Lindsay Clancy's Psychiatrist Was Asked Whether the Pills Pushed Her Over the Edge. She Said No. Then the Prosecutor Picked Up the Bottle.

"Increased the amitriptyline, pushed her over the edge, didn't it?"

"I don't think so."

Those two lines closed the sharpest cross-examination this trial has produced. They came from Dr. Jennifer Tufts, the outpatient psychiatrist who prescribed Lindsay Clancy's medication for four months, and they landed seconds before an afternoon recess, with the jury sent out on the doctor's denial, under a leading question, that her last prescribing decision, made the day before three children died, was the thing that tipped their mother over. The defense had spent four hours getting her to that question. She did not give it the answer.

The redirect that came after the lunch recess did not need to argue the point; it proved it. The prosecutor produced a pill bottle, counted what was left in it in front of the jury, and showed that Lindsay Clancy never actually took the raised dose at all. Read the two exchanges together: the doctor said no, and the bottle said she was right. That is the shape the day itself built.

In between those two moments, one witness closed out a four-hour cross-examination that took the entire day to run its course, and a new one opened a different kind of record entirely, more careful on paper than anything the defense has spent the last week taking apart, and completely untested. Lindsay Clancy is on trial in Plymouth County Superior Court for three counts of first degree murder in the deaths of her children Cora, Dawson and Callan. Her defense does not contest what happened in the house. It contests whether she was criminally responsible, arguing postpartum psychosis and a medication regimen nobody was watching closely enough, which is the whole fight this case keeps returning to: a mother the system failed, or a killer who used that argument as cover. Day 10 put both halves of that fight in front of the jury within a few hours of each other.

What one witness is worth to this case

Dr. Jennifer Tufts is a psychiatrist at Aster Mental Health in Braintree. She finished her residency at Boston Medical Center in 2022, started practicing independently that August, and saw Lindsay Clancy for the first time on September 15, roughly a month later. Over the next four months she prescribed nearly every medication this trial has now spent days discussing: sertraline, buspirone, hydroxyzine, lorazepam, diazepam, trazodone, amitriptyline. Every one of the fourteen appointments happened over video. She never examined Lindsay Clancy in person until this trial.

That single fact, telemedicine only, across the entire treatment relationship, is the foundation defense counsel Kevin Reddington built his entire cross on, and it is worth being precise about what kind of attack it is, and when it happened. Day 9 was the Commonwealth's direct examination of Dr. Tufts, start to finish; the defense never got up. Reddington's cross, all of it, ran on Day 10 alone, Segments 1 and 2, roughly four hours. He never called Dr. Tufts a liar. He never suggested she invented a note or covered anything up. His method, appointment by appointment, chart entry by chart entry, was to ask what she went and found out for herself, and to let the jury hear how often the honest answer was nothing, because Lindsay told her and that was enough. Those four hours are what produced the sentence that closed Segment 2. The redirect that followed is what this day is actually about, because it is the clearest example yet of how fast this trial's most quotable moments can turn once the other side gets its turn.

If you are dropping into this trial cold, here is the frame that makes any of this matter. Lindsay Clancy's defense does not dispute that she caused her children's deaths. It rests on criminal responsibility, a legal standard that asks whether, at the moment of the act, a mental disease or defect left her unable to understand that what she was doing was wrong, or unable to control her own conduct because of it. That is a narrower question than whether someone was struggling, or medicated, or exhausted. Plenty of people are all three and are still held fully responsible for what they do. Once the defense puts the question genuinely in play, the burden shifts to the Commonwealth to disprove it, which is why a treating psychiatrist's own chart, written months before anyone knew there would be a trial, carries more weight here than almost any other kind of witness this case will call.

This case is publicly known as the Duxbury Mom trial, and if you followed Day 9, this is the same fight continuing on its second front. That day put Lindsay Clancy's inpatient psychiatrist from her four-and-a-half-day stay at McLean Hospital on the stand, then walked the jury through Dr. Tufts's own direct testimony about the same fourteen appointments Day 10 now cross-examines. Day 9 ended with the state's case looking strong on paper: two clinicians, months apart, asking the same protective questions and getting the same answers, right up to the afternoon before the killings. Day 10 is the defense's turn to take that paper apart, appointment by appointment, and it very nearly did.

