The SHOCKING New Phone Evidence in the Lindsay Clancy Trial and What Patrick Explained

The SHOCKING New Phone Evidence in the Lindsay Clancy Trial and What Patrick Explained

Six words were just pulled off Lindsay Clancy’s phone and read out loud in a Massachusetts courtroom. That’s when everything started going downhill. All the media coverage is misinterpreting the phone evidence. By the end of this video, you’ll know exactly what she was describing and why it may be the single most important sentence in this entire trial.

 Three things I’m going to show you. One, her own writing, notes that she typed to herself extracted from her phone describing exactly when she thought she was starting to come apart. And what she was told to do about it. Two, a reversal that happened in that courtroom last Thursday that I’ve not seen anyone explain properly.

Prosecutors put a very dark website on the screen. Then the defense showed the jury a timestamp and it was her husband who’d already said that he was the one who found it. Three, research on ordinary loving parents showing that exact thought that most people assume makes you dangerous is experienced by most of them.

And in the middle, I’m going to tell you the single most likely reason a person in crisis says nothing to anyone. It isn’t shame, it’s a form. If you’re caring for a new parent or an aging parent, that part alone is worth your time. Please send this video to someone else who needs to see it. I’m Neil K.

 Shah, a Johns Hopkins and NIH funded caregiving researcher and the CEO of Cariiaya. I’ve helped thousands of families navigate aging, dementia, and serious illness. I’m not a clinician, but a leading researcher and innovator in caregiving. And one thing before we start here, three children died in this heartbreaking stra- tragedy, Cora, Dawson, and Callan.

 Nothing in this video is a defense of that. This is about what the evidence can and cannot tell us. And if you haven’t seen my previous video on this case that hundreds of thousands people watched, please watch it after this one. It’s fascinating and covers totally different insights. This video is about the new evidence itself.

Lindsay is on trial and charged with three counts of first-degree murder and has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Prosecutors say she acted deliberately and meticulously and have described her as controlling and manipulative. Her attorney, Kevin Reddington, argues she was in the throes of postpartum psychosis, that she has bipolar disorder, and that her medications contributed to it.

As I record this, the prosecution is still putting on its case, the defense hasn’t started, there’s no verdict yet. This week, the state called Massachusetts State Police digital forensic examiner examiner, Trooper Timothy Chapin. His job is called extraction. That just means using a software tool that copies everything off a locked phone, texts, searches, photos, notes, calls, and sorts it into a report with the exact second that each thing happened.

 [snorts]  And one of those things he pulled off that phone was her own writing. In a note last modified on January 23rd, 2023, the day before the killings, she described struggling with anxiety after the birth of her youngest, who wouldn’t take a bottle and was on a strict nap schedule.

 Three young kids to take care of, and she was, in her own words, a touch anxious. She wrote, “I did what you do, asked the psychiatrist for some Zoloft.” I want you to notice that phrasing, “I did what you do.” That’s a healthcare worker describing following the path she thought was completely normal. Ask for help, take the medicine. Then, her dose was increased per the doctor’s instructions, and after that, she wrote that she couldn’t sleep a wink.

Her psychiatrist then told her to stop the Zoloft and advised Ativan and Benadryl to help her sleep. And then, the sixth keyword she wrote, “That’s when everything started going downhill.” She goes on to describe becoming dependent on medications to fall asleep. Now, that note is not proof of anything legally.

 It’s It’s account written by her about herself. The prosecution would tell you a person can write a sympathetic version of their own story. That’s fair. But it’s also the closest thing this jury has to hearing from her directly because Lindsay Clancy has not yet taken the stand and she may never. What she typed into her phone the day before the killings is that she believed the trouble started with sleep.

Hold on to that because the research on that specific point is going to really surprise you and I’m going to get into it. Now the timeline the prosecution built. I’m going to give it to you at full strength because it’s genuinely powerful. On the afternoon [snorts] of January 24th, 2023 her phone shows searches for children’s laxatives, a search for a restaurant called 3V in Plymouth.

And then she opens Apple Maps and pulls up a route to it. That’s the piece prosecutors leaned the hardest on. A route preview isn’t just a map, it’s a screen that tells you how many minutes the drive takes. And so their argument is simple. She was measuring how long her husband would be gone. Then the text messages.

 4:53 in the afternoon, “Any chance you want to do take out? I didn’t cook anything. It’s been a long day.” He says, “Yeah.” She replies, “Okie dokie.” They pick dinner off the menu at 5:15. As he’s walking out, she asked him to also stop at CVS for a stool softener for their 5-year-old Cora. Security video has him entering that CVS at 5:32.

The store manager who took her earlier call testified her voice sounded completely normal. If you stopped watching right there, you’d walk away certain that this is over. But it actually gets much more interesting. Because then Raddington stood up for cross-examination and started reading from the same extraction, the same phone, the same time period.

Hallucinations searched for on January 19th. Intrusive, January 20th. Psychosis, schizophrenia, Seroquel, an antipsychotic, benzo withdrawals. That’s what happens when somebody comes to comes off certain anxiety and sleep medications. Insomnia, ketamine, McLean Hospital, one of the most respected psychiatric hospitals in America, and a place she checked herself into on New Year’s Eve.

