The Phone That Searched "Hallucinations" Also Texted "You're a Good Mama." Day 13 Read the Same Evidence Two Different Ways.

Lindsay Clancy did not testify on Day 13. She did not have to. The Commonwealth spent the entire day inside her digital life instead: her husband's computer, her own phone, a journal entry she wrote fifteen months before the killings, and a stretch of text messages with her mother that runs almost to the morning of January 24, 2023. Two state police digital forensics examiners walked a jury through browsing history, search terms, photo metadata and message threads with the kind of granularity only a forensic extraction can produce. And by the end of the day, on exhibit after exhibit, the defense had gotten there first and turned the record around.

That is Day 13 in one sentence, and it is worth sitting with before I walk through the parts, because it is not a story about who won. It is a story about what happens when a jury is handed a person's entire phone. Every family's phone, read closely enough by two lawyers pulling in opposite directions, will produce a search history that looks alarming and a text thread that looks ordinary, sometimes in the same week, sometimes in the same hour. The question this trial has to answer is not whether that phone contains dark material. It does. The question is what that material means about the person carrying it, and Day 13 is the day the jury got the fullest possible record to decide that question with, cut two ways by two lawyers who each know exactly what they are doing.

The day opened with the trial's standing housekeeping: Judge William F. Sullivan's mid-trial check with the jury, whether anyone has read, seen, heard or overheard anything that could affect their fairness. Nobody raised anything. Then the schedule note that shaped the rest of the week: the court would not sit the next day, and testimony would resume the following Monday at 9:00 a.m. Everything that followed, six witnesses' worth of testimony across three segments, had to carry a jury through a long weekend before any of it could be revisited.

There is a reason a digital forensics day looks different from every other kind of trial day, and it is worth naming before we get into it. A witness on the stand describes what they saw, and a cross-examiner tests their memory, their vantage point, their bias. A phone extraction is not memory. It is a record, timestamped down to the second, of every search, every text, every photograph touched, whether or not the person who owned that phone would ever have chosen to explain any of it out loud. Nothing in it can be misremembered. But nothing in it comes with intent attached either. A search for "hallucinations" tells you a search happened. It does not tell you why, and it does not tell you what the person searching believed about themselves when they typed it. That gap between the record and the meaning of the record is where the entire day lived.

I want to say plainly, before any of the specifics, that nothing in this record has been decided. Lindsay Clancy is presumed innocent, and the jury has not been asked to reach a verdict on anything discussed below. Kevin Reddington's defense has already conceded that Lindsay Clancy caused the deaths of Cora, Dawson and Callan Clancy. What remains contested, the only question left in this trial, is criminal responsibility: whether her mental state at the time meant she could be held criminally accountable for what her hands did. Everything the jury heard on Day 13 goes to that question and only that question. It does not answer it.

A morning she also drove her son to the doctor

The Commonwealth's first witness was a Massachusetts State Police sergeant who spelled his own name into the record letter by letter: "Kyle Paveo, K-Y-L-E, last name P-A-V-A-O." That spelling governs here. Sergeant Kyle Pavao has eight years with the State Police, eighteen years total in law enforcement, and roughly three and a half of those years in the department's cybercrime unit, the primary child-exploitation unit, before his current post at the Bourne Barracks. He is a certified forensic computer examiner, a certified forensic Mac examiner, a Cellebrite-certified mobile examiner, and a Magnet-certified digital video examiner. In October 2025 he examined a bit-for-bit forensic image of a Microsoft Surface Pro seized from 47 Summer Street in Duxbury, by all accounts Patrick Clancy's own computer.

What he found on that laptop is the piece of digital evidence in this entire case that comes closest to sounding like someone researching her own death, and it is worth laying out exactly as the Commonwealth presented it before I explain what the cross-examination did to it. On the morning of August 23, 2022, someone using that Surface Pro visited a Facebook profile page at roughly 9:40 a.m., ran a Spotify search two minutes later for the country singer Tom T. Hall, ran the same search on Google at 9:44:30 a.m., landed on Hall's Wikipedia page, clicked through to an anchored section of that page titled "Death," which describes Hall's death by self-inflicted gunshot wound, and from there clicked a further link to the Wikipedia page for the Grafton Bridge, reached at 9:48 a.m., three minutes after first touching material adjacent to suicide methods. Pavao was careful, and the prosecution had him confirm it directly: a forensic extraction shows what data exists and was accessed. It cannot show who was sitting at the keyboard.