One month on her own

Day 10 opened exactly where Day 9 left off, with the judge telling the jury the Commonwealth had already finished its direct examination of Dr. Tufts and cross would begin now. Reddington opened on credentials, and the numbers he built were not disputed: a 2018 medical degree from the University of Vermont, a psychiatry residency finished at Boston Medical Center in 2022, and independent practice at Aster starting in August of that year, about a month before Lindsay Clancy became her patient. He got Dr. Tufts to agree she held no board certification in perinatal psychiatry, because none exists as a credential, had never attended a postpartum-specific symposium, and had treated at most a handful of postpartum depression patients and no cases of postpartum psychosis in the month before Lindsay walked in. Aster's own website advertised a "special interest" in perinatal psychiatry and trauma. Dr. Tufts pushed back that interest is not the same as expertise, but conceded she never changed that website language in the nearly four years since. Reddington also got her to confirm, in open court, that she is a named defendant in a large civil lawsuit connected to her care of Lindsay Clancy, represented by her own counsel. He asked her directly whether she considered her own conduct negligent or a misrepresentation. "I do not believe that I have been negligent," she answered. Asked whether she understood what misrepresentation meant, she said yes.

Reddington also established that Dr. Tufts screened Lindsay with the PHQ-9, a general depression questionnaire, rather than the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale built specifically for new mothers. "We did not use it on Lindsay," she confirmed, and could not fully explain on the stand how the Edinburgh scale is scored.

The distance question came next, and it is the one that will follow this witness for the rest of the trial. Fourteen appointments, all fourteen by video. Reddington pressed on what that costs clinically: she could not see Lindsay's hands to check for wringing, could not see her legs for anxious movement, could not observe anything below the torso. Dr. Tufts maintained she could still assess mood and affect on a screen, and that psychiatry does not work the way a physical exam does in other specialties. Reddington also put to her a specific screening result from Lindsay's chart, one she said on the stand she had never heard existed, and moved on without giving the jury the underlying numbers. That gap in the record is deliberate on this article's part as well. The figures involved sit in a stretch of audio this trial's own transcription flagged as degraded, and until that is confirmed against the actual recording, no downstream account should be quoting numbers out of it, this one included.

Reddington also spent time on the intake software itself, and by the end of the exchange the software was doing almost as much damage as the doctor. Aster's records run on dropdown and checkbox fields for the categories that matter most, not free text, so a nuanced clinical read, a patient who is incongruent, or has poor insight into her own condition, cannot always be written down even when Dr. Tufts believed it applied. More than once she agreed a specific word in her own chart, a status marked as worsening on one visit, was not really her clinical judgment so much as the closest of three fixed options the software offered her. She also confirmed she had attended no continuing education specific to postpartum psychiatry in the nearly four years since finishing residency, and that she could not fully agree with the premise that combining Ativan with over-the-counter Benadryl, both central nervous system depressants, carried a compounding risk, even as she conceded the two drugs do interact.

CASE STORY, PART 30 Lindsay Clancy's Psychiatrist Admits She Had One Month on Her Own When Lindsay Came to Her

Then the medication chronology began, and it is worth walking slowly because the jury heard it walked slowly. September 15: sertraline, brand name Zoloft, 25 milligrams, for a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder plus adjustment disorder with depressed mood, with instructions to double the dose after a week. Dr. Tufts agreed Zoloft carries an FDA black box warning covering suicidal and homicidal ideation, and agreed the warning's studied age cutoff sits around 24. Lindsay was several years past that cutoff, and Dr. Tufts maintained there is no evidence the risk extends beyond it. Lindsay did not actually take the increased dose for roughly a month, afraid of what a new medication might do. When she finally did, in Dr. Tufts's words on the stand, she felt awful: stomach aches, diarrhea, worse anxiety, worse sleep. Dr. Tufts told her to stop the drug outright.

