Beyond All Repair: The Clancy Trial

After the mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case, one big question remains: Will District Attorney Tim Cruz retry the case — and if so, on what charges?

As we wait for a status hearing on Sept. 29, new details have emerged about the holdout juror. Three jurors recently told the media he refused to go along with the other 11 jurors. Reports suggest he may have failed to disclose a criminal history.

Meanwhile, a case in Massachusetts with similarities to Clancy's case is being reconsidered. Latarsha Sanders was convicted of murder for killing her two children in 2022. The charges were brought by Cruz, and her trial was presided over by the same judge who handled Clancy's trial. For Sanders's trial, Judge William Sullivan ruled her medical records inadmissible. But this summer, in the middle of Clancy's trial, the state's high court said that was a mistake and vacated the earlier conviction. Now, Sanders is getting a new trial.

WBUR’s Deborah Becker explores what a retrial might look like for both women and what Clancy's future holds. She also examines what this case reveals about gaps in America's mental health system and unpacks what this case tells us about how we handle family tragedies.

A week after Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial, WBUR's Deborah Becker reflects on the reaction online and in real life — inside as well as outside the courtroom.

From TikTok influencers to international media outlets, the trial drew unprecedented crowds to the Plymouth courthouse.

The attention on the Clancy trial is drawing attention to new mothers' mental health. But it has also sparked a national debate on gender, accountability, and women's mental health. Throughout the trial, we saw the darker side of social media virality and algorithmic bias, giving rise to multiple conspiracy theories online, especially about Lindsay Clancy's ex-husband, Patrick Clancy.

Without a conviction, there's little closure for the Clancy family or the hordes of court watchers. Plymouth County District Attorney Tim Cruz will need to decide what charges to bring for a retrial.

WBUR reporter Deborah Becker spent many of her days this summer at the Plymouth County courthouse. She's been covering the trial of Lindsay Clancy, who was charged with murdering her three children before attempting to kill herself.

The Massachusetts woman's defense argued she was experiencing postpartum psychosis at the time and should not be held criminally responsible for her actions. After weeks of testimony and seven days of deliberation, the jury was deadlocked.

The tragedy at the center of the case is unbelievable — a mother killing her children. But what is also remarkable about this case is how it's captivated the public and drawn immense support for the woman on trial.

Now, everyone is looking for some type of closure to this harrowing case.

Dr. Ewen Cameron wanted to win a Nobel Prize for his work in psychiatry. He never got one. He died of a heart attack while climbing a mountain in the Adirondacks in 1967. So we don’t have access to Cameron's thoughts on his own legacy. But we do have his son, Duncan Cameron. In the final installment of “Madness," Amory and Ben sit down with Duncan and explore the shocking ways his father's methods are still being used today.

"Madness: The Secret Mission for Mind Control and the People Who Paid the Price," an Endless Thread series in 5 parts, unravels the shocking history of CIA-funded mind-control experiments. This is Part 5. If you haven't heard Parts 1 through 4 yet, you can find them here, here, here, and here.

In the early 1980s, victims of Dr. Ewen Cameron’s mind-altering experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute began a slow process of finding each other and building a case against the CIA for funding Cameron's work. The legacy of that case has played a key role in two separate lawsuits in progress today. These new lawsuits represent the interests of hundreds of families still seeking justice for the brutal “treatments” their loved ones were subjected to decades ago.

"Madness: The Secret Mission for Mind Control and the People Who Paid the Price" -- an investigative series in 5 parts -- unravels the shocking history of CIA-funded mind-control experiments. This is Part 4. If you haven't heard Parts 1 through 3 yet, you can find them here, here and here.

As the fear of communism was rising in the U.S. after World War II, government officials set their sights on developing a weapon that sounds straight out of science fiction: mind control. This effort was led by the CIA in a program called MK-ULTRA, which was made up of 149 "subprojects" involving more than 80 academic institutions, prisons, and organizations. In this episode, we learn the dark history of MK-ULTRA and examine the origins of Subproject 68: Dr. Ewen Cameron's experimentation on patients at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal.

Hundreds of people who were experimented on at the Allan Memorial Institute over the course of two decades are all connected to one man: Dr. Ewen Cameron. In this episode, we look at how Cameron rose to prominence in his field and investigate the surprising origins of his treatment program.

This episode is part of "Madness: The Secret Mission for Mind Control and the People Who Paid the Price," a five-part investigative series from Endless Thread that unravels the shocking history of CIA-funded mind-control experiments.

"Hey, it's Amory. We've had such a huge response for Beyond All Repair that the team and I are thinking and talking about what we might bring to you in the future. But in the meantime, we wanted to keep things going, at least for now, with something a little different. So, as you may know, I'm the co-host of another show called Endless Thread.

This is a show about mysteries and history, all connected to the internet. Back in April of 2020, my Endless Thread co-host Ben Brock Johnson and I released a real doozy of a story. It's about alleged crimes at one of the highest-ranking institutions of higher ed and medicine, connected to the MKUltra experiments conducted on people by the CIA during the Cold War.

It's also a story about the origins of psychiatry, a dangerous doctor. And a group of people, often women, who have been fighting for their personal stories to be heard. We're putting this series into this feed for just a limited time, so listen now while you can to this set of stories called Madness. And we'll be in touch with more Beyond All Repair news in the future."

Beyond All Repair has mostly wrapped, but if there are updates in the story or the case, Amory will jump back in here to let you know, so keep following the show!

In the meantime though, I wanted to introduce you to another show. It’s from Campside Media and it’s called White Devil. It’s a series that, at first, seems to be a crime story… but there are so many layers to this. It starts with a woman who’s a member of one of the most powerful families in Belize. She’s found on a pier late at night, next to a body. It becomes the country’s biggest news story in a generation.

This is the first episode of White Devil. Host Josh Dean — who you might know from The Clearing or Chameleon: Hollywood Con Queen — takes us back to the beginning, in 2021, when the nation of Belize was rocked by a shocking death and the arrest of this influential woman. Most people expected that she would just… walk away. But nothing in White Devil is QUITE as it seems…

Listen to White Devil wherever you get your podcasts.