Ep. 1821 - The Lindsay Clancy Case Isn’t A "Who-Dun-It." Why Are TikTok Moms Pretending It Is?

**Matt Walsh** (0:00)
Today, we're going to discuss one of the most horrifying murder cases in memory. And we don't often cover murder cases on the show, unless the case has political implications of some kind. Outside of those kinds of cases, this is not a true crime podcast. And this murder case in particular is so awful, so dark, so totally unthinkable and ghastly that, frankly, I don't like to think about it and would therefore prefer not to talk about it. Yet the case does have implications, not merely political, but deeper than that. The murder itself, the reaction to it, the commentary on it, the defense that's being argued in court, all say something and something quite troubling about our culture. And that's why I've decided to spend at least one episode of the show discussing it. So Lindsay Clancy is a former labor and delivery nurse. Back in January of 2023, she sent her husband Patrick out of the house to run an errand at CVS and pick up food. With Patrick out of the way, Clancy took her young children Cora, age five, Dawson, age three, and Callan eight months into the basement, where she methodically strangled them each to death with exercise bands. Clancy then slashed her wrists and jumped out of a second story window, sustaining serious injuries that left her paralyzed from the waist down. When her husband arrived, she told him the kids were in the basement. He ran downstairs to find them all dead. And later, according to her husband, Lindsay claimed that she had heard a voice commanding her to kill the children and then herself. Now, despite what the wannabe Nancy Drews are saying on TikTok, this is not exactly a whodunit. Lindsay Clancy confessed to the crime. Her guilt is self-evident. And her attorneys in front of the jury aren't even attempting to argue that she didn't commit the crime. They've stipulated to all of the forensic evidence, which means they formally agree that all the evidence is real and legitimate and valid. Again, they are not trying to argue that she didn't do it. She did it. That is not being disputed by any rational person, though it is being disputed by plenty of irrational people, as we will see.
Instead, the case is about whether Lindsay Clancy qualifies as not guilty by reason of insanity, specifically by reason of postpartum psychosis exacerbated by the medications that she was taking.
This is a defense that should not exist as a matter of law. Once a woman brutally murders her own children, it doesn't matter what a therapist says about why she did it. It doesn't matter how she felt. It doesn't matter if she was sad or anxious or indeed insane. She should be removed from society permanently as a matter of justice. If her defense is that she's so crazy that she just can't help herself, that she had no choice but to strangle her own children to death, then that's all the more reason to remove her from society permanently. It should not be controversial to say that a person who methodically executes three children, strangling each to death while the others watch in horror, is a person who must be punished to the fullest extent of the law, crazy or not, on medication or not. There are some things that you can do in life that once they've been done preclude you from ever walking free again. These are actions that cry out to heaven for vengeance, justice must be done, punishment must be given, and if murdering three children, your own young helpless children, does not qualify as one of those sorts of actions, if it does not call for the most severe punishment, then nothing does.
We should note that a successful insanity plea in the state of Massachusetts does not at all mean necessarily that the person who was found not guilty by reason of insanity will spend the rest of their life in a mental institution. You'll often hear people claim that there's no reason to get upset when a murderer is found not guilty by reason of insanity because they'll still be locked up in an institution for life. But that's not true.
There's a reason defendants try for the insanity defense. The fate of a person found not guilty on that basis is considerably more favorable than one who is found guilty. Now, if we were still living in the 1940s, when the criminally insane were committed for life to insane asylums, which were institutions often more punishing and nightmarish than actual prisons, then I might feel differently, but we're not in the 1940s anymore. If Clancy's insanity defense is successful, she will be placed in a mental health institution indefinitely but not necessarily permanently. The state will have to petition every single year to keep her there. Every year, they will have to prove that she is still mentally ill and a risk to society. If they can't prove it or if they decline to petition in the first place, then she will in fact be released back into society. That happens all the time. There's a very high chance that it would happen with Lindsay Clancy. The only way to permanently remove this woman who, again, murdered three children from society is to find her guilty of murder in the first degree and put her into prison for life with no parole or execute her.