Last week, I took you through the devastating events of January 24, 2023, the night Lindsay Clancy’s three young children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan, were fatally harmed inside their family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts. This week, we move from the home to the courtroom. In The Lindsay Clancy Trial: Psychosis, Premeditation, or Both?, I take a closer look at one of the most complicated questions surrounding this case: What was happening in Lindsay Clancy’s mind when her children died? Lindsay’s mental health before the deaths has become a critical part of understanding the case. Her treatment, medications, reported symptoms, and concerns surrounding postpartum mental illness raise difficult questions about postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis, and about how severe psychiatric illness affects criminal responsibility. But there is another side to this case. The circumstances surrounding that night also raise questions about planning and awareness. Lindsay’s husband, Patrick, left the home to run errands. During the relatively short period he was gone, the lives of all three children were changed forever. So how does the legal system distinguish between an intentional, premeditated act and an act committed by someone experiencing profound psychosis? Can a person appear organized or purposeful while simultaneously experiencing a severe break from reality? And where does mental illness end and legal responsibility begin? As a nurse and former forensic death investigator, I’m particularly interested in the intersection between the medical evidence and the investigative evidence. A case like this cannot be understood through one piece of information alone. We have to look at the timeline, behavior, medical and psychiatric history, physical evidence, statements, expert opinions, and what investigators were able to establish. We also have to remember why this trial is happening. Three young children lost their lives. Whatever conclusions are ultimately reached about Lindsay’s mental state and criminal responsibility, Cora, Dawson, and Callan remain at the center of this case. In this episode, I explore the competing questions surrounding the Lindsay Clancy trial and the challenge of evaluating a case in which mental illness and evidence of apparent planning may exist alongside one another. Was this postpartum psychosis? Was it premeditation? Or is the truth more complicated than either explanation alone? Join me for Part Two of the Lindsay Clancy case on Pushing Up Lilies: The Lindsay Clancy Trial: Psychosis, Premeditation, or Both? EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: 00:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies. I’m your host, Julie Mattson. 00:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine-tingling, unusual, and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner. 00:24 Do I have some stories for you. Are you ready? Hey, guys, welcome to another episode of Pushing Up Lilies. I’m your host, Julie. I’m recording today from my med spa. 00:40 I have to admit I love, love, love this microphone. I hope it sounds as good as it sounds in my headset. 00:48 But wanted to bring to your attention, and I know I may have mentioned it last week, but we are having our second annual Murder Mystery Dinner. 00:58 This year is gonna be on October 10th in Krum, Texas, at Studio 141, and we’re gonna have an amazing, immersive murder mystery dinner catered by Our Blended Table. 01:13 And if you haven’t had their food, let me just tell you, it’s amazing. 01:18 It’s gonna be very interactive, a great chance to meet people who love true crime, and also an opportunity to meet and speak with Ann Byrum. 01:30 Now, many of you may not know who Ann is, but Ann is the mother of Kelly Ann Cox, and Kelly was actually abducted in Denton back in 1997 from a gas station in- very near the Denton Police Department after a tour of the jail with her criminal justice class from UNT. 01:54 And Ann loves to remind us how important it is to kinda watch your back and always use the buddy system. This happened to Kelly Ann during the day. 02:09 I mean, it was daylight right in front of the police department with officers going in and out on a very busy road. 02:17 I’m so thankful and grateful that Ann has offered to come up from Houston and be my speaker, and so I’m very much looking forward to talking to her. 02:29 We’re gonna do an interview with her, and then we’re gonna open up the floor for questions. Now, I’m also going to have a booth at the Day of the Dead Festival. I’m not racing this year. 02:42 They went up a little bit on the cost, and I just decided that I would rather spend that money advocating, so I turned it around a little bit. 02:51 This year I’ll just have a merch booth, but we’re gonna have hoodies, we’ll have T-shirts, we’ll have pins, we’ll have plenty of stickers, and the comic book. 03:02 The comic book will be there, and I’ll be glad to sign those as well. 03:07 And we’ll also be at the Overdose Awareness event on the square in Denton, Texas, on August 31st, so that’s coming up right around the corner. 03:18 It’s so crazy to think that it’s already September or almost September. It makes me wanna go Christmas shopping. 03:24 It’s never too early, I think, to just go look around, see what you can find, and the Hobby Lobby already has their Christmas stuff out. 03:32 That kinda drives me crazy to think that really in July they started doing that. I don’t like it, because I like to just celebrate my seasons. 03:42 I wanna celebrate Thanksgiving without my Christmas tree up. So anyway, I don’t know if y’all feel the same way about it, but there’s my piece. 03:50 Wanna talk a little bit more about the Lindsay Clancy trial, and I know that many of you have been watching it, and I’m so upset that I haven’t been able to watch
