Two Doctors Asked Lindsay Clancy the Same Question for Four Months. The Last Time Was the Day Before.

On January 23, 2023, a psychiatrist in Braintree, Massachusetts sat down with Lindsay Clancy for the fourteenth time in four months and worked through the same list of questions she had worked through at every appointment since the previous September. Was she planning to kill herself. No. Was she planning to kill her children. No. Absolutely not.

Twenty-four hours later, Cora, Dawson and Callan Clancy were dead.

That exchange is where Day 9 of this trial ended, and it is the reason the whole day matters. The Commonwealth put both of Lindsay Clancy's treating psychiatrists in front of the jury, back to back, and let them build the same wall from opposite directions. Dr. Alia Goodheart had her for four and a half days on a locked inpatient unit at McLean Hospital over New Year's. Dr. Jennifer Tufts had her for four months and fourteen outpatient visits, from three months postpartum right through to the afternoon before the killings. Both of them asked about suicide. Both of them asked about harming anyone else. Both of them wrote down the same answer, over and over, for months.

The defense in this case has never contested what happened in that house. It concedes the acts and contests criminal responsibility, which is the whole argument: was this a woman who did a terrible thing, or a woman in a psychiatric collapse that the people paid to catch it never caught. Day 9 is the state's answer to that question, delivered by the two clinicians closest to it. And the day's most damaging half hour, for the state, came when the defense got its hands on the first one.

Why two doctors decide this case

If you have been dropping in and out of this trial, here is the frame that makes Day 9 legible.

Nobody in that courtroom is arguing about who was in the house. The fight is over a legal idea called criminal responsibility, which in Massachusetts asks whether, at the moment of the act, a mental disease or defect left a person unable to appreciate that what they were doing was wrong, or unable to conform their conduct to the law. It is not a question of whether someone was sad, or struggling, or on a lot of medication. Plenty of people are all three and are still held responsible for what they do. The bar is higher and narrower than most people expect, and the burden of disproving it, once it is genuinely in play, sits with the Commonwealth.

Which is why the treating clinicians matter more here than they would in almost any other murder trial. Retained experts will come later, on both sides, and everyone in the room knows retained experts are paid to arrive at a conclusion. The treating doctors are different. They wrote their notes in real time, months before anyone knew there would be a case, with no idea what those notes would eventually be used for. Their charts are the closest thing this trial has to a contemporaneous record of Lindsay Clancy's mind in the weeks before January 24, 2023.

So the state's project on Day 9 was straightforward. Put the two people who were actually in the room with her on the stand and let the jury hear, visit after visit, that they asked and she said no. The defense's project was equally straightforward and considerably harder: show that asking was not the same as looking.

Two ordinary mornings, described by people who were looking for something wrong

Before the doctors, the Commonwealth called two witnesses who cost it nothing and gave the jury more of the texture this case keeps producing.

Kimberlee Hardy ran the playroom at the Kingsbury Club in Kingston for four years. She signed Cora and Dawson Clancy in and out, she watched their parents drop them off and pick them up, and when the prosecution asked her what Lindsay Clancy was like, her answer was the same one nearly every witness in this trial has given: "she just seemed very shy." Never angry. Always on time. Always happy to see her kids.

Hardy explained why the baby never came. Callan, eight months old that January, was not brought to the playroom because his mother was worried about him getting sick. Hardy remembered it as "she was nervous about colds because it was cold and flu season." In any other family that sentence is a sentence about a cautious mother in December. Here it sits in a transcript and everyone in the room has to decide what it means, and the honest answer is that it probably means nothing.

Then the prosecutor asked about the last time she saw Cora. Did she draw a picture that day. Yes. Did she take it with her, or did she give it to you. "She left it." Asked whether anything about that last day stands out in her memory, Hardy said no, not that she recalls. That is the whole testimony. A five year old left a drawing behind at a gym playroom, and nobody has been able to say anything about that morning that would have told anyone anything.

Sarah Carney followed. She has known the family for roughly twelve years, through her husband Kyle Carney, who testified on Day 8 about the same afternoon she was about to describe. On Sunday, January 22, 2023, the Carneys hosted a bonfire at their house. Pat came. Lindsay came. Cora and Dawson came. The baby stayed home with Lindsay's parents. It was two days before the killings and it was the last time anyone in that circle of friends ever saw or spoke to her.

