True Crime Conspiracists Have Homed In On Patrick Clancy. I Can’t Believe What I’m About to Say.

Family The Lindsay Clancy Conspiracy Theories Are Hiding a Darker Truth Popular true-crime cases always receive a certain level of deranged online speculation. For this one, it speaks to something universal. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Scaachi Koul? Aug 20, 20262:32 PM Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Jeff McCollough/Getty Images Plus and @lonefreewolfe/TikTok. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. There seem to be only two kinds of people in the world lately: those who can’t bring themselves to look at the Lindsay Clancy case, and those who refuse to miss even one gruesome detail. Participation in either camp makes sense, since the case is both too hideous to really enjoy as true crime grist and so thick with detail and credulity on all sides that it’s impossible not to want to read just a little bit more. It’s a rarity for a trial like this, but there are some basic facts that the prosecution and defense have agreed upon. In January 2023, Clancy strangled her three children, a 5-year-old, a 3-year-old, and an 8-month-old, using exercise bands in the basement of their home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, an affluent suburb of Boston. She then tried to kill herself by cutting her wrists and throat, then jumping from the second floor of the house. She killed her three children and paralyzed herself from the waist down, leaving behind a scene for her husband, Patrick Clancy, to find when he came home that night. Typically, this is the kind of case that would fit neatly into the Bad Mommy canon of true crime, from Diane Downs, in the 1980s, who shot her kids and claimed that it had been a carjacking; to Andrea Yates, in 2001, who drowned her kids because she was hallucinating; to Taylor Parker, featured in the recent Netflix documentary Maternal Instinct, who in 2020 faked a pregnancy, then killed her pregnant friend and her in utero baby. But in this case, the public’s response to the Clancy trial has been markedly more nuanced. Clancy has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Her defense team is claiming that she killed the kids and tried to kill herself because she was experiencing severe postpartum psychosis after a long bout with postpartum depression and anxiety. Her auditory hallucinations, which she says took the form of a male voice telling her to commit these crimes, are the alleged culprit. The trial, then, is about not just whether Clancy is sent to prison without parole or to a mental health facility for the remainder of her tragic life. It’s about the validity of a postpartum woman’s experience, the kind of help available to her, and the members of her community who were required to do more. The Clancy case is true-crime catnip—rest assured you’ll see a spate of documentaries, podcasts, books, and torn-from-the-headlines Law & Order episodes about her and her family by the time fall comes around. Reddit and the comment threads of local Boston papers are rife with calls for Clancy to be put in a maximum-security prison for life. But this is a case as much about motherhood as about mental health and criminality, and so some of the most layered responses are coming from women online who feel as if they’ve heard a lot of Clancy’s story before. On TikTok, you’ll now find countless amateur sleuths, along with some delusional conspiracy theorists, offering not only their versions of how the murders might have happened, but sometimes arguments for why Clancy might not have committed the crimes at all. Coverage is coming from the usual fixtures online, podcasts and video series that tend to chronicle the most bombastic true crimes available in the public record. But increasingly, women from all industries and life experiences are going mini-viral for posting their takes on the case and, saliently, why they think the husband is actually at fault. Moms who have rarely posted before are becoming forensics influencers, watching around-the-clock trial footage and news reports. Outside the courtroom on Day 17 were hundreds of women wearing pink, joined together to “stand in peace for Lindsay.” Many think Patrick Clancy is hiding something around his involvement in his kids’ deaths, while others believe that Lindsay Clancy committed the crimes with her own hands. What they have in common, however, is a united fury against a healthcare system that barely listens to women at all, never mind new mothers, and Western, heteronormative family structures that leave women to handle the bulk of the child-rearing. This side of true-crime TikTok consists of unbridled rage. “This lady did not do this shit on her motherfucking own. I’m willing to die on that hill,” says TikTokker @alchemistsosoho in a video from early August that, as of this article’s publication, has nearly 130,000 likes. “Any mom that has gone through postpartum—Lord Jesus, I’m getting emotional—all type of thoughts done ran through your mind, if you’re real about that shit. On top of that, when you’re dealing with a man who really don’t even fucking want you, ready to fucking replace you, doing whatever the fuck he can to play on your mindset—shit happens.” The details of the tragedy sound all too familiar for women who have experienced postpartum depression or anxiety, have had children with an indifferent (at best) man, and have a village that doesn’t really know how to help. The details that the women of TikTok are focusing on in particular also speak to that apparent negligence. Testimony from her mother showed how much Clancy was struggling with her mental health in the months running up to the murders. She told her mother, her mother-in-law, her husband, and her sister about it, as they’ve all testified. In one exchange submitted into evidence—a conversation that the defense blew up into a poster-board-size screenshot, and that has been picked apart by Clancy-sympathetic sleuths for days now—she texted her mother in October 2022 asking her to drive over from Connecticut. “I’m really sick. Something is wrong. I have horrible insomnia all night and I just don’t know how I’m going to get through the day,” Clancy wrote. “I started taking the medicine my doctor prescribed for anxiety and I think it’s made things worse. It’s just really scary and I don’t want to be alone.” Her mother said that a month or so before the killings, Clancy told her and Patrick that she was having thoughts about hurting the kids. When Patrick asked if she felt as if she could be alone with them, she allegedly said no. That November, he took a two-day trip to New York, leaving her alone with the kids. The day after he returned, he took a four-day trip with just the eldest of their children, again leaving Clancy