The man who found his three children dead and his wife lying in the snow below a second-floor window — a fall that left her paralyzed from the waist down — is finally talking. Patrick Clancy and his new wife Rachel Danis sat down with 60 Minutes ahead of a September 29 hearing that will determine whether prosecutors retry Lindsay Clancy for the killings. The interview is the first time either has spoken publicly since a summer trial that riveted the country, ended in a mistrial, and somehow still managed to spawn a cottage industry of online conspiracy theories targeting Patrick himself.
Three Kids, One Holdout, Zero Closure
In January 2023, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children — Cora, five; Dawson, three; and Callan, eight months old — at the family's Massachusetts home, then jumped from a second-floor window. Patrick Clancy found them. He found her in the snow. He has not spoken publicly about any of it until now.
The trial this summer laid out the brutal facts of that night against the backdrop of a defense argument that Lindsay Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis so severe she could not be held criminally responsible. It was a case that forced courtroom observers to sit with genuinely impossible questions about mental illness, pharmaceutical care, and culpability. Then a single juror blew it up.
Michael Desronvil, the holdout, came forward after the mistrial to tell his side of it. According to The Guardian, he believes the physical evidence and key witness testimony proved Clancy 'knew exactly what she was doing and planned it.' One man. Eleven others apparently disagreed. The case now sits in limbo while prosecutors decide whether to do the whole thing over again.
Patrick Clancy's Impossible Position
Here is the thing that makes this case so hard to look away from: Patrick Clancy has publicly supported his former wife throughout. The man whose children are dead. The man who found the scene. He testified for the prosecution but has not condemned Lindsay, and has joined a civil lawsuit alleging that two health professionals and healthcare providers were negligent in her care and over-prescribed her medications in the months leading up to the killings.
In excerpts of the 60 Minutes interview released ahead of Sunday's broadcast, as The Guardian reports, Clancy told correspondent Ross Douthat he still talks to his kids all the time. Asked whether they answer back, he said: 'I like to believe they do. It's a way I stay connected to them.' Then he said the part that's going to echo for a while: 'I think I did the best I could with what I had at the time, and I live with the outcome. I live with it every day, but I think I did the best I could.'
What do you do with that? What is the right response to a man who has to find a way to live inside that sentence? There isn't one. You just let it land.
A New Life, and the Mob That Followed
Patrick Clancy has since moved to New York and married Rachel Danis, 37, an infertility specialist. They met jogging in Central Park on a cold Saturday. She told 60 Minutes: 'I was just a girl that met a guy running in Central Park on a really cold Saturday, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.'
The internet, predictably, found plenty wrong with it. The Guardian reports that Patrick Clancy has been the target of what his attorney Howard Cooper described in a letter earlier this month as a 'relentless, escalating and destructive defamation campaign' driven by online content creators and conspiracists. Cooper did not mince it: 'Enough is enough — this spread of blatant and baseless falsehoods must stop. Those responsible should understand that there will be consequences, and every appropriate measure will be pursued to hold them accountable, including legally.'
Danis defended her husband in the interview, telling 60 Minutes: 'I don't understand how the story's been so twisted, but I would hope people know that Pat is, as I said before, the most selfless father and supportive partner.' This is what grief looks like in 2026: a man who lost three children has to retain a lawyer to make strangers on the internet stop lying about him.
What Happens Next
Plymouth Superior Court has a hearing scheduled for September 29, where Massachusetts prosecutors will reveal whether they intend to retry Lindsay Clancy. That is ten days away. The decision will not be easy and will not make anyone happy regardless of which way it goes.
A retrial means putting a woman whose defense rests on severe postpartum psychosis — and whose care in the months before the killings is now the subject of a civil negligence lawsuit — through the entire machinery of criminal prosecution again. A decision not to retry means three children's deaths result in no criminal conviction whatsoever. There is no outcome here that feels like justice, because what happened does not have a shape that justice can fill.
The 60 Minutes interview itself is worth noting for another reason. The Guardian reports it is the second major interview secured by the program under its new leadership this year, following a sit-down with a pilot rescued by special forces after being shot down over Iran. 60 Minutes is apparently back in the business of getting people to talk. Whether any of this talking helps anyone involved in the Clancy case is a genuinely open question.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe this is a story about guilt and innocence. It is not, or at least it's not only that. It is a story about what happens when a healthcare system fails someone catastrophically, three children die, and then the legal system has to figure out what to do with the wreckage. The Clancys filed a civil suit alleging negligence and over-prescription of medications. That suit exists because Patrick Clancy apparently believes, on some level, that the people who were supposed to help his former wife didn't. That belief did not stop the criminal trial. It didn't stop the mistrial. And it won't stop whatever September 29 brings.
The online harassment of Patrick Clancy is its own specific kind of rot. A man who lost his three kids, who has navigated three years of grief in public, who met someone and tried to build something resembling a life again, is now the subject of a defamation campaign run by people who have apparently decided the real story here is about him. It is not. It was never about him. The fact that his lawyer had to write a cease-and-desist letter to content creators is one of the more depressing sentences you will read this week, and this week has had some competition.
Lindsay Clancy has been sitting in a wheelchair since January 2023, paralyzed, waiting to find out if she will stand trial again for killing her children while, her defense maintains, she was out of her mind from a condition that medicine still barely understands. Patrick Clancy talks to his dead kids in his head and tells himself they answer back because that is how he stays connected to them. Whatever you think about guilt, responsibility, or the verdict that never came, none of this is a story that ends well. The hearing is in ten days. Nobody is ready for it.
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