Lindsay Clancy case: forensic psychologist testifies that an 18-minute hallucination that lasts as long as 3 murders is not psychosis

Lindsay Clancy did not have acute psychosis when she killed her three children but rather took their lives so they wouldn’t “suffer” after she took her own life, a forensic psychologist testified Monday in her murder trial .

Kirk Heilbrun said he ruled out acute psychosis with command hallucinations because he didn’t believe Clancy when she said she heard a voice telling her to “kill the children so you can kill yourself.” “The way she described this as happening is that she heard a voice that she’d never heard before, experienced a hallucination and she’s never experienced it since.

But she only experienced it for the 18 minutes or so that it took to kill the children,” Heilbrun testified.

“To put it mildly, that would be a very, very unusual pattern or manifestation of how this kind of thing comes about.

Very unusual.” A key issue at trial is Clancy’s mental health.

Defense attorney Kevin Reddington does not dispute that Clancy killed the children in January 2023 but says she shouldn’t be held criminally responsible because she had postpartum psychosis , a rare mental illness linked to the stress, sleep deprivation and hormonal changes that follow childbirth. ___ EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide.

If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. ___ Clancy didn’t want to leave her children behind After killing her children, Clancy jumped from a second-floor window and remains paralyzed from the waist down.

Heilbrun testified that he concluded that Clancy killed her children because she wanted to kill herself but didn’t want to leave them behind.

“One of the things that she said when I asked about what happened, is that in the course of strangling each child, she said, `Go to God, baby.

Go to God,’” he said.

“That was part of her expectation that she and the children would be together in heaven with God.” Heilbrun also mentioned Clancy’s Catholic faith, prompting a request for a mistrial from Reddington that Judge William Sullivan denied.

He later instructed the jury to disregard the reference to “the religion that the defendant was raised with,” calling it “an absolutely inappropriate area of testimony.” Prosecution argues Clancy wasn’t suffering from psychosis Heilbrun is the latest prosecution witness to say that while Clancy was mentally ill, she still knew that what she was doing was wrong.

On Friday, Dr.

Avram Mack, a forensic psychiatrist, testified that he found no evidence of mania or hypomania to support a bipolar diagnosis — or of psychosis — leading up to the killings.