Crime
“That doesn’t mean no accountability, it just means that we recognize the suffering and the stigma, and we try to find a way to prevent this from happening in the future,” Patrick Clancy said.
In an extended cut of his “60 Minutes” interview released Tuesday, Patrick Clancy opened up about his own mental health struggles and suggested a “compassionate” approach to justice after his ex-wife, Lindsay Clancy, killed their children in 2023.
“It’s hard sometimes. I’ve had people say to me, ‘Pat, you were really quiet today,’” Patrick shared. “But they don’t know the things that are playing over and over and over again in my head. They don’t know that the scenes are playing over and over again from that night, or that the grief is just so heavy that it makes me quiet.”
He previously revealed that he suffered a “massive, traumatic” panic attack after testifying at length about the night Lindsay strangled their children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan — at home in Duxbury on Jan. 24, 2023. Patrick, who was out running errands at the time, returned home to find his wife badly injured from a suicide attempt and their children dead or dying.
Speaking to “60 Minutes” correspondent Ross Douthat in the extended cut, Patrick said he has benefitted from the trauma-focused psychotherapy EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.
“It’s a little unusual. They put you right back in that place that you’ve been trying to avoid for years, and you face it head-on,” he explained. “And it’s unpleasant, but they get you used to dealing with that, and eventually you’re better at processing it.”
After several EMDR sessions, “the waking up screaming, the horrible dreams, they mostly stopped,” Patrick said. “I mean, it was like a miracle.”
Lindsay, who is charged with first-degree murder, has admitted to strangling all three children but maintains she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time and heard a voice in her head urging her to kill the children and herself. Prosecutors rejected her so-called insanity defense, arguing that although her mental health declined leading up to the killings, she was still able to tell right from wrong and control her actions.
Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial Sept. 4 after the jury of nine women and three men returned deadlocked. The Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office has not yet said whether it intends to retry Lindsay, but an attorney for Patrick has said he and his family find the prospect of another trial “extraordinarily painful.”
Asked what justice looks like in a case that revolves around mental illness, Patrick suggested a measured approach.
“I think we can find a compassionate way to deal with these tragedies,” he told Douthat. “And that doesn’t mean no accountability, it just means that we recognize the suffering and the stigma, and we try to find a way to prevent this from happening in the future. That’s always how I’ve looked at it.”
He also said he thinks about his children every day and tries to keep their memory alive.
“Cora was cautious; she was shy, but she was so good at making friends,” Patrick recalled. “I used to see her at birthday parties and at school when I’m picking her up, and I could see the friendships that she was creating. And I just loved that.”
Dawson “helped me realize that not all of your kids are the same, they have different personalities,” Patrick continued, describing his middle child as adventurous and daring.
The youngest Clancy child, Callan, “was just one of the happiest babies,” he added. “I mourn Callan in a way that I didn’t really get to know him as well as my other kids.”
Though he has since moved to New York City, divorced Lindsay, and remarried, Patrick said he’s still in touch with close friends in Duxbury.
“My kids are buried here, and I still have family here,” he explained. “But it’s hard. It’s difficult, coming back to this town, even though I loved it so much.”
Joining him in the “60 Minutes” interview was his second wife, Dr. Rachel Danis, who confirmed she and Patrick are now starting a family of their own. Danis told Douthat she initially viewed Patrick as more of a friend after they met in a New York run club in January 2024. She said she began to see him in a new light a few months later, when he came to cheer her on at a half marathon and met her sister, who has Down syndrome.
“I think you can tell a lot about someone when they’re interacting with a person with special needs. Pat was really friendly, really warm,” Danis said. Patrick also snapped a candid photo of the sisters hugging, which Danis said showed her that he “really saw what matters to me.”
Still, she said some of her close friends “paused” when she and Patrick began dating.
“I think people were worried,” Danis explained, adding that she had hesitations as well.
However, “I would say and still say it was the first time Sundays felt like Saturdays,” she quipped. “Life just got a lot calmer for me.”
The couple married in April, a few months before Lindsay’s murder trial began. Asked about the viral — but unfounded — conspiracy theories that suggest Patrick was somehow involved in his children’s deaths or that he cheated on Lindsay while her condition deteriorated, Danis was quick to come to her husband’s defense.
“I don’t understand how the story has been so twisted, but I would hope people know that Pat is … the most selfless father and supportive partner,” she said. “And I was just a girl that met a guy running in Central Park on a really cold Saturday, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”
Added Patrick: “We’re carrying forward what happened. We’re carrying my kids’ legacy forward, together. And I think that’s really important to both of us.”
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