What the Lindsay Clancy Trial Taught Me

I don’t remember exactly where I was when I first heard her name. It was January 2023, and the headline did what headlines like that always do — it stopped me cold before I’d even finished reading it. A mother. Three children. Strangled. I sat with it the way you sit with something that doesn’t fit anywhere in your understanding of the world, turning it over, trying to make it make sense, and failing.

I am a mother. That single fact is the lens I couldn’t take off, no matter how hard I tried. I have stood in a nursery at 3 a.m., bone-tired in a way that has no bottom. I have felt the particular loneliness of being needed by small people every single minute of every single day. And still — still — there was no version of that exhaustion I could stretch far enough to reach what she did. So I didn’t try very hard. I made my verdict before anyone in a courtroom would ever get the chance to make theirs.

Lindsay Clancy killed her children, I decided. And she deserved to spend whatever was left of her life paying for it. No notes. No nuance. No nagging asterisk of but what if.

I didn’t know yet how ignorant I was of the case, its facts, her story and what would later come.

Fast forward three years. It’s 2026, the trial has finally started, and I’m doing what I do most evenings now — half-listening to a show, half-scrolling TikTok — when a video stops my thumb again, the way that headline did back in January of 2023. It’s commentary on Patrick Clancy’s testimony. Someone’s dissecting his words, his tone, cutting it together with captions doing a lot of the interpretive heavy lifting. And something about it just felt… off. Not wrong, exactly. Just off enough that I didn’t trust it. I closed the app before the video even finished.

If I wanted to actually understand this, TikTok wasn’t going to be the place I did it. So I went and found the real thing — the raw footage, unedited, uncaptioned, no one telling me what to feel before I’d felt it.

And that’s when it happened.

I watched his face. I watched his eyes. I watched the particular stillness of his body language, the kind that either means someone is composed or means someone is performing composure, and I have spent enough of my life reading rooms to know those two things look almost identical right up until they don’t. I listened to the way he talked — not just what he said, but the rhythm of it, the places where the words came too easily and the places where they didn’t come at all.

And then I rewound the footage. Started from the beginning again. That’s when I first SAW Lindsay, actually SAW her. Her reaction when Patrick walked into that courtroom?

Five-alarm fire.

I didn’t arrive at that thought — it arrived at me, whole and immediate, the same way my original certainty had three years earlier. And just like that, the conviction I’d been carrying since January 2023 — didn’t crack, didn’t erode away slowly, it just — evaporated. Gone, in the time it took to watch one man walk into a room.

Once the algorithm knew what I’d clicked on, it made its decision for me. My feed became a single, endless stream of Clancy content — clip after clip, theory after theory, strangers in cars and bathrooms and parked driveways explaining, with total conviction, exactly what had happened to that family. And here’s the strange part: every video made me more sure something was wrong underneath the official story, while simultaneously making me deeply suspicious of the people telling me so. They had the tone of people holding onto a raft in open water — loud, certain, a little unhinged — and I didn’t want to be one of them. I didn’t want to embrace my new train of thought without careful consideration, without evidence, without reasons that could survive daylight.

So I did the only thing that felt was honest: I stopped watching other people talk about the trial and started watching the trial.

All of it. Every day, gavel to gavel.

Within a few days I realized I was drowning in my own research — testimony piling on testimony, exhibits, timelines, half-remembered details from two weeks back that I needed to cross-reference with something said that morning. I needed a way to actually hold all of it, not just absorb it and hope my brain would sort it out on its own. So every evening, I uploaded that day’s transcript into Claude and had it break the day down for me — a clean outline of the evidence entered, the witness testimony and what it did or didn’t corroborate, where that day fit in the timeline, and yes, even a running ledger of the wilder TikTok theories, so I could hold them up against what had actually been said in that courtroom instead of what had been said about it.

Five weeks. That was the rhythm — watch, transcribe, outline, stack. Every single day, I added another layer of evidence to the pile and watched a few more possible outcomes quietly fall away. It didn’t feel like following a trial anymore. It felt like building a case file, one day at a time, for a verdict I was no longer guessing at. A verdict I was truly trying to objectively decide: for myself.

Somewhere around week two, the outlines stopped being enough. I didn’t just want a summary of the day’s testimony — I wanted someone to argue with me. So that’s what the evenings became: I’d lay out a theory, and instead of nodding along, Claude would push back, and I’d have to decide whether my theory could survive the pushing.

