Patrick Clancy Went Back to Court and Still Is Not Done

Patrick Clancy told 60 Minutes he left an ambulance and walked back into court because he wanted his testimony finished.

On the Sept. 20 broadcast he described a “massive, traumatic” panic attack on his second day on the stand, just before jurors heard his 911 call from Jan. 24, 2023. He declined medication, went back in, and later learned the trial still ended without a verdict. He sat for television with his wife, Dr. Rachel Danis, and said they are starting a family while Lindsay Clancy’s murder file remains open.

The Break Before the 911 Call

Patrick was the first witness when the Plymouth Superior Court trial began in late July. He spent two days describing Lindsay’s spiral after their third child, Callan, and the night he found 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan in the basement of their Duxbury, Massachusetts, home. Court took a break before the 911 audio, which he already knew would be horrific.

He went to a back room. His heart pounded. Staff put him in an ambulance and offered drugs. He said no.

I don’t want it, because I want to go back and I want to finish this so I can be done with this. And I went back and I finished the testimony.

Patrick Clancy, on 60 Minutes

The official 60 Minutes clip of that account is the first time he has described the medical break on camera.

Patrick Clancy says he had a “massive traumatic panic attack” during a break in his testimony in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial. He was put in an ambulance but later returned to court to finish his testimony. pic.twitter.com/zJDqLP8tCQ

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) September 20, 2026

His composure on the stand had already become a prop for strangers. In the interview he said testifying was very difficult, and that the second day focused on the night the children died. Finishing the testimony was the point. Closing the case was the hope. The jury never gave him that ending.

Eleven Jurors Were Not Enough

Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial on Sept. 4 after seven days of deliberations. Eleven of 12 jurors were ready to find Lindsay not criminally responsible. Michael P. Desronvil, the remaining juror, would not join them. A mistrial is not an acquittal. The three first-degree murder counts stay in force, and Lindsay remains at Tewksbury Hospital, the state psychiatric facility where she has been held without bail.

Her lawyers, led by Kevin Reddington, argued she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis and could not be blamed as a criminal. Prosecutors said the former labor-and-delivery nurse knew what she was doing, sent Patrick out for takeout and medicine, and strangled the children with exercise bands. Nobody at trial disputed that she killed them. The fight was over her mind that night.

FROM THE KILLINGS TO SEPT. 29

Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz has not said whether he will try the case again. After the mistrial he told reporters the work “has been and will be about getting justice,” and that he would make sure “the victims are not invisible.” Reddington has said he expected another first-degree murder trial. He has also brought in Boston attorney Martin Weinberg to argue that a retrial should be blocked on double-jeopardy grounds. Those fights sit on the Sept. 29 calendar, 16 days after the broadcast and 25 days after the hung jury.

Online Sleuths Wrote a Second Indictment

Patrick said an online swarm of sleuths and influencers dissected the file and built theories that painted him as uncaring, unfaithful, and even the killer. He called that campaign painful, and said lie after lie can start to stick. One spark, he said, was how still he looked on the stand. The panic attack was the part of that day the cameras never showed.

On 60 Minutes he put the rumor mill in a single sentence. “It’s deeply harmful to the legacy of my children. It is a huge distraction from what really matters here, which is perinatal mental health. And it’s done real harm to real people, myself included but also others.” Reddington, speaking after the mistrial, said Patrick had been “set upon” and that his life had been turned into a nightmare he does not deserve.

The pre-air conversation already treated Danis as a problem. Putting a new spouse on national television while a murder file is still open was a bet that viewers would see a marriage. A large share of that talk treated the booking as a dare, and the same accounts that accuse Patrick of the killings used the run-club meet-cute as proof of a plot. The interview was built to starve that rumor mill. The format fed it anyway, because a live docket turns every new photograph into an exhibit.

Callan Lived Four Days After the Basement

Patrick said he came home from an errand and found Lindsay in the backyard with her throat and wrists cut, paralyzed after jumping from an upstairs window. He found the children strangled in the basement. Cora and Dawson were dead. Callan still had a pulse and was flown to Boston Children’s Hospital.

I really thought there was a chance that Callan would live. I remember just thinking, Just give me one. Just give me one kid, and I would raise him as best I could, and I would give him the best life I possibly could. I’d tell him about his brother and sister.

Patrick Clancy, on 60 Minutes

Callan’s heart kept beating for four days. “I got to hold him. I got to lay down next to him. And he died in my arms,” Patrick said. At the hospital he saw the look on the doctor’s face and knew the prognosis was bad. Months later, on the day Callan would have turned 1, he lit a candle at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, walked onto Fifth Avenue, and cried.

He still talks to the three of them, he said, “all the time.” In one dream he is in the kitchen of the Duxbury house when Cora walks in. He asks where she has been. She hugs him. In the Manhattan apartment he keeps a baby sloth Cora carried everywhere, a photo of Callan in a bow tie almost bigger than he was, and Dawson’s toy helicopter. Those objects are how the hour let viewers meet the children, instead of meeting only the arguments about their mother.

Starting a Family on an Open Murder File

Patrick wrote public tributes to each child in the first days and decided to forgive Lindsay in public. He said headlines that called her a monster were not accurate. “I think if people said, ‘She did a horrible thing,’ I think everyone could agree with that. But I believe that it was her mental illness that caused that.” She never asked him to forgive her. He gave it anyway, because he felt that if he did not get there he would be “eaten up inside forever.”

