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Nearly 40 years before postpartum psychosis became the central issue in the nationally watched Lindsay Clancy murder trial, Anaheim police found themselves at the center of a case that raised many of the same questions.
In April 1987, 23-year-old Sheryl Lynn Massip reported that her 6-week-old son, Michael, had been kidnapped.
Anaheim officers initially treated the case as an urgent child abduction. But within hours, the investigation changed dramatically.
Michael’s body was found in a trash container in Fullerton, and Anaheim detectives began testing Massip’s account against the evidence. Her story did not hold up.
Massip admitted she killed her son, and the case became an Anaheim homicide investigation spanning city boundaries.
Evidence showed that Massip had driven over her infant son with a car and later disposed of his body before returning to Anaheim and reporting the fictional abduction. What followed, however, turned the case into something much larger than a murder prosecution.
A new type of defense
Massip’s attorney, Milton Grimes, argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, a severe psychiatric disorder that can involve hallucinations, delusions, and a profound break from reality.
At the time, the concept was largely unfamiliar to the public and only beginning to emerge in American criminal courts. Her defense maintained that Massip had experienced severe psychiatric symptoms after giving birth, including hearing voices telling her that her baby was suffering.
Prosecutors countered that Massip knew exactly what she had done and knew it was wrong. They pointed to the fabricated kidnapping story as evidence that she understood the criminal nature of her actions.
An Orange County jury agreed with prosecutors and convicted Massip of second-degree murder in 1988.
Then came an extraordinary judicial decision.
Superior Court Judge Robert Fitzgerald set aside the murder verdict and found Massip not guilty by reason of insanity, concluding that her postpartum psychosis had rendered her legally insane when she killed her son.
The Massip case became one of Southern California’s earliest and most significant murder cases involving postpartum psychosis.
Four decades later, the question remains
A Massachusetts jury wrestled with a remarkably similar issue in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy.
Clancy is accused of killing her three children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — inside the family’s home in January 2023.
There is little dispute that Clancy killed the children. The question is whether she was criminally responsible when she did it.
Her attorneys argue that Clancy was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis and other psychiatric problems. Prosecutors acknowledge Clancy had mental health problems but argue she understood what she was doing and acted deliberately.
This week, the jury was unable to reach a verdict, and the judge declared a mistrial.
Mental illness or murder?
Postpartum psychosis itself is not a legal defense; rather, it can become the medical foundation for an insanity or lack-of-criminal-responsibility defense. The legal question is whether the mental illness was so severe that the defendant could no longer be held criminally responsible for the act.
That was the issue facing an Orange County courtroom in the Massip case in 1988.
And it is essentially the same question confronting jurors in Massachusetts today.
For Anaheim officers and detectives who remember the Massip investigation, the similarities are striking.
What began in Anaheim as the reported kidnapping of an infant became a case about something far more difficult to investigate or prove: What was happening inside the mother’s mind at the moment she killed her child?
We still struggle to determine justice
Nearly four decades after the Massip case forced an Orange County courtroom to confront postpartum psychosis, the Lindsay Clancy case has reached another extraordinary turning point — without an answer.
On Friday, Sept. 4, a Massachusetts judge declared a mistrial after jurors reported they were hopelessly deadlocked. Published reports indicate the jury was divided 11-1 after seven days of deliberations over whether Clancy should be held criminally responsible for killing her three children. Prosecutors must now decide whether to try her again.
That outcome may be the most telling connection of all between Clancy and the Anaheim case.
In 1988, a jury convicted Sheryl Massip of murder, only to have the trial judge overturn that verdict and find her not guilty by reason of insanity because of postpartum psychosis. Almost 40 years later, with far greater medical understanding of postpartum mental illness, 12 jurors in Massachusetts still could not unanimously answer essentially the same question.
When someone suffering from profound mental illness commits an unthinkable act, where does illness end and criminal responsibility begin?
The science has advanced. Public awareness has changed. The legal question remains extraordinarily difficult.
For the Anaheim detectives who investigated the disappearance and murder of 6-week-old Michael Massip in 1987, the Clancy mistrial is a remarkable reminder that a case they worked nearly four decades ago was not simply a chapter in local crime history.
It was an early glimpse of a debate the criminal justice system is still struggling to resolve.
The post FROM THE ARCHIVES: Anaheim’s Massip murder case echoes in today’s Lindsay Clancy trial appeared first on Behind the Badge.