 There were searches related to self-harm, which I’m not going to detail here. And on her laptop, searches about bipolar disorder, mania, and medications. And woven all through it, searches about pre-made goody bags, the kids’ TV show PAW Patrol, the best kids’ movies, free coloring pages to print. So, think about both of those search lists at once.

Every item on the prosecution’s timeline is real. Every item on the defense list is also real. The same device has produced both. Which brings me to what happened next, and this is the part that I promised you earlier. The state also called a second investigator, Trooper Kyle Pavao, who examined a laptop. And that trooper testified that on morning of August 23rd, 2022, that laptop was used to reach a website about methods of suicide.

Now, stop and feel what that might do in a courtroom. That’s about as damaging evidence, you know, as you can get. Then, the defense started asking about timestamps, and the picture totally inverted. Here’s the actual sequence the trooper described. The laptop went to Facebook, from there a country song on Spotify, then a Wikipedia page for the country artist Tom T. Hall.

 And on that Wikipedia page, someone clicked a link about Hall’s death. Tom T. Hall died by suicide, and the laptop was looking at the method of suicide. But that’s how the site was reached, not by someone searching for suicide methods, but by someone reading about a famous musician who had died. So, Raddatz didn’t put it plainly to the jury.

 The search was not actually, you know, methods of suicide. It came from the Tom T. Hall link. And then, two more things landed. First, the husband, Patrick Clancy, had already said that he was the one who looked up the details of Tom T. Hall’s death after learning that Hall died by suicide. And second, this is the detail that really got me.

Chapin had testified that the calendar on Lindsay Clancy’s phone showed a doctor’s appointment for Dawson at 8 9:45 that morning and one for Callan at 10:00. So, the trooper placed the laptop activity between roughly 9:40 and 9:48 a.m. So, on redirect, he said he had not been aware that Lindsay and Dawson had already gone to the doctor that morning.

So, the most alarming single artifact in that day of testimony appears to have a completely ordinary explanation. One that the husband had already given under oath several weeks earlier. So, I want to be careful and fair here. The jury will sort out, you know, whose account holds. Nobody’s been accused of misleading anyone.

 But, I think that’s exactly the lesson here and it’s why you should care. A forensic report just tells you what was accessed. It does not tell you the context, the who, the why. Those questions are supplied by human beings afterwards with a theory already in mind. And there’s a mechanical version of this that came up in the same testimony.

Chapini explained that one single action on a phone can appear several times in a forensic report in different categories because the software files the same item into multiple buckets. So, one search can mean several lines on the page. You know, and if you didn’t know that, seeing a long list would look like a pattern and a pattern would look like intent.

We’ve watched exactly this go totally wrong before. At the Casey Anthony trial back in 2011, a forensic tool told the jury that a page about chloroform had been visited 84 times. After the trial, the software’s own developer ran it and found the page had been visited once. The tool had misread that how that browser stored in its history.

 He came forward on his own to say so, but the jury never heard the correction. To Chapini’s credit, he gave the detailed version here on the stand. Prosecutors had even noted that photos of the children were modified the night before, which sounds really sinister. But, on cross, he agreed it could have been several ordinary things, including simply turning a live photo into a regular still picture.

 I think that’s what real integrity on a witness stand can sound like. So, now back to those six words. That’s when everything started going downhill. She dated her collapse to when she stopped being able to sleep. And here’s what robust research says about it, and I think it’s really strong. A 2016 study in psychiatry research led by Shaves and colleagues used two large British National Health Service, more than 15,000 people.

People with mild sleep problems had about two to three times the odds of reporting hallucinations. People with long-term insomnia about four times. And in the group followed over time, the insomnia came first and hallucinations came later, sometimes over 18 months, even after accounting for depression, anxiety, and paranoia.

 It’s a very strong association and it’s been repeated in research. A 2018 review in Frontiers in Psychiatry by Waters and colleagues pulled 21 studies of severe sleep deprivation in a systematic review. And they documented a progression. Around 24 to 48 hours awake, visual distortions, a lost sense of time. Further in, full hallucinations.

 Past roughly 72 hours, false beliefs. A picture that really starts to look like psychosis in otherwise healthy people with nothing else wrong. And there was even an experiment, a 2021 study in Clinical Psychological Science by Harrington and colleagues found that sleep deprived participants had nearly 50% more unwanted intrusive thoughts than well-rested participants.

 The researchers link it to weakened control from the prefrontal cortex, the front part of your brain that lets you push a bad thought away when you are sleep deprived. Sit with all of that for a second. Sleep loss Sleep loss is linked to more unwanted thoughts and a less ability to get rid of them. Now, none of that tells you whether Lindsay Clancy is criminally responsible.

 That’s 12 people’s job on the jury. But, I think what it tells you is that when she typed that, everything went downhill when the sleep went. She was describing something that science strongly shows. In my previous video, I explained why postpartum psychosis comes and goes hour by hour. And why she seemed fine an hour ago is a trap, the same trap that families fall into with delirium in aging parent.

