Massachusetts Mom Kills Her 3 Young Children was IT PSYCHOSIS... OR PREMEDITATED MURDER?

PROSECUTORS SAY LINDSAY CLANCY STRANGLED HER KIDS IN A CAREFULLY PLANNED CRIME. LOVED ONES SAY THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE

-  K.C. BAKER

With three kids under 5, Lindsay Clancy led a life centered on family. The labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston could often be seen outside the family's blue-and-gray-shingled colonial-style house in Duxbury, Mass., with kids Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 7 months, playing in the snow or on the family play set's swings and slide. And Lindsay, 32, and husband Patrick, 34, who works in IT at Microsoft, loved weekend outings, taking the kids to the zoo or the beach in their seaside town. "She was always going everywhere with her kids," says friend Michelle Connor, 32. "She was that mom you always wanted to be."

But the Clancy family's outwardly idyllic life was shattered forever on Jan. 24. Patrick came home at 6:09 p.m. from running errands and found Lindsay in the backyard-she had jumped from a second-floor window-with her neck and wrists slashed and her spine shattered. What he discovered inside the house was even more horrific: The couple’s three children were all face-down on the basement floor with rubber exercise bands tied tightly around their necks. Despite efforts by EMTs to save them, Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead. Callan was airlifted to a children’s hospital, where he died three days later.

Lindsay was taken to the hospital and arrested. On Feb. 7 she was arraigned from her hospital bed on two counts of murder and three counts of strangulation in the deaths of her children. (As of press time she has not yet been charged with murder in Callan’s death.)