Cases Like Lindsay Clancy: The Mothers Who Killed Their Children — And The Verdicts That Went Completely Different Ways
Does planning automatically defeat an insanity defence?
From Insanity Acquittals to Life in Prison
Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial has reached the point where two radically different futures are coming into focus. One could leave the Massachusetts mother confined in a psychiatric hospital after being found not criminally responsible for killing her three children. The other could leave her convicted of first-degree murder and facing life imprisonment without parole.
History offers examples of both outcomes. Mothers whose cases involved psychosis, delusions, hallucinations, severe depression and attempts to die alongside their children have sometimes been found legally insane. Others displaying severe psychiatric symptoms have been convicted of murder anyway.
That is what makes the cases preceding Clancy so important. They expose a difficult truth at the centre of the American insanity defence: proving that somebody was mentally ill is not the same as proving that they were legally incapable of criminal responsibility.
The Question Facing Lindsay Clancy’s Jury
Clancy does not deny causing the deaths of her children Cora, five, Dawson, three, and eight-month-old Callan at the family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, on January 24, 2023. Her defence instead argues that severe postpartum mental illness meant she was not criminally responsible for what she did.
The defence has presented evidence that Clancy suffered postpartum psychosis, experienced a command hallucination and believed she needed to kill the children before killing herself. Forensic psychiatrist Dr Phillip Resnick told the court that Clancy was psychotic and suffering from a delusional belief that killing the children would protect them from suffering after her own death.
Prosecutors have presented a fundamentally different interpretation. Their experts have argued that Clancy was depressed or otherwise mentally ill but retained the ability to understand what she was doing, appreciate that it was wrong and control her behaviour.
That distinction is everything.
Postpartum psychosis is a genuine and extremely serious psychiatric emergency. It is rare, typically estimated at roughly one or two cases per 1,000 births, and can involve delusions, hallucinations, confusion, mood disturbance and dramatically impaired judgement. Research has also identified an elevated risk of suicide and, in a small minority of cases, infanticide.
But medicine and criminal law ask different questions. A psychiatrist can conclude that somebody was severely mentally ill without a court necessarily concluding that the illness removed criminal responsibility.
No case demonstrates that divide more clearly than Andrea Yates.
Andrea Yates: The Case Hanging Over the Clancy Trial
The parallels are extraordinary.
Andrea Yates was a nurse and mother of five who had an extensive psychiatric history, including severe postpartum mental illness, hospitalisations and suicide attempts. On June 20, 2001, she drowned her five children — Noah, John, Paul, Luke and Mary — in the bathtub of the family’s Texas home.
There was little dispute that Yates was profoundly mentally ill.
She suffered terrifying religious delusions. She believed Satan was influencing her and came to believe that killing her children could save them from eternal damnation.
Yet her first jury still convicted her.
Yates was found guilty of capital murder in 2002 and sentenced to life imprisonment. The central legal argument was not simply whether she was psychotic but whether she nevertheless understood that killing her children was wrong.
Then the case dramatically unravelled.
A prosecution psychiatric expert had testified about an episode of the television programme Law & Order involving a woman who drowned her children and successfully used an insanity defence. The supposed episode did not exist as described.
An appeals court overturned Yates’s conviction in 2005.
At her retrial in 2006, the result changed completely.
The second jury found Andrea Yates not guilty by reason of insanity.
Instead of returning to prison, she was committed to a secure psychiatric hospital.
That alone makes Yates perhaps the single most important historical comparison with Clancy. It proves that behaviour which can look calculated from the outside — waiting until another adult is gone, carrying out multiple killings and understanding the physical actions required — does not automatically defeat an insanity defence.
The decisive issue is what was happening inside the defendant’s mind.
There is another remarkable connection. Resnick, the forensic psychiatrist who testified for Clancy’s defence, was also involved in the Yates case.
But Yates should not be treated as a prediction of Clancy’s verdict.
Her psychiatric history was unusually extensive and included previous psychotic episodes, hospital admissions and suicide attempts before the killings. Clancy’s prosecutors have repeatedly sought to distinguish her circumstances from Yates’s.
