In an interview broadcast on CBS on Sunday, Patrick Clancy, the former husband of Lindsay Clancy, described the weight of his grief in the years since Ms. Clancy killed their three children in January 2023.
Mr. Clancy dreams about his children “all the time,” he told Ross Douthat on the program “60 Minutes.” Cora was 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months old, when they died.
In one dream, Mr. Clancy said, “I’m in the kitchen at the house, and Cora walks in. And I just look at her and I — it was, like, I basically just said, ‘Where have you been?’ And she comes up to me and gives me a big hug.”
Shortly after the deaths of the three children, Mr. Clancy moved to New York City. On the day that Callan would have turned 1, he lit a candle at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in his son’s honor. Then he sobbed on Fifth Avenue, Mr. Clancy, 38, said in the interview, which was his first since Ms. Clancy’s murder trial ended in a mistrial on Sept. 4.
Mr. Clancy’s life changed forever on the night of Jan. 24, 2023, when he returned to his home in Duxbury, Mass., after running errands to find that his wife had strangled their children and then tried to kill herself.
On the night of the killings, she later said, she heard a voice commanding her to kill the children and herself. Mr. Clancy said she had struggled for months to find effective care for what he described in the interview as “deep, deep depression, intrusive thoughts.”
When Mr. Clancy found the children, Cora and Dawson were dead. Callan would live for a few more days. Mr. Clancy said in the interview that he held Callan as he died, and told the child, “I’m so sorry.”
He said he later asked Ms. Clancy if she remembered killing the children, to which she had responded that it had felt like a dream. “She remembered it much in the way you would remember a dream after waking up,” he said.
At her trial for first-degree murder in Plymouth, Mass., this summer, Ms. Clancy’s lawyer argued that she was not criminally responsible for her actions because of her mental illness. Eleven jurors agreed, but one held steady for conviction, and after nearly 40 hours of deliberations, the judge declared a mistrial on Sept. 4.
During the five-week trial, which included testimony from Mr. Clancy about his wife’s mental illness and the night of the killings, the case became an obsession for a huge audience of true crime influencers and fans. As conspiracy theories multiplied online, Mr. Clancy — still grieving the deaths of his children and trying to rebuild his life — also had to contend with unfounded speculation that he had committed the killings and framed his wife.
Mr. Clancy said earlier this month that he planned legal action against those who had waged a “relentless and destructive” defamation campaign against him.
In the “60 Minutes” interview, he said the online campaign had been “deeply harmful to the legacy of my children.”
“It’s a huge distraction from what really matters here, which is perinatal mental health,” he continued. “And it’s done real harm to real people, myself included, but also others.”
Mr. Clancy, who divorced Ms. Clancy and has since remarried, appeared in the interview with his new wife, Dr. Rachel Danis, an infertility specialist in New York City, where the couple lives.
In the interview, Dr. Danis said, “I can’t 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.”
Dr. Danis and Mr. Clancy said in the interview that they are starting a new family. Mr. Douthat, who was a New York Times opinion columnist from 2009 until earlier this year, asked them what they would say to the child.
“I think every parent can agree, you have different relationships with your kids, but they’re all your kids,” Mr. Clancy said. “And I can’t wait to tell them about their brothers and sister.”
Mr. Clancy’s decision to speak out about his experience — and against the damaging public discourse surrounding the case — followed earlier attempts to temper the tone of the reaction. A few days after the killings in January 2023, as public condemnation of Ms. Clancy reached a fever pitch, Mr. Clancy made his first public statement, urging forgiveness.
“I want to ask all of you that you find it deep within yourselves to forgive Lindsay, as I have,” he wrote at the time. “The real Lindsay was generously loving and caring towards everyone.”
Prosecutors have not yet announced a decision on whether to retry Ms. Clancy.
Testifying at Ms. Clancy’s trial in July, Mr. Clancy described his growing concern about his wife’s state of mind in the fall of 2022 — and the flicker of hope he had felt in the hours before his children’s deaths, when Ms. Clancy took them into the backyard to build a snowman while he worked from home in his basement office.
“She was having one of her best days,” he testified at the trial in July.
Mr. Clancy said during Sunday’s interview that, during a break before the jury was set to hear the horrific 911 call in which Mr. Clancy is heard discovering the children’s bodies, he was put in an ambulance and offered medication for a “massive traumatic panic attack.”
He declined. “I said, ‘I — 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,” Mr. Clancy said.
