The Lindsay Clancy Jury Gets It This Week, a Murder-for-Hire Trial With No Gun and No DNA, and Seven Years to Find Morgan Bauer

Judge William Sullivan denied a defense motion for a mistrial Monday in Lindsay Clancy's murder trial, as Kevin Reddington finished a contentious cross-examination of the Commonwealth's rebuttal psychiatrist, Dr. Avram Mack — at one point asking, "What are you smiling for? This is not funny, sir." Mack has testified Clancy suffered a major depressive episode but was not psychotic, and that she recalled telling her children "go to God" as she killed them. Reddington challenged his credentials and pressed him on the DSM's four-week postpartum window; Mack acknowledged the World Health Organization uses a different one. Prosecutors also called forensic psychologist Dr. Kirk Heilbrun. Closing arguments are now expected Wednesday, after which 18 jurors will be reduced to 12 for deliberations. Clancy has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months. Also: in Jacksonville, the state's effort to trace the gun in the Jared Bridegan murder-for-hire trial stalled when a longtime friend of defendant Mario Fernandez Saldana denied giving him the weapon. And in Newton County, Georgia, jury selection began for Katelyn Goble in the 2016 killing of 19-year-old Morgan Bauer.

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Speaker 1: Caalaroga Shark Media.

Speaker 2: Good morning.

Speaker 1: This is Daily Crime Injustice from Calaroga Shark Media powered

by AI.

Speaker 2: I'm Garrett Fisher.

Speaker 1: It's Tuesday, August twenty fifth, twenty twenty six. After twenty

two days of testimony, more than forty witnesses, and five

weeks of a Plymouth County jury sitting in a room

listening to psychiatrists disagree with each other, it is finally

almost over. Closing arguments in the Lindsay Clancy trial are

expected today and then twelve people go into a room

and decide whether a woman who killed her three children

is criminally responsible for it. In Jacksonville, the second week

of testimony opened in the trial of Mario Fernandez Saldana

for the murder for higher killing of Jared Bride again,

and the state spent Monday trying to trace a gun.

It did not entirely go their way, and in a

court house in Covington, Georgia, lawyers began picking a jury

in a case about a nineteen year old named Morgan

Bauer who vanished in twenty sixteen and whose family spent

seven years being told there was nothing to find. Let's

get into it. On the evening of January twenty fourth,

twenty twenty three, Lindsey Clancy strangled her three children with

exercise bands in the basement of their house in Duxbury, Massachusetts,

while her husband was out picking up takeout and a prescription.

Cor was five, Dawson was three, Callen was eight months old.

Clancy then cut herself, went out a second story window, survived,

and has been paralyzed from the waist down ever since.

She has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first

degree murder. Nobody in that courtroom disputes that she did it.

The only question is whether the Commonwealth can prove she

was criminally responsible. The defense rested Friday after ten witnesses.

Clancy never took the stand, and since Friday afternoon, this

trial has belonged entirely to one man, doctor Avra Mac,

the prosecution's forensic psychiatrist. Let me tell you what Mac

has actually told this jury, because it is more careful

than the headline suggests. Mac does not say Lindsey Clancy

was fine. He says she was severely mentally ill. What

he says is that what she had was a major

depressive episode, not psychosis, and that it was a continuation

of the depression she had been living in for months.

He found no evidence of the mania you would need

to support a bipolar diagnosis, and critically, he told the

jury she retained the ability to understand right from wrong

and to control her behavior. Then he gave the prosecution

the single most devastating piece of testimony in this entire trial.

Clancy told Mack what she said to her children while

she was killing them, three words go to God. And

Mac's reading of that was this, it is a way

of thinking about those children as innocents, as people who

had done nothing wrong, while what she was doing was

the opposite. It was wrong, and she knew it. I

want to be careful here because that is one psychiatrist

interpretation of three words spoken by a woman in the

worst moment of her life, and a different expert read

the same words as a mother in a dream state

trying to send her children somewhere safe. But you can

see why the Commonwealth built its closing around it. Mack

also told the jury Clancy described hearing a loud male

voice that night telling her to kill the children so

that she could then kill herself. He does not dispute

she reported that His position is that hearing it does

not settle the legal question, because, in his view, she

was still able to conform her conduct to the law.