The first real test came early. I’d built a whole theory around the fact that Lindsay was a nurse — someone who’d know exactly how to be lethally effective if she wanted to die. So why three separate methods? I wrote it out almost triumphantly: “Why did she escalate to three separate methods of suicide when she very easily could have killed herself with the first method… This makes me question whether or not she hurt herself, but also if she did, she was CLEARLY not in her right mind.” It felt airtight to me. Then it was pointed out that escalating through methods is a well-documented pattern in real attempts, not a tell that someone wasn’t serious, and that her actual injuries argued against the “not really trying” half of my theory. I didn’t defend it. I just wrote back, “Fair enough,” and moved the whole idea from “doubt about what happened” to “evidence about her state of mind” — which is a very different pile to stack it on, and I made myself move it.

Not everything folded that easily, and I want to be honest about that too, because a real audit isn’t just noticing when you’re wrong — it’s noticing when you’re only partly wrong and refusing to pretend otherwise. I’d built a timeline theory around how long Lindsay was outside in the cold, and how that window mattered for whether one of the children could have plausibly been revived. When the counterargument came back — that the extra time more likely came from ambulance delay, not an earlier start time, and that pushing the killings earlier collided with Patrick’s own account — I didn’t drop it. I conceded the point but kept the thread: “I can concede for now but there is more issues with actus reus than just this.” That’s the harder kind of self-audit. Not “I was wrong,” but “I was partially wrong, and I need to sit with the part that isn’t resolved instead of rounding it up to fully wrong just to feel finished.”

I even started grading my own arguments against each other, which felt strange the first time I did it — like turning a critical eye on a case I’d spent weeks building for myself. I had four separate doubts stacked on top of each other, and when I was asked to weigh them honestly instead of defending all four with equal force, I ranked them out loud: “Sloppy investigation… it’s the weakest but with all the other things, it’s something yet.” Admitting your weakest card is weak, while still holding the hand, is a different kind of honesty than either folding or bluffing.

The number is the part I’m proudest of, if I’m honest. Claude had estimated a guilty verdict — either degree — as the single most likely outcome, somewhere around 35 to 45 percent. And even though a lower guilty number wasn’t obviously the outcome I wanted more of by that point, I didn’t just accept it because it came from the analysis instead of from me. I pushed: “You really think that all of the points we made for acquittal and NCR could be resolved for a guilty plea 35–45% chance?” That question forced both of us to get precise about something I hadn’t realized I was conflating — the difference between the single most likely outcome and an outcome that’s more likely than not. Two different claims, and I’d been treating them as one.

I tried to hold myself to that same standard when I built out my hung-jury theory, too. It would have been easy to only imagine the version that flattered my own leaning — a holdout who doubted her guilt. Instead I made myself build the mirror image with equal care: “I believe that there will be at least one person who believes she is guilty of murder one… I also believe at least one person will think she didn’t do it. For similar reasons on the opposite side. And that they will be just as hard to sway.” Arguing both sides of a coin toss you’re hoping lands a specific way is uncomfortable. I did it anyway, on purpose, because the theory wasn’t worth much if I’d only stress-tested the half of it I liked.

I want to note here that while I was doing all of this — in real time, as the trial unfolded — there was also a lot of noise online that I was not able to ignore. However, I didn’t allow any other opinions or wild theories to sway me from the facts. I kept to cold, hard evidence and data to back up where my mind was leaning. I stayed away from extremes and focused on finding the thing that most closely felt, to me, like truth.

But the moment that mattered most — the one that actually taught me something about myself instead of just about the case — was Patrick. Somewhere in the middle of all this rigor, all this careful weighing of actus reus and demeanor evidence and probability, I said a sentence I still remember writing: “I wholeheartedly believe that he did it… he tried to kill her and he killed their kids. Because there is nothing more dangerous than a man who wants a new life.” No timeline supported it. No exhibit backed it up. It was pointed out — fairly — that the alibi evidence didn’t fit, and that reading a man’s face in a courtroom is one of the least reliable forms of evidence there is. I knew that. I’d made that exact argument myself, about other people, days earlier.

And I still couldn’t put it down. So instead of forcing myself to abandon a belief that wouldn’t leave, or dressing it up as something more evidentiary than it was, I just told the truth about what kind of belief it was: “I still can’t shake my gut feeling… And, even if I’m dead wrong, that’s okay. Because I’m not actually on the jury. And my believing something to be true, doesn’t make it true. But I’m being honest, on the personal level. For me, this is the truth that I can sit with. Regardless of the verdict. I know the verdict doesn’t validate or invalidate my experience or beliefs.”

