Two Juries in One Afternoon: Lindsay Clancy Goes to Deliberations, the Bridegan Verdict Is Next, and a Hot Mic in the Tupac Trial
Closing arguments are expected today in Lindsay Clancy's murder trial, after Judge William Sullivan denied a defense motion for a mistrial. Prosecution expert Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, testifying that Clancy told each child "go to God" as she killed them, described her Catholic upbringing and began asking whether suicide is a mortal sin before defense attorney Kevin Reddington objected — the second time the phrase has surfaced in the trial. Reddington called it "intentional misconduct." Sullivan refused the mistrial but told jurors the defendant's religion was "absolutely an inappropriate area of testimony… It is to be stricken." Heilbrun testified Clancy retained awareness that killing was illegal, and that she reported the voice only during the killings — never before or after. Clancy has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months. Eighteen jurors will be narrowed to twelve for deliberations. Also: both sides have rested in Jacksonville in the Mario Fernandez Saldana murder-for-hire trial over the killing of Jared Bridegan; the defense called two witnesses and Fernandez Saldana did not testify. And in Las Vegas, jurors in the Duane Davis trial heard a recording made through a live studio microphone.
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Speaker 1: Good morning.
Speaker 2: This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Shark Media,
powered by AI.
Speaker 1: I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Wednesday, August 26, 2026. Two juries.
One day.
Speaker 2: In Plymouth, Massachusetts, after five weeks of testimony and more
than 40 witnesses, closing arguments in the Lindsay Clancy triple
murder trial are expected today. And then 12 people, chosen
at random out of the 18 who have been sitting
there since July, walk into a room to decide whether
a woman who killed her three children can be held
responsible for it. In Jacksonville, Florida, both sides have rested
in the trial of Mario Fernandez Saldana for the ambush
killing of Jared Breidgen. The defense called two witnesses and
took half a day. Fernandez Saldana did not take the stand.
The prosecution closed yesterday afternoon, the defense closes this morning,
and that jury is expected to begin deliberating this afternoon.
And in Las Vegas, a man who works in true
crime television told a jury he recorded Dwayne Davis through
a live microphone from an office down the hall, and
kept recording during the breaks. Davis apparently knew enough to
say the words hot mic out loud. He kept talking anyway.
Let's get into it. On the evening of January 24th, 2023,
Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children with exercise bands in
the basement of their house in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Cora was five.
Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. Clancy then
attempted to take her own life, went out a second-story window,
and has been paralyzed ever since. She has pleaded not
guilty to three counts of first-degree murder. She does not
deny doing it. The only question is criminal responsibility. The
prosecution has now put three experts in front of this jury,
and they have each taken a different angle on the
same target. We covered Dr. Avram Mack yesterday. He was
the psychiatrist who said what she had was a major
depressive episode, not psychosis, and that she knew right from wrong.
Speaker 1: And I want to correct the record.
Speaker 2: On something, because Monday's cross was rougher on him than
I gave you. Kevin Reddington went at Mack's credentials directly
and got him to acknowledge that this was only about
the third time in his entire career that he had
testified in court on the question of criminal responsibility.
Speaker 1: Third time.
Speaker 2: Reddington also confronted him with prior cases in which he
said courts had questioned Mack's qualifications, which Mack largely said
he did not recall or disputed outright. Then Reddington went
after the framework. Mack's position is that in the United States,
clinicians use the diagnostic manual, and that manual defines postpartum
onset as four weeks after birth. Callan Clancy was eight
months old, so Reddington pushed and got Mack to concede
that the World Health Organization uses a different window, and
a proposed revision to the American manual would extend it
to six weeks. And then Reddington said the line that
I suspect ends up in the closing argument. Postpartum is
not a disease doctor. That is the whole defense theory
of the prosecution's case in six words. The state is
treating a calendar as biology. Reddington's position is that postpartum
depression and psychosis can develop a year out or longer,
and that a number in a manual is a billing convenience,
not a fact about a human brain. The second expert
was a forensic psychologist named Dr. Kirk Heilbrunn, and he
is the one who did the most damage. Heilbrunn interviewed
Clancy for about 10 hours across three days in April,
alongside Mack. He has testified in roughly 330 cases, and
he told the jury flatly that, in his opinion, Lindsay
Clancy was criminally responsible. He said she retained an awareness
of the illegality of killing others, including her own children.