And then came Monday, and Monday got ugly. Kevin Reddington

spent the morning on cross examination, and he went after

the framework rather than the man. His line of attack

was that Mack was working from a definition that is

too rigid. The American Diagnostic Manual defines postpartum onset as

four weeks after birth. Reddington got Mack to acknowledge that

the World Health Organization uses a different window, and that

a proposed revision to the American manual would extend it

to six weeks. Callan Clancy was eight months old, so

you can see the shape of the argument. If the

official cutoff is four weeks, then by definition, nothing that

happened to Lindsay Clancy in January of twenty twenty three

was postpartum anything. Reddington's point is that the calendar is

a bureaucratic convenience, not a biological fact, and that the

experts themselves cannot agree on where to draw the line.

Here's the part that tells you how tense that courtroom got.

According to reporters, in the room, Mack at times simply

refused to answer Reddington's questions, and Judge William Sullivan had

to intervene more than once to get the witness to respond. Look,

I'm going to be honest with you. When a paid

expert starts fighting the lawyer instead of answering the question,

Jury's notice they may not follow the argument about diagnostic windows.

They absolutely notice a man on a witness stand who

does not want to say a word out loud. Whether

that helps Reddington or just makes everyone tired. By day

twenty two, I do not know, but it happened, and

it happened in front of the people who decide this.

Prosecutors are calling three medical experts in rebuttal in total.

Mack was the first. The rest were expected to be short.

So let me tell you what you're going to hear today.

Because both closings are already visible in the record. The

Commonwealth is going to argue planning. Their whole case has

been that Lindsey Clancy engineered the window. She was the

one who asked her husband to go pick up medicine

for Cora and food from a restaurant. That is what

created the twenty five minutes she was alone in the

house with those children. Jennifer Sprague will walk that jury

through the phone data, the searches, the Apple watch logging

her moving through the house, and she will argue that

a woman who can order takeout and time an errand

is a woman executing a plan. Matt gave her the

closing line, and she will use it. Go to God.

Reddington is going to argue that the entire frame is wrong.

His case has never been that Lindsey Clancy was confused.

It is that she was failed methodically by people whose

job it was to catch this. She reported anxiety, insomnia,

intrusive thoughts about harming her children. She was prescribed and

re prescribed, and had her medications changed. Her husband went

to a doctor the week before and said his wife

was being turned into a zombie. Reddington's version is that

a system watched a woman deteriorate in real time, kept

adjusting the dosage, and then acted shocked. And both of

those things can be true at once, Which is the

actual problem this jury has, which brings us to today

and to the question this jury actually has to answer,

Because almost every version of this story you will gets

it slightly wrong. The question is not whether Lindsey Clancy

was mentally ill. Everybody agrees she was. Both sides every

expert that is not in dispute, and it never was.

Massachusetts uses a two part standard, and the defense only

has to get there on one of them. Either Clancy

was unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of what she was doing,

or she was unable to conform her conduct to the

requirements of the law, unable to know it was wrong,

or unable to stop herself one or the other, and

the burden is on the commonwealth. Once criminal responsibility is

genuinely in play, it is the prosecution that has to

prove she was responsible, not the defense that has to

prove she was not. If the jury finds her guilty

of first degree murder, it is life in prison with

no possibility of parole. If they find her not criminally responsible,

she goes to a state psychiatric facility and she does

not simply walk out. That is a commitment with its

own review process that can last the rest of her life,

and there is still the open question of what else

goes on that verdict. Slip Reddington has been pushing for

an involuntary manslaughter option built on involuntary intoxication. The argument

that Clancy was over prescribed and that abruptly changing her

medications altered her mind in a way she did not choose.

