Patrick Clancy after January 2023

What he did, said and built in the three and a half years between the killings and the mistrial, and the criticism that followed him for it. Everything here is from his own public statements, the reporting of newsrooms that interviewed him or his family, his foundation's own site, and his trial testimony. He is a bereaved parent and a witness, never an accused.

His pretrial and trial record is in 02-timeline-patrick.md; the online theories about his responsibility are tested in 09-claims-and-the-record.md. This page is the other thing people ask about: how he lived afterward.

Much of what follows comes from Eren Orbey's New Yorker profile, "A Husband in the Aftermath of His Wife's Unfathomable Act," published 2024-10-14 and read in full for this corpus on 2026-09-05. It is built on interviews with Patrick across 2023 and 2024, plus his parents, his sister Erin Donahue, his cousin Kristen Walton, family friends, Reddington, and two outside forensic psychiatrists. It is the profile the Commonwealth subpoenaed for two years and never obtained. Orbey wrote to Lindsay Clancy at Tewksbury and she did not reply; he discloses that a Clancy cousin works on the magazine's editorial staff. The raw extraction is at raw/s8-new-yorker-profile.md. [S204][S87]

Before

Scituate, Massachusetts, about ten miles up the coast from Duxbury. A sailor. Salve Regina University in Newport. Tech sales, home office and travel. PRESS [S198]

He met Lindsay Musgrove through his sister and a cousin, proposed on New Year's Eve 2015 at the place they had their first date, and married her in December 2016 near her childhood home in Connecticut. They bought the Duxbury house while she was pregnant with Dawson. Cora arrived on Christmas Eve 2017, Dawson two years later, Callan in May 2022. PRESS [S198]

Orbey's account of the meeting fills this in. It was the summer of 2013; Lindsay Musgrove was 22, a nursing student living with one of Patrick's roughly forty first cousins. A childhood friend of hers told the magazine she had been "looking for a good potential family man." He took her kite-flying on an early date and then to the family's beachside Fourth of July party. The cousin who introduced them, Kristen Walton: "They never really had any bumps in the road." At Mass General her colleagues knew her as "a ray of sunshine." PRESS [S204]

His mother, testifying for the defense at the trial, described him as gentle and conflict-avoidant since childhood: "He doesn't like hostility," and he has "always been that type... to just give the benefit of the doubt." TEST Susan Clancy [S200]

What he did while she was ill

This is the section that did not exist before the profile was read, and it is the part of his record that bears most directly on the online argument that he left her to struggle alone. Everything here is his own account to Orbey, uncorroborated by the trial record, and should be read as such.

• He describes himself as a "software guy" who knew almost nothing about mental health and had pictured therapy as the long armchair conversations of the movies. PRESS [S204]
• When her insomnia did not lift, he began sitting in on her virtual appointments with Dr. Tufts. He came away thinking they were confined too narrowly to medication management: a matter of listing symptoms and being handed pills. PRESS [S204]
• He says he called more than a dozen therapists and could not find one with immediate availability. Orbey notes that her crisis coincided with a documented shortage of Massachusetts mental-health providers. PRESS [S204]
• Neither Dr. Tufts nor Aster Mental Health responded to the magazine; McLean declined to comment. [S204]
• On 2022-11-08, without his knowledge, Lindsay asked for medication suggestions in a private Facebook group for postpartum depression, anxiety and rage, writing that she worried Ativan was addictive but that it made her feel like herself again. PRESS [S204]
• In mid-January 2023 she seemed to be improving and, on a few occasions, encouraged him to go out himself. He went to a Sunday brunch with a group of fathers and took Cora skiing on Martin Luther King Day. PRESS [S204]
• Two days after her McLean discharge they held Cora's fifth birthday party at a trampoline park. Orbey describes a photograph of Cora in a paper crown watching her mother light the candles. Patrick: it "gave me hope," and he thought it gave Lindsay hope too. PRESS [S204]

The last two items matter for the same reason the first three do. They are also the only sourced account of Lindsay Clancy asking her husband to leave the house in the weeks before 2023-01-24, and they come from him, not from a witness the jury heard.

