LINDSAY CLANCY’S LIFE BEHIND PSYCH WARD DOORS REVEALED: HER RAW FEELINGS ABOUT PATRICK, SECRETIVE VISITOR LOG AND THE HEARTBREAKING HOURLY ROUTINE SHE NOW ENDURES
Lindsay Clancy’s quaint Summer Street home was supposed to be the setting for her family’s happily ever after.
It was where she and her husband Patrick chose to raise their three children: Cora, five, Dawson, three, and baby Callan.
But for the past three years, that picture-perfect suburban setting has been shattered and replaced by the clinical corridors at Tewksbury State Hospital.
Behind the doors of the pre-Civil War psychiatric facility, the former nurse who once cared for her own patients has become the patient herself.
There, confined to a wheelchair, she receives round-the-clock care for her physical and mental health, following what her defense says was a severe episode of postpartum psychosis and depression.
After strangling her three children with exercise bands on the evening of January 24, 2023, the 36-year-old now leads a lonely existence inside the hospital.
Patrick, now her ex-husband, has never visited.
He has publicly expressed compassion for Lindsay and described her as a loving mother during courtroom testimony, but the tragedy ultimately destroyed their marriage. He relocated from Duxbury, Massachusetts to New York City in May 2023, four months after the deaths of his children, and remarried earlier this year.
Lindsay Clancy thinks about her children almost every minute of the day, the pastor said
For the past three years, Lindsay Clancy has called Tewksbury Hospital her home – a state-run facility known for housing a large number of mental health patients
Clancy’s childhood friend of 29 years, Amy Bevins, is thought to have visited her in hospital just once in the aftermath of the killings. The visit lasted just 30 minutes and they played boardgames, but they never discussed the killings.
Her parents, Mike and Paula Musgrove, have remained steadfastly by her side, uprooting their lives in Connecticut and spending years living out of hotels near the hospital so they can be close to their daughter.
But Clancy does have one other regular visitor: a Catholic priest who has spent the past three-and-a-half years watching her try to rebuild her shattered life inside the hospital.
Father Bob Deehan, pastor of Holy Family Parish in Duxbury, has visited Clancy at Tewksbury every week for the past three-and-a-half years.
He told the Daily Mail that little Cora, Dawson and Callan remain constantly on their mother’s mind, with Clancy often talking about them during his visits.
‘She’s doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances,’ the pastor said.
‘She’s very devastated and thinks of the children pretty much every hour of the day.’
They often speak about the children and, in growing closer to her faith, Clancy feels she has been able to connect with them, he said.
‘I’ve been working with her in terms of faith, hope and everlasting life. She understands that her little children are now with the Lord in heaven, and so she is able to pray with them, pray for them, and continue to have a spiritual relationship with them that way.’
While pointing out that he is ‘no medical professional,’ the pastor affectionately known as Father Bob said that he has seen a marked progress in Clancy’s mental state compared to how she was in the aftermath of the killings.
She seems to ‘no longer be in a state of psychological crisis,’ he said.
‘She seems fairly stable in her mental condition.’
Clancy with her husband Patrick Clancy and two oldest children Cora, five, and Dawson, three
Patrick found new love in Dr Rachel Danis, whom he married earlier this year
But the trial has forced Clancy to relive the loss of her children in excruciating detail.
‘She’ll never get over it but she’s a little bit more able to express herself in terms of her affect,’ Father Bob said.
‘There’s a lot of feelings. Then of course she is virtually incarcerated in the hospital and she’s now paraplegic – which is of course lower in the rung of the losses that she’s experienced.
‘But she’s doing the best she can be doing under some very, very difficult circumstances.’
Something similar has been visible inside the courtroom.
Throughout the trial, she has appeared lucid, closely following testimony and conferring with her defense team.
She has also been utterly inconsolable when testimony has turned to her three young children – in particular the fatal injuries she inflicted on them.
When graphic details of Cora and Dawson’s autopsies were revealed last week, Clancy broke down into guttural, uncontrollable wails, crying out ‘I can’t do it.’
Father Bob was inside the courtroom at the time and was ushered into the chambers to help comfort the 36-year-old when the judge swiftly called a break in proceedings.
It was something that sparked the ire of the prosecution team who unsuccessfully demanded information about the pastor as well as access to logs of who was speaking with Clancy during breaks.
Visibly baffled, Clancy’s defense attorney Kevin Reddington threw his hands in the air and laughed: ‘It’s Father Bob!’
Lindsay Clancy is on trial in Plymouth, Massachusetts, for the January 2023 killings of her children
The three-bedroom home in the wealthy suburb of Duxbury where Patrick and Lindsay Clancy lived with their children
Reddington went on to describe the pastor as someone who is ‘very, very close to Lindsay’ and a ‘nice, nice man’ who has ‘been with her for three years.’
