With its scenic beaches, good schools and family-friendly environment, the coastal town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, was the ideal place for Patrick and Lindsay Clancy to raise their three young children.
The Microsoft executive, 38, and his wife, a former cheerleader and maternity nurse, were popular members of the small and affluent community 35 miles south of Boston and regarded as loving and devoted parents to Cora, five, Dawson, three, and eight-month-old Callan.
To neighbours they seemed like a typical young couple juggling busy schedules and a growing family. Yet on a chilly winter’s day three years ago, the lives of these outwardly normal, middle-class parents were consumed by tragedy.
Sending her husband to pick up medication from a local pharmacy and a takeaway dinner, Lindsay did something seemingly unfathomable. In a methodical act of violence that would have lasted several minutes, she strangled her three children in the basement of the house, then went back upstairs and attempted to kill herself by slashing her wrists and neck, swallowing crushed pills and jumping from a second-floor window.
Returning to the family’s colonial-style clapboard house after less than an hour, Patrick Clancy found two unimaginable scenes – his wife lying severely injured on the ground in their garden and his three tiny children unconscious with rubber exercise bands around their necks.
The children were rushed to hospital, where Cora and Dawson were declared dead. Medics resuscitated infant Callan after a cardiac arrest but, after three days on life support, he was deemed brain dead and passed away too.
Last month Lindsay Clancy’s trial for murder began at Plymouth Superior Court in Massachusetts, and quickly gripped both US and global audiences. Televised live each day, with its gut-wrenching evidence from first responders, a first-hand account from the bereaved father of the events leading up to the deaths and periodic outbreaks of uncontrollable sobbing from Lindsay, it’s been dubbed ‘America’s saddest murder trial’.
Lindsay Clancy, 36, in court, is accused of killing her three children and then attempting to take her own life
Patrick Clancy described his wife’s whispered words after killing the children: ‘She said she heard a man’s voice telling her if she didn’t do it now, she would lose her chance’
Now podcasts, true crime forums and social media platforms are buzzing with comments from dedicated armchair sleuths, all attempting to answer the fraught and increasingly divisive question at the trial’s heart.
Why did she do it?
What’s more, in some parts of the online crime commentariat, people are asking a further, still wilder question. Did she do it?
The case centres on Lindsay’s mental health after giving birth to Callan and, by extension, the care given to mothers suffering postpartum conditions in general.
Lindsay had been struggling for months with serious issues after the birth of Callan – and Patrick was struggling to support her. The couple repeatedly sought help for her worsening mental state after she reported having symptoms that included severe insomnia, heart-racing anxiety and thoughts about killing herself.
She told another mother that she ‘felt like a zombie’ and wrote in a notebook that she felt ‘completely overwhelmed’ looking after three small children and as though she was ‘drowning’.
The Clancys consulted doctors and other experts, and Lindsay, who turned 36 this week, was prescribed at least a dozen medications in the space of just a few months, including antidepressants, antipsychotics, sleep aids and anti-anxiety drugs.
With no improvement in her health, on New Year’s Eve 2022, she voluntarily checked herself into the McLean psychiatric hospital, one of the state’s top-ranked mental health facilities. However, staff deemed her a ‘low risk’ patient and she was discharged after five days.
Nineteen days later, on the evening of January 24, 2023, she killed her children.
In the wood-panelled US courtroom in Massachusetts, the prosecution led by Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague claims Lindsay connived to get her husband out of the house and deliberately, carefully and cold-bloodedly planned the murders.
Lindsay’s defence lawyer Kevin Reddington, who is fast becoming an internet sensation for his calm, forensic questioning style and obvious compassion for Lindsay, says his client does not dispute her role in their deaths. Instead, he argues that she was let down by a negligent medical community who over-medicated her and failed to properly diagnose her.
He claims she is not criminally responsible for the triple killings because she was suffering a postnatal crisis of mental health that warped her sense of reality. Doctors who diagnosed her with postpartum depression, he argues, failed to identify accurately the much rarer and more acute condition of postpartum psychosis (PPP), a severe illness linked to stress, sleep deprivation and hormonal changes after childbirth.
Lindsay and Patrick with their children Cora, five, Dawson, three, and eight-month-old Callan
Affecting about one in 1,000 mothers, PPP symptoms include high or low moods, hallucinations, delusions and extreme confusion.
At one point in his evidence, Patrick described his wife’s whispered words after killing the children: ‘She said she heard a man’s voice telling her if she didn’t do it now, she would lose her chance.’
As a result of the fall from the window that night, Lindsay is now paralysed from the waist down and in a wheelchair. As she sits at the defence table, occasionally clutching Reddington’s hand, she cuts a frail, guilt-ridden figure and has often been difficult to watch.
On one particularly emotional day in court, she hid behind her long dark hair and her body shook with sobs as autopsy photos of baby Callan were shown to jurors.
On another traumatic day, when Patrick’s piercing screams were heard on a 911 call after he discovered their children’s bodies, she repeatedly broke down. It was the first time she had heard the emergency call.
Moments earlier, Patrick described coming home from his errands and calling out to his family. When no one answered, he searched the children’s rooms and the bathroom, before finding blood throughout the main bedroom and a window open.
Now the armchair detectives are lining up to weigh in with their opinions. Much of it has been sensible and considered analysis of the evidence, with many online commentators – mostly women – rooting for Lindsay.
Some have talked about their own experiences with post-birth depression, saying that, even if they didn’t hurt their babies, they have sympathy for what the young mother was going through and that men cannot fully understand the complexity of postnatal medical conditions.
