The trial of Lindsay Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse who admitted to strangling her three young children before attempting suicide in January 2023, has become the latest true crime sensation largely due to social media. Amateur sleuths, armchair lawyers and influencers have turned the soon-to-conclude trial into snackable, whodunit content, dissecting every detail and advancing their own theories across TikTok and other social platforms.
Rather than focusing on the established facts — particularly Lindsay Clancy’s own admission that she killed her children — a growing number of internet investigators have cast her ex-husband and the children’s father, Patrick Clancy, as the villain. The murderer.
“He was having an affair, he plotted, drugged her, made her crazy, killed their kids. Tried to kill her. When she didn’t die, he convinced her he killed them. Framed her. Sent her to prison,” one Instagram user wrote in a widely shared post.
In a TikTok video posted on Aug. 17, Lisa Rinna, the former star of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” said, “All right, he did it. Patrick did it. Patrick’s the one who did it. Not Lindsay. Patrick did it. Because, you know, I also heard that women typically don’t strangle.”