Speaker 1: Then he went at the voice.
Speaker 2: Heilbrunn told the jury that Clancy's account of hearing a
male voice was inconsistent over time, and that what she
described was more consistent with an unwelcome intrusive thought, which
she had been having for months, than with a command hallucination.
And he gave the jury a specific, and it is
a hard one. After the suicide attempt, the first thing
Lindsay Clancy said to her husband was that she had
tried to kill herself. Heilbrunn's point was that if a
voice had genuinely commanded her, You might expect her to
say something like, I did what I had to do,
or I did what the voice said. She did not
say that. And then he used the word that is
going to follow this case around. He testified that on
about three points, her account more closely resembled exaggerated or
fabricated hallucinations.
Speaker 1: One looked more genuine. One was mixed.
Speaker 2: Now, I want to give you the other half of
Heilbrunn's testimony, because the coverage is not doing it and
it matters. The same witness told that jury that Lindsay
Clancy is still grieving, that she is still in mourning
for those children. He said she used language like, I
have lost everything and I don't want to be here.
And he said explicitly that he would not think of
her as somebody who is self-centered or oriented only to herself.
That is the prosecution's own expert. A man being paid
by the Commonwealth to say she is criminally responsible went
out of his way to tell 12 people she is
not a monster. I have watched a lot of expert
testimony and that is not nothing. And then Monday afternoon
fell apart. Heilbrun, explaining how he assessed whether Clancy understood
moral wrongfulness, started talking about her Catholic upbringing. He described
her saying her children had gone to God and offered
that as he understood Catholic teaching. That is not necessarily
what happens. Then he said he had asked Clancy whether
suicide was a mortal sin. Reddington moved for a mistrial.
He called it intentional misconduct by the Commonwealth. And his
anger was not coming from nowhere, because this was the
second time. Last week, prosecutors cross-examining Clancy's former mother-in-law, Susan Clancy,
asked whether she was aware the church considers murder a
mortal sin. The judge struck that one, too. Judge William
Sullivan denied the mistrial. But listen to how he denied it.
He called the testimony problematic. He asked out loud how
any of it was proper at this point. And when
he brought the jury back in, he told them the
religion the defendant was raised with was absolutely an inappropriate
area of testimony.
Speaker 1: Stricken.
Speaker 2: Not to be considered. He said he could not be
any clearer than that. Reporters in the room noted several
jurors nodding while he said it. Then he sent them
home early and called the lawyers back for a sidebar. Look,
I'm going to be honest with you about what I
think happened there. A witness who has testified 330 times
knows what he is allowed to say. Reddington used the
words intentional misconduct, and a judge does not call testimony
problematic and demand to know how it was proper if
he thinks it was an innocent slip. Sullivan also told
prosecutors to strongly instruct their own witness not to go
near it again.
Speaker 1: And here is.
Speaker 2: Why it is dangerous and why Reddington fought that hard.
You cannot ask a jury to weigh whether a woman
knew killing was morally wrong and then hand them her
church's doctrine on sin. That stops being psychiatry and becomes
a sermon. Twelve people who may have their own feelings
about mortal sin do not need help importing them into
a verdict. Whether an instruction fixes it is the oldest
unanswerable question in criminal law. Reddington told reporters he has
no doubt the jury will overlook it, which is the
only thing a lawyer can say out loud. It is
also now preserved in the record for appeal. Tuesday, prosecutors
put on their third and final rebuttal witness, Dr. Gregory Sathoff,
a forensic psychiatrist and professor of emergency medicine who has
worked with the FBI. And with that, the evidence in
this case is done. So step back and look at
what this jury actually has. On one side, a psychiatrist
who testified for the defense in both Andrea Yates' trials
who told them Clancy was in a dream state, a
puppet with someone else pulling the strings. On the other,
three prosecution experts saying depression, not psychosis, and that she knew.