Since this page was first written, the two civil complaints have been read in the original, and they corroborate the substance of the account above. They place him at an appointment with Nurse Paul on 2022-12-05 and at one with Nurse Jollotta on 2022-12-06, where he said "Lindsay is ten thousand times worse since she has taken medication" and asked to take her off everything and start again; they record urgent calls to Jollotta's office on 12-09 and 12-15; and they record his mother, a nurse at South Shore Health, bringing Nurse Paul into the case on 2022-11-20. They also plead that Tufts and Jollotta "regularly met with Lindsay via video conference rather than assessing her in person," in appointments of 17 minutes. The one thing they do not corroborate is the specific claim that he sat in on the Tufts appointments. The full table is in Claim 10 of 09-claims-and-the-record.md. [S205][S206]

Four days later: the statement

On 2023-01-28 he posted roughly 1,300 words to the family's GoFundMe. It is the document that set the terms for everything that followed. PRESS [S193][S202]

He wrote about the children one at a time. Cora "had an infectious laugh and was stunningly beautiful" and "wanted to be a doctor and a mama." Dawson's "best quality was his pure kindness"; he loved Paw Patrol and dinosaurs. Callan "always knew how to heal me," and perhaps that was why "he held on a little longer," to spare him whatever pain he could.

On himself: "I'm constantly reminded of them and with the little sleep I get, I dream about them on repeat." "There is now a massive void where that purpose once was." "My family was the best thing that ever happened to me." [S193][S198]

And then the passage that made international news:

"I want to ask all of you that you find it deep within yourselves to forgive Lindsay, as I have."

"The real Lindsay was generously loving and caring towards everyone, me, our kids, family, friends, and her patients. The very fibers of her soul are loving. All I wish for her now is that she can somehow find peace."

The fundraiser. Its stated purpose was medical bills, funeral services and legal help, because "Pat will be unable to work for the foreseeable future." It passed $1 million on 2023-02-03, from more than 15,000 donors. PRESS [S194]

Two things worth separating, because they are routinely confused. This was his fundraiser, in early 2023. The fundraiser that reached $1.11 million during the 2026 trial was a different one, for Lindsay's parents, who were paying for her defense. [S49] Contemporary coverage records public argument at the time about whether Patrick's fund was for the children's funerals or his wife's legal bills; the stated purpose covered both. [S194]

Six months of silence, then a phone call

The immediate aftermath. For months he was consumed by the thought that nothing was left. In February 2023 he travelled alone through Central America and then Europe, staying in youth hostels specifically to avoid the sight of vacationing families. He came back, cleared out the Duxbury house, and drove around town handing the children's stuffed animals and unused arcade cards to friends. PRESS [S204]

He did not realise until he arrived in New York that his building sits next to a preschool. Of the harried parents he watches steering clingy children through its doors each morning, he told Orbey: "I envy their misery." [S204]

The first calls.

• He did not contact her. They went six months without speaking. [S195][S204]
• The first contact came from her: in early February 2023, from a psychologist's phone, she left a voicemail saying she loved him. She called again the next day, while he was walking the shoreline, and he answered. Speaking fast and panicked, she told him about the voice and the "last chance." He ended the call after about a minute. "She did not sound like my wife." [S195][S198][S204]
• On her thirty-third birthday, in August 2023, at her father's suggestion, he called her. The profile places this in August; People placed it in June. [S204][S198]
• They began speaking more often after the first anniversary memorial service. [S195]

What he asked her. Orbey records that Patrick had always described the killings as a sudden rupture, a bolt of lightning that struck without warning. In the later calls he began putting to her the questions the trial would eventually put to a jury, and reported her answers:

Two things are worth saying about that table. First, these are the exact three items the Commonwealth built its premeditation case on, asked and answered privately more than a year before Sprague put them to the jury. Second, they are hearsay twice over: his recollection of her explanation, published in a magazine. Orbey's own assessment was that Patrick's reflex to extend her the benefit of the doubt struck him as both credulous and entirely rational. [S204]

On the illness and the care. "I never even heard the term until after the kids died." And on the December 2022 hospitalization: "If I could go back in time, I'd have called McLean... Keep her in there for a year if you have to." [S195]