The comparison therefore cuts both ways.
Deanna Laney: ‘God Told Me to Kill My Sons’
Just two years after Yates killed her children, another Texas mother produced an equally disturbing test of the insanity defence.
Deanna Laney killed her six-year-old son Luke and eight-year-old son Joshua in 2003 and severely injured her youngest child.
Laney said she believed God had ordered her to kill the children.
Psychiatrists described profound religious delusions. She believed the killings were part of a divine test and that her children could be resurrected.
The prosecution could still point towards apparently purposeful behaviour. Laney carried out physical acts requiring decisions and movement. She later called authorities. From a purely behavioural perspective, parts of what she did could be described as organised.
Yet several psychiatric experts concluded she had been incapable of distinguishing right from wrong.
The jury agreed.
In April 2004, Laney was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a maximum-security psychiatric hospital rather than prison.
The significance for Clancy is obvious.
A person can physically plan or execute a sequence of actions while simultaneously operating within a profoundly delusional reality. Organisation does not necessarily equal sanity.
That may become one of the most important concepts jurors have to consider in Clancy’s case.
Lisa Diaz: Two Daughters Drowned, Then an Attempted Suicide
Another Texas case followed an eerily familiar pattern.
Lisa Diaz killed her young daughters Briana and Kamryn by drowning them in a bathtub in 2003.
Afterwards, Diaz inflicted serious injuries upon herself.
Her defence presented evidence of severe depression and delusional beliefs concerning her daughters. The case once again forced jurors to separate the physical mechanics of the killings from the defendant’s psychiatric perception of what she was doing.
Diaz was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
She was committed to a state psychiatric hospital.
The combination of child killings followed by serious self-harm gives the case particular relevance to Clancy, who prosecutors say killed her three children before attempting to take her own life and suffering catastrophic injuries that left her paralysed.
Yet suicide attempts are not automatic evidence of insanity.
They can support several competing interpretations. A defence can argue that the killings and attempted suicide formed one catastrophic act driven by delusion or psychosis. Prosecutors can argue that suicide demonstrates remorse, despair or a desire to escape consequences while still maintaining that the defendant understood the killings were wrong.
That battle over interpretation is now occurring in Massachusetts.
Dena Schlosser: A Deadlocked Jury Before an Insanity Finding
Dena Schlosser’s case provides another dramatic example of how difficult these decisions can be.
In November 2004, Schlosser killed her 10-month-old daughter Maggie during an extraordinary psychotic episode.
Evidence presented in court described bizarre religious delusions and hallucinations. Schlosser believed God wanted her to carry out the act.
She pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
Her first trial did not produce a clean answer.
Jurors deliberated for days before becoming hopelessly deadlocked, forcing the judge to declare a mistrial.
That is important because insanity cases frequently do not divide neatly into obvious categories. Jurors can accept that someone was desperately mentally ill while still disagreeing about whether the legal threshold for insanity was crossed.
Rather than conducting another jury trial, Schlosser later had the question decided by a judge.
The outcome was dramatically different from a murder conviction.
She was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a secure psychiatric facility.
By 2008, doctors concluded that she was sufficiently stable for conditional outpatient treatment. Strict conditions included continued psychiatric treatment, medication and restrictions on contact with children.
The case demonstrates another often misunderstood feature of insanity acquittals.
“Not guilty by reason of insanity” does not normally mean somebody walks out of court and goes home. In cases involving extreme violence, secure psychiatric confinement can follow, potentially for an uncertain period determined by continuing risk and mental condition.
That distinction matters enormously when considering Clancy’s possible future.
Otty Sanchez: Three Experts Agreed She Was Insane
Few cases demonstrate the severity of postpartum psychosis more starkly than that of Otty Sanchez.
Sanchez killed her three-and-a-half-week-old son in San Antonio, Texas, in 2009 during an extraordinarily severe psychiatric episode.
The case involved bizarre delusions and claims involving the devil.
Crucially, psychiatric opinion was unusually unified.
Three mental-health experts concluded that Sanchez was legally insane, and prosecutors did not contest those findings.