A word on what a "browser profile" actually is, because the entire cross turns on it. Chrome, like most browsers, lets more than one person share a single computer while keeping their own bookmarks, saved passwords and logged-in accounts separate, organized under named profiles. When nobody actively switches to a specific profile, the browser opens to whichever one is set as the default. A forensic examiner can see which accounts were logged into a session and which pages loaded. What a forensic examiner cannot see, ever, no matter how good the tool, is a face in front of the keyboard. That is the entire gap Reddington's cross drove through.

Kevin Reddington's cross took that admission and built an entire alternate reading on top of it. He got Pavao to concede, one fact at a time, that he cannot say who was using the computer; that the Facebook account accessed that morning was signed in under the browser's default Chrome profile, and that default profile belonged to Patrick Clancy, not Lindsay; that Patrick Clancy's own Gmail account was independently found logged into that same browser around the same window, a detail that was never in Pavao's original report; that he does not know whether Patrick Clancy plays guitar, is what the cross called "a music aficionado," or personally enjoyed Tom Hall's music; and that no search resembling "ways to kill" ever turned up anywhere in his review. Reddington then placed a timeline fact next to all of it: that same morning, at 10:15 a.m., Lindsay Clancy drove their then-two-year-old son, Dawson, to South Shore Health for an ear recheck, a four-minute drive from the house. Twenty minutes of browsing sat inside a morning that also required getting a toddler dressed, fed and driven to a pediatric appointment. On redirect, the Commonwealth pushed back on the clock itself: the Grafton Bridge page was reached at 9:48 a.m., not "10 o'clock" as the cross's rounding had implied, and the pediatric visit was closer to 10:00 than 10:15.

Notice what the redirect did and did not do. It tightened the clock by a few minutes. It did not touch the browser-profile problem, and it did not touch the Gmail account, because there was nothing to say about either one that helps the Commonwealth. A prosecution that had a clean answer to "whose browser was this" would have given it. It gave a clock correction instead, and a jury paying attention will notice the difference between rebutting a fact and rebutting a rounding error.

Reddington's closing question to Pavao asked him not to leave the jury with an impression the evidence would not support, and the witness's answer is as guarded as anything on this record: all he is presenting is the facts that were presented to him. That is a state's witness declining to draw the inference the state would like drawn, on the state's own exhibit, and it is as clean a defense moment as this trial has produced from a forensic examiner who was never on the defense's side to begin with.

KEY MOMENT All I'm Presenting Is The Facts Presented To Me

The journal, read in full

The Commonwealth's next witness introduced himself cleanly: "Timothy Chiappini, last name is spelled C-H-I-A, P as in Peter, P as in Peter, I-N-I." Spoken and spelled forms match, no name trap here. Chiappini has been with the State Police since March 2012 and is currently the Unit Commander of the Critical Incident Technical Investigations Team. In January 2023 he was assigned to the State Police Detective Unit for the Plymouth County District Attorney's Office, and he performed what is called an advanced logical extraction of Lindsay Clancy's iPhone in 2023, essentially a full iTunes-style backup of everything the phone would normally hand over when it syncs with a computer, its integrity verified by cryptographic hash both then and at every point the file has since been reopened. A cryptographic hash is a kind of digital fingerprint for a file. If a single byte of the extraction changed after it was created, the hash would change with it, which is how the state can prove in court that nobody altered the evidence between 2023 and today.

Two separate examiners took the stand this day for a reason that is more mundane than it might sound: Pavao's certifications cover computers, Chiappini's cover phones, and the state police divide digital forensics work along that line rather than have one examiner claim expertise across every kind of device. That division is why the Surface Pro and the iPhone got two different witnesses instead of one, and it is worth knowing going in, because the jury is about to receive two entirely separate records of two entirely separate devices, and only the human beings in this family connect them.

His direct examination is a long, document-heavy walk through Cellebrite timeline reports spanning September through December 2022, then a separate report covering the four hours from 4:00 to 8:00 p.m. on January 24, 2023, the day of the killings. The September-December material includes a text to a contact saved as Allison mentioning wanting "a general depression mental health program like at McLean Hospital," a downloaded request-for-medical-leave form, and two iPhone Notes entries the Commonwealth spends real time on.