Two of them interviewed her in the same room in
April and came out with the same answer. Somebody is
going to tell you that means the experts cancel each
other out. I do not think that is right, and
here is why. This jury is not being asked to
pick a diagnosis. They are being asked whether the Commonwealth
carried a burden, and when a case comes down to
competing experts, that burden gets harder, not easier.
Speaker 1: So today, both sides argue.
Speaker 2: Then Sullivan instructs the jury, the 18 get narrowed to
12 at random, and it goes to a room. The
standard is two-pronged and the defense only needs one. Either
Lindsay Clancy could not appreciate the wrongfulness of what she
was doing, or she could not conform her conduct to
the requirements of the law. could not know, or could
not stop. And the burden sits with the Commonwealth. Guilty
of first-degree murder means life with no parole. Not criminally
responsible means a state psychiatric facility under a commitment that
can last the rest of her life. Cora Clancy was
five years old. Dawson Clancy was three. Callan Clancy was
eight months old. They have been dead for three and
a half years while adults argued about diagnostic manuals. Everyone
in America knows their mother's name. Someone has to say theirs.
When we come back, both sides have rested in Jacksonville.
Mario Fernandez Saldana never took the stand, and a second
jury gets a murder case today. On the night of
February 16th, 2022, Jared Bridegan dropped his twins, Abby and Liam,
at their mother's house in Jacksonville Beach and started driving
home with his two-year-old daughter, Bexley, in the backseat. On
a dark one-way street, he found a tire lying in
the road, stopped, and got out to move it. He
was shot and killed. Bexley was strapped in her car
seat a few feet away. Jared Bridegan was 33, a
design manager at Microsoft, a father of four. Mario Fernandez
Saldana is the estranged husband of Breitigan's ex-wife. He is
charged with first-degree murder and solicitation to commit a capital felony.
He has pleaded not guilty and he is presumed innocent.
And one thing I should have told you yesterday. Back
in July, two of the charges he originally faced, child
abuse and conspiracy to commit murder, were dropped. He is
going to the jury on two counts, not four. The
state rested Monday. and they closed on money and a gun.
The financial testimony walked jurors through the three checks, roughly $ 10, 000
paid to Henry Tennant after the murder, one of them
carrying a memo line reading.
Speaker 1: Kickstarter, good luck.
Speaker 2: The state's theory is that this is what a murder
payment looks like when a man tries to make it
look like a business expense. Then they called the person
investigators believe supplied the weapon, and he denied it. That
is how the prosecution ended its case. because the murder
weapon in this case has never been found. Not in 2022,
not in the four and a half years since. The
state has implied Fernandez Saldana could have obtained the Glock,
and the man they think handed it over got on
a witness stand and said no. Then Tuesday morning, the
defense put on its entire case in about half a day.
Speaker 1: Two witnesses, both of them schoolteachers.
Speaker 2: Jesse Dreiser called a teacher and the head of school
from the private school in Jacksonville Beach that the twins attended.
Speaker 1: And what they said was this, that Shauna Gardner.
Speaker 2: And Mario Fernandez-Saldana were involved, friendly parents, that Fernandez-Saldana came
to events and picked the kids up, that everybody at
the school knew the couple was separating in 2022, and
that he was supposed to move out over spring break,
a plan that got delayed when Jared Breidigan was killed,
and that after the murder, he stopped being involved with
those children entirely. That is the defense case. Two teachers
describing a normal dad at pickup. And I want to
give that it's due because it is not nothing. The
state's story requires you to believe that a man was
orchestrating an ambush killing during the same months he was
showing up at school events and carrying kids to the car.
Juries do think about that. The teachers also confirmed something
that cuts the state's motive theory a little.
Speaker 1: Everyone knew that marriage was ending.