That sentence is the whole audit, really. Five weeks of transcripts and outlines and stacked evidence, and what I actually learned how to do wasn’t reach a verdict. It was hold a conviction and a doubt about that conviction in the same hand, at the same time, without needing one to cancel the other out.

I want to update that belief here, in the same place I first made it, because burying a correction at the bottom of a post would be its own kind of dishonesty, and dishonesty was the whole thing I was trying to train myself out of. I no longer believe Patrick Clancy killed his children. The record never gave that theory anything solid to stand on, and eventually I had to do to it what I’d made myself do to every other theory in this process: weigh it against the evidence, and let it go when it couldn’t survive the weighing. What I still believe, and what I don’t think the evidence lets me set down, is that he is culpable. Not for the killings. For leaving her alone. For missing what was happening to her, or seeing it and not acting on it, and then walking away from the wreckage into a new life while she carries all of it, permanently, by herself.

If the research had taught me how to hold conviction and doubt in the same hand, TikTok taught me something else entirely — how quickly a comment section can turn into a mob, and how much of that mob’s fury landed, disproportionately and viciously, on women.

I want to be precise about what I mean by vitriol, because “people were mean online” doesn’t begin to cover it. There were two warring camps — those certain Lindsay deserved to die in prison, and those certain her ex-husband did it and she should walk free — and both sides could be staggeringly cruel. But cruelty aimed at a stranger’s opinion is one thing. What I watched happen to women who expressed any sympathy for Lindsay — even women who fully believed she’d killed her children and simply argued she’d been too psychotic to be criminally responsible — was something else. It was a coordinated campaign of ruin. Women were doxxed. Their employers were called. Someone, somewhere, decided the appropriate response to a woman saying I think this was psychosis, not malice was to report her to child protective services, as though holding a clinical opinion about another mother’s mental state was itself evidence of unfitness to raise your own children. Men left partners over it. Broke off engagements. Called their own girlfriends “dangerous,” accused them of “justifying baby murder,” or worse, insisted that a woman capable of that much empathy for Lindsay must be capable of the same thing herself, waiting in the wings.

And then it went somewhere I genuinely did not see coming: people, men and women both, started calling, in real numbers, for the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment. Women, they argued, weren’t stable enough to be trusted with a vote, if this was the kind of “mass psychosis” a sympathetic opinion represented. I sat with that for a long time. A woman on trial for killing her children while allegedly in the grip of postpartum psychosis had somehow become the pretext for arguing that women, categorically, were too unstable to participate in democracy. The irony was so total it almost looped back around to feeling deliberate.

But I don’t want to only tell you about the ugliest corner of that feed, because it wasn’t the only one, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. On the other side of that same app, women were building something. They found each other in comment sections and stayed. They prayed together. They dug through the same cold, hard facts I was digging through, compared notes, corrected each other, and stood their ground without flinching or apologizing for it. What started as scattered sympathy turned into an actual movement — women sending Lindsay hundreds of letters, flowers, encouragement, some of them traveling across the country to stand outside that Plymouth courthouse in pink, holding signs that weren’t about her innocence so much as about maternal mental health care reform. They started a GoFundMe for her parents, who’d spent three-plus years quietly drowning financially while their daughter’s case played out in public. It raised over a million dollars.

So that’s the honest, uncomfortable shape of what I watched: real hatred, feral and unhinged and mostly aimed at women for the crime of having a complicated thought out loud, sitting right alongside real tenderness, real community, real money moved to help a family that needed it. Both things were true on the same app, sometimes in the same hour of scrolling.

I don’t think I fully knew what to do with that contradiction. I’m not sure I do yet.

If I’m honest about what really pulled me under, it wasn’t the legal theories or the timeline gaps. It was recognition. Watching Patrick, I kept seeing shapes I knew from the inside — patterns I’d lived through myself, in motherhood, in being a wife, in building a home, in building a career. Not the specifics. The shape of it. The particular architecture of a person slowly, patiently making you doubt your own reality while the rest of the world sees only his composure and her exhaustion.

And that recognition turned into fury almost instantly. Because what do you mean, a man can watch a woman come apart in front of him for months, watch the sleeplessness and the spiraling and the pleading for help, and still leave her alone with three small children on the worst night of her life? What do you mean he gets to sell the house, pack up, move away, and build a new life with someone else, while she sits unable to walk, having lost the very thing she was, in her own broken and psychotic way, trying to protect? I turned that possibility over and over and it never got easier to hold. It still hasn’t.

