Lindsay Clancy is one of the most talked-about women in America right now. In 2023 she strangled her three children and jumped from a second-story window trying to die with them. She survived, paralyzed from the chest down, and is now on trial to determine whether she understood what she was doing.
This case is a paradigmatic example of social media frenzies: a dark, obscure true crime story with a body count high enough to guarantee outrage and a diagnosis intricate enough, it is the perfect recipe for an online inferno. With striking headlines and attention-grabbing fifteen-second clips, a court of public opinion has decreed, with unwavering confidence, that they know better than the forensic psychiatrists testifying under oath. Postpartum psychosis, in their view, is a loophole for baby-killers. Anyone who so much as considers her illness is defending child murder.
Evidently, that conclusion is not based on any sort of thorough or professional review of evidence; rather, it comes from the fact that a paralyzed woman who killed her children makes a better villain than a complicated one; that a mother who failed at the one job society insists is hers alone is an electrifying story.
Lindsay Clancy, then, has become two opposing things at once: to some, a barefaced murderer who deserves to be locked up; to others, a martyr failed by the healthcare system. In both interpretations, the actual issue is missed: in the specific hours she killed her children, had Ms. Clancy’s mind lost its grip on reality badly enough that the law’s standard for culpability doesn’t apply to her the way it would to someone who carried out a murder with full use of their faculties? And therein lies the uncomfortable truth: none of us can answer that. But regardless, a parallel trial has been run on social media with no expertise, no burden of proof, no rules of evidence and no real stake in the outcome beyond pining for darkness and mystery.
What if Lindsay Clancy were a man? Fathers kill their children too, sometimes during psychiatric breaks. There’s outrage, but it doesn’t calcify into the same lasting cultural symbol. A father who kills is a broken man, a tragedy. A mother who kills becomes something closer to myth: the Medea who corrupted and perverted the one role she wasn’t allowed to fail at. Motherhood is construed as an identity with one acceptable version and any deviation, illness included, is filed as proof the woman underneath was never what she seemed. In this vision, postpartum psychosis doesn’t explain the killings; it just unmasks a monster that was there all along. There is no room for a woman who was, by all available accounts including those of her parents in law (her mother-in-law testified that she was “begging for help”) and the children’s nanny, loving and present, and who was failed by the people meant to take care of her, including when she was turned away by a Women and Infants Program dedicated to these cases because “she was overly medicated.”
Another fundamental misconception pertains to the verdict. Clancy’s defense has argued for weeks that she should be found not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI). Online, this has been treated as some sick, twisted bid for freedom, some legal trick to let a murderer walk. That is abysmally wrong. In the jurisdiction trying her, an NGRI verdict triggers automatic commitment: indefinite confinement to a secure psychiatric facility, for however long the court decides. Thus, the defense is not asking to wheel her home where she can enjoy freedom; it is asking to decide which locked institution she spends the rest of her life in.
Calling that a lighter outcome grossly misunderstands what confinement actually is. In 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children in a bathtub in Houston and was found not guilty by reason of insanity; two decades later, she remains hospitalized. Ed Gein was found not guilty by reason of insanity too and spent the rest of his life in psychiatric institutions. His crimes look nothing like Clancy’s, but the verdict did the same thing in both cases, and no one argued he was “getting away” with his crimes — because he was not.
What this case tells us is that mental health is still, despite major progress over the last decades, a taboo. One study published in 2020 and comparing public attitudes toward physical and psychiatric conditions found that people with mental illness experience more social stigmatization and receive less concern for their welfare than people with physical illness do. Part of that comes from a visibility issue: the impairment behind a mental illness is typically invisible and abstract in a way a broken spine or a dislocated shoulder isn’t. That taboo is at the crux of the Clancy case: while nobody would ask a woman recovering from a car crash to prove, beyond her doctors’ word, that her spine was actually broken, she is however being asked to prove that her mind was actually gone, and her doctors’ own say-so is insufficient to some. Our culture has not yet come to terms with the fact that the mind can falter the same way the organ can.
That misconception explains in great part the public’s anger. Reading NGRI as “getting away with murder” assumes the legal and medical process is a con and that mercy is fraud; that there is a villain who is conning the system to walk free. Naturally, that story is exactly that: a story. It is not truthful, valid or accurate. If people actually understood that Clancy faces potential lifelong confinement with no sentence to count down, the outrage would have almost nothing left to stand on. A villain story is more tantalizing.
None of this means treating Clancy as an innocent martyr or defending the killing of children. But it requires acknowledging a basic, unflattering truth: that we don’t know, that we’re not equipped, trained, meant to know. As of this article, the jury itself doesn’t seem to know either; they have told the judge three times that they are deadlocked. Twelve people who actually sat through eighty-plus witnesses and months of testimony cannot settle this confidently, and that should tell us something about those online so eager to settle it in fifteen seconds.
This is not an isolated case in which social media seizes upon a tragedy and distorts it in every possible way, rejecting all expert opinion and disregarding the rules that govern the judicial process, in order to bring to light a story that is darker, more sensational, and more shocking — and it is certainly not the last. But one should hope that more people will exercise more restraint, more humility and more moderation in future cases; true crime conspiracies and pre-baked verdicts not only risk undermining judicial processes, they are also an insult to the victims of these crimes and to their loved ones.