And the sentence that became the case's most quoted line: "I wasn't married to a monster, I was married to someone who got sick." [S13]

Her situation as he described it. By the time of the profile she was at Tewksbury. Her parents were living out of a hotel to be near her. The pastor who had baptized Callan drove down from Duxbury weekly to pray with her; after a psychiatrist ruled that rosary beads were a suicide hazard, he brought a string too short to fit around her neck. She was on a new antidepressant that interfered with her ability to cry, and Patrick said she was numbed by it and self-conscious about that. She wanted, he said, nothing more than to tell her story, and had raised becoming an advocate for other mothers with postpartum mood disorders; Reddington had told her not to speak to the press before trial. PRESS [S204]

His sister Erin Donahue gave the profile the family's more complicated register. Lindsay before was "sweet, and a little quiet, but just lovely." Afterward: "Because Lindsay is still alive, there are all these questions, and this simmering anger." Her fuller point was about asymmetry: a widower whose wife had killed herself along with their child gets to memorialise her, while the Clancys cannot say what a great person Lindsay was without also being asked why. [S200][S204]

Grief, and being seen

Published eighteen months before the remarriage became public, the profile contains the passage that anticipates the criticism almost exactly.

Patrick had befriended a man Orbey calls Talty, a chef in Westchester whose wife killed their daughter and then herself, and whose forearm carries their names tattooed over flowers. Talty's line about it: an illness took his family, and people need to understand the completeness of the change, that it is not the same person you love. [S204]

Part of what Patrick found in that friendship was relief from having to perform grief. "I have this worry that people will see me socializing, and be, like, 'Shouldn't he be sad, because his whole family was just killed?'" And: he is still hurting, but he can smile and sometimes laugh, and he said the same was true of Lindsay. [S204]

The difference between the two men, as Orbey draws it, is that only one of the two wives survived. Patrick told him Lindsay knows that her surviving is what made this a sensational story. [S204]

What he built

The Boston Marathon, April 2024. He ran for Boston Children's Hospital, where Callan died. He wore Cora's hair bow on his jersey, Dawson's wristband on his right wrist and Callan's bracelet on his left; the jersey read "In memory of Cora, Dawson & Callan. Every mile, every day." He finished in 3:59:19. The goal was $25,000, raised to $65,000, and he brought in close to $76,000. PRESS [S196]

"They were my motivation. It was therapeutic. It was purpose. I knew we could make a big difference and we did, so it was good."

"Callan spent his last moments in my arms before he passed at Boston Children's Hospital."

The Heard Foundation, 2024. He founded it with his sisters Erin Donahue and Laura Sullivan. Its mission, in its own words, is "to reimagine perinatal mental-health care, to build a dedicated treatment center where parents can heal with dignity and support, and to foster a culture of kindness and connection so no one struggles alone." Its concrete goal is the first postpartum treatment center in Massachusetts, the thing his wife could not find in the four months before she killed their children. PRESS [S199][S200]

Two details of the foundation say more than its mission statement. The name works twice over, "Heard" and "Herd": "every parent is heard and every family has a herd." And the logo, a rainbow heart, was drawn by Cora. Its annual event, With Love From Duxbury Day, falls on January 24. [S199]

The playground, June 2025. He went back to Duxbury and built one near the old house, with volunteers and with Rachel Danis. It carries the children's names and a line Cora used to say at bedtime: "Thank you for a beautiful day in the neighborhood." PRESS [S198]

The new marriage

He took solo trips to Latin America and Europe, put the Duxbury house on the market, and moved to New York, where he took a job at Microsoft as a business applications sales executive and lives on the Upper East Side. He filed for divorce in February 2024. PRESS [S197][S198]

By that same month he was dating Dr. Rachel Danis, a reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist at RMA of New York and an assistant clinical professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She moved into his apartment in 2025. In April 2026 they married in a small ceremony in Central Park. PRESS [S197][S198][S201]