Carney's account of that afternoon is the closest thing this case has to a missed chance, and it is almost unbearably small. She said Lindsay seemed quiet but fairly normal. She had noticed at a drop off the previous fall that Lindsay "seemed thinner. She seemed thinner." At the bonfire they ended up alone in the kitchen. Carney was talking about her own kids, her daughter's allergies, and then, in her words, "the conversation lulled, and I asked her how she was doing."

The answer was one word. "Good."

The prosecutor asked why she did not follow up. Carney said she figured that if Lindsay had wanted to explain or go deeper into it, she would have, and she was not going to press her. On cross, defense counsel Kevin Reddington got her to agree the two of them were never close enough for Lindsay to confide in her anyway. That is the entire exchange, and two days later three children were dead.

Four and a half days on a locked unit

Dr. Alia Goodheart is an inpatient psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in Belmont. She took the stand mid morning and the Commonwealth spent a long stretch building McLean as an institution that ran its process by the book.

Before getting to the patient, the prosecution walked her through how the place works, and it is worth understanding because both sides use it later. A Section 12 is the Massachusetts provision that lets a qualified clinician mandate that a person be transported to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation whether or not they agree to go. It buys the hospital a short window to evaluate before it has to either let the person go or move to commit them formally. A voluntary admission is the opposite: the patient signs herself in, and once she is cleared as not dangerous, she can ask to leave. Everyone arriving at McLean passes through a clinical evaluation center first, gets a level of observation assigned, and is seen daily, including on holidays.

Lindsay Clancy arrived in the early hours of January 1, 2023, brought from the Mass General emergency room. She came under a Section 12, but she signed herself in voluntarily once she got there. That distinction matters and it comes back later. She was medically stable, assessed as low risk, and placed on the lowest level of observation checks, which at McLean means a staff member laying eyes on her every fifteen minutes. Her chief complaint, as Goodheart put it, was that "she was finding it hard to sleep if she didn't take medications." She also told the intake team she felt numb.

The provisional diagnosis was major depressive disorder, severe, without psychotic features. Goodheart walked the jury through the medication management over those days: a taper off Seroquel, a switch from Valium to Ativan, daily psychiatric contact, group programming that runs even over a holiday weekend. She testified that the thing Lindsay was most worried about was dependency, that she did not want to need an antipsychotic just to be able to fall asleep.

And then the prosecutor walked her through the questions. Was she expressly asked whether she wanted to kill herself. "She denied that." Was she specifically asked whether she had a plan. "She denied it." Was she specifically asked whether she wanted to harm anyone else. "She denied it." And those are standard questions you would ask at every interaction with her, correct. Yes.

Then came the answer that will follow this day around. Asked whether Lindsay had told her there were reasons she would not take her own life, Goodheart said yes. Asked what those reasons were, she said: her children, and her family, her mother.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOjrZYu2ReA

Asked what made her comfortable discharging Lindsay on January 5, Goodheart listed the protective factors without hesitating: she was future oriented, she was clearly invested in her children, she was a caring mother, she had her parents around to help, she had outpatient psychiatric follow up lined up, she had no history of suicide, she had no history of psychosis or postpartum psychosis, she had a stable place to live.

On paper that is a defensible discharge. Then Reddington stood up.

What nobody at McLean did

The cross examination of Dr. Goodheart is the most consequential thing that happened on Day 9, and the shape of it is simple. Reddington did not attack what McLean concluded. He attacked what McLean never looked at before concluding it.

Start with the records. Lindsay Clancy arrived at McLean with a live outpatient psychiatrist, a nurse practitioner who had been prescribing for her, and a therapist, all of them holding months of documentation about exactly the condition McLean was now treating. Reddington asked whether anyone had ever asked her to sign a HIPAA release to get the nurse practitioner's records. No. The psychiatrist's records. No. The other prescriber's records. No.

"So other than what Lindsay, who was in the locked ward, tells you and her husband, who tells you, what, if any, investigation did you do?"

"We did not do any additional collateral contact."

Then the testing. As a psychiatrist, do you administer psychological testing. No. The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, the standard screening instrument built for exactly this population, was it administered during the four and a half days she was in your hospital. "No." Why not. "Because we don't necessarily administer scales."

No new thyroid testing was drawn. Asked whether thyroid levels matter in evaluating a postpartum woman, Goodheart allowed that "it's one tiny component of the entire, it is one component, okay."

No blood was checked for the levels of the psychiatric medications she had been taking for the previous three and a half months. Reddington pushed on it and got an answer that is either the correct defense of the profession or the whole problem, depending on which side of this case you are sitting on:

"Psychiatry as a field is not dependent on blood tests. If it was that simple, it would be much better for everybody. It's based on the evaluation of the patient who's sitting in front of you."

