In 2023, Lindsay Clancy, a former labor-and-delivery nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, strangled her three children to death with exercise resistance bands in the basement of the family home. She then cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window, an act that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Her murder trial opened in Plymouth Superior Court in July and is expected to run for six to eight weeks.
Both sides agree Clancy killed five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan. What is contested is whether she should be held responsible. Prosecutors say Clancy “acted intentionally, rationally and swiftly,” and point to the fact that she texted her husband, Patrick, to grab takeout and stop by the pharmacy shortly before the killings, thus ensuring the house was clear. Her defense says she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis and undiagnosed bipolar disorder, made worse by 13 psychiatric medications from a revolving cast of providers, and that a voice told her it was her “last chance” to kill the kids and herself. Psychiatrists who’d seen her in the preceding weeks testified they had not noticed signs of psychosis.
We are watching social-media-induced insanity taking hold of otherwise normal women
