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Photograph by Greg Derr / Pool / Reuters
The trial of Lindsay Clancy has reached its fourth week. Clancy is accused of murdering her three young children, in 2023, while in the midst of a postpartum mental-health crisis. She is pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, but the prosecution is arguing that she operated “coldly and calculatingly” when she fatally strangled her children. In 2024, I interviewed Clancy’s now ex-husband, Pat, for a piece about the case, and he told me, “I wasn’t married to a monster—I was married to someone who got sick.”
Pat agreed to speak with me then because he wanted to quash “lies and misinformation” about the tragedy that he saw circulating online. Unfortunately, since the trial began, the misinformation has only multiplied. Social-media commentators have propagated conspiracy theories about the case, including a theory that Pat himself committed the killings. There is no evidence to support this idea. Both the prosecution and the defense agree that Lindsay killed her children. But the rampant proliferation of such theories speaks to the difficulty of making moral sense of a case like this one.