Speaker 2: In 2022 and he was already scheduled to move out.
If you're about to walk away from the marriage, the
argument goes, why murder your wife's ex-husband over her custody fight?
The state's answer is the trust fund. Prosecutors have told
this jury that Fernandez Saldana was the trustee on money
that came from Gardner's family, and that after Breitigan was killed,
he moved $ 50, 000 of it into his own account and
sold off what they had acquired together. Their version is
that he was not walking away empty-handed. He was cashing out.
And then Mario Fernandez Saldana did not testify. I want
to be very careful here because this is where people
get it wrong every single time. A defendant has an
absolute right not to testify. The jury will be instructed
they cannot hold it against him. And it is very
often the correct call. Putting your client on the stand
in a circumstantial case hands the prosecution a chance to
cross-examine the only person who can explain the checks. Most
defense lawyers would tell you not to do it. It
is not evidence of anything, and I am not going
to treat it like it is. But it does tell
you what the defense believes. They are not trying to
win by explaining. They are trying to win by pointing
at the hole in the middle.
Speaker 1: Of the state's case. And there is a hole.
Speaker 2: No murder weapon, no DNA belonging to Fernandez Saldana on
anything tested. No surveillance, no fingerprints, no hair putting him
in Tennant's truck or in Jacksonville Beach that night. The
lead detective conceded all of it on the stand. So
the prosecution closed yesterday afternoon on the only argument available
to them, and it is actually a coherent one. Their
pitch is totality. Take all of it together. Fernandez-Saldana is
the single connecting line between the alleged gunman and the victim.
Speaker 1: Tenon was his tenant.
Speaker 2: The tire matching the one in the road was found
at his rental property. The phone contacts, the practice run
down Breitigan's route, and then $ 10, 000 moving from him to
Tenon in the weeks after. And the prosecutor made an
argument that is going to matter a great deal in
that deliberation room. He told the jury they do not
need to hear the ask. Nobody has to produce a
recording of Mario Fernandez Saldana asking Henry Tenon to kill anyone,
because the killing itself is proof the ask happened. That
is a real legal argument, and it is also a
big swing. It asks 12 people to reason backward from
a dead man to a conversation nobody heard. An attorney
not involved in the case put it about as plainly
as anyone has. When it is all said and done,
what does the jury believe about those checks? Were they
written to commit a murder, or were they written for
tree work, roof work, and tile? Everything else in this
trial is arrangement around that one question. The defense closes
this morning. Judge London Kite instructs the jury, and that
case goes into a room this afternoon. One more thing,
and it is why this trial matters beyond itself. Shanna
Gardner has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent, and
jury selection in her trial begins Monday, August 31st. Whatever
this jury does today lands directly on top of that.
Jared Breidegen was 33 years old. He had four children.
The youngest one was two, and she was in the car.
His widow, Kirsten, has sat in that courtroom every day,
including the day they played video of an evidence technician
walking up to the scene in the dark. Four and
a half years to get one jury. Someone has to
say his name. When we come back, a hot microphone
in a recording studio and a judge who ruled that
what it caught was fair game. As we told you Monday,
we are running Las Vegas one day behind. Court Out
West runs on Pacific time and is often still in
session when we record. So what follows is where the
Dwayne Davis trial stood as of Monday.
Speaker 1: Quick reset.
Speaker 2: Tupac Shakur was shot on September 7th, 1996 at an
intersection off the Las Vegas Strip and died six days
later at 25. Dwayne Davis, known as Kefi D, is
63 and the only person ever charged. He has pleaded
not guilty. His defense is not that somebody else said
these things. It is that he said them and they
were fiction invented across two decades to sell books and
get on television. Which brings us to Monday and a
man named Michael Dorsey. Dorsey has worked in true crime
television for about 20 years. He got into the Tupac
and Biggie cases around 2012, helped make a documentary called
Murder Rap, and later worked as a contractor on a
BET docuseries about death row records. In July of 2017,
Davis sat down to be interviewed for that series. Dorsey
was not in the room. He was in an office
down the hall, listening to the live studio feed through headphones.