In 2010 she was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
She was ordered into indefinite confinement at a maximum-security psychiatric facility.
Sanchez therefore represents something close to one end of the spectrum: unmistakable psychotic symptoms combined with unusually strong agreement among mental-health professionals.
Clancy’s trial looks very different.
Her courtroom has become a battle between highly qualified experts reaching sharply conflicting conclusions from overlapping evidence.
The defence says psychosis.
Prosecution experts say she retained criminal responsibility.
That disagreement may make Clancy’s jury’s task considerably harder.
Carol Coronado: The Warning Case for Clancy’s Defence
If Andrea Yates represents the outcome Clancy’s lawyers hope for, Carol Coronado represents the danger they cannot ignore.
Coronado killed her three young daughters — two-year-old Sophia, 16-month-old Yazmine and two-month-old Xenia — in California in May 2014.
Her youngest child was only weeks old.
The defence argued that Coronado was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
There was substantial psychiatric evidence that something was seriously wrong. Doctors examining her shortly after the killings found profound confusion and signs of psychosis. One psychiatrist diagnosed severe major depression with psychotic features; another diagnosed a psychotic disorder.
Her husband also described dramatic changes in her behaviour before the deaths.
Yet this did not produce an insanity acquittal.
Coronado was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder.
During the separate sanity phase of proceedings, a judge concluded that she was legally sane when she killed her daughters.
In 2016, Coronado was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Her case may be one of the most important warnings against assuming that a postpartum psychosis diagnosis automatically resolves criminal responsibility.
A defendant can be psychotic.
A defendant can require antipsychotic medication.
Doctors can observe severe psychiatric abnormalities soon after the offence.
And a court can still conclude that the legal insanity standard has not been established.
That is exactly the distinction prosecutors are asking Clancy’s jury to make.
Christina Riggs: Severe Depression but a Murder Conviction
The Christina Riggs case produced an even harsher outcome.
Riggs, an Arkansas nurse, killed her two young children Justin and Shelby in 1997 before making an extremely serious attempt to kill herself.
The apparent logic of the killings had an “altruistic” quality familiar from other maternal filicide cases: Riggs appeared to believe that if she died, she could not leave her children behind.
Psychiatrists presented evidence of major depression and argued that her mental condition affected her ability to understand the wrongfulness of her actions.
The jury nevertheless rejected the insanity argument.
Riggs was convicted of capital murder in 1998 and sentenced to death.
She later abandoned further attempts to prevent her execution.
On May 2, 2000, Christina Riggs was executed by lethal injection.
The legal and factual circumstances differ significantly from Clancy’s case, but Riggs illustrates something essential: evidence of severe depression, suicidal intent and even a perceived desire to spare children from future suffering does not guarantee that a jury will find legal insanity.
The prosecution in Clancy’s trial has advanced its own version of that argument.
One prosecution expert has characterised the killings not as the product of psychosis but as an “altruistic filicide” connected to Clancy’s intended suicide, while maintaining that she nevertheless understood what she was doing and possessed sufficient control.
That interpretation could be devastating to the defence if jurors accept it.
What Actually Separates These Cases?
Looking across these cases produces an uncomfortable result.
There is no simple formula.
Yates killed five children after waiting until her husband had left home. She was eventually found insane.
Laney carried out a sequence of deliberate physical acts against several children. She was found insane.
Schlosser killed her daughter amid extraordinary religious delusions. She was found insane.
Diaz killed two daughters and then seriously harmed herself. She was found insane.
Sanchez killed her newborn during severe postpartum psychosis. She was found insane.
Coronado killed three daughters when there was significant evidence of serious psychiatric illness. She was found sane and received life without parole.
Riggs killed two children and attempted suicide amid severe depression. She was convicted and executed.
The dividing line was never simply whether the defendant suffered from mental illness.
It was whether that illness met the specific legal definition of insanity or lack of criminal responsibility in the jurisdiction where the case was tried.
That is a much narrower question.
It explains why apparently contradictory evidence can coexist. A woman may be delusional yet still understand that society considers killing illegal. She may know an act is physically happening while misunderstanding its moral meaning. She may hide behaviour because some part of her recognises consequences while simultaneously believing a psychotic justification makes the act necessary.