But the fury didn’t stay contained to one man. The deeper I went, the angrier I got at everyone who should have helped her and didn’t. A medical system that had every opportunity to see what was happening to Lindsay Clancy — that had her in front of them, discharged her anyway, and then, when it all went wrong, didn’t apologize, didn’t reckon with what they’d missed. They stood ten toes down instead and called her a liar. An entire system built to protect mothers in crisis looked at one falling apart in real time and decided the cleanest story was that she’d made it up.

Add that to what I was simultaneously watching happen to women on TikTok — doxxed, reported, abandoned, accused of being dangerous simply for extending compassion — and I found myself in a strange, exhausting loop. Every place I looked, women were being failed, blamed, or punished for the failing. By the end of it, being this deep in the trial didn’t feel like following a case anymore. It felt like being in an abusive relationship with it, pulled back in every single day, certain this time would finally give me something resolved, and never quite getting it.

The call came the way these things always seem to: not with the courtroom hush I’d been picturing for five weeks, but with the familiar sound of people filing back into the courtroom, streaming on my TV. Hung jury. Mistrial declared, on September 4th, after the panel spent more than six days and over thirty-eight hours behind closed doors. Twelve people, nine women and three men, had all the same evidence I’d spent five weeks building outlines from, and they still couldn’t get to unanimous.

I didn’t have to wait long to find out what actually happened in that room. Days later, the foreperson and two other jurors sat down for an interview and confirmed almost exactly what I’d guessed weeks earlier, down to the mechanism. The panel had been leaning toward not guilty by reason of insanity. The foreperson, Roni Carlson, said the lone holdout, a man, told the room he had reasonable doubt about Lindsay’s criminal responsibility, and that she was so relieved she started filling out the verdict forms. Then he told her he still wasn’t going to sign off. Not because the doubt wasn’t real to him. Because he wasn’t willing to let it move him.

Reddington’s team tried to have him removed from the panel for exactly that reason, arguing he wasn’t following the judge’s instructions on reasonable doubt and that holding a woman to a hung verdict under those conditions amounted to its own kind of constitutional violation. The other jurors described him as unwilling to hear anyone out; when jurors with nursing backgrounds tried walking him through the hospital toxicology report, he reportedly waved it off. One juror, speaking anonymously afterward, said the case never handed either side a smoking gun, and that there was too much genuine gray area to be certain of anything, which is more or less the exact place five weeks of transcripts had walked me to as well.

I don’t say any of that to relitigate the holdout’s conscience. I don’t know what he actually sat with in that room, and I’m not interested in pretending I do; that’s the same overreach I spent this entire project trying to train myself out of. But the mechanism matters, because it’s the difference between “the jury couldn’t agree” and “one person acknowledged the standard was met and voted against it anyway.” Those aren’t the same failure. Only one of them is a failure of process instead of a failure of consensus.

I want to pause here and say something about Kevin Reddington directly, because I don’t think I’ve given him enough credit for what he actually did in that courtroom. This is a defense attorney who took a case most lawyers would have run from, one already convicted in the court of public opinion before he ever said a word, and tried it like he believed every part of it: the actus reus arguments, the psychiatric evidence, the timeline gaps, all of it, argued with a rigor that matched or beat anything the Commonwealth put up. But it’s not just the legal craft. He’s been one of the loudest, most consistent voices out there actually treating postpartum psychosis as a real, underdiagnosed, undertreated crisis instead of a punchline or an excuse, at a moment when plenty of people online were happy to make it into both. And whatever anyone thinks of the theory of the case, the way he has talked about Lindsay herself, with something that actually looks like care instead of performance, has stuck with me. He didn’t just represent her. He fought for her like she mattered, in front of a public that had mostly already decided she didn’t.

But a mistrial isn’t an ending. It’s a pause button on a story that’s going to keep going, and now there’s a date on the calendar to prove it. The next hearing is set for September 29th at 9 a.m., which means somewhere in the next few weeks, the Commonwealth and Reddington both have to decide what comes next, in public, on the record.

Kevin Reddington isn’t interested in giving anyone room to regroup. He’s already signaled he wants to retry this immediately, next week, if he had his way, because he doesn’t want the Commonwealth given time to evaluate Lindsay again, with new experts almost four years later. He’s called their experts unqualified, said outright he doesn’t believe the Commonwealth proved actus reus beyond a reasonable doubt, and made clear he thinks a second trial only gets harder for the prosecution, not easier, that their case, in his view, degrades rather than strengthens with time. This isn’t surprising coming from the man who responded with, “I wouldn’t believe him if he said, in the middle of a blizzard, that it was snowing out, okay?” when asked about Patrick’s version of events.