Then the thing she did not know. Reddington asked whether she was aware that Lindsay had reached out to a suicide hotline on not one but two occasions before McLean ever saw her. Goodheart confirmed she was not.

And then the question that closed the segment. Reddington asked how many women she had treated who were suffering from postpartum psychosis. She said she did not recall. He pressed. She said, "I don't remember, but I think it would stick in my memory, so I don't think that I probably have." He repeated it back to her. She answered plainly: "I don't think I have. I haven't seen any."

Two other exchanges from that cross are worth having, because they show what kind of witness she was.

Reddington asked about the DSM, the diagnostic manual American psychiatry runs on, and where postpartum psychosis sits in it. Goodheart said she does not exactly know where it is in the current edition and does not recall paying attention to where it is categorized. Asked whether she was aware of efforts to give it its own place in the next revision, she said she thought it was clear there is a question about where it should be placed. The state came back on redirect and got the cleaner version: postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis are not their own standalone categories in the manual, they appear as specifiers attached to other diagnoses. Both of those things are true. The defense wants the jury to hear a psychiatrist who has not been tracking the literature on the condition at the center of this case. The state wants the jury to hear that the manual itself is unsettled and no clinician should be blamed for that.

The other exchange was flatter and stranger. Reddington put it to her that his client had been in a locked ward and could not walk off the unit. Goodheart answered, "That is what a psychiatric unit is." He followed up: right, and she was very sick, wasn't she. And Goodheart said, "I don't know what you mean by very sick."

That happened more than once. Over and over on cross, she declined to accept the premise of a question rather than answering it, on the insurance line, on the psychological testing line, on the "very sick" line. Some of that is a careful clinician refusing to be led into imprecise language, which is exactly what a good expert does. Some of it, watched by twelve people who are not clinicians, reads as a doctor who will not give an inch about a patient whose three children died nineteen days after she sent her home. Juries notice the difference between careful and defensive, and they do not always agree with each other about which one they just watched.

Read that back with the calendar next to it. A licensed psychiatrist on a locked inpatient unit at one of the most respected psychiatric hospitals in the country evaluated a woman four months postpartum, discharged her in four and a half days, pulled no outside records, drew no drug levels, ran no standardized postpartum screen, did not know about two calls to a suicide hotline, and has never personally treated a case of the condition at the center of this trial. Nineteen days later her three children were dead.

That is not an accusation of malpractice and this article is not making one. It is a description of what is now in the record, and the defense will build a closing argument on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcWPWw-ApZU

The hot mic

Before the jury came back from a recess the court had run straight past, something broke the surface that this trial has mostly kept underneath it.

On the open record, before any sidebar, someone at counsel table said out loud that people had been picked up on a hot mic saying "shut her up" during the playing of an autopsy exhibit, and denied being any part of it. The judge wanted the matter taken to sidebar. Somebody did not want to go to sidebar without first knowing what the subject was. The stated reason for taking it private was that there were, in the words spoken in the room, "a lot of privileged issues."

Then the record goes quiet for about twelve seconds, and when it picks back up it is cold: ready for the jury, court in session, please continue. Nothing about what was argued, nothing about what was decided. The dispute happened in open court and the resolution did not.

I am not going to speculate about who said what. The transcript will not support it and I am not in the business of inventing courtroom drama out of a garbled thirty seconds. What I will say is that this is week three of a trial about three dead children, the jury has been sitting through autopsy testimony, and the people in that room are human beings under real strain. It surfaced, the judge shut it down, the jury never saw it.

Putting the discharge back together

The Commonwealth's redirect of Dr. Goodheart is the part most people will skip, and it is where the state got a real piece of the day back.

First, the discharge was not against medical advice. That mattered enough that both sides fought over the phrase. Second, the discharge packet was not, as the cross had made it sound, a website and a phone number. Walked through as an exhibit, it contained a written crisis plan, the suicide prevention lifeline numbers, and an instruction to call an insurance case manager for help finding community providers.

Third, and this is the strongest fact the state pulled out of that witness: Lindsay Clancy made her follow up appointment with Dr. Tufts within the hour of leaving McLean, on her own initiative, for the very next morning. The defense had used the discharge to argue McLean pushed her out the door. The state used the same discharge to argue she was actively engaged with the plan the moment she walked through it.

