A Massachusetts mother who methodically strangled her three young children — a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and a seven-month-old — with an exercise band now has the establishment press and paid psychiatric experts working overtime to reframe her as the real victim. The stakes couldn't be clearer: if the institutions can generate sympathy for a woman who killed her babies, there is no limit to what they'll excuse, while ordinary parents who push back at school board meetings get labeled domestic terrorists.
Lindsay Clancy, 36, pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder for the January 2023 deaths of Cora, Dawson, and Callan in the family's Duxbury home. The defense rested Friday after calling forensic psychiatrist Dr. Phillip Resnick — the same expert who helped secure an insanity acquittal for Andrea Yates after she drowned her five children in Texas in 2001. Resnick testified that Clancy felt an "external force" take over her body, describing her as "a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings," according to CBS News. He said she was under a "command hallucination" and was "clearly psychotic on that day."
Resnick also told the court that Clancy believed she was "doing her children a favor by having them go to heaven with her rather than remain on Earth without her doing the mothering," as the New York Post reported. She thought her children "would be miserable" without her. A psychological test administered by the government found "no evidence of faking psychiatric symptoms," Resnick said.
The prosecution called rebuttal witness Dr. Avram Mack, a forensic psychiatrist who interviewed Clancy in April. He said she seemed normal, tearful at times, complained about hospital food, and wasn't interested in physical therapy. She described "feeling miserable, not wanting to be alive," Mack testified, per CBS News.
But the courtroom testimony is only half the story. The New York Post's lifestyle section ran a piece headlined "Lindsay Clancy isn't a monster" — arguing that women who feel empathy for her aren't excusing the crime but expressing their own fears about postpartum mental health collapse. The piece acknowledges that Clancy was "disturbingly methodical," tying an exercise band to a basement door and strangling each child one at a time, then leaving her youngest son still alive as she went upstairs to attempt suicide. Yet the Post's columnist insists that criticizing Clancy's supporters "is to fundamentally misunderstand what women are trying to say."
The piece does concede the double standard: "when men murder their families no one rushes to excuse their actions with a mental health defense." Then it moves on.
That's the tell. The same media apparatus that demonizes concerned parents as threats to democracy wraps its arms around a woman who strangled her babies. Hundreds of women gathered outside the courthouse to support Clancy. Chat forums exploded with postpartum trauma stories. The infrastructure of sympathy is vast and well-oiled.
Suicide is the leading cause of death for postpartum women, and one in seven women experience postpartum depression with intrusive thoughts of harming their children. Those are real facts about a real crisis. But the vast majority of those women do not kill their kids. Conflating the two is a choice — one the press is making deliberately.
Closing arguments could come as early as Monday. The question for the jury is whether Clancy's psychosis was severe enough to make her legally insane. The question for the country is why the institutions that should speak for three dead children are so eager to speak for the woman who killed them.
