On Tuesday in Plymouth, Kevin Reddington stood up and asked the question the last five weeks of trial had treated as settled. Where, he said, is the evidence that Lindsay Clancy killed her children? The entire case, he told Judge William Sullivan, was speculation. There was no admission. There was "a total and complete lack of evidence" that "this woman killed those children."
That is not a small turn. It is a change of destination.
For years the public case has had a grim, agreed skeleton. On 24 January 2023, in a house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, were strangled. Prosecutors say exercise bands were used. Clancy, then a labour-and-delivery nurse, was found outside after a jump from a window, her neck and wrists cut, later paralysed. Her husband, Patrick, had been out. He came home to a slaughter and a wife in the yard. She pleaded not guilty. At trial her lawyer did not fight the act. He fought responsibility. Postpartum psychosis, overmedication, a mind that could not form the intent the law requires. Eleven jurors were ready to say she lacked criminal responsibility. One was not. After thirty-eight hours the judge declared a mistrial.
Now the same lawyer wants the judge to end the case with a required finding of not guilty: not the insanity verdict the eleven almost delivered, but not guilty as if the Commonwealth never proved who did the killing at all. Prosecutors called the new line "laughable." The district attorney has not committed to a retrial. The next hearing is 2 November. The children are still dead. Nobody else has been named.
Criminal law splits a killing into pieces. Someone must have done the physical act. That someone must have had a blameworthy mind, or the statute must allow a substitute. Insanity, in Massachusetts "lack of criminal responsibility," assumes the act and attacks the mind. You tell the jury: she did it, and she could not help it.
That is the defence Reddington tried. It is why he could talk about command voices and hospital statements and expert after expert agreeing she was ill. It is why an 11–1 split in her favour still left three small bodies unexplained in the only way the law was being asked to explain them: she did this, and the disease did it through her.
A required finding of not guilty on the act is a different machine. It says the state failed to prove she was the killer beyond a reasonable doubt. If the judge grants it, she walks as to murder. No hospital commitment that follows an insanity acquittal. No second jury. Double jeopardy would slam the door.
You cannot run both stories at full volume without a cost. If she killed them in a psychosis, the act is not the mystery. If the act is the mystery, the psychosis trial was a long conversation about the wrong question. Reddington now says the judge forced a "conundrum" by refusing a split trial, first guilt, then sanity, so the defence had to concede the killings to reach the mental-state issue. That is a real procedural complaint. It is also a late one. Juries heard a case in which the identity of the killer was not the fight. Opening statements and the shape of the evidence told them what the fight was.
Asking "where is the admission?" is lawyer's work. Plenty of murderers never confess. Circumstantial cases are still cases: who was in the house, the manner of death, the suicide attempt that followed, what she said when she could speak, what she did not say. The defence now picks at body temperature, memory gaps, the quality of the first police work. "There was no investigation," Reddington said, calling it not merely thin but "ridiculous." That is an attack on the file. It is not a theory of an alternative perpetrator.
And that is the hole at the centre of the new claim. If Lindsay Clancy did not kill Cora, Dawson and Callan, someone did. Three children did not strangle themselves with exercise bands. The house was not a public street. The husband was not home. The defence has not offered a name, a shadow in the doorway, a second set of hands. It has offered insufficiency. Insufficiency can win a motion. It cannot answer a parent's first question, or a public's.
The 11–1 split has been treated, in some corners, as a moral verdict the holdout stole. That is not how a criminal jury works. Unanimity is the point. The holdout's position, as later described, was that she knew what she was doing and should answer for it. Reddington wants that juror investigated, while insisting the inquiry will not touch the substance of deliberations, a circle courts are wary of entering. He also wants the mistrial treated as if it should never have been declared, so that double jeopardy bars a second try.
These are the tools you reach for when you have come within one vote of an insanity acquittal and you do not want to roll the dice again. They are not proof that the first trial secretly failed to identify a killer. They are proof the defence would rather a judge finish what eleven jurors almost finished, and on better terms: not "not guilty by reason of insanity," which still names her as the actor, but not guilty, period.
That is the aim now. Not guilty simpliciter. Wipe the act as well as the blame.
The Clancy case became a cultural argument before it became a mistrial. Postpartum psychosis is real, rare, and terrifying. Compassion for a shattered mother is not a vice. What unsettled critics was the speed with which the children's deaths became a backdrop to a story about medication, systems, and a woman in a wheelchair. Caitlin Flanagan called the online energy around Clancy something stranger than sympathy: a fan-like celebration. Pro-life writers argued that a culture practiced at centring the mother's crisis, first in abortion, then here, struggles to keep three dead children in the foreground. Abby Johnson, who has described her own postpartum psychosis, put the distinction as sharply as anyone: illness may change culpability. It does not change what the act was. Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old.
You can hold two facts at once. A mother can be profoundly ill. Three children can still have been murdered in their home. The law is built to hold both. The new defence motion tries to dissolve the second fact into a gap in the paperwork.
Police investigated a family homicide, not a locked-room puzzle with a cast of suspects. If that investigation was sloppy, that is a scandal of competence, and a jury on retrial can hear it. It does not conjure a second killer. Courts do not acquit on the existence of an unnamed ghost unless the evidence truly cannot support a rational finding that the defendant was the one who used the bands.
Judge Sullivan took the not-guilty motion under advisement. He wants the case to move. Timothy Cruz can retry on first-degree murder, drop to a lesser charge, deal, or walk away. Reddington has signalled he will not take a deal that means prison time. Clancy remains in psychiatric care while the file sits in mid-air.
A serious ending would not require cruelty toward a sick woman. It would require that the legal system not pretend the central fact of the first trial was a rumour. Either the Commonwealth can prove she killed them, and the live question is responsibility, or it cannot, and it should say who else the evidence supports. "No evidence she admitted it" is not the same as "no evidence she did it." "We never named another person" is not a theory. It is an absence.
Cora, Dawson and Callan cannot fill that absence. They went to bed in the house where they were supposed to be safest. The lawyer's new sentence, she didn't kill them, is a sentence that still has no subject for the verb that matters. Until someone supplies that subject, the motion is not a revelation about the night of 24 January. It is a bid to leave the night without a legally finished account of who closed their airways, and to call that account not guilty.
https://www.lifenews.com/2026/09/29/lindsay-clancy-attorney-now-claims-she-didnt-kill-the-children/