill your children so you can kill yourself, because they'll suffer without you." What she tells a lot of the doctors is, "It says this is your last chance. You have to kill the kids so you can kill yourself." And then she tells the chaplain, "You have to..."
A third version, "You have to kill the kids so you can kill yourself, because they're in danger." There's these three different versions. Another flag that it... Red flag, it doesn't make sense that the voice... She's saying the voice says all these different things. And then the third thing, the fourth thing rather, that doesn't make sense about the voice is that it's vague in its command. It doesn't tell her how to kill the kids, where, with what. Nothing. It says, "Kill the kids so you can kill yourself." So she had to choose where, the basement. She had to choose how, strangulation. She had to choose with what, exercise band. Choose again, exercise band. Choose again, exercise band. She had to choose how to kill herself. Now, if you're being compelled by this voice and you have no free will whatsoever, you're just doing, your body's acting on the voice, why wouldn't you just kill yourself the same way you killed the children? You strangled them, you hang yourself. That's acting on compulsion. That's no choice. She tried three different ways, and none of them similar to what happened to the kids.
MS. SPRAGUE: And I'll take this other quarter now and explain to you why we got into the superficiality of the wounds and why we got into the height of the window and why we got into how she didn't take enough pills to actually kill herself. We're not saying she didn't want to kill herself. We're talking about that third prong of suicidality that Dr. Saathoff talked about. Remember he talked about aloneness and feeling burdensome, but that third category, capability. She wanted to kill herself, but her natural instinct to live was fighting against that. So she took pills, but you heard the toxicologist. They were all at therapeutic levels or below, except Aciphex, which was a little elevated. She cut herself, but you saw the cuts on the meaty, meaty part of her arm horizontally. No arteries, no major blood vessels. Didn't need to be stitched the next day. The one on her neck didn't need to be stitched at all. She knew as a nurse those weren't going to kill her, but she was trying. And then going out of the window 12, 13 feet, and she landed the wrong way and ended up paralyzed on the frozen ground. But, you know, the idea that falling out of a 12-foot window is going to definitely kill you, not necessarily. And so she wanted to, she was trying, she was trying in all these different ways, but she just couldn't get over that third prong, the capability of actually killing herself. And that goes against it being a voice. Because if she's compelled to do it, if this voice is making her do it, she would just do it. There would be no fight. There would be no struggle. There would be no resistance to dying. But there was.
MS. SPRAGUE: I guess the third one is Dr. Zeizel. We've never said that he told the defendant what to say. Not one witness, not one piece of evidence. The only person that said that Dr. Zeizel, that we were trying to say Dr. Zeizel told her to make up the voice, is defense counsel. He's the only one that asked about it. He's the only one that brought it up. We have never said that in this courtroom, and no witness has said that, that we've asked.
MS. SPRAGUE: She knew what she did was wrong. She could conform her behavior to the law and chose not to.
MS. SPRAGUE: And she didn't expect to have any consequences because she expected to die with her children. And we get to what we have to prove is that first degree is deliberate premeditation and extreme atrocity and cruelty. We know it was deliberate premeditation because of the way she killed them and the way they died.
MS. SPRAGUE: And the order also shows a rationality, the order she killed them in. Because Cora and Dawson are older.
MS. SPRAGUE: If she had tried to strangle one in front of the other, they would have known this is bad, and they would have tried to intervene or run and hide. And she had a very limited time. She didn't have time to try to find a child who ran off and hid. So taking Dawson first and moving him to a separate room, having Cora stay with Callan, and having Dawson go in another room, that's rational. That makes sense. That's ordered thinking. And we didn't show you that post that she made about Dawson being a handful and not being compliant to show she was a bad mom. We showed it to you because it proves she knew that he was a handful. She knew that he was less likely to be compliant, to just go along. She knew that he might struggle. And so it made sense rationally to remove him and separate him first and kill him first. And she brought him into that room, into the office, and closed the door, and she wrapped that band around his little neck. And she squeezed until he was unconscious.
As the blood's pooling in his face and causing those blood vessels to burst, calli- causing him pain and panic and confusion. And defense calls Dr. LaPasada to say, "No, it wasn't 20 or 30 seconds. It was only five or 10 seconds that, until he went unconscious." I'm sorry. How many seconds is it okay for them to have been in pain and panic and confusion? How about it wasn't okay for one second for any of those children to feel that? And they all felt it, all for up to 30 seconds. And then she continued strangling their limp bodies for one to two minutes to make sure they were dead. Deliberate premeditation and then extreme atrocity and cruelty. The indifference that she showed to their pain, to their struggle, to their suffering, leaving them there on the floor with the bands around their necks, completely indifferent because she had a plan and she was following it through. Just think of that. The being strangled and the pain and the confusion that they're going through and it's being done by their mom. Their mom is the one that's hurting them. Their mom is the one that's killing them. That's extreme atrocity and cruelty.
MS. SPRAGUE: She didn't see them in that moment as individual human beings with rights, with dreams, with futures, individually belonging to them. You heard about the three kids. Cora wanted to be a doctor and a mom. Dawson wanted to be a firefighter. Callan never got the chance to dream. Who knows what future he would have dreamed for himself?
MS. SPRAGUE: She killed them, and she left them there on the floor with the bands around their necks.
MS. SPRAGUE: She didn't bring them up to their beds and put them with their favorite stuffed animal and cover them up gently and lovingly, leaving them peacefully there. No. She left them discarded on the basement floor like broken toys because she was done playing the game. You know to a moral certainty she is guilty.