The defense wrapped up its case on Friday in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial, after spending several days hearing testimony about her mental state both before and after she strangled her three young children.

Prosecutors then proceeded to call rebuttal witnesses in the trial, which appears to be drawing to a close.

Closing arguments are anticipated for the coming week.

Clancy, 36, has pleaded not guilty to murder charges in the deaths of her children—Callan, Dawson, and Cora—who were between 8 months and 5 years old.

Their bodies were found in the basement of the family home in coastal Duxbury, Massachusetts.

After strangling the children, Clancy jumped from a second-story window and has been paralyzed from the waist down ever since.

Prosecutors contend that Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, orchestrated the killings.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story contains discussions of suicide.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, the U.S. national suicide and crisis lifeline can be reached by calling or texting 988.

Clancy's lawyer, Kevin Reddington, has not disputed that she killed the children, but he argues that she should not be held criminally responsible because she suffered from postpartum psychosis, a rare mental illness linked to the stress, sleep deprivation, and hormonal changes that follow childbirth.

He sought to bolster that defense by having the jury hear from more of Clancy's family members, who detailed her worsening mental health and her attempts to address it through psychiatric treatment and medication before the killings in January 2023.

The jury also heard from a psychologist and a hospital chaplain who had met with Clancy after the killings.

For his final witness on Friday, Reddington called Dr. Phillip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist and expert in filicide—the killing of a child by a parent.

Resnick testified that Clancy was “clearly psychotic” on the day she killed her children and was not in control of her actions.

"It was almost as if she were a puppet, with someone else pulling the strings," said Resnick, who testified for the defense in the 2006 trial of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children in 2001.

Resnick said he spent hours interviewing Clancy four months after the killings and believed she tended to downplay rather than exaggerate her symptoms.

He added that she suffered from severe depression, showed signs consistent with bipolar disorder, and reported hearing a voice that commanded her to kill her children.

Resnick delineated several categories of filicide, encompassing killings that entail abuse.

Others involve psychosis or what he terms “altruistic” filicide — a killing perpetrated “out of love rather than hostility.”

He noted that Clancy’s case encompassed both of the latter categories, yet he found no evidence of abuse.

Resnick stated that Clancy was under the delusion that if social services took the children or she took her own life, her children would suffer without her, and she believed they would be better off dying with her and going to heaven.

"She was persuaded that her conduct was aligned with the paramount welfare of her offspring," he observed.

During cross-examination, prosecutor Jennifer Sprague contested that portrayal.

“So it is preferable to eliminate them rather than have them apprehended?” Sprague inquired.

The judge ruled the question inadmissible.

Prosecutors argue that Clancy deliberately arranged for her husband to be away from the house on the day of the killings.

They have tried to show that, even though she was receiving treatment for anxiety, insomnia, and depression, she was not suffering from psychosis.

The spelling of Clancy’s first name in the headline has been amended to Lindsay, rather than Lindsey.