Patrick Clancy says his ex-wife Lindsay Clancy never once asked him to forgive her for strangling their three children — but he forgave her anyway. He revealed this during his first sit-down interview since her murder trial ended in a mistrial earlier this month, speaking to CBS correspondent Ross Douthat on “60 Minutes.”
“Has she ever asked for your forgiveness?” Douthat asked. “No. But I gave it to her,” Patrick Clancy answered.
Lindsay Clancy strangled the couple’s three children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan — with exercise bands inside their Duxbury, Massachusetts, home in January 2023, then attempted suicide by cutting her throat and wrists and jumping from a second-story window.
Patrick Clancy publicly forgave his wife almost immediately after the killings, a decision that shocked much of the public at the time.
“I saw headlines that said, you know, ‘Killer Mom,’ and ‘Baby Murderer,’ ‘Monster.’ And none of ’em were accurate — I believe that it was her mental illness that caused that. So I shared those words,” he said.
“And I think when it comes to forgiveness, I also felt that if I didn’t get there, I would be eaten up inside forever,” he told Douthat.
A Mental Health Collapse
Patrick Clancy described watching Lindsay’s mental state deteriorate starting in the fall of 2022, when Callan was five months old. “It was October and — she went a few nights without sleeping,” he said.
Her condition worsened through repeated emergency room visits and a stint in a postpartum depression program. Despite being prescribed multiple medications, she continued declining.
“I think December. December was — it was a big struggle for her — just a huge lack of sleep, deep, deep depression, intrusive thoughts, and — at the end of that month she went to the hospital,” Patrick Clancy said.
Asked whether he knew anything about postpartum mental illness before his wife began struggling, he said: “I didn’t know how to manage a postpartum illness. I think mental illness has this ability to be tragically deceptive. So I’m — I’m sure there are things that I didn’t see.”
Seventeen days after Lindsay checked herself into McLean Psychiatric Hospital, she killed all three children and attempted to take her own life. Patrick Clancy found her partially paralyzed in their backyard after the failed suicide attempt — testimony he first gave at trial in July.
Reliving the 911 Call
Patrick Clancy told Douthat that during his second day of trial testimony, when the 911 call documenting his discovery of the children in the basement was played for jurors, he suffered a
