Lindsay Clancy live updates: Killer mom speaks on record in court for first time — as new twist could speed up trial

A forensic scientist is currently on the witness stand testifying about collecting blood samples from Lindsay Clancy’s wrists as well as from her bedroom.

Maureen Hartnett, who works in the Massachusetts State Police Crime Lab as a forensic scientist, is telling jurors about how she swabbed the “red-brown stains” on Clancy’s wrists and then collected samples as well from blood around her bedroom.

Hartnett also took samples from under Clancy’s fingernails, she said.

Clancy slit her wrists and neck before throwing herself out of her bedroom window in the second story from her home.

Prior to Hartnett, Massachusetts State Police Lieutenant Joseph Rabbitt testified about a search warrant for collecting evidence from Clancy’s Duxbury home.

He was questioned about several prescriptions taken from her home and about how many pills were left in each bottle.

Shortly before trial wrapped Monday, the jury heard Lindsay Clancy’s attorney read heartbreaking excerpts from one of many journals she kept in the months before killing her children.

Sleep training her youngest, baby Callan, at around six months old was tearing her apart — though it was apparently necessary, as Clancy also wrote that she was suffering from “horrible insomnia and anxiety.”

“Hearing him cry for one-plus hours and not intervening just about killed me,” Clancy wrote, adding that she had told her husband, Patrick, “I want to die,” while Callan was crying.

“I even said the words, ‘I wanna die,’ to Pat while he was crying,” the “completely overwhelmed” mother wrote.

Cristina Carpio, a surgeon at South Shore Hospital, testified about treating Lindsay Clancy before she was transferred to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

The doctor said imaging showed that Clancy had “complex fractures in her spine” and that she “needed a higher level of care.”

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Clancy tried to kill herself by throwing herself from a second-story window in her Duxbury home after she strangled her three kids. She is now partially paralyzed and wheelchair bound.

Lindsay Clancy answered many questions the judge posed to her this morning before the jury was brought in — marking a rare occasion of her speaking in court.

Clancy has been seen leaning over and speaking to her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, throughout the trial, but she hasn’t spoken to address the court on the record since the trial began over a week ago.

The trial kicked off today with Lindsay Clancy answering a slew of Judge William Sullivan’s questions about how she is agreeing to “stipulated facts” in the case to avoid the prosecution calling certain witnesses to testify.

“You agree that the Commonwealth doesn’t have to prove the facts that are in the stipulation?” Sullivan asked.

“Yes, your honor,” Clancy said, nodding her head.

“You are basically relieving the Commonwealth of its burden to prove certain facts. Is that what you want to do?” the judge asked.

“Yes, your honor,” Clancy said again.

The former labor and delivery nurse is wearing a pink short-sleeve blouse and a headband today.

After the judge asked the series of questions, Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, said: “We have not contested the government’s case in chief” — meaning the defense isn’t arguing against the facts of prosecution’s case, the witnesses they call and the evidence they present.

Instead, the case is centering on Clancy’s mental state, and whether she was cold and calculating in carrying out the murders, or in the throes of severe postpartum psychosis, as the defense has argued.

Reddington said the point was to relieve “the government of having to bring in dozens of witnesses to prove chain of custody of bloods, fluids and all of that.”

He added that they were agreeing to evidence including blood, DNA and the exercise bands that Clancy used to strangle the kids.

Reddington has said that he’s not contesting that Clancy killed her kids, but is instead going to ask the jury to find her not guilty by reason of insanity, on the grounds she was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis at the time.

The stipulation — or the facts that Clancy has agreed to — could significantly shorten the trial as many witnesses will no longer be required to testify to prove those facts.

Lindsay Clancy wrote in her journal two months before killing her three young kids that she was “so desperate to get a mental break from taking care of everyone,” jurors learned at her murder trial Monday.

The 35-year-old Boston-area mom documented having “horrible insomnia and anxiety” and being wracked with guilt over her choice to stop breastfeeding her 8-month-old son and sleep train him in journal entries before the murder.

On Nov. 18, 2023, two months before she strangled her kids with elastic workout bands, she wrote: “It’s like I’m so desperate to get a mental break from taking care of everyone that my mind is trying to make something physically wrong with me.”

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