Patrick Clancy, the father of three children killed inside their Duxbury, Massachusetts, home in January 2023, sat down with CBS News' "60 Minutes" after his ex-wife's triple-murder trial ended in a mistrial, sharing gut-level details about his loss, his remarriage, and the online mob that followed.
Clancy spoke with correspondent Ross Douthat in an interview that Fox News reported aired after Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial on September 4, 2026, when jurors split 11-1, eleven favoring a finding that Lindsay Clancy was not criminally responsible for the deaths of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and baby Callan, with a single holdout pushing for conviction. Prosecutors argued Lindsay knew what she was doing. Defense attorneys maintained she suffered from postpartum psychosis and could not be held criminally responsible.
The interview marked the first time Patrick Clancy described, on camera, the final hours of his youngest son's life, and the years of grief, suicidal thoughts, and public harassment that followed.
Callan survived four days, then died in his father's arms
Doctors at Boston Children's Hospital managed to restore Callan's heartbeat after the January 2023 attack at the family's home in Duxbury, a small coastal town about 35 miles south of Boston. Patrick rushed to the hospital. He held onto hope.
"I remember that night, I really thought there was a chance that Callan would live," Clancy told Douthat. He described the bargaining that consumed him:
"And I remember just thinking, 'Just give me one. Just give me one kid.' And I would raise him as best I could, and I would give him the best life I possibly could. And I'd tell him about his brother and sister."
Callan's heart held on for four days. Then it stopped. Patrick was beside him.
"I said, 'I'm so sorry,'" Clancy recalled. "And I got to hold him. I got to lay down next to him. And he died in my arms."
While Callan was still alive, Patrick wrote tributes to all three of his children. The Washington Examiner noted that Clancy revealed he had contemplated suicide in the aftermath, telling Douthat there was a period when he did not expect, or want, to reach his next birthday.
"There was a time where I didn't think I would live to see my 35th birthday, and I was completely fine with it," he said.
Clancy left Duxbury for New York and found grief's anonymity
After the killings, Patrick left Massachusetts for New York City. Five weeks into his new life, on what would have been Callan's first birthday, he walked into St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan and lit a candle.
"I love you, buddy," he said to Callan.
He stepped outside onto Fifth Avenue and broke down. "And I walk out on Fifth Avenue and I start crying my eyes out, and nobody cared," Clancy said. In a city of strangers, that indifference was a mercy. "I thought, this is where I need to be. I can grieve."
His Manhattan apartment still holds reminders of Cora, Dawson, and Callan. He described dreaming about his daughter Cora, dreams vivid enough to feel like visits. "I just looked at her and it was like I basically just said, 'Where have you been?'" he recalled. "Those dreams are so real."
Clancy met Dr. Rachel Danis through a New York running club in January 2024. Danis described seeing a photograph of the three children for the first time: "I just asked, 'Who are those cuties?'" she told Douthat. Patrick had answered simply: "Those are my kids." The couple married in New York City the following April.
The New York Post reported that Clancy also announced during the interview that he and Danis, a fertility doctor, are expecting a child together. Clancy addressed the prospect directly: "You have different relationships with your kids, but they're all your kids. And I can't wait to tell them about their brothers and sister."
Lindsay told Patrick the killings felt "like a dream"
Clancy described visiting Lindsay after the killings, a decision he said he made for his own survival, not hers. "I felt that if I didn't get there, I would be eaten up inside," he said.
He recounted what Lindsay told him about the night she killed their children. "She said it was like a dream, and she remembered it much in the way you would remember a dream after waking up," Patrick said. Lindsay has never asked Patrick to forgive her, but he offered forgiveness anyway.
"I believe that it was her mental illness that caused that," Clancy said. He pushed back against the media coverage that followed the case, saying the labels applied to Lindsay missed the point. "I saw headlines that said, you know, 'killer mom' and 'baby murderer,' 'monster,' and none of them were accurate."
The five-week trial at Plymouth County Superior Court in Plymouth, Massachusetts, ended without a verdict. The jury of nine women and three men deadlocked after more than 36 hours of deliberation spread across seven days, according to post-trial reporting. Prosecutors have not announced whether they will seek a retrial.
One juror admitted she may still believe Lindsay is guilty
An anonymous juror who spoke publicly after the mistrial revealed that she had originally believed Lindsay was criminally responsible, but changed her vote. Breitbart reported the juror's explanation:
"Originally, I felt as though she was guilty and she was criminally responsible for it. And maybe I still believe that in a certain way."
She cited "too much gray area" in the evidence and defended the lone holdout juror, saying multiple jurors with "big personalities" were unwilling to consider other perspectives during the contentious deliberations. "There was not a single moment throughout that presentation of that case that you could say, Oh, yep. 100 percent, I'm certain she did it or that she didn't do it," the juror said.
The holdout juror has since faced scrutiny of her own. Reports surfaced about her background, and she has claimed she was politically targeted after the mistrial.
Whether prosecutors retry Lindsay remains an open question. Her defense team has explored unusual legal avenues, including a pardon request directed at President Trump, though a presidential pardon cannot apply to a state murder charge. The Plymouth County district attorney's office, which rarely offers plea deals, faces pressure from both sides on how to proceed.
Online conspiracies targeted a grieving father
Patrick Clancy reserved some of his sharpest words for the online world that turned his family's tragedy into content. Douthat described the post-mistrial frenzy as a "trial by TikTok," and Clancy did not disagree. Online sleuths and influencers have painted Patrick as uncaring, unfaithful, and, in some corners, responsible for his own children's deaths.
"It's deeply harmful to the legacy of my children," Clancy said. He called the conspiracy theories "a huge distraction from what really matters here, which is [perinatal mental health], and it's done real harm to real people."
Clancy described the corrosive effect of repeated falsehoods: "After seeing lie after lie after lie, they start to believe it. And that's what we're left with."
True crime podcaster Briana Whitney, a contributor to the Crime Junkie Podcast, criticized the "60 Minutes" interview for not pressing Clancy on the conspiracy theories, saying "Patrick wasn't really asked anything by the host of actual substance." Clancy's attorney has threatened legal action against those spreading misinformation about him. Patrick himself called the prospect of a second trial "extraordinarily painful" in a statement released through his lawyer.
The Clancy case has drawn comment from figures well beyond the courtroom. President Trump weighed in after Lindsay's defense attorney made a public plea, saying prosecutors should "work something out."
Eva Terry of the National Review described Patrick as "a man emerging from devastation with forgiveness in his right hand and hope in his left." The September 20, 2026, broadcast gave a national audience its first extended look at a father who lost everything and chose, against every instinct of self-preservation, to keep going.
'I think I did the best I could'
Clancy did not claim to have all the answers. He acknowledged the weight of what happened and his own place in it with a plainness that no courtroom verdict could provide.
"I think I did the best I could with what I had at the time, and I live with the outcome," he said. "I live with it every day."
The question of whether Lindsay Clancy will face a second trial remains unanswered. So does the broader question the case forces on the public: whether a legal system built to assign blame can account for a mind that, by nearly every medical and legal measure presented at trial, had broken.
Patrick Clancy buried three children, forgave the woman who killed them, and rebuilt a life in a city where nobody knew his name. The internet rewarded him with conspiracy theories. That says less about him than it does about the rest of us.
