Patrick Clancy and his wife, Rachel Danis, are starting a family, he revealed in an interview with “60 Minutes” on Sunday, as they spoke publicly together for the first time about rebuilding his life after the deaths of his three children.
In the interview, Clancy said he looks forward to telling his future child about Cora, Dawson, and Callan, who were killed by his former wife, Lindsay Clancy, in their Duxbury home in January, 2023.
“I think every parent can agree, 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,” he said.
When asked if Lindsay Clancy had asked for his forgiveness, he said she hadn’t.
“But I gave it to her,” he said.
The comments came during Clancy’s first interview since Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial ended with a hung jury earlier this month. He spoke at length about his grief, his decision to forgive Lindsay, and the online conspiracy theories he said have distracted from the legacy of his children and the issue of perinatal mental health.
Clancy said his forgiveness came in part from his belief that Lindsay’s mental illness caused her to kill their children.
“I saw headlines that said, you know, ‘Killer Mom,’ and ‘Baby Murderer,’ ‘Monster.’ And none of [them] were accurate,” Clancy said. “I believe that it was her mental illness that caused that.”
He said he also felt that forgiving her was necessary for him to move forward.
“I think when it comes to forgiveness, I also felt that if I didn’t get there, I would be eaten up inside forever,” Clancy said.
Clancy said he once asked Lindsay whether she remembered killing their children. She told him, “it was like a dream,” he said, and that she remembered it like someone would remember a dream after waking up.
Lindsay Clancy has admitted through counsel that she strangled Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan. She has argued she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time and should not be held criminally responsible.
Her murder trial ended in a mistrial on Sept. 4 after jurors were unable to reach a verdict. Patrick Clancy was the prosecution’s first witness.
During the “60 Minutes” interview, Patrick Clancy described Lindsay’s worsening mental health in the months before the killings, including sleeplessness, severe depression, and intrusive thoughts.
He said he knew little about postpartum mental illness, as Lindsay made repeated emergency room visits and sought psychiatric treatment.
“I could piece together what it was like to be really, really anxious or depressed, but I didn’t know how to manage a postpartum illness,” Clancy said. “I think mental illness has this ability to be tragically deceptive. So I’m sure there are things that I didn’t see.”
Lindsay checked herself into McLean Psychiatric Hospital on New Year’s Eve of 2022, where she stayed for five days and was treated for depression before being released.
On Jan. 24, 2023, after Patrick left the family’s home to run an errand and pick up dinner, he returned to find Lindsay injured in the backyard after jumping from an upstairs window. He then found their three children strangled in the basement.
Cora and Dawson were dead. Callan initially survived and was airlifted to Boston Children’s Hospital.
Clancy said he clung to hope after learning doctors had restored Callan’s heartbeat.
“I really thought there was a chance that Callan would live,” Clancy said. “I remember just thinking, ‘Just gimme one. Just gimme one kid, and I would raise him as best I could, and I would give him the best life I possibly could.’”
Callan survived for four days.
Clancy said his son lay beside him at the hospital as he was telling him, “I’m so sorry.”
“And he died in my arms,” Clancy said.
During those final hours, Clancy wrote tributes to each of his three children, typing with one hand while holding Callan’s hand in the other. He told “60 Minutes” he feared that if he did not write about them, they would be forgotten.
In the months that followed, Clancy said his grief became so overwhelming that he did not believe he would live to see his 35th birthday. He contemplated suicide himself.;
“And I was completely fine with it,” he said.
Unable to stay in Duxbury, Clancy moved to New York City, where he said the anonymity gave him room to grieve.
He recalled going to St. Patrick’s Cathedral on what would have been Callan’s first birthday. He lit a candle and said, “I love you, buddy.”
When he walked back out onto Fifth Avenue, he began to cry.
“And nobody cared,” Clancy said.
Asked whether he was grateful for that, Clancy said he realized, “This is where I need to be. I need to grieve.”
He kept some of his children’s toys and personal belongings, which are now placed around his Manhattan apartment.
“Just things that reminded me of them,” Clancy said.
In Duxbury, a playground was also built with features honoring each of the children.
Clancy said he still dreams about them.
“All the time,” he said.
He met Danis, a 37-year-old reproductive medicine doctor, in a New York run club in January 2024. Danis said the two later went for coffee, where she noticed a photograph of children on the wallpaper of Clancy’s cell phone.
“I just asked, ‘Who are those cuties?’ And Pat said, ‘Those are my kids,’” Danis recalled.
She asked whether they lived in Massachusetts.
“Pat said, ‘They died,’” she said.
Their relationship deepened as they continued running together, and they married in New York City in April.
“My life has changed since I met Rachel in such a positive way,” Clancy said.
Danis said she tries to help Clancy carry his grief while continuing to honor his children.
“I know I can’t fix — I can’t bring his kids back,” she said. “But if I can honor them and allow Pat to grieve but also just continue to honor them in the present, I guess that’s all I can do.”
Clancy also pushed back on conspiracy theories that spread online during Lindsay’s trial, including unfounded allegations that he was involved in his children’s deaths.
“It’s deeply harmful to the legacy of my children,” Clancy said. “It is a huge distraction from what really matters here, which is perinatal mental health. And it’s done real harm to real people, myself included but also others.”
Clancy said the online theories have made it difficult for him to be in public.
“It’s painful to see,” he said. “And it makes it difficult to be in public, and it’s possible that some of those people, after seeing lie after lie after lie, they start to believe it, and that’s what we’re left with.”
Clancy also addressed criticism of his demeanor while testifying at the trial. He said he suffered a severe panic attack during a break before prosecutors played his 911 call from the night his children were killed.
Clancy said he was taken to an ambulance and offered medication, but he declined it because he wanted to return to the courtroom to finish his testimony.
When asked if he felt he failed his family, Clancy said he believed he did the best he could.
“I think I did the best I could with what I had at the time,” he said. “And I live with the outcome. I live with it every day.”
Camilo Fonseca of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Nick Stoico can be reached at nick.stoico@globe.com.