PLYMOUTH, Mass. — Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Kyle Pavao took the stand Thursday morning at Plymouth Superior Court as the 13th day of testimony in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial got underway. Pavao, who formerly worked in the State Police cybercrime unit, examined a Microsoft Surface Pro laptop removed from Clancy's home in early 2023.
Prosecutors asked Pavao whether his forensic extraction of the device revealed a visit to a website about suicide methods on Aug. 23, 2022. Pavao confirmed it did. He testified that the visit did not come from a direct search but through a chain of clicks: someone had searched for singer-songwriter Tom Hall on Google after listening to his music on Spotify, landed on Hall's Wikipedia page and then navigated to the suicide-methods site. Hall died by suicide.
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington pushed back immediately on cross-examination, questioning whether anyone could establish that Lindsay Clancy was the person logged in when those searches occurred. Reddington said Clancy's husband, Patrick Clancy, was a fan of Tom Hall. "That search was not actually methods of suicide; it was from the Tom Hall link," Reddington said. "You don't know if it was Lindsay Clancy who used the computer to search Tom Hall." Pavao concluded his time on the stand before 10:30 a.m. after a brief redirect and recross-examination.
Timothy Chiappini, a former Plymouth County detective who now serves as a unit commander on the State Police critical investigations team, followed Pavao to the stand. Chiappini conducted a forensic analysis of Clancy's iPhone and read aloud entries from her notes app dated Oct. 25, 2022—roughly three months after the laptop search and roughly three months before the deaths of her three children in Jan. 2023.
The notes entry described deep ambivalence about her capacity as a parent. "I am sad and depressed because I cannot parent my third child like my first," Chiappini read from the phone. "I sort of resent my other children because they prevent me from treating Cal like my first baby. And I know that's not fair to them."
The entry also described the prior evening as difficult: "I was feeling so depressed last evening when Cora and Dawson came home from school. I know it runs off on them so we had a pretty rough evening." Clancy wrote that she remained conflicted about starting a new anxiety and depression medication and said her goal was straightforward: "I just want to feel happy."
The notes testimony is central to the prosecution's case. Prosecutors have argued that Clancy harbored escalating mental distress and resentment in the months before the deaths, building a timeline that links her documented psychological state to the killings. The defense has not disputed that Clancy suffered from serious postpartum mental illness but has argued that illness—not deliberate criminal intent—drove her actions.
Reddington has been a consistent presence in the courtroom challenging the evidentiary foundation of the prosecution's case. His cross-examination of Pavao illustrated the defense strategy: introduce doubt about who controlled the devices, rather than contesting the content of the searches directly.
The trial is running on a compressed weekly schedule. No testimony took place Friday, and proceedings are scheduled to resume Monday at Plymouth Superior Court. Thursday marked the fourth consecutive week of witness testimony in the case.
Clancy is charged with murder in the deaths of her three children. The trial has drawn sustained public attention because of the postpartum mental illness defense and the documented severity of her psychiatric condition in the period leading up to the killings.