The first of those notes is the day's heaviest piece of evidence, and the jury heard it read into the record in full. Created October 24, 2022 and last modified November 3, it is a raw, extended journal-style entry in which Lindsay Clancy writes that she is sad and depressed because she is not able to parent her third child the way she parented her first, names Cora, Dawson and Cal directly, describes resenting her own ability to bond with her youngest, writes about guilt over sleep-training and stopping breastfeeding, says she is on the fence about starting a new medication for anxiety and depression, and describes a pretty rough evening the night before with her two older children. There is no way to soften what that entry sounds like read aloud in a courtroom in the defendant's own first-person voice, and I am not going to try. It is raw first-person evidence of exactly the postpartum strain the defense's own theory of this case rests on.

Sit with that entry for a moment before moving on, because it is the piece of evidence both sides will point to for the rest of this trial for opposite reasons. To the Commonwealth, it is a data point: a documented state of mind fifteen months before the killings, useful mostly to establish that something had been present for a long time. To the defense, it is closer to the whole case: contemporaneous, first-person, unprompted proof that a woman was describing exactly the kind of postpartum breakdown her legal team says explains everything that followed. I am not going to tell you which reading is correct, because that is not a call this outlet makes. What I can tell you is that a note written in October 2022 and read into a courtroom in August 2026 does not, by itself, prove anything about January 24, 2023. Fifteen months separate the two dates, and a great deal happened inside that gap that this trial has already spent twelve days establishing.

A second note, created December 22, 2022 and modified January 23, 2023, the night before the murders, is flagged by its own modification date but its content was not read into the record in this stretch of testimony. Chiappini also identified a set of photographs on the phone with metadata showing they were accessed and modified during the evening of January 23, 2023, that same night. Every photo and video an iPhone stores carries hidden data alongside the image itself, when it was taken, when it was last edited, sometimes where. That is metadata, and it is how a forensic examiner can tell a photo was opened and altered on a specific night without anyone needing to say so out loud. Chiappini explained the general mechanics of how those edits get logged, but the content of those specific photographs was never described on this record, and I am not going to speculate about what they show.

CASE STORY, PART 42 Lindsay Clancy's Own Journal Read in Court Says She Resented Her Other Children

The final report Chiappini walked was a minute-by-minute timeline for the evening of January 24, 2023, the day of the killings, and it is where the Commonwealth's forensic case and the defense's forensic case start pulling on the exact same thread. Searches for "Miralax for kids" and "Pedialax" appear in multiple categories at the same timestamp, which Chiappini attributed to how the Cellebrite tool sorts a single search artifact rather than to repeated searching. There is an Apple Maps search for a restaurant, a phone call to a CVS pharmacy in Kingston at 4:48 p.m., and an ordinary back-and-forth text exchange between Lindsay and Patrick Clancy about ordering takeout: "any chance you want to do takeout from 3B, I didn't cook anything, it's been a long day," "yeah," "okie dokie," "check the menu when you can," "also, what are you getting," "but it was just a short nap." A text at 5:15 p.m. reads "PDLX liquid stool softener." Several short phone calls between Lindsay and Patrick run between 5:09 and 5:34 p.m., two of them logged at zero duration, which may mean they went unanswered and may mean nothing more than a short connection window. In the final moments before the morning recess, Chiappini confirmed one more report had been run and admitted as an exhibit: every text message between Lindsay Clancy's phone and the contact saved in it as "mommy," for the entire month of January 2023. That exhibit was admitted seconds before the recess. Its content was not yet in front of the jury when Segment 1 ended.

Two witnesses were new to the record on Day 13, and both spelled their own names cleanly on direct: Pavao and Chiappini. No name trap on either one.

The extraction the jury never saw

Court returned from the morning recess and Reddington resumed his cross of Chiappini with no further direct remaining. He drew a lane distinction first: Chiappini worked mobile devices only, never computers, that territory belonged to Pavao. Then he established something the Commonwealth's own direct had not mentioned. A third trooper, Lieutenant Joseph Rabbitt, performed his own extraction of Lindsay Clancy's phone on January 27, 2023, three days before Chiappini's own extraction on January 30, using a method called a full file system extraction.