Prosecutors have fought it. If Sullivan allows it, this jury

gets a middle option. If he does not, they are

choosing between prison and a hospital with nothing in between.

One more thing worth noting, and then I want to

close this segment properly. Rusty Yates, who was married to

Andrea Yates when she drowned their five children in two

thousand and one, has spoken publicly in recent days about

Patrick Clancy, and his message was that the blame being

aimed at Patrick is baseless. He would know he spent

years being told he should have seen it coming. And

that is worth sitting with, because there is a version

of this conversation happening online right now that has decided

Patrick Clancy is the villain here. He went to a

doctor of the week before and said his wife was

being turned into a zombie.

Speaker 2: He came home from a.

Speaker 1: Twenty five minute errand to find his entire family destroyed.

Whatever the failures were in that house, and there were failures,

that man is not the person who has to answer

for them. Coret Clancy was five and in kindergarten. Dawson

Clancy was three. Calan Clancy was eight months old. Their

mother killed them in their own basement, and today twelve

strangers start deciding what the law says about that. However,

this comes back. They were real children who liked real

things and had names. Someone has to say them when

we come back. A man who has known Mario Fernandez

Saldona for years took the stand in Jacksonville and told

the jury he did not give him a gun. We

covered this case back in July when it was still

a fight over subpoenas and phone records. It is a

trial now and it is one of the most consequential

murder cases in the country this year. On the night

of February sixteenth, twenty twenty two, Jared Bride again dropped

his nine year old twins at their mother's house in

Jacksonville Beach after a dinner out and started driving home

to Saint John's County. His two year old daughter, Bexley,

was in the back seat. On a dark one way

street called Sanctuary Boulevard, there was a tire lying in

the road. Bride again stopped and got out to move it.

He was shot multiple times and killed. One round passed

through the vehicle near where his daughter was strapped into

her car seat.

Speaker 2: She was not hit.

Speaker 1: She was two years old, and she was there for

all of it. Jared bride Again was thirty three. He

was a design manager at Microsoft, a father of four, and,

by every account of the investigation, a man with no enemies.

Police looked for a robbery motive, and there was not one.

His wallet and his watch were untouched. Prosecutors say the

tire was placed there deliberately to make him stop, and

they say the reason was a custody fight. Bridgin and

Shanna Gardner divorced in twenty fifteen after five years of marriage.

They shared twins and reached a joint custody agreement, and

then spent years fighting in family court about custody, about

child support, about which schools the kids would attend. Prosecutors

have put that grinding conflict at the center of the case.

Assistant State Attorney Christina Steifler told the jury that Gardner

wanted full custody and that the only people who stood

to gain anything from Jared Bridegan's death were his ex

wife and her husband. Steifler also told the jury about money.

Gardner came from a wealthy family, and her parents had

set up a trust with Fernandez Saldana as the trustee.

The state's account is that this was a marriage of

convenience from the start, that Fernandez Saldona married her to

help her with her bridegin problem, and that after the killing,

he moved fifty thousand dollars out of that trust into

his own account and sold off what they had acquired together.

Gardner left Florida, he moved to Orlando. The defense pushed

straight back on that. James Hill told jurors his client

had access to hundreds of thousands of dollars and an

army background, and that if he were a man running

from a murder he had orchestrated, he would have left

the country. Instead, he took a road trip to Pennsylvania

and came back. Mario Fernande Saldana is thirty eight, an

army veteran and the estranged husband of Bridegan's ex wife,

Shanna Gardner. He is charged with first degree murder and

solicitation to commit a capital felony. He has pleaded not guilty,

and he is presumed innocent. Two other people are charged.

