During the five weeks of her murder trial, Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother accused of murdering her three young children in 2023, spoke barely a word. She has been on display for the entirety of her livestreamed trial, sitting in her wheelchair beside her lawyer at the defense table. At one point, when the prosecution walked the jury through the children’s autopsy reports, she hunched over, racked with sobs, crying out “I can’t do this!” But mostly, Clancy has remained silent and wide-eyed, her gaze wandering around the courtroom as though searching for something.
The judge in the case has just declared a mistrial because the jury has been unable to reach a unanimous verdict. But the viewing public, in the absence of Clancy’s own explanation of her experiences leading up to and after the killings, has projected its own ideas onto the case and rendered its own verdict. Some people have interpreted Clancy’s trial as a referendum on women’s postpartum mental health. Others have developed elaborate conspiracy theories maintaining that Clancy’s ex-husband, Patrick, is actually the guilty party. Still others have construed Clancy’s story as evidence for their own niche political beliefs.
These are all comforting narratives, in some sense, because they imply an underlying logic that imbues the events with meaning and provides a road map for catharsis. Yet the jury’s inability to arrive at a verdict makes plain that a careful evaluation of the facts does not yield an easily intelligible conclusion. The reality may be darker and more despairing: that something so dramatic and destructive could, in the end, mean nothing at all.
As Clancy’s trial has progressed, dozens of women wearing pink have appeared at organized rallies outside the courthouse in Plymouth, Massachusetts, holding signs signaling a kind of support for her. “Any one of us who have dealt with mental health, anxiety, depression, postpartum—I think we just know that any one of us could be sitting in her chair,” the organizer of a recent event billed as an opportunity to “stand in peace for Lindsay” told a local news outlet.
There is something inherently unsettling about any public expression of support for a confessed killer, but these gatherings and their associated social-media movements have not seemed aimed at improving Clancy’s odds of success in court. Instead, these demonstrations suggest that Clancy has for some women become a symbolic figure: the devoted but suffering mother martyred by the relentless, punishing demands of her children’s early years and left to suffer by a flawed and fractured health-care system. Many women have felt overwhelmed to the point of drowning in the months after giving birth, and many have sought help but failed to receive it. In her supporters’ imagination, Clancy’s case appears to be the sum of all those biological and social hazards. What happened to Clancy, in this view, was predictable, and thus preventable.
[Stephanie McCrummen: The women who are obsessed with Lindsay Clancy]
That’s a tidy narrative about what took place in Duxbury that night in 2023, when Clancy strangled her three young children to death, then attempted to end her own life by swallowing prescription drugs, slashing her neck and wrists, and then jumping out of a window. A possible upshot of this view is that it may raise awareness about the inadequacy of treatment options for postpartum mental illnesses—to the degree that raising awareness about any given issue ever meaningfully changes anything. And some elements of it seem inarguably true, such as the idea that Clancy’s psychiatric care was woefully uncoordinated. But this theory also has the odd effect of making Clancy the star of her own murder trial, for whom the viewer at home may be encouraged to root, which risks eliding the gravity of what she did.
Simultaneously believing that someone is relatable and vulnerable and that they are nevertheless guilty of and accountable for heinous crimes is, however, cognitively tricky. I suspect that that tension is the origin of a similarly enormous groundswell of conspiracy theorizing about Clancy’s case that has pervaded social media. Although those theories vary, they generally maintain that Clancy is factually innocent of the killings and that her ex-husband is instead guilty of murdering the children, attempting to murder Clancy, and framing his ex-wife for the deaths. Proponents typically cite as proof any number of purported facts presented at trial, such as that Clancy’s fingerprints weren’t found on the exercise bands used to strangle the children, or that her core body temperature upon her arrival to the hospital called the prosecution’s timeline of events into question. Clancy is, in these tellings, a victim of spousal abuse akin to torture, whose partner cruelly exploited her postpartum suffering in order to dispose of his family.
That, too, is a tidy story with symbolic significance: For those who deny her guilt, Clancy’s life and fate become a nightmare of female subjugation. This view morphs a reasonable claim that Patrick ought to have been more attentive to Clancy’s deteriorating mental state into a much stronger insistence that he is in fact fully culpable for what happened, having carefully plotted the entire sequence of events. Clancy’s story, then, becomes a parable about male violence against women.
Yet this embrace of Clancy as the true victim of her crimes has triggered an online backlash on the political right that maintains that liberal-female support for Clancy is a naked expression of latent female tendencies toward violence against children and an indication that liberal women are unstable and dangerous. (This despite the fact that women actually have varying views on the case, and that men kill the majority of children murdered in the United States.) That thinking also mistakenly takes Clancy to be a representative everywoman, this time standing in for the threatening volatility of liberal women writ large.
[Elizabeth Bruenig: Why Lindsay Clancy’s insanity defense might fail]
All of these views of Clancy’s case strive to make sense of her alleged crimes: This trial must mean that mothers in America are crucially underserved, or that men in America are chauvinistically exploitative, or that women in America are secretly a danger to themselves and others. Some of those readings are more compelling than others, but they all seem to overemphasize what is generalizable about the case while understating what is unique, particular, and hyper-specific about what happened. The broader the statements about this case are, the less they have to do with the events as they really occurred.
Clancy’s experience was inarguably extreme. If, as the defense claims, she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, it was an ultra-rare expression of an already uncommon condition. Her psychiatric care was, per a subsequent malpractice lawsuit, allegedly mismanaged, and the severity of her purported adverse reactions to widely used medications was highly unusual. She was undoubtedly suffering in the months leading up to the murders, and it’s possible that the right degree of support could have prevented what happened, but it’s likewise true that nobody could have reasonably predicted what happened. More than any general theme or idea, Clancy’s crimes seem to have hinged on a moment of catastrophic dysfunction. Life, in the end, defies a great deal of neat storytelling.
For the past several weeks, Clancy’s case has been heard in the court of public opinion. At this point, people seem desperate for answers about why these deaths happened and what they mean, or at least a guarantee that something we’ve learned from this case will prevent similar tragedies from happening in the future. Many such onlookers have hoped that the trial verdict will supply such insights. This hope now appears to have been in vain.
Prosecutors in Clancy’s case must now decide whether to retry her, negotiate a plea deal, or drop the charges altogether. No matter what they choose, this case will continue to frustrate those trying to make sense of it.
Clancy herself, with her haunted, bewildered gaze, seems to already understand what her well-meaning supporters and their opponents can’t yet come to terms with: There is no making sense of what happened, and no greater wisdom to learn from it. At the core of all of this is a void, and nothing emanates from it but the assurance of everlasting pain.
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