But in an unexpected and disturbing development, there is scant compassion for Patrick, with some claiming that he has questions to answer too. Did he support his wife enough? Should he not have stepped up to look after the children more when she was so clearly at crisis point? Even more sinister are outright accusations from a small but growing number of conspiracy theorists – with no evidence to back up their claims – that Patrick is the true guilty party and that he framed his wife, gaslighted her and made her believe she killed the children. ‘My gut reaction is that he did it,’ declares one commentator, while another writes righteously: ‘I definitely believe that the husband did it… someone should tell the judge.’
The Clancy family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, where Lindsay is alleged to have carried out the murders
‘The nature of social media is that it breeds conspiracy theories and everybody gets to be a dime store detective in a case like this,’ former prosecutor and criminal defence attorney Jack Rice told the Daily Mail. ‘We’re seeing more and more people making things up in their heads. Evidence becomes superfluous and it’s just people’s opinions that count these days. We’re already seeing in politics that if you say something with confidence it must be true and now it’s bleeding into the criminal justice system.’
While Judge William Sullivan reminded jurors at the start of the trial that they cannot decide the case based on emotion, no such restriction applies to the millions watching this family tragedy from the sidelines and some are clearly taking full advantage of it. Online antipathy towards Patrick is one of the hottest topics of discussion about the Clancy case, despite law enforcement officials and prosecutors repeatedly stating that he had no involvement in the heartbreaking event and has been cleared of any wrongdoing.
Keyboard warriors have pointed to the bereaved father’s demeanour as being ‘cold’ in the witness box, when it appeared to those in the courtroom that the businessman was desperately trying to maintain his equilibrium while being forced to relive every parent’s worst nightmare.
Critics have also pointed out that he was ‘quick’ to marry again after divorcing Lindsay, with some amateur sleuths suggesting he was having an affair before the murders. Patrick married fertility doctor Rachel Danis in New York in April this year, three years after the tragedy.
Most popular in online discussion groups are examinations of ‘inconsistencies’ in evidence put before the jury so far. A theory that Patrick changed his shoes went viral with claims that he wore boots when he went to pick up medication for his daughter at the pharmacy then changed into sneakers minutes later to pick up takeaway food, as seen on CCTV footage. The apparent difference, however, is more likely to be due to lighting in the different stores. Others claim a ‘suspicious’ email sent that evening raises further questions. Having left the house at about 5.15pm, Patrick arrived at the pharmacy at about 5.32pm, yet an email to his staff was time-stamped 5.24pm.
Social media users have asked how he could send a work email when he was supposed to be running errands. Questioned by his wife’s attorney, Patrick said he wasn’t sure whether the email was sent from his laptop or his mobile phone, adding to the confusion. If from the laptop, amateur detectives say he must have been at the house rather than the shops, which does not fit the police timeline. No evidence has been presented in court to suggest this theory.
Other ‘anomalies’ include the weight of a bed allegedly moved by Lindsay so she could leap from the second-floor window. Online conspiracy theorists claim she could not have moved the heavy piece of furniture alone and that Patrick staged the scene having pushed her out of the window.
Perhaps the biggest of the online oddball theories is that Patrick committed the crimes himself and framed his wife because he wanted to make a new life without his family. Some people have gone further and suggested that Patrick himself was the male voice in his wife’s head telling her to kill herself and her children.
Assistant DA Jennifer Sprague holds up as evidence the pyjamas of Callan Clancy during the trial
A recent poll on TikTok of 63,000 people said 91 per cent of respondents think Patrick is guilty.
‘People want a villain,’ says Rice, one of America’s most respected legal commentators. ‘Who can’t look at three dead children and think somebody must pay?
‘They’re shifting the blame on to him [Patrick] because people think she [Lindsay] wasn’t in her right mind or people have a hard time believing a mother could kill her children. I think how calm he was on the witness stand made people decide it was inappropriate for someone who was the innocent parent and that there must be something nefarious going on. That was the starting shot and then people began looking for any other inconsistency.’
With conspiracy theories of Patrick’s guilt spreading, even the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper, the Boston Globe, has felt compelled to address the fact that the internet is putting the bereaved father on trial amid ‘misinformation and lies’.
Alex Piquero, professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Miami, says: ‘What concerns me most is that people jump to conclusions and affect other people’s thinking without all the facts in hand. It is not instructive or helpful and can have negative consequences.’
In a further twist, a social worker called Emily Thorndike posted a TikTok video contradicting the prosecution’s claim that the McLean Hospital, where Lindsay was treated for her mental health issues, offered a five star, world class service. Turning whistleblower, she ‘wanted to correct the misinformation the prosecutor is using’ and went viral with the claim that a single doctor was responsible for 23 patients over one holiday period.
Defence attorney Reddington has now asked for Thorndike to take the stand, to the prosecution’s dismay. Judge Sullivan has said he will make a ruling on the matter in due course.
‘Everybody is watching this case and everybody has opinions but that doesn’t always mean those opinions have no value,’ says Rice of the emerging evidence. ‘They may see something that everybody else misses.’
Meanwhile Patrick has said he forgives his wife and believes she was ill rather than evil. He has made no comment about the false accusations being levelled at him online nor the fact that his life is being put under a microscope by millions of strangers.
He and Lindsay have both filed separate lawsuits accusing her multiple medical providers – some of whom she only met over Zoom – of failing to properly diagnose, treat and monitor her.
If the jury find her guilty of murder, she faces life in prison without parole. If she’s found not guilty because she lacked criminal responsibility, she’ll be committed to a state psychiatric facility. Whatever happens, you only have to look at her in the courtroom to see that her life is ruined for ever.
The trial is set to continue for several weeks, giving online commentators more time to spout their spurious theories – to the agony of the two grieving parents at the heart of a story that could have leapt from the pages of a Greek tragedy.
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