Shanna Gardner has pleaded not guilty to first degree murder

and related charges. Jury selection in her trial begins August

thirty first, one week from two. And Henry Tennen, the

man the state says pulled the trigger, is also charged

and has a trial set for March of twenty twenty seven. Now,

the ten In piece is delicate, and I want to

handle it the same way we did in July. Tenan

originally pleaded guilty to second degree murder in twenty twenty

three under a deal that required him to testify against

the other two. Then he backed out. He told the

court his statements under that agreement were false. A judge

let him withdraw the plea, and he is now going

to trial. So the man the state calls the shooter

is a person who admitted it and then took it back.

That does not make him innocent and it does not

make him guilty. What it means is that his word

is not doing any work in this trial, and prosecutors

are not asking it to. So what is the state's

case without him? It is three checks. Prosecutors say Fernandez

Saldana paid ten and roughly ten thousand dollars after the murder.

The checks were written for landscaping, roof repair, and an investment.

Speaker 2: A business idea.

Speaker 1: One of them, written weeks after the killing, carries a

note in the memo line kickstarter and then good luck

around those checks. The state has built a circumstantial structure.

Tenon was a tenant in a property Fernandez Saldana owned.

Investigators found a tire at that same rental property that

matched the tire in the road, same manufacture date, same plant,

same identifying numbers. Tennant's DNA was on the tire at

the scene. Phone records showed dozens of contacts between the

two men, and GPS data shows Tenen driving Bridegins exact

route twice in the weeks before, which prosecutors have called

a practice run. An attorney not involved in the case

put it plainly last week, and I think he is right.

This entire trial hinges on what the jury decides those

checks were for, because the defense has a real answer

and it is not a stupid one. James Hill told

the jury that Henry Tennan was a workhorse, that there

is video of him tilling a front yard, cutting down trees,

unloading tile from his truck, at that property. His argument

is that Fernanda Saldana hired that man to do work,

not murder, tree work, roofwork, landscaping, tile, and Hill has

been hammering something the state cannot fix. There is no

forensic evidence putting his client anywhere near this. Fernando Saldana's

DNA was not on a single item submitted for testing.

The lead detective acknowledged there is no surveillance, no fingerprints,

no hair placing him in Tennant's truck or at Jacksonville

Beach that night. Hill also pointed out that a man

supposedly paid to commit a homicide apparently could not afford

to fix his own truck afterward.

Speaker 2: That is the case.

Speaker 1: Money that the state says is a murder payment and

the defense says is a paycheck, which brings us to

Monday and the gun. There has never been a murder

weapon recovered in this case, so the state has been

trying to establish where a gun came from, and that

effort ran into a wall Monday, when a longtime friend

of Fernande Saldana took the stand and denied giving him

the firearm investigators believe was used to kill Jared Bride. Again,

I want to be precise about what that does and

does not mean. It does not mean the state's theory

is wrong. Witnesses deny things for all kinds of reasons,

and the jury gets to weigh that. But the state

needed that link and did not get it on the

record Monday. And in a case with no murder weapon,

no defendant, DNA, and no eyewitness, every failed link matters

more than it would in an ordinary trial. There's a

playbook for this, and prosecutors are running it. When you

cannot put the defendant at the scene, you put his

money there instead. Sometimes that works. Jury's convict on paper

trails all the time. But it asked twelve people to

take a longer walk than a fingerprint does, and the

defense only has to make them stumble once. Jared Bride

Again was thirty three years old. He was a devout

member of his church. He had four children, and the

youngest one watched him die on a dark street over

what prosecutors say was a fight about custody. His widow, Kirsten,

has sat in that courtroom through all of it, including

the moment they played the video of an evidence technician

walking up to the scene in the dark. Four years

and six months. That is how long it took to

get a first trial. Someone has to say his name

when we come back. Morganbauer was nineteen years old when

she disappeared in twenty sixteen, and it took seven years

to find her. This is a new case for us,

so let me start at the beginning. Morgan Bauer was

nineteen years old. She was from Aberdeen, South Dakota, and

she had recently moved to the Atlanta air In February

of twenty.

