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Lindsay Clancy trial: Forensic psychologist Kirk Heilbrun reveals why 18-minute hallucination is ‘not psychosis’
A forensic psychologist testified at Lindsay Clancy's murder trial that she was not acutely psychotic during the killings of her three children.
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During Lindsay Clancy murder trial on Monday, a forensic psychologist testified that sh was not experiencing acute psychosis when she killed her three children. Instead, he stated that she took their lives to prevent them from "suffering" after her own suicide.
Kirk Heilbrun explained that he dismissed the possibility of acute psychosis accompanied by command hallucinations, as he did not find Clancy credible when she claimed to have heard a voice instructing her to “kill the children so you can kill yourself.”
18-minute hallucination that lasts for 3 murders is ‘not psychosis’, says Heilbrun
“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 said. “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 central matter in the trial concerns Clancy's mental health. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington acknowledges that Clancy took the lives of the children in January 2023. However, he argues that she should not be held criminally accountable due to her suffering from postpartum psychosis, an uncommon mental disorder associated with the stress, sleep deprivation, and hormonal fluctuations that occur after giving birth. Here are some key takeaways from Heilbrun's testimony.
Clancy was reluctant to abandon her children
After taking the lives of her children, Clancy leaped from a second-floor window and is now paralyzed from the waist down. Heilbrun testified that he determined Clancy killed her children because she intended to take her own life but did not wish 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 stated during the court hearing. “That was part of her expectation that she and the children would be together in heaven with God.”
Heilbrun also brought up Clancy's Catholic faith, which led Reddington to request a mistrial, a motion that Judge William Sullivan rejected.
Subsequently, he urged the jury to ignore the mention of “the religion that the defendant was raised with,” labeling it “an absolutely inappropriate area of testimony.”
Clancy was not experiencing psychosis, says prosecution
Heilbrun is the most recent witness for the prosecution, asserting that although Clancy was mentally ill, she was still aware that her actions were wrong.
Heilbrun stated that he confirmed Clancy has bipolar 2 disorder, noting that the diagnosis was challenging, partly due to the several diagnoses in the records and the various symptoms she exhibited. People with bipolar 2 disorder undergo cycles of depression and hypomania, which is less severe than the mania associated with bipolar 1 disorder.
On Friday, Dr. Phillip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist specializing in filicide, which refers to the act of a parent killing their child, stated that Clancy was "clearly psychotic" on the day she took the lives of her children and lacked control over her actions. He remarked, “It was almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings."
This statement was consistent with the findings of another defense witness, psychologist Paul Zeizel, who determined that Clancy “had no appreciation for the wrongfulness of her act.”
