Clancy-obsessed Corie Walsh planned to poison her husband after hanging 2-year-old son from rafters: prosecutors

Corie Walsh, the mother who has been arrested for hanging and killing her 2-year-old son from the rafters of her basement in Illinois, allegedly planned to also kill her husband with poison, according to prosecutors.

A slew of details have emerged from the gruesome case, where Walsh, who claims that she was suffering from a psychotic episode, reportedly killed the child, believing the toddler to be the "anti-Christ" and "the devil."

In court on Tuesday, prosecutors revealed that two other children who lived at the home came back from school and saw the situation unfolding and then went to get a neighbor for help. The neighbor came to the home and pulled 2-year-old Barrett Walsh down from the rafters and tried to perform CPR, but was too late. An 8-month-old was home at the time of the killing, and was left on the ground unsupervised, per NBC News.

The mother was discovered fully clothed in a bathtub full of bloody water with injuries to her thighs and wrists. She later made statements that she wanted to harm her husband and would "poison him with a drink." Walsh also believed she had killed the other children.

Her defense attorneys have claimed that she was having a psychotic break when the killing took place. "She was severely mentally ill at the time of incident and requires treatment," defense attorney Robert Kerr said in court. He noted that doctors who treated Walsh after the killing said she needed "immediate" care.  

Prosecutors also said that Walsh had "recently become very invested in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial," the mother from Massachusetts who killed her three children before cutting herself and jumping out a window. The Clancy trial ended in a mistrial after there was a hung jury.

According to court documents, friends noticed a "shift" in Walsh's text hours before the killing took place. Walsh “had been actively discussing the [Clancy] case via group text message with her friends” just hours before the killing of her son.

Those in the group chat said that her text began to be "confusing" and "out of character." They said that she believed Patrick Clancy had actually killed the children. She wrote that "it was manslaughter, please help I’m really freaking out."

The defense attorney, however, has said that making the comparison to Clancy, or calling Walsh a "Clancy copycat" is "sickening."

“Describing Corie to a copied Lindsay is to take an easy bait,” Kerr added.