Speaker 2: Sixteen, she disappeared.

Speaker 1: The last confirmed sightings put her at a gas station

on Highway two seventy eight in Covington, Georgia, and a

social media post from Yellow River Park in Porterdale, and

then nothing. The two people last seen with her, her

friend Caitlin Goebel, and Goebel's then boyfriend Jonathan Warren, told

investigators and told Morgan's mother directly, that they had dropped

her off at a gas station and that was the

last they saw her. That story held for seven years,

seven years of a mother in South Dakota not knowing

seven years of a missing person's case that friends were

openly afraid would turn into a homicide investigation. Seven years

of Morgenbauer being officially a girl who walked away from

a gas station. In July of twenty twenty three, the

FBI helped Porterdale police search a property on Broad Street

near the Yellow River. They found remains they were Morgan's.

A month later, Warren was arrested in Los Angeles and

Goebel was arrested in Peoria, Illinois. In October of twenty

twenty three, a Newton County grand jury indicted them both.

The indictment alleges Morgan was strangled and that both of

them put their hands on her neck. It further alleges

that afterward they cut up and burned her remains to

hide what had happened. In January of twenty twenty four,

Jonathan Warren pleaded guilty at his arraignment, not to a

lesser charge to all of it, including malice, murder, and

an additional count involving the abuse of Morgan's body after

she was dead. Prosecutors say he asked for the death penalty.

At sentencing, he asked for life with the possibility of parole.

The judge gave him life without so One of the

two people in that house is convicted sentenced and finished.

The other is on trial starting now. Caitlin Goebel is thirty.

She is charged with malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault,

tampering with evidence, and concealing the death of another. She

has not been convicted of anything, and she has presumed innocent.

Jury selection began Monday in Newton County before Judge Joe Bishop.

And here is the strange thing about how this case

broke open, because it did not break the way you

would expect. Prosecutors say, Caitlin Goebel is the one who

went to investigators in twenty twenty three and told them

she had information about a murder. They say she did

not initially implicate herself and instead pointed at Warren as

the person solely responsible. Investigators concluded otherwise. The state's position

is that she was just as culpable as he was,

and in interviews with police, prosecutors say Goebel eventually acknowledged

being present when Morgan was killed and helping cut up

her body afterward, putting the remains in a suitcase and

setting it on fire in a backyard. Her defense has

said she was under Warren's control, but her attorney told

the court on Friday that she will not be pursuing

a battered person syndrome defense and will not be pursuing

an insanity defense. So whatever the argument is going to

be at this trial, it is not going to be

that she was legally incapable of choosing.

Speaker 2: The fight that got this.

Speaker 1: Case into the headlines is about what the jury is

allowed to hear. The state moved to introduce Goebel's social

media activity from around the time of the killing, material

about satanism, about serial killers, about death. Prosecutors say it

establishes motive. The defense argued it is inflammatory, that its

prejudicial effect swamps whatever it proves, and that a jury

shown that material will convict on vibes rather than evidence.

The judge sided with the state that evidence is coming

in and the post prosecutors have highlighted made the Knight

Morgan died reads this is Bob. Bob kills people. I

have thoughts about this, and I am going to give

them to you straight. Occult evidence in a murder trial

makes me nervous, and it should make you nervous. Two,

this country has a genuinely embarrassing track record here. We

ran a moral panic in the eighties and nineties that

put people in prison over dungeons and dragons and heavy

metal albums, and some of those convictions have since fallen apart,

being a weird twenty year old who posts about the

Satanic Bible is not evidence of murder. It is evidence

of being a weird twenty year old. But that is

not quite what this is, and I want to be

fair about the distinction. A post made the same night

a person died. Referring to a named object as something

that kills people is not a general statement about someone's taste.

It is a specific thing said at a specific moment.

