Why Lindsay Clancy is Guilty Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

A short take

The judge has declared a mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case. I’m writing a much longer podcast on the women — the crazy, crazy women — but I’d also like to lay out the case as I see it and why I am grateful to the one juror who stood against the 11 and led to the mistrial. I watched every minute of this trial, all those weeks of testimony and seven days of deliberations, and if I were on the jury, I would have joined him.

The whole thing played out in dramatic fashion, with the defense attorney, Big Red Reddington, attempting to bully the lone juror and even appealing an emergency stay with the Supreme Judicial Court. That failed. The jury was deadlocked, reportedly 11-1, and the judge declared a mistrial.

This trial has consumed a lot of the country and set in motion a scenario very much like the OJ trial, which I sat through in the same way. I remember what it was like in Los Angeles when he was found Not Guilty and how half of the city celebrated while the other half was left shaken. He got away with murder.

Now, it seems to me that the whole thing has reversed itself and for a minute there, it would look like Lindsay Clancy would get away with murder, too. But here we are again, with half of the country seeing her as Not Criminally Responsible and the other half thinking her guilty. I am in the latter camp, and I’ll lay out why I believe that.

There are two civil cases pending for wrongful death and malpractice by both Lindsay and Patrick Clancy. A not-guilty or not-criminally-responsible verdict would go a long way toward helping their case. That is why, I suspect, no one in their two families, including friends, would ever say one bad word against Lindsay.

Moreover, they’ve all forgiven her and settled on her version of events that meant she was spiraling in postpartum psychosis or misdiagnosed and over-medicated. That’s the much easier way to absorb this horrific tragedy, and they’ve all chosen self-preservation over the truth. But that doesn’t mean I have to.

To be found “not criminally responsible,” Lindsay Clancy would have to show that she was not of sound mind at the time of the murders. Yet she had the presence of mind to take her child to the doctor, play with her two older kids in the backyard, build a snowman, send ordinary photos, search for kids’ Miralax and takeout, and then send her husband out on an errand that would last just long enough to kill the kids and maybe herself.

The texts and photos that day were ordinary. Snowman. Kids in the snow. Nothing screaming psychosis to the people receiving them.

To believe she is not criminally responsible means going along with the story that she was in “psychosis” and that’s what drove her to murder her kids. But she knew it was wrong. She knew enough to hide the worst of it from healthcare workers and therapists. She told her mother and her husband some of it, but they did not see it as a serious enough threat to keep her from being left alone with the children. She had been thinking of doing harm for a long time.

The crime itself reveals someone who lined up the necessary factors to commit murder: means (the basement, the exercise bands), the opportunity (sending Patrick out of the house), and the motive. That’s the harder part, but I think I know the direction of the answer.

I would bet somewhere in her past, or in the gap between the mother she wanted to be and the mother she felt she was becoming, lies the missing piece. Something that explains why she wanted to harm her children. But no one dared to press that at trial, lest they hurt her case or the two pending civil cases.

She had seven days in the hospital before she really started talking. She did not speak much at first. She was left alone with her thoughts. Then a chaplain visited after those seven days, and Lindsay said she was glad her children were safe. The chaplain said, yes, they’re with God in Heaven.

They prayed together, and Lindsay supposedly said something about a voice ordering her to do bad things. She never laid it all out fully until later, when she got Patrick on the phone and then told the psychiatrist.

So what was Lindsay’s motive? Look at her background, from Grok:

A lifelong athlete. Competitive cheerleader. Gymnast. Powderpuff football. Volleyball. Long-distance runner. Her legs and her body were everything to her, even though she said her lifelong dream was to become a mother.

Motherhood was the one thing Lindsay Clancy could not master the way she mastered everything else. She was successful at what she tried. Biology degree from Quinnipiac. Nursing school. Labor and delivery nurse. Then she met Patrick, married him, and had three beautiful children.

Biology degree, athlete, nurse and she doesn’t know how to kill herself? That is what we’re expected to believe about this case; meanwhile, her precision in murdering her own children made her look like a professional assassin.

Why she spiraled

Things began to go wrong when she started to sleep-train her third baby, Callan. She had been following the attachment-parenting method: hold the baby when he cries, breastfeed, keep him close. That’s what she believed was best. Then she forced herself to let the baby “cry it out.”

Her older son Dawson was, in her own words, the “most difficult human” she had ever encountered. Her oldest, Cora, had health problems that required constant attention.

She couldn’t do the job she wanted to be the best at, and it was causing her depression, anger, resentment, and suicidal and homicidal thoughts. She concealed the worst of those thoughts because she knew her kids could be taken away from her and her failure as a parent would be exposed.

At every turn, she avoided doing the one thing she could have done to save her kids: telling a healthcare worker, removing herself from children’s care. Why didn’t she? Because she wanted the problem to go away. Killing the children covers up the bigger crime in her mind: her failure as a mother.

The question is not whether Lindsay Clancy was insane. Lots of, if not most, murderers are in some sense insane. The question is whether she knew what she was doing was wrong and whether she could have stopped herself, and the answer to both is an unequivocal yes.

Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and many of the mothers who have killed their kids have been convicted because they knew the difference between right and wrong. Lindsay Clancy did too. She showed this many times: concealing the truth about her homicidal thoughts, deceiving Patrick about why he needed to leave the house, and systematically murdering her children one by one.

It didn’t just happen one day because she snapped. She thought about it. She planned it. And she coldly executed her plan. Even after she was lying in the hospital, she wasn’t screaming for her babies. She wasn’t asking where they were, because she already knew. She left them to die cold and alone, face down on the basement floor.

What is terrifying is how we’ve suddenly and dramatically turned a corner, and now someone like Lindsay Clancy has become a hero to too many. How easy it’s been for us as a society to slip comfortably into the idea that drugs made her do it, her hormones made her do it, the bad therapy made her do it, and even her husband made her do it — everyone except Lindsay herself is to blame.

The psycho pink ladies on TikTok have accused Patrick Clancy of murder, of sexism, of misogyny, even of molesting his own daughter Cora. But the rest of this story will have to wait for my podcast, Lindsay Clancy — the Psychopath and the Sycophants, which I’ll drop soon.