What he said about the marriage while it was ending. In the profile, published October 2024, Patrick declined to comment on the status of his marriage, out of deference to Lindsay. He had filed for divorce eight months earlier and was already seeing Danis; the profile mentions neither, and it is not clear whether Orbey knew. His mother was the one who addressed it on the record: he has to come to terms with the fact that she is no longer part of anything, and "She's gonna go her way, and he's gonna go his." At the Boston Marathon finish line that April, asked about Lindsay by a television reporter, he said he had forgiven her. PRESS [S204][S197]

It stayed private until the trial. TMZ reported seeing the couple in Manhattan on 2026-08-13, and the New York Post followed with details from public records. [S197] TMZ described them on a rooftop during the trial as "visibly stressed," Patrick "taking phone calls and pacing in circles." [S201]

A rumor that they had a baby together is false. [S201]

Reddington, watching him through the trial: "How that guy is not an emotional basket case is beyond me." [S201]

The criticism, and what it actually consists of

The remarriage became one of the three things the online case against him was built on. Boston.com lists them: "his clothing that night, his body language, his subsequent remarriage," and calls the lot "irrelevant minutiae and baseless." [S80]

What is documented:

• "Moved on too quickly." Fox reports online sleuths criticizing him for remarrying during the pretrial period, and that he and Danis "have been trailed by paparazzi and dogged by sordid, but wholly unfounded, allegations." [S197] The chronology the criticism runs on: killings January 2023, divorce filed February 2024, dating from about February 2024, married April 2026. AllSides puts it as about three years after the deaths and two after the divorce. [S183][S198]
• The affair theory. That he was involved with someone before the killings, or that Danis was somehow implicated. No evidence for either was presented at trial or appears in any source here; Slate calls the second version "patently absurd," and neither Danis nor Patrick has been accused of anything. See Claim 4 in 09-claims-and-the-record.md. [S71]
• The "abandonment" argument, from the Substack "Liberating Motherhood": that he left her alone knowing she was suffering, citing his travel. The record on that, including the November 2022 trips and the fact that no clinician ever told him she should not be alone with the children, is in Claim 10 of the same file. [S183][S29]
• Fabricated claims, including the baby rumor. [S201]

Variety devoted a piece to it, "Online Sleuthing Is Out of Control, and the Vitriol Against Patrick Clancy Proves It." It is paywalled and was not read here. [S203]

His lawyers answered once, through Howard Cooper of Todd and Weld: the statements are "patently false, defamatory, and injurious," and those making them, "from minor influencers to major celebrities, should be on notice that their despicable actions and false, defamatory statements have caused real life consequences to the health and safety of Patrick and his family." [S66]

One observation about the shape of this. The forgiveness statement of January 2023 was received almost universally as extraordinary, and it is the reason much of the public first sympathized with Lindsay Clancy at all. The same public, or an overlapping part of it, later treated his remarriage as a betrayal of the position that statement established. He has, in fact, held both: he asked the world to forgive her in 2023, kept speaking to her, built a foundation named for the illness her lawyers say caused it, testified in a way both sides used, sued her doctors on the children's behalf, and married someone else. Nothing in the record suggests he ever treated those as being in tension.

What he said when it ended

Through David Meier, hours after the mistrial on 2026-09-04:

"Patrick Clancy is grateful to the Court and to the jurors for their hard work, their commitment, and their perseverance. The loss of Patrick's children is something from which he will never recover and from which there will never be closure. The prospect of reliving this tragedy through another trial is extraordinarily painful, for Patrick, for his family, and for all of us."

[S129][S53]

Open on this page

• When he moved to New York. Fox says spring 2023; the house sale closed January 2024; the profile places him in an apartment by autumn 2024 but in midtown, where later reporting says the Upper East Side. [S197][S141][S204]
• Whether he knew of the Facebook post at any point before Orbey published it. [S204]
• Whether the treating clinicians ever documented his presence at the telehealth appointments. If they did, it is in records this corpus has not seen, and it would move his account from self-report to record. [S204]
• Whether he and Lindsay are still in contact, and whether he will testify at a retrial. He was on the defense witness list and called by the Commonwealth. [S143]
• The Heard Foundation's progress toward the treatment center. [S199]

Closed by the profile: his conduct during her illness, the content of the first phone calls, the three questions he put to her, and his own account of grief and of being watched. See the section above and raw/s8-new-yorker-profile.md.