Meg Hamp, a former colleague of Lindsay Clancy, broke down in tears during an Oprah Winfrey podcast as she recalled the accused child-killer’s emotional reactions to childbirth.
Hamp, who worked alongside Clancy as a labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital for years, told Winfrey on Thursday’s episode that she “often remember looking up after a baby was born, and Lindsay was my second nurse in the delivery, and just looking over at the mother and Lindsay with tears in her eyes because birth was just so emotional for her.”
“She felt that for so many other women — not just her friends or her family,” Hamp continued on the podcast, which centered on Clancy’s trial and postpartum mental illness.
The fellow nurse said she never observed any signs of mental illness while they worked together. Clancy, 36, is accused of fatally strangling her three young children with exercise cords in their Duxbury, Massachusetts home in January 2023.
During the podcast, Winfrey pressed Hamp on testimony she had given at Clancy’s recent trial about a conversation the two nurses once had regarding Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children in a bathtub in 2001. Yates was convicted of capital murder in 2002, then retried in 2006 and found not guilty by reason of insanity; she remains committed to a state psychiatric facility.
Hamp explained that the topic arose when “we had a patient on the unit that was suffering from some mental-health challenges, and there was just a lot of question around that, Lindsay being a new nurse, and there was another new nurse on the floor at that time, and I just asked [Clancy] if she had ever heard of the Andrea Yates case, and she said she hadn’t.”
“It seems like such a big case in the maternal health world, but Lindsay was at that age where she probably hadn’t lived through that – I’m a little bit older than Lindsay,” Hamp noted.
Clancy’s trial ended in a hung jury last week when a single juror refused to budge on a first-degree murder conviction, despite eleven others voting to acquit. Prosecutors have not yet announced whether they will retry the case.
Hamp described her disbelief upon learning what had happened to Clancy’s children. “I had a phone call from a colleague. We weren’t 100% sure what had happened, but the address was hitting the news, and I knew her address, so I knew something had happened,” she said.
The coworker insisted Clancy was devoted to her family. “She loved her children,” Hamp said. “She lived for her children, she did everything for them. She wanted all the parenting tips. It wasn’t possible in my mind that this was a person who could murder her three children.”
Hamp said she is “devastated” at the possibility that Clancy could face a retrial.
When Winfrey asked what she would say to people who view Clancy as simply evil, Hamp let out a deep sigh before responding.
“I think mental health can affect anyone,” Hamp said. “It can affect the person who goes to their dream college, meets the man of their dreams, decides to have a family, buys a house, buys another house as their family grows.”
“It doesn’t matter where you are in life or how many boxes on your life’s bucket list you’re checking off as you go, it can impact anyone regardless of where you are in your life, and this has been very eye-opening that someone like Lindsay who was checking off those boxes on her life’s bucket list, that this could happen to her.”
The killings of five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan rocked the Boston suburb and sparked national debate about postpartum mental illness, with Clancy’s defense arguing she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and overmedication when she strangled the children and attempted suicide by jumping from a window. Prosecutors countered that her actions were premeditated, noting she had ordered a prescription delivered to the house on the day of the killings and had searched online for ways to kill her children while making the house silent.
Clancy had messaged one of her caregivers less than two months before the killings to report “intrusive thoughts I never had before” and “feeling completely hopeless,” according to evidence presented at trial.
Prosecutors are expected to announce their decision on whether to retry Clancy in the coming weeks.