The Lindsay Clancy Case: Three Children, One Unthinkable Night
On January 24, 2023, what began as an ordinary evening for a young Massachusetts family ended in an unimaginable tragedy. Lindsay Clancy was a labor and delivery nurse, wife, and mother of three young children. That night, her husband, Patrick, briefly left their Duxbury home to pick up dinner and medication. When he returned, everything had changed. Their three children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan, would ultimately lose their lives, and Lindsay would survive after suffering serious injuries herself. In this episode of Pushing Up Lilies, I walk you through what happened that night and the events surrounding the deaths of these three children. As a nurse and former forensic death investigator, this case raises difficult questions for me, not only about the investigation itself, but about mental health following childbirth. Lindsay had reportedly been struggling with her mental health and receiving treatment before the deaths, bringing postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, and postpartum psychosis into the national conversation. What happens when a mother’s perception of reality becomes distorted? How do investigators begin reconstructing a scene involving multiple children and a critically injured parent? And how do we discuss a case this devastating while remembering that at the center of it are three children whose lives were lost? This week, we’re focusing on the night everything happened: the timeline, the circumstances surrounding the deaths, and what investigators began to uncover. Next week, we’ll continue with the Lindsay Clancy case as we turn our attention to the courtroom, the evidence and arguments being presented, and the complicated questions surrounding postpartum psychosis and criminal responsibility. This is a heartbreaking case with no easy answers. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: 00:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies. I’m your host, Julie Matson. 00:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine-tingling, unusual, and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner. 00:24 Do I have some stories for you? Are you ready? Hey, guys. Welcome to another episode of Pushing Up Lilies. I’m your host, Julie. I just want to say that I’m so grateful for all my followers. 00:43 I am just about to hit 100,000 downloads, which is amazing. 00:49 I’ve recorded over 200 episodes, and I am being asked to guest host on a lot of other true crime podcasts, which I’m so grateful for the friends and true crime family that I met at Beyond the Crime and then also at Crime Con. 01:07 And I’ve already… I think I told y’all, I’ve already actually applied as a creator for Crime Con 2027, which is in September 2027 in Orlando, and I’m excited about the possibility. 01:22 I will be exhibitor if I’m not chosen to be on Creators Row again. I don’t think there was really a lot of separation as far as who was on Creators Row and who was an exhibitor. 01:36 However, I know that there was a cost difference, so it doesn’t matter to me really. I used to be so focused on being a creator and you know what? 01:46 We’re all creators, and they only chose a certain number of people, and that’s fine. I don’t know how they decide that. They say that they’re fair about it. I just don’t know. 01:57 I don’t know who makes that decision. 01:59 I don’t even know how many creators they had versus exhibitors, but I know that many podcasters who had been in the podcasting world for years still were not chosen. 02:11 So, it really had nothing to do with your experience or your level of expertise or even how long you’d been doing it. Anyway, I applied as a creator, if nothing else, to save a little bit of money. 02:26 I can tell you that I think I will drive next time because the cost of shipping all my merch there was ridiculous, and it had to be there two weeks before the event, and then we had to pay Caesars Palace to store our stuff. 02:43 So, the underlying cost of podcasting, I think, is something that a lot of people don’t understand, and that’s why we work so hard to get sponsors. 02:52 This year, I am hosting my second annual Murder Mystery Dinner, and it’s gonna be in Krum, Texas. The date we have chosen is October 10th. 03:03 It’ll start at 5:00 PM, and we’re gonna have, like, a one-hour kinda meet and greet, have some drinks, visit, meet each other, and also talk to the actors. 03:15 And then at 6:00, it will start, and that is a three-hour show that will be put on during dinner. It’s very interactive. Super excited. There are opportunities this year to sponsor the event. 03:32 I will say that I have reached out to several different organizations to be a part of promoting them. 03:43 One of them is making the coasters where you can test for GHB and Rohypnol in your drink, and to put the Pushing Up Lilies logo on those and then hand them out at local bars for free. 03:58 And then also, we have two major universities in Denton, giving them to students so that they can check their drink before they take a drink to make sure that it hasn’t been tainted. 04:10 I like to help with prevention, and so those things are things that I wanna do with the sponsorship and promotion money that we get from the event, as well as to help kinda cover the costs of the podcast. 04:24 So anyway, there’s a lot of stuff up and coming, and so I’m super excited to share it with y’all. 04:28 I really don’t wanna mention the names of the organizations until I have something set in stone, but it’s gonna be exciting. There’s gonna be a lot. 04:37 I have, uh, a guest speaker lined up that y’all are going to love to hear. Her daughter was murdered, and I’m
