Blog/News: What is With the Lindsay Clancy Case?

I’ve been pretty touch-and-go with the news lately, but one of the things that I keep seeing every time I go on a quick doomscroll is someone talking about the Lindsay Clancy case.

To sum up this case, back in January 2023, Lindsay sent her husband – Patrick Clancy – out of the house on some errands and while he was gone, she strangled her three children with an exercise band before cutting her wrists and neck and jumping out of the second story window of her house in a suicide attempt. When Patrick returned, he found her lying outside where she had fallen and called 911. While on the phone with emergency services, he went inside and found the children unconscious. When paramedics arrived, resuscitation attempts were made, but two of the kids were pronounced dead at the hospital, and the youngest died three days after the incident.

From that summary alone, it should seem like a pretty cut and dry case that should end with life in prison or the death sentence. But that’s only if we lived in a sane society…and if there weren’t underlying things that the defense is pulling out so she doesn’t get life in prison.

According to Lindsay, after the birth of her first two kids, she began experiencing postpartum anxiety, which worsened after the birth of the second child. She began taking Zoloft for it and trying talk therapy for a while. However, she only did this briefly, and after she gave birth to her third child, planned to resume taking the Zoloft because her anxiety had returned. Then, in September 2022, she was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, and prescribed Zoloft by her therapist, but after she complained about insomnia (which is a side effect of that medication), she was prescribed Ativan. She said that while it reduced her anxiety, it didn’t help her sleep, and she had turned to taking Benadryl as a sleep aid. She was then prescribed Buspar but didn’t take it since she didn’t want to try a new medication.

In November of 2022, things worsened as she was prescribed even more medications. During a visit to the ER on November 15, 2022, she was prescribed Trazodone. Six days later, on November 21st, she was prescribed Prozac by psychiatric nurse practitioner, Julie Paul. Four days later, Paul put Lindsay on Ambien, Remeron, and Klonopin. On November 29, she was prescribed with an anti-psychotic called Seroquel by nurse practitioner Rebecca Jollotta.

From there, things continued to get worse as Lindsay claimed the Remeron was causing her to have suicidal thoughts and severe emotional numbness. She told this to her therapist, Jeniffer Tufts, and to Rebecca Jollotta, but Jollotta testified that she believed it to be part of postpartum depression, not side effects from the medication. Lindsay also reported having hallucinations and calling two suicide hotlines, and Jollotta suggested that she had bipolar disorder, recommending hospitalization.

On December 20th, Lindsay Clancy went to Women & Infants Hospital Rhode Island for a day program to deal with post-partum depression, but was discharged, with hospital staff believing that she had been misdiagnosed and her symptoms were a result of overmedication. She was encouraged to get off the Seroquel and over the next few weeks began tapering off, though she was later put on Ativan and Amitriptyline.

Because of her reported postpartum depression and anxiety that led to her giant cocktail of drugs, Lindsay’s defense is arguing that she killed her children in a fit of postpartum psychosis, and thus, shouldn’t be put in prison. Instead, they’re arguing that she shouldn’t be found guilty of her crimes since she wasn’t in the right state of mind during the murders and should be put in a psychiatric facility.

Of course, this defense ignores that the explanation of insanity from postpartum psychosis does not match her official diagnoses, because while she was diagnosed with postpartum depression and anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder, and suggested to have bipolar, she was not diagnosed with psychosis.

However, there is something extremely odd about this case, that, from a Christian perspective does make me wonder. According to Lindsay, on the day that she murdered her children, she reportedly heard a male voice telling her to kill her children and herself. She reports that it became loud and demanding, repeatedly telling her to kill the kids and herself, saying she wouldn’t get another chance to do it, and during the murders, the voice took over and she felt like she had to comply. That detail makes me wonder: is she lying or did she actually hear something? If the latter, was that an auditory hallucination from the drugs messing with her brain, or was she actually possessed?

We may never know for certain, but that detail totally reminds me of the movie Nefarious. It also makes me ask the question: if she was demon possessed, how would the legal system deal with that? Would it be good to put her in jail forever? Would she be treated as insane and put in the psych ward? If she were exorcized or something, what happens then? Anyway…

Besides the question of if she was insane, of sound mind, or possibly possessed, there is something else that’s extremely disturbing about the case, and that’s the Lindsay Clancy supporters.

For some reason, women have been lining up in droves in support of Lindsay Clancy outside of the courthouse where she’s being tried. Online, women have been posting videos with the captions “Same, Lindsay,” “Me too, Lindsay,” etc. talking about their postpartum depression, rage, anxiety, etc. That would be disturbing enough that women are essentially saying that they, too, have had the urge to kill their kids, but what’s worse is that their kids are often in the videos with them. I can understand joking about wanting to kill your kids because they can be annoying, but when you’re saying that with a straight face in defense of a murderer…that’s just creepy.

What’s even worse than that, however, is that it’s seen as a feminist issue. Women online are saying that if Lindsay Clancy is found guilty, then we need to start a whole new feminist revolution for her. I didn’t think the modern feminist movement could get any worse. They already chant for babies to be killed up to the moment of birth and have erased what it means to be a woman. Now, they want a new feminist movement to defend a mentally unstable murderer that they believe should be acquitted essentially because her hormones were out of whack and causing problems.

Never mind the fact that this line of logic can easily be used by men to justify things like rape. An insane surge of testosterone made him do it and caused temporary insanity. He’s innocent. Or how it can be used to argue against women being able to vote or hold public office. After all, if a woman’s hormones can be so powerful that they cause insanity, then why trust women to vote rationally or be in charge of running a district, a city, a state, or even a country?

But the feminists don’t think that far ahead. They’re more interested in seeing what they can get away with. And in the case of Lindsay Clancy, there’s even been a copycat murder in which a woman – Corie Walsh – hanged her two-year-old, and when police arrived, she had self-inflicted wounds on her wrists and thighs. Incidentally, she too was reported to be having a psychotic break and was an avid follower of the Lindsay Clancy case. I’m sure that that murder totally wasn’t done for the attention of fem-nazis online and was actually the result of psychosis.

Overall, this is an interesting case, not just because it raises a lot of questions about the motives behind the murder, but because of what it’s revealed about society at large.

Until next time,

M.J.