The internet doesn’t like being called weird. I made the grave error Tuesday of calling certain corners of it exactly that, in light of their weirdness. Namely: women on TikTok participating in the “Same, Lindsay” trend, posting videos of themselves crying, holding their babies, being mothers, implying they’re standing in the same shoes as Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother of three who in 2023 strangled her children — Cora (5), Dawson (3), and Callan (8 months) — with three separate exercise bands in the family’s basement, after sending her husband out to run errands.
“Same, Lindsay.” Because they feel for her. They get it. They’ve been there.
These women are racking up hundreds of thousands of likes for expressing sympathy with a child killer, theorizing about what “prompted” her, or floating conspiracies about who actually did the strangling.
“You’ll never make me hate Lindsay Clancy.” “Me when I had to ask the neighbor to bathe her because I thought I would drown her.” “NEW THEORY: He killed the kids.” “I had my first dream about little Cora, she was being SA’d by him (the father). Hopefully Lindsay gets justice.”
This is super weird, because she is on trial for murder; neither the defense nor the prosecution disputes that she did it. What they’re debating is punishment: prison or a psych ward.
Though the outcome is binary, the online reaction has splintered into half a dozen conclusions about a horrific, unimaginable tragedy: those who believe she committed cold-blooded, premeditated murder; those who believe she did it but isn’t criminally liable because she was in a state of psychosis; those who believe she did it but bears no fault at all, because the medical system and her husband failed her; and those who believe she didn’t do it at all, insisting the real culprit is her husband.
Let’s examine each.
The prosecution argues she wasn’t, beyond a shadow of a doubt, “crazy” — that she engaged in deliberate premeditation and rational planning before following through. They point to the fact that she functioned normally on the day of the murders, January 24, 2023: she took her daughter to the doctor, played with her kids in the snow, texted her husband to grab takeout and pick up her daughter’s MiraLax, placed a coherent phone order with the restaurant, and returned her husband’s call from CVS to answer a question about Cora’s medication. She also mapped the driving distance to the restaurant, prosecutors say, to calculate how much time she’d have. Her DNA was on each exercise band.
The defense argues she was in the grip of an acute mental break and can’t be held criminally liable. Her attorney said in his opening statement that she has bipolar disorder, that her medication made it worse, and that on the day she killed her children she heard a man’s voice telling her, “This is your last chance. Kill the children so you can kill yourself.” She kept a detailed list of every medication her doctors had prescribed and was on six antipsychotics at the time, including Seroquel, which can cause hallucinations. She also kept a diary documenting her insomnia, paranoia, and delusions, and had told her mother and husband beforehand that she’d had thoughts of killing her children.
Internet sleuths looked at all of that and said: IGNORE.
Instead, it’s become another episode of “let’s blame everyone but the perp.”
Begin with the group that claims “the husband did it.” The facts: Patrick Clancy left the house around 5:15 p.m. to pick up takeout and grab MiraLax from CVS. Surveillance footage shows him arriving at CVS at 5:32, walking to the pediatric aisle, and calling Lindsay to ask if the generic brand was okay. (A very “typical man” thing to do.) She didn’t answer; about a minute later she called back, answered his question, and hung up — he later testified she sounded busy. Patrick then left CVS and is seen on video walking into the restaurant, ThreeV, at 5:54 p.m. He went home, found the bodies, and called 911 at about 6:11 p.m. Some are claiming, absurdly, that Patrick did it — either by hiring a body double or by making sure he was caught on camera at CVS, sprinting home to commit the murders, changing his shoes, and sprinting back out to grab the food. I’ll concede his shoes look different between the two videos, and he may have changed them; that could be due to any number of things, including the fact that it was snowy and wet outside. Hello, Massachusetts in January. Everything else he’s wearing stays the same. No body double. Logistically, it would have been impossible for him to zoom home at 5:35, throw his wife out a window with no signs of struggle, strangle three children for four minutes each, and still make it back to the restaurant, eleven minutes away, by 5:54.
Unless he also has a secret time machine.
The Candace Owens-inspired camp also points to her body temperature: 82 degrees, hypothermic, when recorded at South Shore Hospital. How could that have happened?! She must have been pushed out the window at some unspecified point in time by her husband after 5:34 and before 5:54! Or, more plausibly, she cut her wrists and neck, jumped out a second-story window, landed in the snow, severely injured her spinal cord, and lost the ability to shiver, inducing poikilothermia, a condition where the body can’t regulate its own temperature. Add blood loss, the shock factor, and common sense, and suddenly the low reading isn’t mysterious at all.
Debunked.
But even if he didn’t do it, the theory goes, the medical system is to blame: the doctors, the hospitals, even the first responders all failed her. I’d concede that the cocktail of medications she was prescribed, and was taking, could have caused a reaction severe enough to make an unthinkable act feel rational in the moment. That’s tragic, and it’s something Lindsay, in her current lucid state, will have to live with for the rest of her life.
But in the noise surrounding this horror, the conversation isn’t really about the children, or about medication and overprescription. It’s about how the man in her life wronged her, and how postpartum struggles can spiral into atrocity.
Even Lindsay’s former coworker Susan Davison, a nurse, wrote in a letter of support: “I could have been Lindsay. Any one of us could have been.”
Um, I couldn’t.
It’s evil. It’s the worst imaginable thing a person could do. It’s painful to think about the fight her eldest may have put up, the confusion on those little faces as the person they trusted most choked the light out of their eyes. To most of us, it’s unimaginable — which is exactly why so many people are trying to shove this case into a tidy box. She’s a murderer. She didn’t mean to. She’s the real victim.
But it isn’t that simple, and it’s weird that so many people are pretending it is.
It’s weird that her GoFundMe has raised almost $900,000 from “millions of women supporting [her] right now.”
It’s weird that women are simultaneously insisting that if only females ran the world we’d have peace and harmony, while also arguing that having a baby makes all of us crazy and unaccountable for our own actions.
It’s weird that we’re pretending mental illness doesn’t exist everywhere else — in lieutenant governors who fatally shoot their wives and themselves, in the homeless men who stab strangers on trains, in the young men who shoot CEOs in the back of the head, in the trans-identifying activists who cross the country to try to kill a treasury secretary.
It’s weird that feminists have grown so anti-men that they’ll ignore the basic facts of a case to protect a preferred narrative.
It’s weird that TikTokers are divining the true killer based on astrology charts.
It’s weird to joke about your own postpartum anxiety on TikTok in the same breath as a postpartum psychosis that left three breathing, innocent babies dead.
And I don’t think it’s weird to point any of that out, or hope she goes away for a long, long time, because Cora, Dawson, and Callan don’t get a trend or a hashtag. They just don’t get anything, ever again, and it’s weird that we made it about everyone except them.
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