That line tells you exactly what a second trial is going to look like. I think Reddington leans even harder into the timeline gaps, the body temperature discrepancy, and the so-called confession, but I think the real shift is rhetorical. I expect a lot more “Patrick said” framing this time around: not accusing him outright, but methodically attaching every disputed fact to his account specifically, letting a jury sit with the implicit question of what if he’s the one who isn’t telling the truth, without Reddington ever having to say it in so many words. Reddington has publicly denied believing Patrick did it, so I don’t anticipate him to actually accuse Patrick. I believe he will only use inconsistencies to point out holes in the investigation that lead directly to more reasonable doubt. I wouldn’t be surprised if he pushes for a change of venue, too, though I doubt he gets it; this case has been too visible for too long for any Massachusetts courtroom to offer a genuinely untouched jury pool.

The request I’ll actually be watching for on the 29th is a bifurcated trial. If Reddington asks for that again and gets it, I think it changes almost everything. A bifurcated trial means the first phase is about facts and evidence alone, did she do it, completely walled off from questions of mental state. And the facts and evidence, on their own, are exactly where all that reasonable doubt I spent five weeks stacking actually lives. Strip away the emotional weight of psychosis and culpability for a moment, and just ask a jury to weigh the actus reus case in isolation, and I think acquittal becomes a real possibility in a way it wasn’t when everything was tangled together at once. Add a sequestered jury, insulated from the TikTok feeds that flooded my own phone for five weeks, and I think you get twelve people reasoning from the courtroom record instead of from the internet’s verdict. If most or all of that comes to pass, my honest read is that the odds of acquittal go up, not down, the second time around.

I still don’t know exactly what happened inside Lindsay Clancy’s mind in that house in January 2023, and I’m not sure any trial, this one or the next one, is built to answer that question fully. What I do know is what I believe now, and it isn’t where I started, and it isn’t even where I was partway through this project, and I think that arc is worth saying plainly instead of pretending I arrived here in one piece.

I believe Lindsay was suffering a severe, undertreated mental health crisis, one that both her husband and the medical system had real, repeated opportunities to see and intervene on, and largely didn’t. I believe she did something unthinkable while unable to fully understand what she was doing. And I don’t think the evidence proves, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she was criminally responsible for it in the way the law requires. I don’t think there’s enough here to convict her. I don’t think there’s enough here to hand her a clean acquittal either. What there is, is a woman who will never walk again, will never mother her children again, and will spend the rest of her life carrying a memory that would break almost anyone forced to hold it.

The greatest tragedy in this story is, and will always be, Cora, Dawson, and Callan. That has to be said first, plainly, and it can’t be diluted by anything that comes after it. But I’ve come to believe Lindsay’s tragedy deserves space too, without that space taking one inch away from theirs. She deserves lifelong treatment for what this has done to her, physically and psychologically. More than that, I think she deserves grace: not the kind that excuses what happened, but the kind that doesn’t demand a person be destroyed twice, once by her own mind and once more by a system that offers her nothing but a cell.

And I don’t believe that only for her. I believe it in every case that looks like this one, whether the person who did the unthinkable is a mother or a father, a woman or a man. Mental healthcare in this country is broken in ways that eventually get someone killed, and we keep responding to the wreckage instead of the cause. Psychosis is not an excuse for murder. I’m not arguing it should erase accountability. I’m arguing that a prison sentence isn’t accountability when the actual failure was an illness nobody caught in time, and that locking someone away until they die of neglect isn’t justice. It’s just a slower, quieter version of the same failure that got us here.

Imagine it happening to you. Imagine losing your mind so completely that you did something monstrous, and then coming back to yourself only to learn what your own hands had done while you weren’t there to stop them. I don’t think there’s a sentence long enough to add anything meaningful to that. Lindsay will never recover, not fully, not physically and not psychologically, and I don’t think justice requires that she also die slowly in a cell to prove a point.

I think justice looks like the people who failed her, her husband included, being held to some kind of account. And I think it looks like removing her from society, yes, but into treatment, with dignity, because she is still a human being who lost her children, her marriage, her ability to walk, and her mind, all in the same handful of minutes. That’s not nothing. It shouldn’t be nothing to the rest of us either.