From there the list only grows. Buspirone for anxiety. Hydroxyzine, an antihistamine, added as a substitute for the over-the-counter Benadryl Lindsay had already started taking on her own. Lorazepam, brand name Ativan, starting at half a milligram and later raised to a full milligram. By December 1, Lindsay is telling her doctor she is close to feeling suicidal, without using the words outright, and Reddington drew out a distinction Dr. Tufts held onto for the rest of her testimony: fear of getting to a dark place is not the same, clinically, as being in one. She testified she did not consider a bare report of being close to those thoughts something Massachusetts mandated-reporter law required her to act on. She also testified she never asked whether Lindsay had called a suicide crisis line. Reddington told her Lindsay had called twice and been turned away both times. It visibly surprised the witness on the stand. "You knew she was really struggling, didn't you?" Reddington asked. "I did," Dr. Tufts answered.

Reddington closed the segment by walking the escalating prescription list back to what it actually looked like from the patient's side. Lindsay kept calling, kept messaging, kept showing up to appointments and asking what else there was to try. "She wasn't doctor shopping," Reddington put to the witness. "She was asking you for help. Isn't that right?" "Yes," Dr. Tufts answered.

The blank assessment

The morning recess ran long, an ordinary court delay that this trial's own transcript nearly turned into a mystery. The automated system that builds these Case Story videos initially misread the whole thirty-eight-minute break as a single garbled line of dialogue, which would have made it look like testimony never stopped. It did stop, for the length of an ordinary recess, and nothing was lost. Cross resumed at the point Reddington had left off: the October 20 appointment, the one where Lindsay told her doctor the Zoloft had made everything worse and her own mother had moved into the house rather than leave her alone, sleeping in the basement some nights, in Lindsay's own bed on others. Dr. Tufts's documented response was to stop the Zoloft and monitor closely, which on cross turned out to mean seeing Lindsay again the next day. Nothing more structured than that.

The records pattern repeated with a second outside provider. Dr. Tufts had looked into brexanolone, an intravenous postpartum-depression infusion requiring a sixty-hour hospital stay, available at Women & Infants Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, and Lindsay eventually pursued a partial hospitalization program there on her own. Dr. Tufts never requested that hospital's own records on her, despite a signed release being available the whole time. "It's similar to South Shore," she testified. "It's a completely separate hospital that I don't have access to." Asked directly why she never sought it out when she could have: "It didn't seem necessary."

Then came the sharpest exchange of the segment. On October 31, a colleague at Dr. Tufts's own practice, Jennifer McAllister, confirmed under oath by Dr. Tufts herself as the clinician who saw Lindsay that day, conducted a therapy visit. Aster's own intake system carries a formal, multi-page suicide-risk assessment, built specifically to trigger whenever a patient reports any thoughts of suicide, which Lindsay had days earlier. Reddington walked Dr. Tufts through the chart line by line and got her to confirm, three separate times, that the assessment built for exactly this situation was never actually administered. The only notation on the page is a single checked box: patient denies suicidal or homicidal ideation. The tool existed. It sat in the chart. Nobody used it.

CASE STORY, PART 31 Lindsay Clancy's Lawyer Confronts Her Psychiatrist With a Blank Four Page Risk Assessment

From there the cross turned to what was never tested at all. A cytochrome P450 panel, the genetic blood test that reads how a specific patient's body metabolizes psychiatric medication, exists and was never ordered. No thyroid testing was ordered either, despite Dr. Tufts's own stated interest in postpartum psychiatric care and a 2021 peer-reviewed study specifically on thyroid function in postpartum psychosis, which she has never read. No endocrinologist was ever recommended. She has never authored a full published article on postpartum depression, anxiety or psychosis herself, telling the jury plainly, "No, I'm not a researcher, I'm a clinician." Asked why none of this testing happened, her position held: none of it, in her clinical judgment, would have changed her treatment plan.

