Lindsay Clancy made a series of disturbing Google searches – including “How to slit throat to die” – in the days and weeks leading up to the grisly murders of her three children, bombshell testimony revealed this week.
Clancy’s defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, shockingly confronted a Massachusetts state trooper with the alarming searches as the mom’s murder trial entered its 13th day Thursday.
“Did you come across a search, ‘Where is the carotid artery?’” Reddington asked Trooper Timothy Chiappini, who analyzed Clancy’s cellphone after 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and Callan, 8 months old, were found fatally strangled in the family’s Duxbury home on Jan. 24, 2023.
“I don’t recall,” Chiappini responded.
Reddington then asked about the searches, “How to slit throat to die” and “How to turn airbags off on Kia Sorento” – but the trooper again said he did not remember them.
“These all came from Lindsay’s phone, right?” Reddington asked, and held up posters displaying each search for the Plymouth County courtroom to see.
“I can’t confirm that,” Chiappini said, but then agreed with Reddington that “it’s a pretty good inference,” given that the phone identifier number displayed on the records introduced at the trial matched the one from his own forensic review of Clancy’s phone.
Another particularly disturbing tidbit recovered from the former nurse’s phone was the Google query, “Can you treat a sociopath,” which was made Jan. 20, 2023 – just four days before the killings, Chiappini confirmed.
The trooper’s chilling testimony also revealed a flurry of searches about postpartum depression and mental health conditions, including “psychosis.”
Clancy searched for information about schizophrenia and psychosis on Jan. 19 and 20, 2023 – when she also looked up the terms “hallucinations” and “intrusive,” Chiappini told the jury, citing the cellphone records.
She also made searches regarding various drugs she had been prescribed – including trazodone and Zoloft and “benzo withdrawals” – as well as “postpartum depression” and “bipolar disorder” multiple times in the weeks before the slayings, the trooper testified.
Clancy is accused of murdering her three children using exercise bands before slitting her wrists and neck and throwing herself out of a second-story window in a botched bid to kill herself.
Earlier Thursday, Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Kyle Pavao testified that his analysis of Clancy’s Microsoft Surface Pro tablet uncovered a visit to a website entitled “suicide methods” in August 2022 – roughly three months after she gave birth to Callan.
Pavao could not confirm Clancy herself had visited the page, only that it was accessed through a series of clicks on a Wikipedia page about the American singer Tom Hall, who died by suicide in 2021.
Clancy’s then-husband, Patrick Clancy, previously told the jury that he conducted the search for Tom Hall.
Reddington is asking jurors to find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity, arguing she was in the throes of severe postpartum psychosis that was worsened by a cocktail of prescription drugs when she killed her children.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, claim her actions portray a calculated killer who was tired of taking care of the kids.
Also on Thursday, the jury heard a gut-wrenching, journal-like note that Clancy had written about wanting a fourth child – just weeks before the murders.
“I really want a fourth child but I need a good therapist before then,” Clancy apparently wrote in a lengthy entry on her phone’s Notes app on Nov. 3, 2022.
Jurors were also shown the final, unnervingly ordinary text messages between Clancy and Patrick in the moments before the dad returned home to discover their three children dead.
