Lindsay Clancy's own defense attorney introduced a series of disturbing Google searches from her phone at her murder trial, including queries about slitting throats and locating arteries, raising hard questions about whether the evidence supports an insanity defense or something far more deliberate.
On the thirteenth day of Clancy's trial in a Plymouth County, Massachusetts, courtroom, defense attorney Kevin Reddington confronted a Massachusetts State Police trooper with forensic records pulled from Clancy's cellphone. Reddington held up poster-sized displays of the search terms for the jury to see, the New York Post reported. Among them: "Where is the carotid artery?" and "How to slit throat to die." A third search asked how to disable the airbags on a Kia Sorento.
Clancy, a former nurse, is charged with murdering her three children, five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan, at the family's home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, on January 24, 2023. Prosecutors say she strangled them with exercise bands. She then allegedly slit her own wrists and neck and threw herself from a second-story window in what authorities describe as a failed suicide attempt.
Her defense team is asking the jury to find her not guilty by reason of insanity, arguing she was consumed by severe postpartum psychosis made worse by a mix of prescription medications. Prosecutors reject that framing entirely. They say the evidence shows a calculated killer who had grown tired of caring for her children.
The courtroom exchange between Reddington and Trooper Timothy Chiappini, the state police analyst who examined Clancy's cellphone, produced a notable back-and-forth. Reddington asked whether the trooper had encountered a search for "Where is the carotid artery?" Chiappini answered, "I don't recall."
Reddington pressed further, asking whether the searches came from Clancy's phone. Chiappini said he could not confirm that, but conceded that, given the phone identifier number displayed on the records matched the one from his own forensic review, "it's a pretty good inference."
That exchange matters. Reddington, the defense attorney, chose to surface these searches himself. The strategic logic appears aimed at getting ahead of damaging evidence and folding it into the insanity narrative, presenting the searches as signs of a woman spiraling into psychosis rather than planning a methodical act. But the content of the searches, anatomical targets, methods of death, disabling vehicle safety features, reads less like a cry for help and more like research.
The forensic record stretches back months before the killings. Chiappini testified that in the weeks leading up to January 24, 2023, Clancy made multiple searches related to trazodone, Zoloft, "benzo withdrawals," "postpartum depression," and "bipolar disorder." On January 19 and 20, she searched for "schizophrenia," "psychosis," "hallucinations," and "intrusive." On January 20, four days before the children died, she searched "Can you treat a sociopath."
AP News reported that Clancy had sought extensive mental health help before the killings, including a psychiatric hospital stay, calls to a suicide hotline, and visits to multiple outpatient providers. A forensic psychiatrist later diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis following the children's deaths.
Separate tablet evidence added another layer. Sgt. Kyle Pavao of the Massachusetts State Police testified that Clancy's Microsoft Surface Pro tablet accessed a website titled "suicide methods" in August 2022, roughly three months after she gave birth to Callan. The page had been reached through a series of clicks starting on a Wikipedia article about American singer Tom Hall, who died by suicide in 2021.
Pavao could not confirm Clancy herself had visited the page. Patrick Clancy, the children's father, had previously told the jury that he was the one who searched for Tom Hall.
Reddington also introduced a note Clancy wrote in her phone's Notes app on November 3, 2022, just weeks before the killings:
"I really want a fourth child but I need a good therapist before then."
The defense likely views that entry as evidence of a woman aware she was struggling and seeking help, not someone coldly plotting to harm her family. But the prosecution can read the same note differently: a woman who recognized her own instability and continued on without adequate intervention, or who was lucid enough to plan for the future even as she researched methods of death.
An earlier personal note, written in October 2022, struck a similar tone. In it, Clancy wrote, "I'm terrified of something happening to my kids or doing something wrong to mess up their development." Whether that fear was the product of psychosis or a more clear-eyed awareness is now a central question for the jury.
Prosecutor Shanan Buckingham urged the jury not to view the case as "a public debate about women's mental health and how the medical system treats women." That framing, delivered before the search evidence was introduced, signals the prosecution's concern that the defense will use Clancy's documented struggles to generate sympathy and blur the line between illness and intent.
The prosecution's position is straightforward: whatever Clancy's mental state, the searches show a woman gathering specific, actionable information about how to kill and how to die. Searching for the location of the carotid artery is not a symptom. It is preparation.
The defense counters that the searches, the hospitalizations, the hotline calls, and the medication questions all point to a woman lost in a psychiatric crisis that the medical system failed to contain. Reddington's insanity defense rests on convincing jurors that Clancy was so consumed by postpartum psychosis that she could not distinguish right from wrong when she killed her children.
Before the trial began, Plymouth Superior Court Judge William Sullivan partially granted a request from Patrick Clancy to shield the most sensitive evidence from public distribution. Fox News reported that Sullivan ruled the 911 call and autopsy photographs of the three children could be shown to jurors but could not be recorded, broadcast, or reproduced by media or the public. Sullivan wrote that releasing the material would create a "substantial likelihood of harm" to Patrick Clancy and the children's family.
A jury of eighteen, twelve women and six men, was seated after days of questioning prospective jurors about their familiarity with the case and their ability to remain impartial.
Whatever the legal arguments, the facts at the core of this trial are plain and brutal. On January 24, 2023, Patrick Clancy came home to find his three children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan, dead. They had been strangled. The oldest was five. The youngest was eight months.
Lindsay Clancy survived her own injuries. She now sits in a Plymouth County courtroom while attorneys argue over whether her Google search history proves she was planning a crime or losing her mind.
The jury will have to decide which story the evidence tells. But the searches speak in plain language, and three children who cannot speak at all are the reason this trial exists.