The doctor who wasn't called

The medication list and the chronology kept moving through November and December. On December 1, four medications were "under consideration," not all of them actually started. By December 16, roughly two weeks later, Lindsay was markedly worse. The chart note that day, in Dr. Tufts's own words read out loud, says "very depressed during the day. No motivation, some SI," tied to an emergency room visit for suicidal ideation. She was evaluated and released without admission. Reddington pressed the distinction Dr. Tufts had drawn earlier in her testimony between being close to those thoughts and actually having them. This note uses "SI" outright, in Lindsay's own reported words, not the hedged language Dr. Tufts had used to describe every prior visit. Patrick Clancy, Lindsay's husband, was present at this appointment, and by Dr. Tufts's own concession may have described one of the prescribed medications as making Lindsay feel like "a zombie." It is not written down anywhere in the chart. Asked if it was said, Dr. Tufts answered it was very possible.

Around the same stretch of visits, Reddington raised undiagnosed bipolar disorder as a possible explanation the chart never fully closed out, and caught Dr. Tufts on a detail that will resurface after the lunch recess: the day-count criteria that separate mania from hypomania, the shorter, milder version of the same mood state, did not match what she had told the jury during her own direct examination on Day 9. It is a small inconsistency inside a much larger record, but it is the kind of thing this cross was built out of all day, one small gap after another, none of them fatal alone.

Then came four and a half days that Dr. Tufts learned about only after they had already happened. Between the December 16 visit and the next one, Lindsay was hospitalized on McLean's inpatient psychiatric unit, self-admitted, diagnosed with major depression, and taken off one of her medications. Nobody at the hospital called Dr. Tufts during the admission. She found out through a two-page faxed discharge summary, never the full chart, because she had never requested a release for those records either, the same pattern as every other outside provider in this case. Reddington's sharpest line of the day landed here: "So you just sit there behind your computer and wait for people, if these people don't call you, it doesn't exist." Dr. Tufts answered: "No, not exactly. I had no way of knowing she was even at McLean."

The chronology closed out with the medications that carried Lindsay to the day before the killings. Diazepam on January 9. Trazodone on January 12. Amitriptyline, a tricyclic antidepressant, starting January 16 at its lowest dose. On that visit Lindsay reported functioning at a baseline: out of bed, handling basics, caring for the baby, though bonding "felt forced." By January 23, her mood was flat and depressed, her heart was racing, she had no motivation, and she described feeling numb for an extended stretch of days. Dr. Tufts's response was to raise the amitriptyline dose, reasoning that a slow increase toward an effective level would help the depression lift.

The marquee moment, and what undid it

That decision is what Reddington's closing question was about. "Increased the amitriptyline, pushed her over the edge, didn't it?" "I don't think so." The court called the afternoon recess seconds later, mid-exchange, and the day's testimony stopped there.

Read that answer for exactly what it is. It is Dr. Tufts's own opinion, drawn out by a leading question under cross-examination, about her own prescribing decision, and it is a denial. It is not a stipulated medical finding either way, and the presumption of innocence in this case is not touched by it. What it is, is the defense's biggest question of the day, asked last so it would hang over the recess, and answered against the defense.

When court resumed that same afternoon, the Commonwealth's redirect made the denial concrete. It produced the bottle. The prosecutor walked Dr. Tufts through the pharmacy record: thirty tablets of amitriptyline, filled January 16, 2023. By January 23 or 24, eight days later, only eight tablets were missing, exactly one pill a day at the original 10 milligram dose Dr. Tufts had prescribed on the sixteenth. The increase to 20 milligrams was authorized on January 23, the day before the killings, and that increase is the exact premise of the question Reddington had asked just before the recess. The pill count means Lindsay never actually took it.

Asked directly whether the raised dose could have pushed her over the edge if she never took the raised dose, Dr. Tufts answered: "Well, if she didn't take 20 milligrams, then that's correct." Meaning it could not have.

CASE STORY, PART 32 Lindsay Clancy's Psychiatrist Concedes the Pill Count Shows She Never Took the Raised Dose

The redirect did more than confirm one answer. It rebuilt the qualifications attack with real numbers: thousands of psychiatric patients treated across four years of residency, roughly fifty of them for postpartum issues, a full year embedded in an obstetrics clinic seeing perinatal patients specifically, and telemedicine confirmed as the industry standard nationwide since COVID, not a shortcut unique to this case. It corrected the black-box-warning math the cross had leaned on all morning: the FDA's studied cutoff for that warning covers children and adolescents, with 24 stated only as an outer bound, and Lindsay was 32, eight years past even that outer bound, not the "three or four years older" framing the cross had used. And it reframed several of the cross's own concessions as evidence of care rather than negligence: Lindsay's mother moving in to help, Dr. Tufts's own caution in delaying the Zoloft increase by a month at Lindsay's request, and Lindsay's consistent, repeated denials of any intent or plan to hurt herself or anyone else, in every single appointment, including the last one.

