Getting there
Brockton Superior Court is a round trip they have made hundreds of times. Fuel, tolls, parking, and a car that has aged three years faster than it should have.
Trial status: The defense rested on August 21, 2026. Closing arguments are expected the week of August 24.
They have not
walked away.
For three years, Mike and Paula Musgrove have shown up. Every hearing. Every continuance. Every day of the trial. Showing up has cost them their savings, their retirement, and the state they used to live in.
This fund takes no position on guilt or innocence. That question belongs to twelve jurors in Brockton, and to no one else. This is about what it has cost two parents to keep showing up for their child.
$1,020,155
raised of $2M
Donations go directly to the family
Raised across the fundraiser to date, as of August 22, 2026. Donations go directly to Michael and Paula Musgrove.
Why this fund exists
The cost of a seat in the gallery
When a case takes three and a half years, someone pays for the waiting. Not the lawyers — they bill for it. Not the court — it is funded. The people who pay are the family members who decide, every single morning, that their child will not look up at an empty row.
Mike and Paula Musgrove made that decision in January 2023 and have not unmade it since. They left Wallingford, Connecticut, the town where they raised their daughter, and moved to Massachusetts so they could be inside the courtroom rather than reading about it. Paula is retired. Mike is a photographer. Neither of them had a plan for what three years of hotel rooms, gas, parking, rent in a second state, and lost working days would do to a retirement account.
They have found out. The savings are largely gone. This fund exists to give some of it back — not as a reward, and not as an argument, but as a straightforward recognition of what presence costs.
What this fund is not
It is not a legal defense fund. It does not pay for attorneys, experts, or appeals. It does not go to Lindsay Clancy. It is not a statement about the verdict. Every dollar goes to two parents in their sixties and seventies who are trying to get their footing back.
3½
Years between the deaths and the verdict
January 2023 – August 2026
2
States they have been paying to live in
Connecticut and Massachusetts
Where it goes
Ordinary expenses, extraordinary duration
There is nothing dramatic on this list. That is rather the point — it is three and a half years of ordinary costs that no household budget is built to absorb.
Staying near
A second address in Massachusetts, kept for one reason: so that a 9 a.m. court date does not begin with a two-hour drive in the dark.
Living
Groceries, utilities, insurance, prescriptions. The costs that do not pause for a trial, funded from savings that were meant to last a retirement.
The case
What is actually being decided
Lindsay Clancy does not dispute that she caused the deaths of her three children in Duxbury on January 24, 2023. Her defense has never argued otherwise. The question in front of the jury is narrower, and stranger, than most people assume: whether she was criminally responsible at the time.
Massachusetts uses the standard set in Commonwealth v. McHoul (1967). A person is not criminally responsible if, because of mental disease or defect, they lacked substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of their conduct or to conform their conduct to the law. Either one is enough.
And unusually — Massachusetts is in the minority here — once the defense raises the issue credibly, the burden falls on the prosecution to prove she was criminally responsible, beyond a reasonable doubt.
July 27, 2026
Opening statements
Testimony begins in Brockton after jury selection started July 20.
August 17, 2026
Prosecution rests
The defense opens its case with Paula Musgrove, Lindsay's mother, as its first witness.
August 21, 2026
Defense rests
Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Philip Resnick testifies last, concluding she was psychotic on the day.
Expected week of August 24
Closing arguments
Judge William Sullivan indicated closings would follow rebuttal testimony, then the case goes to the jury.
The illness at the centre of it
Postpartum psychosis is rare, fast, and treatable
It is also, according to the clinicians who testified at this trial, routinely missed. Whatever the jury decides, that part is not in dispute — and it is the reason this case matters to families who have never heard of Duxbury.
1–2
per 1,000 births
More common than SIDS
2 wks
Typical onset after delivery
Can escalate within days
~98%
Respond to treatment
When it is correctly identified
0
Standalone entries in the DSM
A key reason it is under-diagnosed
It is a medical emergency
Not a severe case of the baby blues, and not postpartum depression. Postpartum psychosis involves delusions, hallucinations, and a break from reality, and it carries a real risk of suicide and infanticide if untreated. Clinicians describe it the way they describe a stroke: the response is measured in hours.
Mothers are afraid to say it out loud
Testimony in this trial returned repeatedly to a single barrier: a woman who admits to frightening thoughts about her baby fears losing that baby. That fear keeps the most dangerous symptom — the one clinicians most need to hear — unspoken.
Two parents. One row. Three and a half years.
31K people have already decided this was worth answering. $1.02M of a $2M goal.
You do not have to be in crisis to call.
If you are pregnant or postpartum and something feels wrong — frightening thoughts, no sleep, a sense that things are not real — these lines are free, confidential, and staffed around the clock.