Lindsay Clancy Wasn't Experiencing Psychosis, Psychologist Testifies

Lindsay Clancy did not have acute psychosis when she killed her three children but rather took their lives so they wouldn't "suffer" after she took her own life, a forensic psychologist testified Monday in her murder trial, the AP reports. Kirk Heilbrun said he ruled out acute psychosis with command hallucinations because he didn't believe Clancy when she said she heard a voice telling her to "kill the children so you can kill yourself." "The way she described this as happening is that she heard a voice that she'd never heard before, experienced a hallucination and she's never experienced it since. But she only experienced it for the 18 minutes or so that it took to kill the children," Heilbrun testified. "To put it mildly, that would be a very, very unusual pattern or manifestation of how this kind of thing comes about. Very unusual."

After killing her children, Clancy jumped from a second-floor window and remains paralyzed from the waist down. Heilbrun testified that he concluded that Clancy killed her children because she wanted to kill herself but didn't want to leave them behind. "One of the things that she said when I asked about what happened, is that in the course of strangling each child, she said, `Go to God, baby. Go to God,'" he said. "That was part of her expectation that she and the children would be together in heaven with God." Heilbrun also mentioned Clancy's Catholic faith, prompting a request for a mistrial from defense attorney Kevin Reddington that Judge William Sullivan denied. He later instructed the jury to disregard the reference to "the religion that the defendant was raised with," calling it "an absolutely inappropriate area of testimony."

Heilbrun is the latest prosecution witness to say that while Clancy was mentally ill, she still knew that what she was doing was wrong. On Friday, Dr. Avram Mack, a forensic psychiatrist, testified that he found no evidence of mania or hypomania to support a bipolar diagnosis—or of psychosis—leading up to the killings. He said Clancy was experiencing severe mental illness when she killed her children but that it was a continuation of the depression she had experienced for months in which she was able to control impulses and distinguish right from wrong. Multiple defense witnesses, however, have testified that they believed Clancy was experiencing psychosis.