In the weeks before she allegedly strangled her three young children and attempted suicide, Lindsay Clancy sent a nurse practitioner a series of haunting messages, revealing a mother in deep distress who felt she was “going to die and I don’t care.”
According to court testimony, the 32-year-old former labor and delivery nurse reached out to Rebecca Jollotta, a nurse practitioner at South Shore Hospital’s Perinatal Behavioral Clinic, starting in late November 2022. Clancy described being overwhelmed by intrusive thoughts and worried she might be addicted to the anxiety medication Ativan.
“I feel like I’m going to die and I don’t care,” Clancy wrote in a MyChart message on December 2, 2022, as reported by the Daily Mail. “I have never felt anything like this before.”
Jollotta responded that such thoughts were “quite common” in women with postpartum depression, assuring Clancy they “mean nothing about you as a mother.”
Just over a month later, on January 24, 2023, Clancy allegedly killed her children—Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan—using exercise bands. She then reportedly slit her own wrists and throat before jumping from the second story of her Duxbury, Massachusetts, home, leaving her partially paralyzed.
During the trial, Jollotta testified that she treated Clancy from November 29 to December 13, 2022, after a colleague transferred her care. She prescribed a range of powerful psychiatric medications.
On November 30, Clancy messaged, “What I’m really feeling is I cannot go on this way.” Later that day, she asked for a phone call, but Jollotta said she was too busy and had a junior staff member call instead.
Clancy continued to express her fears about treatment, writing on December 2, “I took the Remeron… I woke up at 12:15 and had intrusive thoughts—of wanting it all to be over.”
She pressed Jollotta about a possible Ativan addiction, stating, “I feel addicted to it, and I feel like I’m not being heard that that is a possibility.” She added, “I feel completely numb. I feel like I’m going to die, and I don’t care.
What do I do about this?”
Jollotta testified she did not believe Clancy was addicted, interpreting the messages as signs of suicidal ideation.
On December 15, 2022, Clancy and her then-husband, Patrick Clancy, called Jollotta to report “persistent and intrusive thoughts of suicide,” though she had “no active plan” to harm herself. Clancy went to the emergency room that day but chose not to check into McLean Hospital, opting instead for an outpatient program at Women and Infants Hospital in Rhode Island.
Jollotta had “strongly, strongly” recommended that facility, but when Clancy arrived on December 20, 2022, she was turned away. According to Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, staff were concerned she might have been overmedicated. Jollotta said she couldn’t speak to that, as she wasn’t affiliated with the other hospital.
Women and Infants suggested Clancy enter a general mental health facility like McLean, rather than one specializing in postpartum care.
Jollotta also testified that during a December 6, 2022, visit, she raised the possibility Clancy had bipolar disorder, citing her intense reactions to antidepressants like Zoloft and Prozac. She noted Clancy’s lack of sleep without fatigue could signal a manic episode, but she never believed Clancy was in psychosis.
Clancy’s journal, read to the jury, revealed she was struggling with postpartum depression, anxiety, insomnia, and guilt over raising her youngest child, including “horrible PTSD from sleep training Callan” and distress over stopping breastfeeding.
What more will the trial reveal about the warning signs that were missed?
