Jurors heard from two of the prosecution’s expert witnesses Tuesday as Lindsay Clancy’s triple murder trial nears its end.

Clancy killed her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, eight months, then tried to kill herself in January 2023.

She isn’t disputing the killings — instead, her attorney Kevin Reddington is arguing she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time and can’t be held criminally responsible.

Defense experts testified that her deteriorating mental health in the months leading up to the killings along with a voice she heard on the night she strangled the children show she was psychotic at the time.

But doctors called by the Commonwealth have disagreed.

Tuesday morning, Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague finished her direct examination of her witness Dr. Kirki Heilbrun, a forensic psychologist.

He likened Clancy’s experience the night of the killings to “peritraumatic dissociation.”

“You are watching yourself go through something,” Heilbrun said, telling jurors Clancy “talked about feeling like it wasn’t her, like she was watching herself… No thinking, no decision making, only responding to the voice” when she strangled the children.

That experience can sound like psychosis, he said, but it is actually a common trauma response and doesn’t reduce a person’s capacity to make decisions.

He said that he did consider Clancy had psychosis, but a number of factors lead him to lean towards another possibility.

“The evidence much more strongly, in my opinion, supported the second explanation, which was the serious suicide attempt accompanied by killing the children out of love,” Heilbrun said.

Clancy was suffering from a mental disease or defect at the time of the crime, bipolar ii disorder, he said, but she was able to retain her appreciation for the wrongfulness of what she did and she demonstrated self control. He said she was criminally responsible.

On cross-examination, Reddington took aim at Heilbrun’s credentials.

“Have you ever treated a woman who had postpartum psychosis?” Reddington asked.

“I had a therapy group which was comprised of women who had killed their children, they were severely mentally ill,” he said, referring to work he did at a Florida hospital in 1982.

“And this was 44 years ago?” Reddington asked.

“Yes,” Heilbrun replied, telling the attorney that there were four or five women in the group.

Reddington took Heilbrun through Mass General’s criteria for postpartum depression and psychosis, and Heilbrun answered that Clancy had all the depression symptoms and most of the psychosis symptoms, including thoughts of killing her children.

On redirect, Heilbrun said Clancy had never shared the homicidal thoughts or suicide plans with healthcare providers.

The next rebuttal witness for the prosecution was Dr. Gregory Saathoff, a forensic psychiatrist for the Quantico’s Behavioral Analysis Unit.

The doctor described different types of psychosis, including hallucinations, delusions (that can be “bizarre or not bizarre,” he said), and difficulty thinking and communicating. Saathoff said psychosis can present with all these characteristics or just one.

For Clancy’s case, the psychiatrist said he reviewed medical records, police records, had a conversation with Patrick Clancy, and interviewed Lindsay Clancy twice, once in May for six and a half hours and once in June for five and a half hours via Zoom.

“She was very pleasant, very responsive to questions that I asked on both occasions,” he said of Clancy.

Like Heilbrun, Saathoff said it was unusual that Clancy only reported auditory hallucination the night of the killings, not before or after.

He noted several other factors that would be atypical for those hallucinations, including that she’d acted on the voice immediately and that it stopped right after she strangled the kids.

“Committing the act is not curative of the voice,” he added. “I’ve never seen that.”

Additionally, Saathoff drew attention to inconsistencies in Clancy’s telling of that night.

To Saathoff, Clancy said she heard the voice after a call with her then husband. To another evaluator, she said that she heard the voice right after he left the house, it became more intense, and it told her children would suffer if she didn’t kill them.

“Widely divergent reports,” Saathoff said, “raise questions about what she is telling me.”

Saathoff is set to get back on the stand Wednesday morning.

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