Please go watch that video because it’s the piece that makes this okey-dokey text make sense. But what I did not give you last time was the actual numbers. And the numbers are really startling. Research by Collado, Fairbrother and colleagues, published in BMC Psychiatry and the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, over 70% of new mothers report unwanted intrusive thoughts about their baby being harmed.

 Thoughts about suffocation, thoughts about accidents. And roughly a third to a half report an intrusive thought about harming the baby on purpose. So, keep in mind this is not a fringe group of people. This is almost most parents in this country. Probably even somebody in your own family or even yourself if you have been a mother.

So, why aren’t half the babies in America in danger? Because of the distinction that I walked through last time. The thought typically feels foreign to most people and they work really hard to fight it. Versus in the small minority of people with psychosis that starts the thought starts feeling true and they may be at risk of acting on it.

And here’s a number that make most people feel safe. A 2022 study by Fairbrother and colleagues found no evidence that those unwanted horrifying thoughts are associated with any increased risk of a parent actually harming their child. The horror that most mothers experience about those thoughts is the protective part.

There’s also a brand new 2026 review of 56 studies on command hallucinations, voices that give instructions, and it found that whether a person obeys a hallucination is associated with how powerful and authoritative the voice feels to them and that most people who hear commanding voices do not act on them.

 I I that research may end up being central once that event defense begins. Now, the part I see through my work helping thousands of caregivers. Everything I describe here, catastrophic sleep loss, frightening thoughts, total silence, you know, that’s not unique just to new mothers. It’s the daily condition of millions of family caregivers across the world.

A 2019 study of studies in JAMA Network Open by Gao and colleagues pulled 35 studies covering more than 3,000 dementia caregivers. They lose meaningful sleep every week and have significantly worse sleep quality in general. Broader review data suggests that up to 2/3 of dementia caregivers have a sleep disturbance.

And the finding that very few people even say out loud. A 2009 study in BMJ by Cooper and colleagues surveyed family carers of people with dementia. 52% reported some abusive behavior towards a person they were caring for. I think these people are not monsters. Exhausted caregivers at the absolute end of their rope sometimes think about doing bad things.

 Separately, a pooled analysis found suicidal thinking in roughly a third of dementia caregivers. And researchers have documented thoughts of harming the person being cared for as well. So, if you’re a caregiver or know someone out there and and you’ve had a thought that frightened you, a flash of wishing that it were over, or something you’ve never told a living soul, please hear this clearly.

 That thought is common. It’s not a diagnosis and having it does not make you dangerous. In the research, the people horrified by the thought are precisely the ones not acting on it. So, why does nobody say anything? And I promised you before, it wasn’t shame, it’s a form. Many times people stay silent because of what they believe happens next.

 Losing guardianship, losing custody, being hospitalized against their will. And remember what Lindsay Clancy did for a living? She was a nurse. Losing your license. That fear is very well documented. In a 2022 survey by the Physicians Foundation, nearly four in 10 physicians were either afraid or knew a colleague who was afraid to even simply get mental health care because of questions asked on licensing and credentialing applications.

The Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes Foundation has spent years trying to get those questions removed and reports that millions of health care workers now can have a safer path to mental health care. Now imagine a labor and delivery nurse like Lindsey Clancy in an intake appointment being asked whether she’s had thoughts of harming her own children.

 And in doing the math real time on giving a truthful answer and thinking how much they may cost her, including costing her entire career. That silence is a thing that I think we can actually change in our society. We can’t change this tragedy that has happened, but we can be stigmatized this topic and improve access to mental health for others.

 If that landed, please share this with your friends or colleagues as I think it takes a community to drive that change. One last note. In my previous video, I went through the dozen medications she was prescribed in four months from prescribers who couldn’t even see each other’s records. So let me come back to where we started here.

Lindsey’s phone search records and text messages can alone settle this case because the phone may support both stories. The science can’t tell a jury whether she’s criminally responsible either. But the science does settle one thing. Frightening thoughts can happen. Exhaustion totally changes what a brain can do and the danger has never been just the thoughts themselves.

It’s often that nobody ever says it out loud. If you or someone you know is struggling, please call or text 988 anytime and share this with people. And there’s one more thing on our phone that I cannot stop thinking about. She wrote another note, a list of affirmations, things she was trying to make herself believe.

I am a great mom. I will overcome postpartum anxiety and depression. She typed those words in the dark all alone. The same phone, the same weeks that when she as when she wrote, that’s when everything started going downhill. And then she went back to being the mother that everyone described as wonderful. And hours before her children were killed, her husband texted her simple words, “You’re a good mama.

” Somewhere tonight, someone might be out there typing something like that into their own phone at 2:00 in the morning. Maybe going on their fourth month with no sleep. Whether they’re caring for a newborn baby or an aging parent living with dementia. Absolutely certain that they’re the only one out there. They’re not.

 Please tell them and offer them support. I’m Neil K. Shah. Let’s take care of each other, and I’ll see you in the next one. Thank you.