The mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case was not entirely unexpected. For most people, the idea that a mother could deliberately kill her own children is almost impossible to process.
She must have been out of her mind, the instinctive argument goes. What other explanation could there be?
It is a thought so horrifying that many recoil from considering any alternative.
That, plainly, was the emotional terrain the defense hoped to occupy: a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, centered on the claim that Clancy suffered an 18-minute psychotic episode during which her three children were strangled before she jumped from a window.
After all, how could anyone commit acts so brutal unless something in the mind had catastrophically broken?
Perhaps that helps explain why 11 of the 12 jurors reportedly favored acquittal, while the lone holdout — a man — refused to abandon his view.
Predictably, some on the progressive feminist left have reached for the charge of misogyny.
But that argument is too easy. It is entirely possible to believe, as I do, that postpartum depression and psychosis are real, that women’s suffering has too often been minimized or misunderstood by medicine, and that reckless overprescribing can have dangerous consequences — and still not accept Lindsay Clancy’s defense.
The mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case shouldn’t surprise. No decent person wants to believe that a mother would murder her own children
But you can be a woman who believes that postpartum depression and psychosis are real – as I do – and still not believe Lindsay Clancy
It’s as old as humanity. Before Christianity, infanticide was a common practice, considered practical. Medea, of Greek mythology, murdered her children to punish her unfaithful husband. Sethe, of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, murdered her baby.
It has ever been with us.
Lindsay’s ex-husband Patrick, father of all three children and now remarried, cannot conceive that she is truly responsible for murdering their kids.
But his own mother apparently can.
In a 2024 profile of Patrick in The New Yorker, his mother, Sue, told the magazine: ‘Lindsay has to pay for what she did.’
Yes. Even those who believe that she had a psychotic break should be able to agree on that. Otherwise — why punish anyone, for anything, if we can all claim temporary madness?
If Lindsay Clancy truly slaughtered her small children in a fit of psychosis — a voice commanding her to kill, she claims — how is she able to live with herself, let alone argue that she should be set free?
The subtext of her defense fits all too perfectly in our post-moral culture: No matter the depravity, consider the perpetrator a victim, too.
Lindsay, her lawyer argued, was at the whims of a medical establishment that overprescribed her. The prosecution countered that Lindsay, a labor and delivery nurse, doctor-shopped for months.
Her defenders say she has already suffered for her sins: She’s in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Isn’t that punishment enough?
Lindsay, her lawyer argued, tried to get help. In fact, after Patrick took her to the ER on New Year’s Eve, 2022, she was transferred to the famed McLean psychiatric hospital in Boston.
But, as Patrick told The New Yorker, when he went to visit her ‘there were people there who were clearly, like, nuts… Lindsay seemed to have it together.’
He also said she texted him from McLean, saying, ‘I don’t belong here.’
Weeks later, on January 24, 2023, she killed their children.
Some of the specifics to follow are gruesome, but they are important to detail, as much of the mainstream media has opted not to publish or broadcast them.
On the morning of the murders, Lindsay took daughter Cora, age 5, to the pediatrician. She did not disclose to Cora’s doctor that she, as the mother, was in distress.
After that, she sent pictures of the children, playing in the snow, to her mother and to Patrick.
At 4.48pm, Lindsay called the local CVS to see if they had Pedia-Lax. The store manager who answered the phone said that Lindsay spoke clearly and cogently — no slurring, no disjointed thoughts.
At 4.53pm, Lindsay texted Patrick, who was in his home office in the basement, about getting takeout for dinner: ‘I didn’t cook anything,’ she wrote. ‘It’s been a long day.’
Patrick agreed.
‘Okie dokie,’ she texted back.
Okie dokie. Does that sound like a woman on the verge of strangling her three children to death?
‘Check the menu when you can,’ she texted Patrick. Calm. Cool. Casual.
At 5.10pm, Lindsay called ThreeV, a local restaurant, to order risotto and a Mediterranean power bowl. Earlier in the day, she had used Apple Maps to check how long it would take to drive there.
At 5.32pm, Patrick can be seen on surveillance video entering the local CVS for the Pedia-Lax, and he calls his wife at home.
‘It sounded like she was busy,’ Patrick said.
She was busy. Medical examiners determined Patrick’s call fell right in the middle of the 45-minute window in which Lindsay killed the children.
Note what Patrick didn’t say: She was hysterical. She was talking gibberish. The kids were making noise in the background.
No: She sounded busy — as if, one could surmise, she had been interrupted and was eager to get back to what she had been doing.
At 5.37pm, Patrick left CVS.
At 5.54pm, he picked up their takeout order from ThreeV.
Patrick returned home at 6.09pm and immediately noticed how silent the house was. He found Lindsay outside, on the ground, having slashed herself and jumped from their second-floor bedroom.
He asked her what she had done. Patrick testified that Lindsay replied: ‘I tried to kill myself.’
Not: ‘I killed the kids.’
Not: ‘Call 911 for the kids.’
And to be clear: She took the children down to the basement, one at a time, returning upstairs for the next child once one was dead, in descending order of strength.
Dawson, her 3-year-old son — who, in a 2021 Facebook post, she called ‘the most difficult human I have ever encountered’ — was first, seemingly because he was the strongest.
Lindsay, who in days prior to the killings had Googled, ‘Can you treat a sociopath,’ took an exercise band and strangled her toddler son to death.
She then went to get Cora, her 5-year-old, and brought her to the basement.
Cora, too, was strangled to death, by her mother, with an exercise band.
Baby Callan, 8 months old, was next.
And like his sister and brother, he was found with an exercise band around his neck. But Callan was still alive when first responders arrived.
Strangulation takes a long time. Were the bands a distancing mechanism, so she didn’t have to lay her hands on her children’s necks?
All three children were found face down, presumably so she didn’t have to look them in the eyes. So she didn’t have to see their abject terror as their own mother killed them.
Callan died in the hospital three days later.
Why punish anyone, for anything, if we can all claim temporary madness?
When Lindsay herself woke up, some of her first questions were about whether she had a lawyer and if her legs were broken — not about her children.
According to Dr Sejal Shah, a female psychiatrist who evaluated Lindsay multiple times in the hospital, Lindsay told her she had not suffered delusions or hallucinations on the day of the killings.
Shah, in her trial testimony, described Lindsay as ‘goal-oriented’ and as having ‘organized’ thoughts just days later.
Lindsay spent much of this trial looking impassive, putting her head down only when confronted with graphic autopsy testimony.
‘I can’t do this,’ she said, covering her face, her shoulders heaving.
But she has lots of things she’d like to do when this is all over: She’d like to become an advocate for postpartum issues and enter a wheelchair marathon, as revealed at trial.
If she cared, she would be prostrating herself before the court, insisting that no matter her mental state, she isn’t worthy of mercy.