On the records question, Goodheart gave her reason. Lindsay's account had been consistent across four separate evaluators, the emergency department, the clinical evaluation center, a second psychiatrist on the unit, and Goodheart herself, and they had collateral from Patrick Clancy on top of that. In her words, she "didn't feel like there was any urgent need to obtain the collateral from the other providers." McLean did draw blood at admission; she simply never checked it for medication levels because nothing in the regimen she had been told about gave her a reason to.

And the "brain fog" the defense had leaned on was met with nursing notes documenting that her memory and concentration improved over the course of the stay.

Then a short recross landed one clean line for the defense. When you are treating a patient who comes to you for help, are you treating the patient in front of you or the patient from several months ago. You take the history into consideration, but you are treating the patient in front of you, because that is the presentation.

Which is a perfectly good answer, and also a concession that a fuller history was never in the room.

The doctor who knew her longest

Dr. Jennifer Tufts is a psychiatrist at Aster Mental Health in Braintree. She went to medical school at the University of Vermont, finished psychiatry training at Boston Medical Center in 2022, and she had been Lindsay Clancy's outpatient psychiatrist since the previous September. If Goodheart's four and a half days were the defense's opening, Tufts is the state's answer, and the answer is paperwork. A great deal of it.

Lindsay Clancy filled out Aster's intake packet on September 12, 2022, three days before she ever met Dr. Tufts. She did it herself, at home, unprompted, with nobody in the room. That packet included a symptom checklist and a ten question suicide risk assessment, and the prosecution read the whole thing into the record.

What she checked: anxiety attacks, decreased appetite, depressed mood, easily distracted, excessive worry, guilt, unable to feel pleasure, unable to fall asleep, racing thoughts. What she left unchecked: risky behavior, hopelessness, abandonment, emptiness, impulsivity.

And the risk assessment. Have you been so distressed you seriously wished to end your life. No. The prosecutor walked it question by question and then summarized: in fact the answers to every question on this suicide checklist were no. Correct.

The anxiety screen came back, in Tufts's words, "highly suggestive of anxiety and anxiety disorder." The depression screen came back partly positive. The ADHD screen was not clinically significant. Her diagnosis at that first visit on September 15, 2022 was generalized anxiety disorder and adjustment disorder with depressed mood. Not psychosis. Not bipolar disorder. She started her on sertraline, brand name Zoloft, at 25 milligrams building to 50, plus individual therapy, and she picked that drug for a specific reason: "It's the safest SSRI for babies." Lindsay was still breastfeeding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYNjhZInDnQ

Four months of trying one thing after another

The afternoon session was the longest sustained stretch of testimony in the day and, for a viewer, the hardest to sit through. The Commonwealth walked Dr. Tufts chronologically through all fourteen visits. It is exhausting, and the exhaustion is the argument. This is what an attentive outpatient psychiatric relationship looks like from the inside, one medication at a time.

She picked up the Zoloft and did not take it. At the next visit, September 28, she said she felt a little better because the baby was sleeping more, so she was sleeping more. Tufts marked her insight as poor, and explained why on the stand: a patient with clinically significant anxiety who is still declining treatment for it does not have a clear view of her own situation.

In between those two visits she sent her doctor a message through the patient portal, and the state read it into the record in full. It is the clearest picture the jury has yet been given of how Lindsay Clancy understood her own situation in September 2022, in her own unedited words:

"hi dr. Tufts, thanks again for all your help at our last two appointments while I am feeling just better enough to function without medication I did reach out to my employer about extending my leave for reasons of postpartum anxiety slash depression I don't feel mentally well enough to return to taking care of patients with a baby at home that still won't take the bottle I know this will trigger my anxiety too much and also having to stay up all night as a nurse I don't feel it's possible right now they asked that my provider could fill out a form so they could process this request can I please send you the form to fill out"

Read that as a document rather than as evidence. It is organized, it is self aware, it names her diagnosis, it explains her reasoning, and it asks for exactly the right piece of paperwork. This is a labor and delivery nurse who knows how the system works, telling her psychiatrist she cannot go back to taking care of other people's patients while her own baby will not take a bottle. Dr. Tufts wrote back that this kind of paperwork usually needs a lot of information, so it would be best to go through it together at an appointment.

On October 3 she said she was on the verge of taking the medication, and wanted to try therapy first. She started therapy that same day.