Grand Haven: The Karolkiewicz Family
When an entire family is lost, it’s easy for the headlines to focus on the person responsible. In this episode, I wanted to do something different. I’m taking you to Grand Haven Township, Michigan, where Mandy Karolkiewicz and her six children lost their lives in one of the most heartbreaking family annihilation cases of the year. Before we talk about the investigation, I want to remember the people whose lives mattered most, the victims. Using my experience as a forensic death investigator, I’ll walk you through how investigators process a scene involving multiple homicide victims, how forensic evidence helps determine the sequence of events, and why details like wound analysis, fire patterns, and scene reconstruction are so important. We’ll also discuss the research surrounding family annihilation, the psychological and behavioral patterns often seen in these cases, and why recognizing risk factors may help save lives in the future. While we may never fully understand why these tragedies occur, we can learn from them, support those in crisis, and continue advocating for families before violence reaches a devastating conclusion. This episode is shared with deep respect for Mandy, her six children, and everyone whose lives were forever changed by this tragedy. * Listener Discretion Advised EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: 00:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies. I’m your host, Julie Matson. Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine-tingling, unusual, and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner. Do I have some stories for you? Are you ready? Hey, guys. Welcome back to another episode of Pushing Up Lilies. I have several guest host appearances this month and next month, and I haven’t really mentioned what shows they were gonna be on because I don’t know the air dates yet. But when I know a little bit more about when they’re gonna air, I’ll be sure and let y’all know. I will say that Pushing Up Lilies will be at the Denton Day of the Dead Festival this year. Again, we are not participating in the coffin races this year, but I went ahead and applied for a booth, so we will have merch there, and that’s October 24th, which is a Saturday. So, we’ll be there all day with special merchandise, and we will probably do some live interviews with some of the fans and do some videos for our YouTube channel. Also, we are in the process of planning our second annual Pushing Up Lilies murder mystery event, and we’re not 100% sure where it’s gonna be yet. It will be a weekend in October, obviously not the 24th ’cause we’ll be at the Day of the Dead Festival, but we’ve got a lot of exciting things coming up. We’ve got some specials we’re gonna run on the subscription box. I need to make sure that everything is up to date on the website for purchase because we do have some exciting new merch that I brought back from CrimeCon with me. I have already applied for Creators Row for CrimeCon 2027, which is in Orlando, Florida. It’s gonna be in September of next year, and I’ve already got my hotel, and it’s sold out. So, I’m really glad that I was able to get in on that because it’s so difficult when you’re traveling with merch and you have to be at an event, to have to Uber back and forth and stay at a different hotel. I’m sure that many of y’all have done that before, and it’s just difficult. It complicates things tremendously, and it’s not always easy to get a ride when you’re traveling, especially in places like Vegas and Orlando, and there’s just a lot of traffic, and it is heavily populated during the summer months. Hopefully, everything will go smoothly, and hopefully, y’all can all go ahead and secure your rooms at a nearby hotel so that you can gear up for CrimeCon 2027. This week, I wanna talk about a case in Michigan, and we kinda talked about the huge influx of murder-suicides last week. We see them all the time, even in a small town where I was, but it just seems like we’ve had a lot of cases lately, and there’s a lot of people going through a lot of things. I just want everybody to be nice to each other. I know it’s hard sometimes. Sometimes that’s the hardest part of life is smiling and just pretending everything’s okay but just be nice to other people. It can make a big difference in how their day goes. Sometimes when we’re traveling, I’ll go to Starbucks and buy even a $5 gift card, and I’ll give them to my flight attendants, just something to make someone’s day. 03:50 And so, I try to do one thing a day for somebody, even if it’s as simple as letting someone in front of me when they’re trying to get onto the road and there’s a lot of traffic or holding the door open for somebody. It doesn’t have to be a family of 12’s dinner. Just put it in your mind that you should do one nice thing for one person a day. And that’s my challenge for you. But I wanna talk about this Friday morning in late July when a call came in. There was a fire, a house on Riverside Trail in Grand Haven Township, Michigan, a quiet stretch of West Michigan near the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. And this was the kind of place where people raise big families. They’re comfortable leaving their garage doors open. Ottawa County sheriff’s deputies and fires crews rolled out, and when they got there, there were eight people dead. A mother, a father, and six children ages five to 15. Every single one of them had been shot in the head. And then someone had set the house on fire. Now, I’ve worked death scenes for a long time, and
