He Rebuilt a Life With a New Wife. She May Face a Second Mu@rder Trial. Three Children Are Gone — and One Grandmother Is Left Holding the Grief.
On January 24, 2023, in a quiet house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, three small lives ended in minutes. Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. Their mother, Lindsay Clancy, a labor and delivery nurse, strangled them with exercise bands, then cut herself and jumped from a second-story window. She survived, paralyzed from the waist down. The children did not.
More than three years later, the legal case still has no ending. After a five-week trial in Plymouth Superior Court, jurors deadlocked. On September 4, 2026, the judge declared a mistrial. The murder charges remain. A status hearing is set for September 29. Prosecutors have not announced whether they will try the case again. Defense lawyers expect they will. For everyone bound to those three names, that possibility is not an abstract legal step. It is another return to the worst night of their lives.
Patrick Clancy, the children’s father, has already lived that night once in public. He was the first adult to find the bodies. He made the 911 call that later filled a silent courtroom. He testified through tears. He has said he does not believe he was married to a monster, but to someone who became gravely ill. He also filed for divorce, left Massachusetts, and built a different life in New York City. In April 2026 he married Dr. Rachel Danis, a reproductive endocrinologist, in a small Central Park ceremony. Friends describe a couple drawn together by fitness and a wish to move forward. Online rumors that she is expecting a child have circulated; neither of them has confirmed a pregnancy.
That contrast is what makes the aftermath so hard to look at. One parent is trying to start again. The other remains in a state psychiatric hospital, facing the chance of a second first-degree murder trial and the possibility of life in prison. Between those two futures sits a third figure who cannot choose either path: Lindsay’s mother, Paula Musgrove.
She sat through the first trial. She testified. She told jurors she loved her grandchildren with all her heart, that no one understands that love until they become a grandmother. She also described watching her daughter unravel in late 2022 — anxiety, fear about returning to work, thoughts she later confessed of harming the children. Paula did not pretend the deaths were anything other than what they were. She also did not abandon the daughter who caused them. That is a position almost no parent should have to occupy: mourning three grandchildren while still showing up for the child who killed them.
A second trial would force that position open again. It would replay the 911 recording. It would replay autopsy language. It would ask a new jury the same question the last one could not answer together: whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible, or whether postpartum psychosis so fractured her mind that the law should not treat the killings as murder. Eleven jurors, according to the defense, were prepared to find she lacked criminal responsibility. One was not. The law requires unanimity. Unanimity did not come.
Nothing about a retrial will restore Cora, Dawson, or Callan. Nothing will give Paula Musgrove the ordinary grandmotherhood she described in court. Patrick may keep the life he has built in Manhattan. Lindsay may face another year of hospital walls and legal argument. The public will argue again about illness, intent, motherhood, and punishment.
The facts that cannot be argued are the smallest ones. Three children were alive in the morning. By night they were not. One family split into a new marriage, a hospital room, and a mother’s ruined gaze. If the state tries the case a second time, that gaze will be asked to witness it all once more.