On October 20 she had been on Zoloft for a week and had just increased the dose, and she now felt awful. Tufts read the list back: increased difficulty sleeping, loss of appetite, diarrhea, mood down, tearful, "very foggy," very anxious. She was afraid of trying anything new. She said she was afraid that if she kept feeling this way she might one day have suicidal thoughts, which is a fear about the future, not a thought in the present, and Tufts was careful about that distinction on the stand. The Zoloft was stopped.

The next day she came back because she had not slept at all, and Tufts started her on the lowest available dose of Ativan, as needed, for one week.

Then it becomes a list. Ativan helped the anxiety but not the sleep. She tried Benadryl on her own, without being told to, and it helped, and Tufts said on the stand, "I was glad that something was helping." Buspar was prescribed and never started because she was too frightened of a new medication. Hydroxyzine was added, an antihistamine that Tufts explained is close cousin to the Benadryl she had found on her own, with the difference being that hydroxyzine is actually indicated for anxiety while Benadryl is indicated for allergies.

On November 2 the conversation turned to getting her off the Ativan. Benzodiazepines carry real dependency and withdrawal risk and are not meant to be a long term answer, so Tufts laid out a slow taper, a quarter milligram every two weeks, and put alternatives on the table that could help sleep and anxiety without that risk. Nothing was chosen. Then there is a three week gap in the record, which Tufts could not explain from the stand, and when Lindsay came back on November 22 she was still on the Ativan at the same dose, with no documented reduction. She had enrolled in a perinatal mental health program on the South Shore and was planning to move her care there. She asked for, and got, a letter clearing her to return to work.

She never went back.

On December 1 she called and made her own appointment, outside the normal schedule, and told Dr. Tufts she had not gone back to work and she was not getting better. What she recited was a four week medication odyssey run through other providers: trazodone, minimal effect. Ativan and Benadryl together, helpful. Prozac added on top, sleep got worse, stopped. Remeron with Klonopin, disoriented, rebound anxiety, minimal help. Remeron with Seroquel prescribed, not yet started.

On Remeron she had described intrusive thoughts, and Tufts was precise about what they were. "She said it was a feeling like I'm going to die." And then, unprompted: "Not a feeling that she wanted to kill herself, but a feeling like she was going to die."

She denied suicidal ideation at that visit but said she was close to it and feeling very hopeless, with no active thoughts of hurting herself, no intention, no plans. And she said something about herself that the state read straight off the chart note: "I think it's my problem, I keep reaching out to different people and not sticking with the plan."

Tufts screened her for bipolar disorder at that visit specifically, and ruled it out. No euphoria, no pressured speech, no grandiosity, no risk taking, no decreased need for sleep. She raised Lamictal, and she raised a partial hospitalization program, which is daily intensive treatment short of being admitted. She gave Lindsay the intake information for it.

December 16, and the hospital bed she said no to

Two weeks later Lindsay Clancy told her outpatient psychiatrist, "I'm having a really rough time."

She had found something that finally worked for sleep, Valium and Seroquel together, and she was very depressed during the day with no motivation, and she had some suicidal ideation, described as hopelessness and a fear of not getting better, with no plan and no intent. And she said she had gone to the Mass General emergency room and had been offered inpatient admission at McLean, and had turned it down. Asked why she declined, Tufts said she did not remember.

Sit with the sequence there. On December 16 she was offered a bed at McLean and said no. Two weeks later, on New Year's Day, she arrived at that same hospital by ambulance from that same emergency room, and this time she signed herself in.

Tufts prescribed Lamictal that day, at the lowest dose, and said on the stand that she felt she needed to step in. The plan was to continue with a perinatal program in Rhode Island and go back to the emergency room if the suicidal ideation worsened.

One more thing from that stretch, because it goes to the McLean cross. Asked why she never obtained records or a release from the South Shore program, Tufts gave an answer that rhymes uncomfortably with Goodheart's: "She was very medically sophisticated, so I didn't think it was necessary." Lindsay Clancy is a labor and delivery nurse. Both of her doctors, independently, decided they did not need the paperwork because the patient could explain it herself.

Deteriorating

On January 6, two days after McLean discharged her, Lindsay Clancy saw Dr. Tufts, and the chart note for that visit records her condition as deteriorating.

The prosecutor put the word to her directly and Tufts pushed back on how heavy it sounds. She has three options in the software: improving, unchanged, deteriorating. "So she wasn't improving and she wasn't really unchanged. She appeared a little bit worse than the last time I had seen her." Deteriorating was the closest of three fixed choices, not a clinical alarm she chose to sound.