The redirect also drew out the line its whole theory of the case depends on: being afraid of a thought is not the same as having one. On the bipolar question Reddington had raised the day before, Dr. Tufts walked back through why she had ruled mania out at every relevant visit, and explained why the medication questions built around it did not hold up the way the cross had framed them. Then the prosecutor read out a run of specific dates in January, four separate points where Lindsay was home with her family, and asked, one at a time, whether Dr. Tufts had known about any of them. Four times, the answer was no. She was also shown normal thyroid results from two different hospitals she had never seen and had not ordered herself. "Do you have any way of knowing these things if the patient doesn't tell you?" the prosecutor asked. "No," Dr. Tufts answered.

Framed against the whole day, this is the Commonwealth's clearest win since Dr. Tufts took the stand. It does not erase four hours of records-access failures and testing that was never ordered. It complicates, specifically and effectively, the one sentence this trial has produced that sounded closest to an admission.

The fight over her own handwriting

Defense re-cross was brief, and it produced the most combative exchange of the day. Reddington returned to an October 21 chart note in Dr. Tufts's own handwriting: "not hyper, comma, pressured speech." Read as written, Reddington argued, only the word "hyper" is negated, meaning the note says Lindsay did have pressured speech, a symptom sometimes associated with mania. Dr. Tufts insisted the word "not" was meant to cover both words together, that her patient did not have pressured speech, and that Reddington was misreading her own note. Neither side gave an inch. The Commonwealth's re-redirect answered with the checkbox on the same page, which reads simply: "Appropriate." The note itself goes to the jury exactly as written, for twelve people to read for themselves and decide what a psychiatrist's own shorthand actually says. It is a small moment next to a pill bottle, but it captures something true about this entire witness: for four hours, this trial has been arguing over what one doctor's own handwriting means, and by the end of it neither side fully trusted the other to read it straight.

Dr. Tufts was excused from the stand shortly after, closing out a witness examination that opened with her direct testimony on Day 9 and closed with cross, redirect and re-cross entirely on Day 10.

A new voice, and an unfinished chapter

The Commonwealth's next witness is the reason Day 10 does not end where the pill count does. Julie Paul is a psychiatric nurse practitioner and certified nurse midwife who founded and directs South Shore Health's Perinatal Behavioral Health Program. She has a 1991 nursing degree, seventeen years of experience as a labor and delivery nurse before she went back for a midwifery degree in 2006, a psychiatric nurse practitioner degree in 2018, and a specialized certification in perinatal mental health from Postpartum Support International. She built the South Shore program from two days a week into a five-day practice after seeing a gap in care for pregnant and postpartum patients on the South Shore, and she still saw patients herself while running it.

Her connection to this case starts with a phone call on a Sunday. Susan Clancy, Patrick's mother and a labor and delivery nurse who had worked births alongside Julie Paul for years, called her on November 20, 2022, having been referred through another midwife in the practice. With Lindsay's permission relayed through Susan, Paul called Lindsay directly that same day, from her own personal phone, for a screening call that ran about an hour. Lindsay reported doing well for the first twelve weeks after having her third child, a South Shore emergency room visit days earlier, a one-week trial of Zoloft, and that she had been weaning herself off Ativan and Benadryl over concern about dependence. Paul asked directly about thoughts of harming herself, thoughts of harming her children, thoughts of harming anyone else, and auditory or visual hallucinations. Every answer was no. Paul scheduled an in-person intake for the very next morning, consistent with her practice's preference for meeting a new patient face to face whenever the schedule allows it.

