The Lindsay Clancy GoFundMe created for her parents has passed $1 million, reaching $1,007,515 of a $2 million goal as her murder trial continues in Massachusetts.
The campaign is called The Musgrove Family Fund, and it was started on August 14 by a woman named Brandee Mulligan. The named beneficiaries and direct recipients are Mike and Paula Musgrove, Clancy’s parents. According to the page, it was created with their knowledge and consent, Clancy’s attorney Kevin Reddington was made aware of it, and the Musgroves control the money and decide how it gets used.
It is not a legal defense fund, and it could not be one. GoFundMe does not permit campaigns earmarked for criminal legal fees, which the organizer has explained publicly. The stated purpose is covering what the couple has spent over three years of showing up: travel, lodging, living expenses and other costs tied to being present for their daughter.
The Musgroves left their home in Connecticut and relocated to Massachusetts to be near Lindsay, and they have attended her court proceedings throughout. Paula is retired. Mike is a photographer. The page says they have been drawing down savings they spent a lifetime building, and that whatever the verdict is, they will still have to rebuild lives they put on hold.
The fundraiser is also unusually direct about what it is not asking for. It says nothing about the fund asks anyone to “share their view of Lindsay or the criminal case.” The pitch is narrower than that: recognize what two parents have spent simply by continuing to be in the room.
Two details on the page itself are worth noticing. GoFundMe has designated the campaign a Monthly cause, which means the platform is actively promoting it rather than it spreading purely through donors. And the cover illustration is not a picture of Mike and Paula. It is a drawing of a woman in a wheelchair with her face in her hands, surrounded by a ring of women holding hands. The fund is for the parents. The artwork is about their daughter.
Clancy’s trial is in its fourth week in Plymouth. She faces three counts of first degree murder in the January 2023 deaths of her children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months old. She survived a suicide attempt the same night and is paralyzed from the waist down. If convicted, she faces life without the possibility of parole.
What the jury is deciding is not really whether she caused their deaths. It is whether she was criminally responsible. Her defense argues she was suffering from postpartum psychosis. Prosecutors argue the killings were planned and intentional. Her mother testified that in December 2022 Lindsay told her and her then husband, Patrick Clancy, that she was becoming psychotic and having thoughts of harming the children. Other witnesses have testified that she frequently skipped medication prescribed for anxiety, depression and insomnia, and her own doctors testified that they never observed signs of psychosis or mania.
There is one more piece of context that makes the money harder to sort out. In 2023, a separate GoFundMe raised $1 million for Patrick Clancy, the children’s father. Donations came from more than 15,000 people, including a group at Massachusetts General Hospital where Lindsay had worked as a nurse. In a post on that page, Patrick asked people to forgive his wife, as he had.
So the same public has now put a million dollars behind the father who lost all three children and a million dollars behind the parents of the woman on trial for their deaths. Both funds were built on the idea that somebody was carrying something they should not have to carry alone. People simply disagree, sharply, about where that logic should stop.
