A Mistrial, a Deadlocked Jury and the Father Who Asked Everyone to Forgive His Wife
Three years after Lindsay Clancy strangled the couple's three children, Patrick Clancy has remarried and is threatening to sue the people accusing him online.
The trial of Lindsay Clancy ran for nearly seven weeks and ended on September 4, 2026 in a mistrial. The jury deadlocked 11 to 1. She had been charged with three counts of first-degree murder.
The children were Cora, who was 5, Dawson, who was 3, and Callan, who was 8 months old. They were killed in the family's home in Massachusetts in January 2023.
What happened that evening
Patrick Clancy was among the first witnesses called, and returned to the stand across several days. On July 27 he was asked to describe his children while the assistant district attorney, Jennifer Sprague, displayed photographs of them to the court.
Shown a picture of Cora wearing a large red bow, he fought back tears.
"She liked princesses," he said. "She had a lot of friends. She just liked taking care of people."
Dawson, he said, liked firefighters, trucks and Paw Patrol. Callan was just a happy baby.
He then took the jury through the last time he saw them. On the evening of January 24, 2023 he left the house to collect dinner and medicine for Cora. Before he went he rocked Callan on his knees, kissed Cora on the head, and watched Dawson eat chicken nuggets.
He was gone roughly 25 minutes. He came back to find that his wife had jumped from a second-storey window in what investigators described as an apparent suicide attempt. She survived, and was left paralysed from the waist down. He then found the three children in the basement. They had been strangled with exercise bands.
He called the emergency services. On the recording, which was played to the jury, he can be heard shouting that she had killed the children.
Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead shortly after reaching hospital. Callan died a few days later.
I want to ask all of you that you find it deep within yourselves to forgive Lindsay, as I have
The letter he wrote four days later
On January 28, 2023, Patrick Clancy posted a message on a fundraising page that has shaped how the case has been discussed ever since.
"I want to ask all of you that you find it deep within yourselves to forgive Lindsay, as I have," he wrote. "The real Lindsay was generously loving and caring towards everyone, me, our kids, family, friends, and her patients. The very fibers of her soul are loving. All I wish for her now is that she can somehow find peace."
He has not retracted it.
Where he is now
The couple separated in January 2023 and divorced in February 2024. Patrick Clancy began seeing Rachel Danis, a fertility specialist based in New York, in 2024. They married in April 2026.
The marriage was not public until Lindsay Clancy's defence attorney, Kevin Reddington, referred to it in court on July 23, 2026. The couple were photographed together in Manhattan on August 13, during a break in the trial, sitting on a rooftop at around eight in the evening for about half an hour, by an account of the scene both appearing under considerable strain.
He has also said publicly that he is prepared to take legal action against anyone falsely accusing him of involvement in his children's deaths, which is a measure of what has been circulating online in the three years since.
Why the jury could not agree
Days after the mistrial, on September 8, a juror named Kellie Farina and two other jurors spoke publicly about the deliberations.
Farina credited the defence with calling witnesses who actually knew Lindsay Clancy, including Patrick Clancy himself and her in-laws. The prosecution, she noted, offered no character witnesses at all.
That is the structural fact underneath an 11 to 1 deadlock. The defence case did not rest on disputing what happened in the house, which was never really in question. It rested on who she had been before it, and the most powerful person available to speak to that was the father of the children she killed.
He testified. He had already asked the public to forgive her. A jury that heard both is a jury that can hang.
The case can be retried. Whether it will be is now a decision for the district attorney.
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