And he put his phone next to the speaker and
recorded the entire thing. Not the interview. The entire thing.
Including the breaks. Including conversations involving Davis and his own attorney.
Dorsey's explanation was that Davis had shown up unprepared the
first day. that he knew there would need to be
a second session, and that he wanted the material so
the production team could write better follow-up questions. He also
said he did not think he needed separate permission because
it was part of his job. And here is the
detail that made me sit up. Dorsey testified that at
one point during that session, Davis warned the room, this.
Speaker 1: Is a hot mic.
Speaker 2: He knew. He knew there was a live microphone in
that room. He said so out loud. And then he
kept talking for hours. The defense fought hard to keep
that recording out, and the fight was about attorney-client privilege,
because Davis' lawyer at the time was in that studio.
Judge Carly Kearney ruled against them. Her reasoning was that
there were third parties present, maybe half a dozen people,
that this was a recording studio, that there were microphones
in the room, and that Davis had signed a release.
Privilege protects a confidential conversation. Kearney's point is that nothing
about that room was confidential. So the jury heard about
40 minutes of it. In the recording, Davis talks about
Sean Combs. Interviewers push him repeatedly to say plainly that
money was offered, and Davis says at one point that
he guesses Combs wanted the big guy taken care of.
And I need to say clearly, as we have every
time this comes up, Sean Combs has denied any involvement
in Tupac Shakur's death, has never been charged in connection
with it, and has never been named a suspect. This
is a recording of a man's claim, not a finding.
Davis also said he never actually got any money, that
things were too hot afterward. He talked about his nephew,
Orlando Anderson, and called him his best friend.
Speaker 1: His everything.
Speaker 2: And that word matters, because the state's entire theory of
motive is that when Anderson got beaten at the MGM
Grand that night, Davis could not let it stand. Davis
described that part himself in the recording. He said that
after the beating, the group went to Club 662, looking
for the people responsible, waited around an hour, and nobody showed.
He also said he had known Suge Knight since he
was nine years old, and that he had helped him
get his record business going, which is why he wanted
to talk to him. Asked why he ever agreed to
tell his story to police in the first place, Davis'
answer was essentially that he did it to save his life.
He was looking at serious prison exposure on unrelated drug charges,
and cooperating was the way out. He also denied any
involvement in the killing of Christopher Wallace, Biggie Smalls, and
called Biggie a friend. The court has told this jury
directly that neither the Los Angeles police nor the court
has any indication Davis was involved in that murder, and
both sides agreed to a limiting instruction on it. And
then something genuinely strange happened. Interviewers pointed out that Anderson
was dead and could not face consequences, and asked directly
whether Anderson went after Tupac that night. And Davis said no.
He said no, he didn't. No, he didn't go after Tupac.
Which is the opposite of what he told Los Angeles
detectives in 2008, when he said Anderson was the one
who rolled down the window and fired. That contradiction is
either the state's problem or the defense's gift, depending on
how you look at it. Michael Sanft's whole case is
that Davis is a man who says whatever the moment
calls for. Tell it to detectives one.
Speaker 1: Way when you need a deal.
Speaker 2: Tell it another way on camera when a documentary is
paying you. Put a third version in a book. Samft
has told this jury that talk is not corroboration. And
the more versions the state plays, the more he gets
to make that point for free. And Samft spent the
afternoon proving it, though not about Davis, about Dorsey. He
established that Dorsey is not a detective. that he never
interviewed the Las Vegas police detectives actually responsible for the
case while doing his documentary research, and that much of
his material came from Greg Kading, the former LAPD detective
who wrote the book that put the Combs theory into circulation.
He walked Dorsey through claims in Davis' memoir, The Versace Suit,
The Rooms at Caesar's Palace, The Tyson Fight, and got
Dorsey to acknowledge he had not independently verified several of them.
