David Millward/US Correspondent
Lindsay Clancy has become a feminist symbol at the same time as she faces life in prison for murder
Dressed in pink, around 300 women gathered outside a Massachusetts courthouse on Thursday wearing shirts emblazoned with slogans such as “Believe”, “She Needed Help”, and “Peace For Lindsay”.
The protesters prayed and made heart shapes with their hands. Some held up flags from across the world; others cradled babies.
The woman whom they, and scores of others at rallies across the globe, including the UK, Portugal and Peru, had turned out to support? Lindsay Clancy, the mother accused of murdering her three children aged 3, 5 and 8 months.
Ms Clancy, a 36-year-old nurse, does not deny killing Cora, Dawson and Callan by strangling them with exercise bands. However, she claims that it was not murder because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time.
The condition, also known as puerperal psychosis or postnatal psychosis, is a mental health disorder affecting around one in 1,000 new mothers. Symptoms – including mania, delusions, hallucinations, low mood and confusion – typically develop soon after giving birth, but can sometimes occur weeks later.
Ms Clancy’s case has prompted a reckoning by those who think she was failed by the system, with many women throwing their support behind her and holding her up as an example of failing mental health support for new mothers.
Ms Clancy has been made into something of a feminist symbol – for her supporters, her story shows how extreme circumstances must become before a conversation about mental health, and particularly new mothers’ mental health, is taken seriously.
“Lindsay shouldn’t even be on trial right now; the systems of mental health care should be,” Renee Kimball, the organiser of the Massachusetts protest, said.
The basic facts of the case are not in dispute.
On Jan 24, 2023, Ms Clancy sent her husband, Patrick Clancy, to pick up a takeaway meal and collect medication from a pharmacy in Duxbury, a wealthy seaside town of 16,000 people, about 35 miles south-east of Boston.
While he was out, she used three exercise bands to kill Cora, Dawson and Callan – aged 5, 3 and 8 months, respectively.
She then jumped from a second-storey window, sustaining serious spinal injuries. When she was found unconscious by police, Ms Clancy was suffering from hypothermia with her body temperature having plummeted to 27.8C (82.1F).
She is paralysed from the waist down as a result of the fall. Mr Clancy, 38, told the court he came home to find his wife in the back garden – and his two older children dead in the basement. Baby Callan was still alive, but died three days after the attack.
She was charged with murder and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. The prosecution says she “acted intentionally, rationally, and swiftly to accomplish a very specific goal – to kill”.
If convicted, she faces life in prison without parole. She has pleaded not guilty.
Claims of over-medication
After Callan was born, Ms Clancy sought help, having been diagnosed with postpartum depression and anxiety.
She put off returning to work at Massachusetts General Hospital and saw a procession of doctors. In all, she was prescribed 13 different medications as medical professionals tried to tackle her psychiatric condition, which was exacerbated by insomnia, triggered by one of the drugs she was taking.
“Every one of these doctors and nurses knew that she was suffering from postpartum [mental health issues], and now it’s turning into psychosis,” said Kevin Reddington, her attorney, claiming Ms Clancy was over-medicated at the time of the killings.
He said that Ms Clancy repeatedly sought help, speaking to multiple providers, tried various drugs, called a suicide hotline, went to an emergency room, and checked herself into a psychiatric hospital.
Throughout the trial, it emerged that Ms Clancy allegedly conducted internet searches for “how to slit throat to die” and “how to turn airbags off on Kia Sorento”.
Her defence team has argued that the searches were red flags which should have been picked up.
Mr Reddington was also scathing in his cross examination of Dr Jennifer Tufts, one of the doctors who treated Ms Clancy, whom he blames for over-medicating her.
He asked Dr Tufts why she only saw Ms Clancy over video rather than in person.
The attorney also questioned the decision to prescribe the anti-anxiety medication Zoloft.
“Why would you prescribe Zoloft to a young woman who is postpartum, who is telling you she has anxiety and telling you she can’t sleep? She has all of these symptoms, and you prescribe a medication with a side effect of trouble sleeping?”
Ms Clancy’s mother, Paula Musgrove, told the court that her daughter had spoken of harming her children as her mental condition worsened. Mr Clancy told the court the same thing.
“I think that there is just a bigger crisis of either the approach of mental health care or the lack of resources,” Ms Kimball said.
“It just gets to a point where people ask for help and ask for help and ask for help. And then there’s just a point where help stops.
“We hear about murder, homicide, suicides happening domestically every day. This is just another example of poor mental health not being treated that’s led to a tragedy.”
Another supporter, April Vincent, a 52-year-old paralegal from Providence, Rhode Island, added: “Women are being dismissed, neglected and ignored when we speak up.
“We’re scared because nobody takes us seriously.”
The case has swept across social media, with 31,000 people contributing more than $1m (£740,000) to a GoFundMe account for Ms Clancy’s parents Mike and Paula Musgrove, and triggered a wave of op-eds, podcasts and TikTok videos of people sharing their “hot takes”.
Candace Owens, a conspiracy theorist and conservative commentator, has even weighed in. “I made my thoughts clear on this. The moment that she was arrested, the moment that it made the news, Lindsay Clancy is obviously not guilty,” she said on TikTok.
“There are a fleet of doctors who should be imprisoned for what they put her on. I regularly speak out against big pharma. They get away with murder all the time.”
Ms Owens’s sentiment was echoed by a surprising number of women for whom her deep-state, anti-Semitic conspiracy videos would not normally resonate.
“They get medicine, they get therapy, and then it just comes to a point where there’s, like, no next step,” Ms Kimball said. “It’s become very clear that there is a mental health crisis, and clearly a lot of other women feel the same,” she told the Boston Globe.
“We’re here, we hear you, we understand you, and any one of us could have been sitting in your chair. So we are behind you, 100 per cent.”
The wave of support has led to an intense backlash online. Supporters of Ms Clancy have been called “terrible people” and “insane” by social media commentators.
The case has attracted a wave of increasingly outlandish conspiracy theories, with some online convinced it was Mr Clancy who committed the murders. He has not been charged and is not accused of any wrongdoing.
His new wife, Rachel Danis, bears a resemblance to his former wife, according to some on social media. Others claim that an apparent change of his shoes, according to CCTV from the night the children died, points to some kind of involvement.
A day does not go by without social media sleuths apparently decoding some small detail – a nod of the head in Ms Clancy’s direction by his mother-in-law, or a review left by Mr Clancy for a hiking trail in Costa Rica – as evidence of the father’s involvement.
Commentators have suggested that these wild conspiracies are further evidence of the need to talk about mental health. It is easier, they say, to imagine a father killing his own children than to accept a mother may do the same while suffering a psychotic episode triggered by childbirth.
Mr Clancy gave evidence at the trial, describing his former wife as a “very dedicated mother” and that her condition spiralled around a month before the children died after she started a new anti-psychotic drug.
But in the hours before the tragedy, he said “she was having one of her best days”.
As far as Ms Kimball was concerned, the Clancy case highlighted a problem that had been ignored for too long.
“People were just waiting for an invite for this,” she said of the protesters who turned out the world over in an effort to start an uncomfortable conversation about mental health.
