On a cold January evening in 2023, a family home near Boston fell silent after a mother killed her three children. She strangled them one by one with exercise bands in the basement.At her trial she would testify that a male voice whispered in her ear, ordering her to kill them and herself; ‘if you don’t do it now, you lose your chance’. She obeyed. Then she slit her wrists and neck, and jumped off the second floor. But she didn’t die, she was left paralysed.Her lawyer’s case was simple – a loving mother, beset by suicidal thoughts, struggling with postpartum psychosis. She had sought treatment. None of it helped.What happened that day in the picturesque coastal town of Duxbury is now the subject of one of the most closely-watched murder trials in recent US history – not because the facts are disputed, but because they ask a harrowing question: Can a mother who kills her children be held criminally responsible if her mind snapped due to postpartum psychosis?Nearly a week into the deliberation, and the jury is still out. Literally.They began on August 27. By September 1 they gave up; they told Judge William Sullivan they could not answer that question, not as a collective. They were told to try again.But really, what the jury eventually decides is perhaps not the point.Story continues below this adPerhaps the point is this – where do we draw the line between requiring a killer to be held accountable for their action and accepting that those actions may have been influenced by emotions or realities outside their control. And does ‘possession’ count?The house on Summer StreetIt was the perfect house, really. Blue-gray shingles, white trim, a snow-sprinkled driveway. AI-generated imageThen police cars. Cold yellow tape. Curious neighbours.Lindsay, 32, was on leave from her job as a maternity nurse after having given birth to a third child. She took her eldest daughter, five-year-old Cora, to the pediatrician.Story continues below this adPatrick Clancy, her husband, worked from home. From the basement – the same basement where the children would be killed.He told the court Lindsay seemed to be having one of her better days; in the afternoon she helped the children make a snowman outside and sent photos of the fun to Patrick.But he wasn’t home at the time. A few minutes after 5 pm he stepped out to pick up dinner and some medicines for one of the children. He called Lindsay at 5.33 pm from the pharmacy.Patrick came home at 6.04 pm to silence.The cold January air swept through the house as he opened the door and called out.There were no greetings.Story continues below this adHe called out to Lindsay. Once, twice, but no response.He went upstairs. Tried the bedroom door. Locked. Found the key. Opened it.Blood everywhere. On the floor. The walls. The bed. Open window.Lindsay was outside, just below the window. Bleeding.“What happened?”“I tried to kill myself.”During the trial Patrick – now divorced from Lindsay – said he then called 911 and sat with his bleeding wife.Story continues below this adMinutes later, after the police came, he went down to the basement. AI-generated imageDawson. Three years old. Face down.Then Cora, 5. Callan, eight months old.January 25, 2023Lindsay Clancy was charged with three counts each of murder, strangulation, and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. She was arraigned in court from her hospital bed, over Zoom, and pleaded ‘not guilty’ to all nine counts.The judge ordered she be held at a medical facility pending completion of treatment.Summer Street, Duxbury limped back to normal.Story continues below this adEight months later the case moved to the Plymouth County Superior Court – which hears the most serious cases. Lindsay’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, said she would plead ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’.Massachusetts law calls that a lack of criminal responsibility. Not innocence. Something else.The case against herProsecutors did not dispute that Lindsay loved her children.But love, they said, had nothing to do with what happened on January 24.Story continues below this adThe case against her came down to one word – intention.Lindsay Clancy waited, they argued. Waited till Patrick Clancy left. Waited till she had – one prosecutor argued – time and privacy to do what she did. There was no panic, they said.She went down to the basement with the children. Came back upstairs. Went to her bedroom. Locked the door. Cut her wrists, neck. Went to the window. Each step a deliberate one.Here, the jury was told, is a woman who understood what she was doing, and that it was wrong.Story continues below this adThe case for herThe defense did not dispute that Lindsay killed her children. But, they said, the mother who loved them was not the woman who killed them. And she is not a well woman.Also read | Lindsay Clancy case: What is postpartum psychosis — and can it drive a mother to kill her children?The defense said that in the months after Callan’s birth, Lindsay told doctor after doctor that something was wrong – insomnia, intrusive thoughts, a mind that wouldn’t quiet.But she never told them about the male voice. Or said it ‘spoke’ to her after the killings.Lindsay was taking psychiatric medication, the defense stressed.And on New Year’s Day, three weeks before that day, she checked herself into McLean Hospital, one of the country’s top psychiatric institutions. Five days later, she was discharged.In all this time no doctor diagnosed postpartum psychosis.Lindsay Clancy’s illness was real, the defense argued. But the system meant to catch it did not.Two Women, One BodyBoth sides called their own psychiatrists. Both psychiatrists examined the same woman, read the same medical records, watched the same footage – Lindsay pushing a stroller, a family trip to a museum. Nothing, on the face of it, suggested a woman about to do the unthinkable.And they reached opposite conclusions.One told the jury Lindsay was in the grip of psychosis so severe she could not see right from wrong.Another said she knew precisely what she was doing, and chose to do it anyway.There was no new fact left to introduce by the time of closing arguments, on August 27.There were only two stories, built from the same evidence, asking the jury to decide which woman had been in that basement.Eleven against oneThat jury has now spent days trying to decide the same thing this story asked from its first paragraph: can a mother whose mind failed her this badly still be held accountable?Whatever verdict the jury does or does not return will only answer the legal question. The harrowing one does not go to a jury. It has no verdict, no foreperson, no form to sign.Eleven jurors, at last report, found their way to one answer. The twelfth had a different one.That, more than any verdict, may be the truest thing anyone can say about this story: that reasonable people, looking at the same woman, the same evidence, the same eleven days – cannot agree.A fiendish question. After a fiendish event