He also said there was a time he did not think he would live to see his 35th birthday, and that he was fine with that. Clancy, 36, told Ross Douthat, the 60 Minutes correspondent, that he did the best he could with what he had at the time, and that he lives with the outcome every day. In April 2023 he left Duxbury for New York, looking for a city that did not know his name.

He met Danis, a fertility doctor, in a New York run club in January 2024. At a cashier she saw a photo of children on his phone wallpaper and asked who those cuties were. “Those are my kids,” he said. She asked if they lived in Massachusetts. “They died,” he said, still at the register. They married in April. “My life has changed since I met Rachel in such a positive way,” he said.

Danis told Douthat she cannot bring his kids back. “But if I can honor them and allow Pat to grieve but also just continue to honor them in the present, it, I guess that’s all I can do.” She has called him the most selfless father and supportive partner, and said she does not understand how the story got so twisted: she was a girl who met a guy running in Central Park on a cold Saturday. They said they are starting a family. He said he cannot wait to tell that child about a sister and two brothers. The broadcast presented that plan as the next chapter. The court file does not move just because a couple is ready for one.

Why One Juror Would Not Move

Desronvil has now spoken through his lawyer, Edward Paltzik, and in a written statement. He said he did not have any doubts. He said that when he tried to raise other theories in the jury room he kept getting cut off, as if questions were the same thing as doubt. “Based on all the physical evidence, key witnesses, and what the prosecution presented, I thought it was enough proof that she knew exactly what she was doing and planned.”

Other jurors had described him as a man who admitted reasonable doubt and still wanted a conviction. He denies that. Paltzik said Desronvil will issue a personal statement in his own words in the near future, and that a juror must be free to follow the evidence without fear of reprisal. Reddington had asked Sullivan to replace the holdout near the end of deliberations. The judge refused, calling the discharge of a deliberating juror a sensitive move, fraught with potential error. An emergency appeal failed, and the mistrial stood.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The split: Eleven jurors were prepared to find Lindsay not criminally responsible; Desronvil held out for a guilty finding.
• The charges: Three counts of first-degree murder remain, and she is held at Tewksbury Hospital.
• The next date: Plymouth Superior Court has a status hearing on Sept. 29.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• A retrial: Cruz has not said whether he will try the case again, cut the charges, or deal.
• Double jeopardy: The defense says it will ask the court to block a second trial; no ruling has been issued.
• Desronvil’s next statement: His lawyer says one is coming, with no date attached.

Forensic work on criminal responsibility draws a hard line that the jury had to walk. Psychosis alone does not prove legal insanity. The diagnosis is not the verdict. That is why 11 people and one person could sit through the same weeks of evidence and leave the room as if they had watched different trials.

Plymouth Comes Back on Sept. 29

Patrick told Douthat he did not know how to manage a postpartum illness. In October 2022, five months after Callan’s birth, Lindsay went nights without sleeping. She made repeated emergency-room visits, checked into a postpartum depression program, and was discharged after a day. Her prescriptions stacked up. December, he said, was the low point: almost no sleep, deep depression, intrusive thoughts. She admitted herself to McLean Psychiatric Hospital on New Year’s Eve, was treated for depression, and made it home in time for Cora’s birthday on Jan. 7. Less than three weeks later, the children were dead.

“I could piece together what it was like to be really, really anxious or depressed, but I didn’t know how to manage a postpartum illness,” he said. “I think mental illness has this ability to be tragically deceptive. So I’m sure there are things that I didn’t see.” He later called psychiatrists and people at Postpartum Support International and asked them what they thought had happened. Postpartum psychosis is rare, occurring in about 1 to 2 of every 1,000 deliveries, and clinicians treat an active case as an emergency. Specialists at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Women’s Mental Health describe mood swings that can precede psychosis, along with delusions, insomnia, and rapid shifts that families often miss until the break is already underway.

Both Patrick and Lindsay have sued health-care providers who treated her, alleging malpractice. Some have denied wrongdoing. Others have not answered. That civil track runs beside the criminal one, and neither is finished.

In 2024 he and his sisters, Erin Donahue and Laura Sullivan, started the Heard Foundation, founded in memory of his children. The group wants Massachusetts’ first dedicated postpartum treatment center. Its mission page notes that perinatal mood and anxiety disorders affect as many as 1 in 5 mothers and 1 in 10 fathers, and that the state still lacks a dedicated inpatient mother-baby psychiatric unit. That is the work he says the conspiracy talk drowns out.

WHAT THE SEPT. 29 HEARING CAN TEASE OUT

• Retry as charged: Cruz can put first-degree murder back in front of a new jury.
• Cut the counts: He can seek a lesser charge, which could open a plea or a shorter trial.
• End it: He can drop the case, a step almost no one who knows his record expects.
• Hear the defense motions: Sullivan can take up the Rule 25 request and the double-jeopardy fight before any new panel is seated.

Patrick went back into the courtroom so he could be done. Cruz still has the file. Lindsay is still at Tewksbury. Desronvil is still talking. On Sept. 29 the same parties return to Plymouth, and the trial Patrick tried to finish in an afternoon will still be looking for an ending.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on a criminal case and on public comments about perinatal mental illness. It is informational only and is not legal advice, medical advice, or a diagnosis of anyone named. Readers who need counsel on criminal charges, civil claims, or treatment should consult a licensed attorney or a qualified mental-health clinician. Court dates, custody status, and clinical descriptions reflect the public record as given in the cited interviews and filings and can change at the next hearing.