The difference between that method and Chiappini's advanced logical extraction is not a technicality, and Reddington made sure the jury understood why. An advanced logical extraction pulls what a phone would normally hand over on its own, the same categories a backup grabs: messages, photos, call logs, notes, the apps' visible contents. A full file system extraction goes underneath that. It can recover deleted material still sitting in the phone's storage, application data the phone was never designed to hand over voluntarily, and system-level records a standard backup does not touch. Chiappini conceded, without hesitation, that Rabbitt's method captures more data than his own. He also said he never discussed the phone with Rabbitt at all, not before his own extraction and not after. A more thorough extraction of the same phone, performed three days sooner, exists somewhere in this case's files. It is not the one the jury has been shown, and nothing in this record explains why.

Reddington also returned to the Gmail-account detail from Pavao's testimony. A Cellebrite report showed an email address, spelled letter by letter for the record: "R-I-C-K-W dot C-L-A-N-C-Y at gmail dot com." Reddington suggested it was fair to say that address belonged to Patrick Clancy and was logged into Lindsay's Facebook session. Chiappini would not go there. His answer was simply, "I can't confirm that." That reading belongs to the lawyer who asked the question, not to a confirmed fact in this case's record, and I am reporting it that way on purpose.

Pretty good inference

The cross then turned to what is probably the single most quoted exchange to come out of Day 13. Reddington read three Cellebrite search entries directly into the record: "carotid artery," a Safari search for "how to slit your throat to die," and a search asking whether you can turn the airbags off on a Kia Sorento. Chiappini did not know Lindsay Clancy owned a Kia Sorento. He could not personally confirm the searches came from her phone specifically rather than some other device tied to the household, but he agreed, in the phrase that has already become this case's shorthand for the entire day, that it was "a pretty good inference." That distinction, between an inference and a confirmed fact, is not lawyer semantics. A phone can be logged into more than one family member's accounts, sit unlocked on a kitchen counter, or be picked up by anyone in the house for thirty seconds. Attributing a search to the phone's registered owner is a reasonable inference. It is still an inference, and a jury deciding whether a specific person searched a specific term is entitled to be told, plainly, when that is all it is. A sidebar interrupted almost immediately after this exchange, and this Guide holds no content of what was discussed at it.

KEY MOMENT Pretty Good Inference, Right? Yes, Sir.

Waiting for the day I wake up and feel like me

Cross then opened Exhibit 238, the text thread between Lindsay Clancy and the contact saved in her phone as "mommy," her own mother, running through January 2023. Green messages are Lindsay's, blue is her mother's. Reddington read a run of it start to finish. January 3, 8:35 a.m.: Lindsay is "all right" but "anxious about meeting with the whole psychiatry team." Two minutes later: "I'm just worried they won't send me home soon," which Chiappini read as placing her at a medical facility, McLean Hospital by his own recollection. Through January 8, 10, 12 and 14 the exchange tracks a slow, plateauing recovery: "did you sleep good," "good, at the gym with the kids," "still sleeping good," "so far, a little bit." And then, January 14 at 1:05 p.m., the line that gives this day its name: Lindsay to her mother, "about the same... hanging in there and waiting for the day I wake up and feel like me." Ten days before her children died, that is what she told the one person who had come up from Connecticut to stay with her.

KEY MOMENT 10 Days Before The Killings, Lindsay Texted This

January 16, Lindsay tells her mother an unspecified outing "was fun... Cora and Dawson enjoyed" it. January 18, her mother asks whether she has started a new medication; Lindsay answers she started one two nights earlier, and the judge tells the witness he does not need to answer further since the exhibit itself is going to the jury directly. Reddington also got Chiappini to confirm that a "snowman photo" from January 24 and Google searches for a restaurant, including its distance from the house and its menu, fall on the same day as a pediatric appointment Patrick had texted Lindsay about. Chiappini recalled the snowman photo specifically and confirmed its date, though he did not independently recall a reply that came with it.

Read the thread in order, the way the jury got to, and it does not sound like a family in the middle of an emergency. It sounds like a mother checking in with her daughter the ordinary way, a sleep question here, a medication question there, an outing worth mentioning because the kids enjoyed it. That is exactly what makes it hard evidence to categorize. Nothing in Exhibit 238 screams crisis. Everything in the October journal entry does. Both documents came out of the same four-week window, and the jury now has to decide which one tells them more about what was actually happening inside that house.

