Boston Herald39%
Lindsay Clancy murder trial: First responders take the stand: 'I knew it wasn’t going to be good' 3%
By Colleen Cronin3%
7/30/2026, 12:39:33 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 14 faulty reasoning types, including Availability Heuristic, Appeal to Authority, and Appeal to Emotion, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 10.4% saturation with 83 hits. Analysis detected 447 faulty-reasoning hits from 801 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 13.4% and a BS Rank of 3% (21,798 of 22,363 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 97.50% of the article peer group.
Firefighters and police officers who responded to Lindsay Clancy’s home the night she strangled her three children then tried to kill herself took the stand Thursday in her triple murder trial.
Clancy is not disputing that she did the killings.
Instead, her attorney Kevin Reddington is arguing that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and isn’t criminally responsible for the deaths.
Duxbury Police Officer Stephen Hall testified for the commonwealth that he was one of the first to arrive on the scene.
As heard in a 911 call played in court Wednesday, Lindsay Clancy’s husband Patrick Clancy called the police when he came home on January 24, 2023, to find his wife on the ground in their backyard after jumping out of a second story window.
“He was upset, he didn’t know what was going on,” Hall said, describing Patrick Clancy standing over the defendant in the backyard of their Duxbury home.
Lindsay Clancy wasn’t speaking but “sounded like she was in pain,” he said.
With first responders on the scene, Patrick Clancy went inside to check on his three kids.
Hall couldn’t remember in what order the next events happened: dispatch radioed that Clancy’s then-husband couldn’t wake up the kids and he heard a loud scream.
Patrick Clancy testified that he’d found the children unresponsive with exercise bands tied around their necks.
Running inside, Hall could hear the scream coming from the basement and went down the stairs with another Duxbury Police Officer Brian Josephine.
The officers went to a part of the basement that was Patrick Clancy’s office and where the stricken father was with one of the children, three-year-old Dawson.
“I can’t wake them up, I can’t get them up,” Clancy told Hall, who testified that Dawson looked oxygen deprived with his skin was discolored.
Josephine said on the stand that Dawson was motionless.
“I knew it wasn’t going to be good,” Josephine said, noting the red marks on the child’s neck.
The officer said he grabbed the child and ran him upstairs to paramedics and an ambulance.
Josephine then went back downstairs to help perform CPR on five-year-old Cora.
She didn’t have a pulse.
“It felt like forever,” he said before more first responders arrived and the little girl was moved from the basement.
Callan, eight months old, had a faint pulse, he said.
The older children died that night, but the baby was pronounced dead at Boston Children’s a few days later.
When Josephine went back upstairs, he said that Patrick Clancy was still “frantic” and screaming.
“I think at that point, one of us requested that we get an ambulance for him as well,” he said.
Officer Hall was also still on the scene, and after going back up the basement stairs, he returned to the backyard to help the medics treating Lindsay Clancy.
There wasn't much help he could offer, he said, except to keep putting an oxygen mask on her face that she kept taking off.
As the scene developed and first responders realized how many victims were at the home, Duxbury Fire Department Captain PJ Hussey said, “it turned very chaotic, very quickly.”
He put in an “all-call” for any off-duty firefighters to come help out at the scene as well as a call for mutual aid from neighboring fire departments.
What had started as a call for one ambulance ultimately turned into a call for three more, for the kids, and eventually, he said, another for the father.
Daniel Dougherty, a member of the Duxbury Fire Department and a paramedic, treated Lindsay Clancy and testified that knife wounds on her wrists and neck were “superficial.”
Reddington, who declined to cross examine most of the ten first responders that took the stand Thursday, asked Dougherty about the cold temperature that night and whether that could have impacted his client’s bleeding.
Dougherty said it could have.
Another firefighter from Pembroke, Robert Costanzo, who treated Clancy, repeated the same phrase about the superficial cuts.
He also said on the stand that she appeared to not have broken any bones.
On cross examination, Reddington asked Costanzo if he knew about her broken ribs and vertebrae, which he said he didn’t.
Clancy sat in the courtroom in her wheelchair; the fall paralyzed her.
Reddington had objected to the number of first responders prosecutors wanted to call during pretrial arguments and objected again during trial, but Judge William Sullivan allowed the witnesses to take the stand.
The trial will resume Friday with viewing for the jury in the morning of the Clancy’s former Duxbury home, as well as a Kingston CVS and the Plymouth restaurant ThreeV, where Patrick Clancy picked up Cora’s medicine and takeout the night of the deaths.
Analysis
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