The father whose wife killed their three young children in their Duxbury, Massachusetts, home has reflected on the tragedy — and her still-pending criminal trial — in an interview in The New Yorker that mark his most extensive public comments on what happened to date.
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The father whose wife killed their three young children in their Duxbury, Massachusetts, home has reflected on the tragedy — and her still-pending criminal trial — in an interview in The New Yorker that mark his most extensive public comments on what happened to date.
Patrick Clancy told the article's author he wanted the interview, which was published Monday, to push back against "lies and misinformation" that have swirled amid the intense interest around Lindsay Clancy's murder trial. She's pleaded not guilty to murder charges brought by the Norfolk District Attorney's Office over the Jan. 24 deaths of their children, 5-year-old Cora Clancy, 3-year-old Dawson Clancy, and 8-month-old Callan Clancy.
"I wasn't married to a monster — I was married to someone who got sick," Clancy said in the interview.
In the article, Patrick Clancy describes how balancing her home and work life as a new mother "drove her anxiety," but that he encouraged her to continue working so she'd have her own life.
He also recalled his wife's mental health struggles. Patrick disputed a part of prosecutors' indictment that said psychiatrists at a Providence, Rhode Island, hospital found "no symptoms" that his wife had postpartum depression misleading because the doctors didn't want to intervene in her ongoing treatment, and said that, when she was later admitted to McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, she texted him, "I don't belong here" — other people had more classic symptoms of a mental break.
She started to do better, and told him the morning the children died that she felt good and had slept pretty well, Clancy recalled. He touched on the agonizing moments he discovered Lindsay wounded outside their home and then their children, dead and dying, inside.
The article also discusses their first contact after the killings, a brief phone call he took while walking on Massachusetts' shoreline in which, "She did not sound like herself," before reaching out to her six months later at the suggestion of her father, where she told him that every day has been the worse of her life. They've spoken more regularly since, he said.
Clancy also shared how he and his wife have been doing lately, though he didn't comment on their marital status. Both are self-conscious of their current emotional status, he said, Lindsay for new medication that makes it hard for her to cry, and Patrick for the "worry that people will see me socializing, and be, like, '‘'Shouldn't he be sad, because his whole family was just killed?'"
Patrick Clancy has only made a few public statements prior to the interview. His first, days after the killing, addressed what happened and asked people "find it deep within" themselves to forgive her, as he had done.
"The real Lindsay was generously loving and caring towards everyone - me, our kids, family, friends, and her patients. The very fibers of her soul are loving," he wrote. "All I wish for her now is that she can somehow find peace."
This April, Clancy ran the Boston Marathon in honor of his kids and to raise money for the hospital where his youngest, Callan, was treated in his last days. He ended up raising over $73,000, above his goal.