Buried in Miralax and Chuck E. Cheese

What followed is the stretch of Day 13 that will do the most work for whichever side this jury believes when it finally deliberates, and it is worth reading exactly the way it was presented, because the ordering is the whole argument. A long medical and psychiatric search-term barrage came in without defense objection: bipolar symptoms, psychosis, a search asking whether you can be in diabetic ketoacidosis without high blood sugar, repeated searches on trazodone's effects, Wellbutrin, Ativan addiction, Prozac, a schizophrenia search Chiappini did not specifically recall, a Seroquel search the witness tied to Lindsay's brother rather than necessarily to Lindsay herself, a suicide search from December 29, 2022, benzodiazepine withdrawal, ketamine, Lamictal, a broad cluster of "postpartum" searches spanning January 11 through 19, 2023, and an amitriptyline search running from January 16 through January 23, 2023, the night before the killings. Reddington got specific confirmation of two dates the Commonwealth had already flagged: a search for "intrusive" on January 20, 2023, and a search for "hallucinations" on January 19, 2023 at 10:33:49 a.m., five days before the children died.

CASE STORY, PART 43 Lindsay Clancy's Phone Searched Hallucinations Five Days Before Her Children Died

Then Reddington read a second list, largely uninterrupted, of ordinary child-care and family search terms pulled from the same Cellebrite report: a search about a child with a bloated belly and lethargy, children's Motrin, children's Tylenol, a six-month milestone search, organic baby food, a real-estate listing, best kids' movies, a trampoline park, unicorn coloring pages, a Paw Patrol toy, a bed for twin girls, a Cape Cod resort, a search for how much formula an eight-month-old needs, Chuck E. Cheese, a children's thermometer search from January 17, 2023, eight-month developmental milestones, a slime recipe, a search for UTI symptoms in children, and, crossing directly into the day of the killings itself, "Kids Miralax" and "Miralax for Kids," the last one timestamped January 24, 2023 at 4:47:31 p.m., plus a CVS Pedialax search, all admitted together in one block.

Read the way the Commonwealth wants it read, the psychiatric search terms are the story: hallucinations, intrusive thoughts, suicide, an amitriptyline search running to the night before the murders. Read the way the defense wants it read, those same terms sit inside a much longer, much more mundane river of ordinary parenting searches, toys and thermometers and stomach bugs and a trampoline park, that runs seamlessly through the same afternoon that ended in three deliberate killings. Both readings are true of the exact same phone. Neither one cancels the other out. That is Day 13's whole argument compressed into one exhibit.

This is where I think it is worth stepping back and saying something about how search-history evidence works in a criminal trial generally, because it is easy to watch a list like that get read aloud and mistake the reading itself for proof of intent. A search term is not a confession. It is not even necessarily the searcher's own words; it is often the platform's autocomplete finishing a thought the person never fully typed. Courts allow this kind of evidence because a pattern of searches, taken as a whole and set against a timeline, can be genuinely probative of a person's state of mind. But the operative phrase there is "taken as a whole." A prosecutor choosing which fifteen searches out of several thousand to read aloud, and a defense attorney choosing to read the surrounding three hundred, are both doing legitimate lawyering. Neither one is showing the jury the whole phone. Only the phone itself, admitted as an exhibit, does that, and Chiappini's testimony repeatedly reminded the jury that it will get exactly that: the full report, not just what either lawyer chose to highlight.

The photo nobody thought to check

The cross's final exhibit before redirect was a text-message report identifying when a photo of "the two kids and the snowman" was sent. Chiappini had to check the extraction itself; the report showed a message from the contact saved as "Cutie," Patrick Clancy's name in Lindsay's phone, timestamped January 24, 2023 at 8:19:45 a.m. That exchange had a genuine audio-clarity problem on its own record and was ear-checked; the timestamp and attribution are confirmed as transcribed. The witness then read the surrounding thread at speed: at 8:36 a.m. Lindsay "loved" an image Patrick had sent, an iMessage tapback, and from 8:42 a.m. onward an ordinary morning exchange runs, "how's it going," "good," "her urine looked good, so nothing going wrong with her kidneys," "you're a good mama," hearts, that continues straight into the takeout-dinner exchange about the restaurant already covered earlier in the day.