Whether it means what the state says it means is

exactly what a jury is for. The judge also went

the other way on some of it. He granted the

defense's request to strip out references to Goebel's drug use

from her police interviews, and both sides agreed to redact

material about Warren's past. So this is not a judge

letting the state throw everything at the wall. The other

thing to watch is that Jonathan Warren is expected to testify.

The man already serving life without parole is going to

take the stand against the woman he was living with

and you should hear that with both eyes open. A

convicted murderer with nothing left to lose is not automatically

a liar, but he is not automatically anything else either.

Morgan Bauer was nineteen years old. She had moved across

the country to a place where she did not know

many people. When she disappeared. The two people who saw

her last told everyone, including her mother, that she had

been dropped off at a gas station and was fine.

She was in the ground the whole time. Nobody was

paying attention to her. A nineteen year old woman new

in town vanishes, and it takes seven years and a

federal search team to find out what happened in a

house on Broad Street. Her mother spent those seven years

pushing her friend spent those seven years afraid of exactly

what turned out to be true. Morgan Bauer. Someone has

to say her name, and for seven years, almost nobody did.

That's the show for Tuesday, August twenty fifth. If this

was useful, send it to one person. Word of mouth

is genuinely the whole engine on a show like this.

And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment. I

want to know what you think. That Plymouth jury does

with Lindsay Clancy because the lawyers I trust are split

down the middle, and so am I. We'll be back

tomorrow with Las Vegas, where the Tupac Shakur murder trial

has now had two more days of testimony, and with

whatever Plymouth County decides. I'm Garrett Fisher do better. A

few notes on sourcing and timing. This episode was recorded

before court opened Tuesday morning. Closing arguments in the Lindsay

Clancy trial were expected Tuesday, but Judge Sullivan had indicated

the schedule could shift depending on how long the remaining

rebuttal witnesses take, and he had offered the attorney's additional

time to prepare closings if they needed it. He also

had not ruled, as of recording on whether involuntary manslaughter

will be included as a verdict option. Nothing in this

episode should be taken as a report on what actually

happened in that courtroom today. Our account of Monday's cross examination,

including the description of the witness declining to answer questions

and the judge intervening, comes from reporters present in the courtroom,

rather than from a transcript we have reviewed on the

Jacksonville trial. Mario Fernandez Saldana has pleaded not guilty and

is presumed innocent, as our Shanna Gardner and Henry Tennan,

who face separate trials.

Speaker 2: Henry Tennan entered.

Speaker 1: A guilty plea in twenty twenty three and later withdrew it,

telling the court his statements under that agreement were false.

Because that plea was withdrawn, we do not treat anything

he said under it as established fact, and we have

not used it as evidence against anyone. Reporting on the

specific charges filed against Fernandez Saldana has varied between outlets,

with some listing first degree murder and solicitation and others

listing a different combination, including conspiracy and second degree murder.

We have used the charges as described in the trial

coverage on the Georgia case. Caitlin Goebel has been indicted

and has not been convicted of anything. She is presumed innocent,

and the account of what she told investigators comes from prosecutors,

not from a finding by any jury. Jonathan Warren's guilty

plea and life sentence are a matter of record.

Speaker 2: We describe the.

Speaker 1: Additional offense he pleaded guilty to in general terms rather

than naming.

Speaker 2: It out of respect for morgen Bauer's family.

Speaker 1: Warren is expected to testify for the state, and listeners

should weigh testimony from a convicted code defendant accordingly. This

episode discusses child deaths, suicide, and postpart of mental illness.

If you are struggling, you can call her Tax nine

to eight eight in the United States to reach the

suicide and crisis lifeline for postpart of mental health. Specifically,

the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is available by caller

tax at one eight three three TLC M A m A.

Postpartum psychosis is rare. It is a medical emergency, and

it is treatable when it is caught. The overwhelming majority

of people who experience postpartum mental illness never harm anyone.