Her mood that day was numb. Her medications were trazodone, Ativan and melatonin, all at low doses. She denied suicidal ideation, denied homicidal ideation, showed no signs of psychosis. Tufts explained to the jury what a Section 12 is, that she could issue one and mandate that a patient be brought to a hospital, and confirmed she did not think one was necessary that day.

On January 9 the trazodone increase was helping. Mood okay but still flat. Unable to cry, able to laugh a little bit. No recent suicidal ideation. Tufts moved her from Ativan to Valium because it has a longer half life and tapers more gently, and because Lindsay wanted off benzodiazepines.

Two days later Lindsay sent a message through the patient portal asking about ketamine therapy. The state read it out: "I'm still feeling a very low mood no motivation just very depressed this has been going on for months now and I'm getting desperate for something that would work quickly to get me out of this depressed state." Tufts said ketamine would require having failed four antidepressants first for insurance purposes and they were not there yet, though she had privately started thinking about treatment resistance.

On January 16 her mood was still very low. She could get out of bed, she could manage hygiene and eating, her concentration was fine, she was caring for the baby, and bonding "felt forced." No suicidal ideation. No homicidal ideation. No psychosis. Tufts started amitriptyline at the lowest dose and confirmed there were no grounds for a Section 12.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT95w3kFdsM

January 23

The last appointment was on a Monday afternoon.

She was doing all right. A little more anxious, heart racing, appetite down, more anxious in the mornings. Mood the same: flat, anxious, no motivation. She had to force herself to get out of bed and out of the house, but she was managing it. She was sleeping okay. She had started the amitriptyline and had no apparent side effects from it.

Her mental status exam that day was unremarkable in every category Tufts named. Appropriately dressed. Appropriate rapport. Appropriate speech. Appropriate thought content and thought process. No cognitive deficits. Normal psychomotor activity. No change in her speech rate or pattern, no change in her ability to communicate, no change in her judgment. Insight still poor, for the same reason it had been poor for four months: she kept attributing her depression to her medications, when in Tufts's clinical view she was, in her words, just depressed.

Tufts slowed the Valium taper because of the increased anxiety, and raised the amitriptyline to 20 milligrams to help her sleep.

And then, one final time, the questions.

At any point in time did she tell you she was planning to kill herself? No. At any point in time on the 23rd did she say she was planning to kill her children? No, absolutely not. At any point during your interaction with her in that session, was there anything about her affect, her demeanor, her behavior that indicated to you that she was a danger to herself or others? No.

Was there any reason, based on your evaluation of her in that session, that would give you grounds to file a Section 12 on her that day. No.

Direct examination rested there. The judge sent the jury home for the weekend with the standard instruction to talk to nobody, read nothing, watch nothing, and keep an open mind, because "you don't have all the evidence."

What Monday has to answer

Day 9 belongs to the state on points, and it is not as clean as it looks.

The Commonwealth now has a chain. Three separate providers, an emergency department, an inpatient unit, and a four month outpatient relationship, all of them asking about suicide and about harming others, all of them writing down no, none of them ever documenting a single sign of psychosis. Dr. Tufts is the best witness the state has produced on that question, because her record is the hardest one to call careless. She tried drug after drug in direct response to what her patient told her. She referred her onward when an office visit was not enough. She asked the same questions every single time, including the day before.

And her record does not deny that Lindsay Clancy was suffering. It proves it, in detail, month after month. What it denies is psychosis, and intent, and any expressed thought about the children.

The defense has the other half. A locked psychiatric hospital had this woman for four and a half days, nineteen days before her children died, and pulled no records, drew no drug levels, ran no postpartum screening instrument, never learned about two suicide hotline calls, and was run by an attending who has never treated a case of the condition this entire trial is about. Both of her doctors independently decided the paperwork was unnecessary because the patient was a nurse and could explain herself. That is a defense closing waiting to be written.

Here is the thing neither side can argue away. The most complete psychiatric record anyone in this case has produced, fourteen visits across four months by the doctor who knew her best, ends twenty four hours before three children died, and there is nothing in it. Whether that means there was no psychiatric break to catch, or means the break was real and nobody in the system was looking hard enough to see it, is the argument this trial has been building toward since the opening statements.

Dr. Tufts has not been cross examined yet. Reddington gets her on Monday. That is where the defense finds out whether the strongest record in the case can be turned the same way the McLean record was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmgey0PdMyk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOCz88GAII

Lindsay Clancy is presumed innocent. She has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first degree murder, and the jury has not been asked to decide anything yet. Everything above is testimony, not a finding.