Redirect opened after the lunch recess. The Commonwealth established that every keyword search discussed on cross, psychiatric and otherwise, is independently locatable by the jury inside the full exhibit rather than only through the excerpts either lawyer chose to read aloud. It re-read two further "mommy" texts the defense had not touched: January 19, 2023, her mother writing "I'll bring it Saturday, never know what treasures I'll find," which Chiappini read as a planned visit, and January 22, 2023, the Sunday after, her mother writing "enjoyed seeing everyone this weekend, nice to see you doing better." Two days before the killings, that is the last word from Lindsay's own mother in this exhibit, and it lands as a genuine complication for any picture of unrelenting, worsening crisis in that final week.

A brief housekeeping exchange about Patrick-Lindsay texts followed, and then the Commonwealth opened one further thread on redirect: text messages between Lindsay Clancy and her mother-in-law, Susan Clancy. An objection was raised and a sidebar called. When the record resumed, redirect simply ended, "That's all I have. Thank you, sir," and the Susan Clancy thread was never reopened. Chiappini was released. The judge called the lunch recess, telling the jury to be back at 2:00 p.m. for the next witness.

What was inside the house

The Commonwealth's next witness was Trooper Joshua McKelligan, self-spelling his name on the record again, the case's lead investigator, confirmed for the first time in his own words as the case officer assigned out of the Plymouth County District Attorney's homicide and major crime section. He has been with the State Police since December 2013. As case officer he coordinated the investigation and collected information from other troopers rather than personally working every piece of it himself.

He learned of what happened at 47 Summer Street at approximately 6:45 p.m. on January 24, 2023, from a call by the duty lieutenant, and was told at the Duxbury Police station that night that he would be the case officer. That title matters for how the rest of his testimony should be read: as case officer, McKelligan is the person who coordinates an investigation, not necessarily the person who personally performs every search or collects every item. A case officer's testimony is often secondhand by design, built from what other troopers reported to him, which is exactly the shape a defense cross tends to go after.

After a search warrant issued, he went to the house himself between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. on January 25, but only to observe after other troopers had already conducted the search; he did not personally search the home. A search warrant, in case the term needs unpacking, is a judge's written order authorizing police to enter a specific place and look for specific items, issued only after police show probable cause in a sworn affidavit. Walking through the house afterward, McKelligan went into the second-floor master bedroom and recalled, from memory, a covering over what he believed was a crib, a mirror ahead of the doorway, and blood on the floor. A scene walkthrough video was played for the jury, and the Commonwealth had him confirm it shows all of the bedroom's walls and that none of them show blood spatter, a detail the state elicited on its own direct rather than leaving for cross. Exterior photographs followed: a second-floor window screen, the one leading to the master bedroom, shown pushed up; staining on the ground between two windows; staining on the shingles and a window ledge below a first-floor window. McKelligan confirmed each condition matched what he personally observed that night. No cause, method or sequence of events was established by this testimony, and I am not inferring any on this page. This outlet also holds a standing policy against publishing graphic crime-scene imagery on any surface, video or text; nothing in this article or on this site shows any of it.

KEY MOMENT The Master Bedroom Window Screen Was Pushed Up

Two sets of pill bottles

The direct then moved to two separate pill-bottle threads, and the second one is a genuinely strange piece of chain-of-custody evidence that has nothing to do with what Lindsay Clancy did or did not do. Investigators learned from Patrick Clancy that the defendant was on psychiatric medication, which is why prescription medication was written into the search warrant to begin with, a detail that puts a fine point on how these first two segments connect to the third: a warrant is only as good as what the affiant knew to ask for, and Patrick Clancy is the person who told investigators to ask for medication in the first place. Patrick Clancy separately brought one set of pill bottles to the state police, found, he said, in the center console of his truck. A second set of pill bottles, found in the master bedroom's nightstand drawer, went a different route entirely. Patrick told McKelligan he gave those bottles to his own attorney, Kevin Reddington, rather than to the police, and never personally turned them over to investigators himself.

That does not square cleanly against a separate detail elsewhere in this case's record describing a February 6, 2023 hand-delivery of pill bottles by Patrick Clancy and a different attorney entirely. This Guide, and this article, hold both accounts apart, unresolved, rather than pick one. What is not in dispute is the plain fact of it: medication evidence sitting in a nightstand drawer went to defense counsel instead of to the police who had a search warrant for exactly that house.