To date, Father Bob has turned up at Clancy’s trial a handful of days, sitting with her parents to lend the family support.
His relationship with Clancy and the wider family stretches back several years.
Though not weekly regulars at Holy Family Parish Church, Clancy and Patrick would take the children occasionally.
Father Bob remembers baptizing Dawson and later Callan in October 2022, three months before the killings, as well as seeing the extended family on special holidays.
On Christmas Day morning 2022, mere weeks before that tragic day, Clancy, Patrick, Cora, Dawson and Callan were joined by Patrick’s parents Sue and Chris at a service.
Clancy had worn a beautiful dress that day, her former father-in-law testified, and had said afterwards that she was glad they had gone.
Back then, Father Bob didn’t know the family personally. But to him ‘they looked like any typical happy family.’
Which is why that day came as such a shock to the whole community.
One day after the killings, Father Bob visited a critically ill Clancy – who, after strangling her children with exercise bands, had tried to take her own life by slitting her neck and wrists and jumping from a second-floor window of her home – at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and administered her the Last Rites.
His visits with Clancy continued weekly from then.
The pastor also reached out to Patrick that day and visited him at his parents’ home in Scituate, where the devastated father had fled in the wake of his unimaginable loss.
Cora, five, Dawson, three, and eight-month-old Callan were strangled at the family home in January 2023
Father Bob Deehan held a prayer vigil for the family in the days after the killings in January 2023
He visited Patrick several more times and performed the funerals for the three children, alongside another priest.
After Patrick moved to New York City, Father Bob said their communication became less frequent.
What I saw in the Lindsay Clancy trial brought the courtroom to tears
I’m Rachel Sharp, US Crime Desk Editor, and I have been in court covering every day of the Lindsay Clancy trial.
The trial, as many of you will know, is streamed live for the world to see. But not everything is shown to the public; some things are simply too distressing – and these moments have had Lindsay, her parents, the jurors, and members of the media in tears.
I have shared my experiences in our new podcast series, which you can listen to for free by clicking here
He wouldn’t go into detail about how Clancy is coping seeing her husband move on with his second wife, fertility specialist Dr Rachel Danis.
But he made clear it had impacted her.
‘When a marriage has ended in such a terrible way with a tragedy of the whole family, with the children gone, it has an effect as you would expect,’ he said.
‘She had been so close to her husband, and it looked like a very happy marriage – just like Patrick said too.
‘So, with all of that history and then [the children’s deaths] causing a rift that was very hard to heal, that has certainly had its effect upon Lindsay – and upon him which has of course caused him to move on.’
Despite Patrick’s public support and forgiveness of his ex-wife, the former couple had not seen each other in person since that tragic night until he became the first witness to testify at her trial.
He choked up with emotion, describing his ex-wife as a loving and doting mother who had struggled with her deteriorating mental health.
A wedding band glistened on his left hand from his nuptials in Manhattan’s Central Park this April, a physical sign of his efforts to move forward in the wake of unspeakable grief.
The outcome of the trial will determine whether Tewksbury remains Lindsay’s home – or whether she’ll spend her days in prison.
If convicted, she faces a potential life sentence in prison for the murders of her children.
He has been in court some days offering support to both Clancy and her heartbroken parents Paula and Mike Musgrove (center and right)
If found not guilty by reason of insanity, however, she would be committed to psychiatric care.
Her confinement would not have a fixed end date: she could remain hospitalized for years, potentially indefinitely.
But she could ultimately seek release if she were no longer deemed a danger to herself or others.
For the time being, Clancy will continue to shuttle 60 miles back and forth between a Plymouth courtroom and the state-run Tewksbury Hospital every day.
It is unclear how much interaction she has with other patients inside the hospital, which is home to a growing number of people who, like her, are part of the criminal justice system – either convicted of crimes, awaiting trial or being evaluated to determine if they are fit to stand trial.
But as well as her regular visitor, Clancy also gets plenty of mail in the way of letters and cards from people offering their support.
‘People write to her at the hospital and send her cards,’ Father Bob said.
‘I think this touched a chord, especially among mothers who may themselves have had some brush with mental illness after the birth of a child.
‘Lindsay knows about the support – and it is very much appreciated by her.’
If you or someone you know needs help, please call or text the confidential 24/7 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US on 988. There is also an online chat available at 988lifeline.org.
SOURCE: https://www.dailymail.com/crime-desk/article-16053859/lindsay-clancy-psych-ward-patrick-trial.html
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