home with their boys. Clancy was a labor and delivery nurse, as was her mother-in-law, and so there were plenty of people around her who understood the basics of postpartum anxiety and could have assisted in getting her help. She was seeing a psychiatrist but seemed to keep getting misdiagnosed. Meanwhile, she was prescribed 13 psychiatric medications in the months leading up to the murders. Some of the drugs on her list, medications prescribed by Jennifer Tufts—who had finished her residency in psychiatry in 2022, months before the killings—appear to be contraindicated, if she was indeed taking them at the same time. (Notably, despite taking all these meds, she still wasn’t sleeping. Extreme sleep deprivation can cause psychosis.) Clancy had never even met Tufts until the trial; all their sessions occurred over Zoom, even while she was being prescribed benzodiazepines and antipsychotic drugs. Her husband also didn’t attend any appointments with Clancy to glean more information about what was going on with his wife. (Clancy and her ex-husband are suing Tufts, among others who handled Clancy’s postpartum care, in civil court for medical malpractice.) Tufts has plenty of defenders on Reddit, including in r/DuxburyDeathsFreeTalk, on which people seem by and large anti-Clancy. “You Are NOT Lindsay Clancy,” reads the subject line of the subreddit’s top post. “This woman is not our poster child. She is not someone who should be held up as a martyr for those of us who have gone through this. I cannot say this enough: WE DID NOT KILL OUR CHILD OR CHILDREN.” But from tradwives to IVF influencers, social media remains a hub for women and mothers to elaborate on what it feels like to be ignored by doctors, prescribed medication instead of paid attention to, and dismissed by a husband on a business trip. And so, even if Patrick Clancy didn’t commit these crimes, is he not still partially responsible for the conditions that allowed the killings to happen? The theories about him range from the patently absurd (Patrick’s current wife did it) to the possible (he ignored her when Lindsay Clancy said she was sick). But it’s not even about Patrick anymore; it’s about what he has come to represent for women watching this trial. Since the murders, Patrick has moved to New York and remarried, something that’s driving online comparisons to family annihilators like Chris Watts and Scott Peterson. (There are rumblings, still unconfirmed, that he vacationed with his now wife just under a month after his children’s deaths.) Other details, like how low Clancy’s basal temperature had fallen by the time paramedics got to her, or that she somehow told Patrick what she had done even after jumping out of a window, cutting her own throat, and crushing her thyroid, are impossible to ignore for those who think her husband was more involved than he’s letting on. There are completely unsubstantiated theories that he has family members in the police department that investigated him, and that they’ve been covering for him for years. More unhinged theories include that he was actually the voice telling her to kill the kids, and that he strangled them and framed her, pushing her out the window, assuming she would die upon impact. Popular true-crime cases always receive a certain level of derangement on both sides, and although some of these theories feel far-fetched, they’re voicing a universal truth for women across the country. Clancy’s alleged crime is undoubtedly cruel and terrifying, but the motivation is perhaps solved through better healthcare access, more support for women with children, and, perhaps toughest of all, believing women when they say something is wrong with their health. Women on TikTok are flocking to her side—and have sent her family nearly $1 million dollars on GoFundMe—because her story sounds similar to their own. The women obsessing over this case now are the same women fed up with having to explain their own moods and needs during and after their pregnancies. A case like Clancy’s would always have garnered headlines, but it speaks to how rarely women are heard in medicine, and in their marriages. Patrick has become a placeholder for every lousy father who treats parenting more like babysitting, and who expects the wife to hold it together through insomnia, exhaustion, and parental overwhelm. Clancy was struggling, and despite having a medical education and a husband, she didn’t know what to do. He, too, seems not to have realized how bad her mental state could get, even as she was literally crying out for help. You can easily make the argument that Patrick was a disengaged husband and a negligent caregiver to the woman who had three of his children. That isn’t criminal, but it is creating a very particular wave of true-crime obsession. It’s not about only what Clancy might have done or why she may have done it. It’s about how Patrick may have (inadvertently or otherwise) facilitated an environment for his wife to commit one of the ugliest crimes in recent history. Clancy is receiving this level of focus and support in large part because she’s a good-looking, white, middle-class mother who had all the tools available to seek mental healthcare. Were she poor, Black or Brown, or less telegenic, she might not have such an audience rally around her. That, too, lends to the constant attention on the case: If this woman, with her many privileges, couldn’t get adequate medical care to save her and her kids, and if the state would rather incarcerate her than get her the care she needs, what hope is there for the rest of us? The crime in this story concerns the lack of postpartum education—even among the educated—and the fact that no one really knows what to do about an unwell mom. Clancy is just one piece of it, a constant media reminder of what could happen to you as a new, exhausted, overwhelmed mother, even if you try to do everything right. During Day 16 of the trial, Brooklyn-based therapist and TikTokker Emily Thorndike addressed the courtroom without the jury present, offering her experience at one of the hospitals where Clancy was treated. The defense wanted the jury to hear her testimony—Thorndike had, in late July, posted on TikTok about McLean Hospital, arguing that Clancy had failed to get the care she needed while she was admitted. The judge called her credible but wouldn’t allow her testimony. She had some interesting thoughts, but she wasn’t a part of Clancy’s treatment. “We need to correct the misinformation that this prosecutor is saying,” Thorndike said in her TikTok. But her words would never make it to the jury. After all, she’s just a woman on the internet, convinced of a sliver of Clancy’s innocence, much like millions of other women following along online, rapt, invested, and furious. Crime Family Motherhood Crimes and Scandals TikTok