Chain of custody is the term for the documented path evidence takes from the moment it is found to the moment it is shown to a jury, and prosecutors spend real effort on it because an unbroken chain is what lets a jury trust that the pill bottle in the courtroom is the same pill bottle that was actually in that drawer. A civilian handing evidence to a private attorney instead of to police is not, by itself, a crime, and nothing in this record suggests anyone believes it was. But it is a break in the ordinary chain, an unusual choice at an unusual moment, and juries notice unusual choices even when nobody explains them. Whatever this jury makes of it in the end, it is an unusual chain of custody, and it belongs to the people around Lindsay Clancy, not to her.

One exchange in this stretch of testimony had a genuine audio problem on the original recording, severe enough that the answer as recorded does not grammatically respond to the question asked, and counsel immediately had the witness re-ask it. That line does not appear anywhere on this page and will not until it clears this outlet's own audio-verification process.

CASE STORY, PART 44 Lindsay Clancy's Lawyer Got the Nightstand Pill Bottles and the State Police Never Did

A trip to the Museum of Science

In the middle of that heavy stretch, the Commonwealth played a previously unshown piece of family video from a Museum of Science visit on January 8, 2023, sixteen days before the killings. Patrick Clancy takes Dawson out of one room, leaving Lindsay alone with Callan and Cora, and the video shows her instructing and assisting the children at an exhibit control panel for several minutes. It is ordinary, engaged, unremarkable family footage of a mother with her children. It could sit comfortably inside either side's story of this case, and I am not going to pretend it tips the balance one way. It is simply what it is: sixteen days before, a mother at a museum with two of her kids.

I noted it here for the same reason the Commonwealth chose to play it: the jury needs to see the whole sixteen-day window, its ordinary hours alongside its worst ones. A trial that only ever showed a defendant's darkest moments would not be a fair trial, and a trial that only ever showed her lightest ones would not be one either. The Museum of Science video and the October journal entry were both admitted by the same side, in the same day, and that alone tells you something about how careful the Commonwealth is being to let the jury see this family as it actually was, not as a caricature in either direction.

Minutes after unconsciousness

The direct closed on the heaviest note of McKelligan's day. He testified that he attended a grand jury preparation meeting with Dr. Barbara Olson, the medical examiner, on the mechanics of death by strangulation. A grand jury, for readers unfamiliar with the term, is a separate, earlier proceeding, closed to the public, where prosecutors present enough evidence for a panel of citizens to decide whether formal charges should be filed at all. It happens well before a trial, and preparing a witness for it is routine. What made this moment unusual was the vehicle: McKelligan was not there when Dr. Olson examined anything, and he was not qualified to explain strangulation mechanics himself. He was relaying, secondhand, what a medical expert told him in a meeting, which is exactly the kind of testimony a hearsay objection exists to test.

Over a sustained leading-question objection that had to be re-asked in proper form, he confirmed Dr. Olson told him that constant pressure has to continue even after a person loses consciousness in order for death to occur, and that it takes several more minutes of continued pressure after that point. The jury has now heard that fact twice, once from McKelligan's secondhand account here, and it will hear it again, directly and under oath, when the medical examiner herself takes the stand and can be cross-examined on it. Cross-examination on this witness was brief and narrow, confined to identifying a specific pill bottle; the recording itself degrades across that stretch and does not support precise quotation, though the witness read as genuinely uncertain on the identification. There was no redirect.

The judge dismissed the jury for the weekend, repeating that the trial would not sit the next day and would resume Monday at 9:00 a.m., along with the standing admonitions against research or discussion of the case. McKelligan's testimony is paused for the recess, not released. His direct examination is not fully wrapped, and no cross beyond the brief pill-bottle exchange has happened yet. It continues Monday.

The priest the court would not name

With the jury out, counsel argued a Commonwealth motion for the trial-court lockup's visitor logs. The Commonwealth told the court it had observed the defense's disclosed criminal-responsibility expert, along with a Roman Catholic priest, visiting Lindsay Clancy in custody, and sought the visitor log as possible material for cross-examination, particularly bearing on the expert's potential bias. Criminal responsibility, the legal question this entire trial now turns on, asks whether a defendant's mental state at the time of an act meant she lacked the substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law. Both sides are expected to call retained experts on that exact question in the weeks ahead, and a prosecutor probing a defense expert's visit history is standard preparation for cross-examining that expert later, nothing more sinister than that.

Defense counsel in this specific exchange is not confirmed by name on this record, so I am not naming him here. He described the priest as someone who baptized the Clancy children and had known Lindsay Clancy for years, including through her hospitalizations, and offered the log voluntarily as to visitors in general.