And then Sanft finished with something I have to admire
as pure craft. He pointed the jury to the disclaimer
printed in Compton Street Legend, the one where the authors
and publishers assume no responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, or omissions.
The state's best evidence is a book that says on
its own copyright page that it might not be accurate.
That is a hell of a closing beat, and Sanft
knew it. But prosecutors had one thing left on redirect,
and it may be the most important thing that happened Monday.
There was a Chrysler Sebring at that intersection the night
Tupac was shot, with young women in it. And Dorsey
testified that as far as he knows, Davis was the
first person ever to identify that car as specifically a
Sebring in his 2008 statement before that detail was public.
That is what corroboration looks like in a case like this.
Not a fingerprint. A man knowing the make and model
of a car that was there. Because that is the
entire trial in one question. If Dwayne Davis was making
it all up to sell books, how did he know
about the Sebring? Tupac Shakur was 25 years old, 30 years,
one defendant, and a jury that has now spent two
weeks listening to a man's own voice on tape. Someone
has to say his name. That's the show for Wednesday,
August 26. If this was useful, send it to one person.
That is the entire engine on a show like this.
And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment because
today is a rare one. Two juries, two cases, both
going into deliberations on the same afternoon. Tell me which
verdict you think lands first and which way each one goes.
We will be here for both of them. I'm Garrett Fisher.
Speaker 1: Do better.
Speaker 2: A few notes on sourcing and timing. This episode was
recorded before court opened Wednesday morning. Closing arguments in the
Lindsay Clancy trial were expected Wednesday, and Judge Sullivan had
indicated deliberations would follow. But schedules in that courtroom have
moved more than once. As of recording, Sullivan had also
not announced whether involuntary manslaughter would be included as a
verdict option. In Jacksonville, the defense closing and jury instructions
were expected Wednesday morning with deliberations to follow Wednesday afternoon.
Nothing here should be taken as a report on what
actually happened in either courtroom today. On Las Vegas, this
segment covers Monday's proceedings. Court in Nevada runs on Pacific
time and is frequently still in session when we record,
so we run that case one day behind by design
rather than guess at partial reporting.
Speaker 1: Testimony continued Tuesday.
Speaker 2: Our accounts of courtroom exchanges, including the mistrial argument and
the jurors' reactions to the judge's instruction, come from reporters
present in the room rather than from transcripts.
Speaker 1: We have reviewed.
Speaker 2: Outlets differ on some details of the Clancy trial's length
and witness count. And at least one national outlet has
misstated the number of children Andrea Yates killed in 2001.
Speaker 1: That number is five.
Speaker 2: On the Jacksonville case, Mario Fernandez Saldana has pleaded not
guilty and is presumed innocent. So have Shanna Gardner and
Henry Tennant, who face separate trials. Henry Tennant pleaded guilty
in 2023 and later withdrew that plea, telling the court
his statements under it were false. So we do not
treat anything he said under that agreement as fact or
use it as.
Speaker 1: Evidence against anyone.
Speaker 2: A defendant's decision not to testify is a constitutional right
and cannot be considered evidence of guilt. Testimony from defense
witnesses characterizing members of the victim's family has been reported
elsewhere and is not included here because it does not
bear on the charges.
Speaker 1: On Las Vegas..
Speaker 2: Allegations Dwayne Davis has made in recorded interviews about living
people who have never been charged in this case, including
Sean Combs, are claims made by a man whose own
attorney has told the jury he cannot be corroborated and
who has said parts of his book were invented. Combs
has denied involvement, has never been charged in connection with
Tupac Shakur's death, and has never been named a suspect.
The jury has also been instructed that there is no
indication Davis had anything to do with the murder of
Christopher Wallace. This episode discusses child deaths, suicide, and postpartum
mental illness. If you are struggling, you can call or
text 988 in the United States to reach the Suicide
and Crisis Lifeline. For postpartum mental health specifically, the National
Maternal Mental Health Hotline is available by call or text
at 1-833-TLC-MAMA. 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.