Those are distinctions psychiatry can help explain.
Ultimately, however, jurors have to translate them into law.
Why Clancy’s Case Could Be Harder Than Yates
There are powerful similarities between Clancy and several women who received insanity verdicts.
There is evidence of serious psychiatric deterioration.
There was treatment before the killings.
The defence says she experienced hallucinations and delusions.
She attempted suicide immediately afterwards.
She had no conventional criminal motive.
And a highly experienced forensic psychiatrist has told jurors that she was psychotic.
But prosecutors have also developed differences they hope will matter more.
They have focused intensely on Clancy’s behaviour before the deaths, including the contention that she created an opportunity to be alone with the children. They have attacked the reliability and timing of her account of hearing a commanding voice. Their experts have argued that depression, distorted thinking and even serious mental illness do not necessarily mean she lost the ability to understand or control her conduct.
That creates a more complicated case than one in which psychiatric experts overwhelmingly agree.
Clancy’s mental condition is not simply being compared with normality.
Two competing psychiatric narratives are fighting for control of the same evidence.
The Most Important Comparison May Still Be Andrea Yates
Andrea Yates nevertheless continues to loom over this trial for a reason.
Both were nurses.
Both were mothers once regarded as loving and functional.
Both suffered severe psychiatric deterioration connected to motherhood.
Both killed multiple children at home.
Both cases involved arguments that apparently purposeful actions showed criminal responsibility.
Both involved claims that the mother believed death could somehow protect the children from something worse.
And both forced jurors to confront the deeply counterintuitive possibility that a person can perform deliberate physical actions without possessing a legally normal understanding of those actions.
But one difference may decide everything.
Yates had an extraordinarily documented history of severe psychosis before killing her children.
For Clancy, jurors are being asked to reconstruct her state of mind from medical records, behaviour, communications, later recollections and conflicting expert testimony.
There is no psychiatric machine capable of looking backwards and displaying exactly what somebody believed at a particular moment.
The jury must decide.
What Happens If Lindsay Clancy Is Found Not Criminally Responsible?
An insanity verdict would not erase what happened to Cora, Dawson and Callan.
Nor would it mean the jury believed Clancy was mentally healthy.
Quite the opposite.
A finding of lack of criminal responsibility would mean jurors concluded that mental disease or defect deprived her of the legally required capacity at the time of the killings.
The likely result would be psychiatric commitment rather than an ordinary release.
Her future liberty would then depend heavily upon psychiatric assessments, judicial oversight and whether she continued to be considered dangerous because of mental illness.
That could mean years of confinement.
Potentially much longer.
What Happens If She Is Convicted?
The other possibility could hardly be more different.
A first-degree murder conviction in Massachusetts can mean life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
That is why the psychiatric arguments taking place in Plymouth Superior Court are not academic disagreements between doctors.
They could determine where Lindsay Clancy spends the rest of her life.
The difference between psychiatric hospital and prison may turn on extraordinarily fine distinctions: hallucination versus intrusive thought, delusion versus distorted belief, loss of control versus despair, psychotic altruism versus intentional killing.
The Cases Point in Both Directions
Anyone looking for a historical case that proves what will happen to Lindsay Clancy will come away disappointed.
Andrea Yates gives the defence enormous precedent in the court of public understanding.
Deanna Laney, Lisa Diaz, Dena Schlosser and Otty Sanchez prove that American courts have repeatedly recognised that psychotic mothers who kill children can lack criminal responsibility.
Carol Coronado proves the opposite can happen even where evidence of postpartum psychosis is substantial.
Christina Riggs demonstrates how severe depression, suicide and a claimed desire to spare children from suffering can coexist with a murder conviction.
Together, those cases explain why the Lindsay Clancy trial has become something far bigger than a dispute about whether she was mentally ill.
The real question is what that illness did to her ability to understand and control her actions at the exact moment her children died.
And history shows that the answer to that question can make the difference between a secure psychiatric hospital and a prison cell for life.