Judge Sullivan allowed the Commonwealth's motion as to the criminal-responsibility expert only. He expressly declined to order the priest's name, address or visit frequency disclosed, and said the Commonwealth could renew its request if the priest is ever named as a witness, which has not happened. It is a small ruling, and a fair one: a defense expert whose opinions the jury will eventually weigh is fair territory for scrutiny, and a priest offering pastoral care to someone in custody is not. Court adjourned for the weekend.

Where Day 13 leaves it

Day 13 is the Commonwealth's digital-forensics day, and it closes closer to a draw than either side would have scripted walking in. The state put its hour-by-hour architecture in front of the jury in full: the October 24 journal entry read start to finish, first-person resentment and guilt in the defendant's own words; a search history threading psychosis, hallucinations and intrusive thoughts into the two weeks before the killings; photographs touched during the evening of January 23; and, through McKelligan, the medical examiner's warning that death by strangulation requires several minutes of continued pressure past unconsciousness, the single heaviest fact of the day for a premeditation theory. Every one of those exhibits passed through Kevin Reddington's hands on the way out of the courtroom, and by the close of the day the defense had converted much of the record into its own. The suicide-methods browsing traced back to a browser profile belonging to Patrick Clancy, a man the state's own witness could not rule out as a Tom Hall fan. The buzzword searches got reduced from a confirmed attribution to "a pretty good inference." The psychiatric search terms sat buried inside a much longer river of children's medicine, toys and a trampoline park that ran straight through 4:47 p.m. on the day of the killings. And a more complete phone extraction exists, performed sooner, by a different method, and the jury has never seen it.

The deepest fact of Day 13 is that both stories got stronger at exactly the same time, on exactly the same phone. The device that searched "hallucinations" on January 19 was texting takeout orders and "you're a good mama" exchanges on January 24. Read one way, that is a mind moving in and out of an untreated crisis behind an ordinary domestic surface. Read the other way, it is an ordinary day, groceries and dinner plans and a sick child's stomach medicine, that ended in three deliberate killings for reasons the phone itself cannot explain. This case's whole tension, killer or a mother the system failed, sits inside that one exhibit list, and Day 13 did not resolve it. It sharpened it.

The day also closes mid-witness, and that matters going into a long weekend. McKelligan is paused, not released. His direct has already delivered the scene, the pill bottles that went to defense counsel instead of police, and the strangulation-mechanics preview, but his cross has barely started. The jury carries all of it, plus a mother's "nice to see you doing better" from two days before the killings, into three days off before anyone gets to ask him another question. Neither side won Day 13 outright. The Commonwealth banked the heavier single facts. The defense won more of the individual exchanges. What a full cross of the lead investigator does to the shape of this investigation belongs to Monday.

Step back far enough and Day 13 is really about a question this trial has been circling since Day 9, when Lindsay Clancy's first treating psychiatrist took the stand: how many people looked at pieces of this record before January 24, 2023, and how much of the whole picture did any single one of them actually have. A crisis clinician saw a woman without a suicide plan and could not admit her. A psychiatrist saw a chart with gaps in it. A nurse practitioner managed medications without the full history. Now a jury is seeing the search terms, the journal entry, and the text messages all at once, assembled after the fact by two state police examiners with access to everything, and even they cannot agree on what it adds up to. Nobody alive on January 23, 2023, had the version of this record the jury got on Day 13. That gap, between what a courtroom can reconstruct with a subpoena and a forensic tool and what any one person around Lindsay Clancy actually knew in real time, is the quiet argument running underneath the loud one.

It is also worth saying what Day 13 did not do. It did not produce a single piece of evidence that resolves the criminal-responsibility question either side needs. A journal entry from October does not establish what a person's mental state was in January. A search for "hallucinations" does not establish that a person experienced one, or that anyone around her knew if she had. A pushed-up window screen does not establish how or why it came to be that way. Everything admitted on Day 13 is a fact. None of it is yet an answer. That distinction is the one this jury will have to hold onto through a long weekend and a longer trial still ahead of it, and it is the one this outlet intends to keep holding onto too.

DAY 13 TOP MOMENTS The Searches He Didn't Recall NO BREAKS EDITION Lindsay Clancy Trial: Day 13, Gavel to Gavel

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