At that November 21 intake, the screening scores were stark in both directions. On the GAD-7 anxiety scale, Lindsay scored 21 out of a possible 21, the ceiling of the instrument. On the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, she scored 23 out of 30, but came back negative on the scale's specific self-harm question, item 10, which Paul testified is the single item she weighs most heavily of the whole assessment. Paul started Lindsay on a low dose of Prozac, kept her existing Ativan in place to offset early side effects, and referred her to a therapist at the practice for talk therapy. Lindsay had a full ninety-minute intake, presented as organized and clear with no signs of psychosis, and saw the therapist twice before Paul transferred her care on November 30, a transition already planned before Lindsay ever became her patient, because Paul was relocating out of state.

The ten days between intake and handoff were dense. Prozac was not tolerated well after three days, Lindsay reporting she felt disconnected and spacey, so Paul switched her to mirtazapine and added Klonopin, which Lindsay stopped on her own within days over the same dependence concern she had already shown with Ativan. On November 28, a panic attack; Paul's guidance was a small dose of Ativan and a run, along with a recommendation for a partial hospitalization program at Women & Infants that Lindsay ultimately did not pursue through Paul. Two days later, care transferred to nurse practitioner Rebecca Jollotta, a handoff Paul described as always intended to be short term, since she was already in the process of leaving the South Shore program at the time she first took Lindsay's call. Asked whether the patient had been told that up front, Paul said she did not recall. Paul had no further contact with Lindsay after that.

Day 10 ended with the jury dismissed and Julie Paul still on direct. The judge told the jury cross-examination of this witness would begin the next morning, then turned to a brief housekeeping exchange about scheduling a pending defense motion over an additional witness. Her cross-examination has not happened yet, and on the pattern this trial has established with every treating clinician so far, cross is reliably where the harder material has surfaced. What is in the record so far reads as the more careful version of the care Reddington spent two full Parts arguing Dr. Tufts should have provided: a real screening, a fast intake, a specific referral, consistent denials, and one score that came back negative on the exact item Paul says she trusts the most. None of that should be read as a finished chapter. It is an opening statement from a witness the defense has not touched yet.

THE FULL DAY, GAVEL TO GAVEL Lindsay Clancy Trial: Day 10, Gavel to Gavel IF YOU ONLY WATCH ONE THING Lindsay Clancy Trial: Day 10 Top Moments / Her Own Psychiatrist Under Fire

What Day 11 has to answer

Step back from the individual exchanges and Day 10 is the closest thing this trial has produced to a genuine seesaw inside a single day. It opened on the most sustained, most damaging cross-examination the defense has built yet, four hours across two Parts, hung on one steady theme: a doctor with one month of independent experience, treating a patient entirely through a screen, working off a chart system that could not hold nuance, never requesting records from four separate outside providers even when a signed release sat available every time, and a safeguard built for exactly this situation that never got used once. That cross closed on a sentence that sounded, for one afternoon, like the closest thing to an admission this trial had produced.

Then the Commonwealth stood up with a pill bottle and took the air out of it, not by arguing, but by counting. Thirty pills in, eight gone, eight days, and a dose that was authorized but never actually swallowed. That is not a small rebuttal. It is the single best piece of physical evidence either side has produced in this trial so far, and it landed on the exact sentence the defense needed most.

Neither of those things cancels the other out, and this trial has not asked the jury to pick just one. Four hours of records that were never pulled and tests that were never ordered are still four hours of records that were never pulled and tests that were never ordered, whether or not the specific dose in the marquee exchange was ever taken. A pill count that undoes one sentence does not undo a chart. What Day 10 actually did was close the state's most complete, most careful treating-clinician record, Dr. Jennifer Tufts across two full trial days, on a note that reads worse for the Commonwealth on volume and better for the Commonwealth on its single sharpest exchange, and then open a new one that has not been tested at all. Julie Paul's phone screening, her intake, her scores, her referrals: all of it reads clean so far, and none of it has met cross-examination yet. Day 11 is where that record gets its first real look, on a pattern this trial keeps repeating for every clinician who has taken this stand: the direct testimony always sounds like a system that worked, and the cross is where the jury finds out what the system never actually checked.

Lindsay Clancy is presumed innocent. She has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first degree murder, and this jury has not been asked to decide anything yet. Everything above is testimony, not a finding.