Patrick Clancy Carries a Grief Only One Man Understands

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dre.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
We got one more segment here to have a conversation about, and it's Patrick Clancy. He lost all three of his children on the same night. If you go on TikTok for a little while, you'd think he's a murderer running the streets in the dark, wearing a mask. No, he lost all three of his children. He's a victim here too. He found his wife at the base of their house after she jumped from a second story window. These are just facts. He has since divorced, he has remarried, he moved to New York, and a significant portion of the internet has decided he's the one who should be on trial.
It seems to start out, because I'm trying to wrap my mind around this, Shavaun Scott, psychotherapist and author with us, and Robin Drake, retired FBI special agent, chief of the counterintelligence behavioral analysis program. As I try to wrap my mind around this, I'm trying to go from the beginning. Like, where do we get off the rails here? Where does Patrick become the villain in this case? Because I was very surprised when I first heard about this a couple weeks ago with people going down this road. And I think it kind of begins, at least for me, you tell me, Shavaun, of people trying to define what appropriate grief looks like, of which there is no such thing. There's no appropriate grief. A lot of people seem to really think they know what it is. And they're not afraid to tell you that accepting a job in New York four months after your children died is very inappropriate, because you might meet somebody there, and three years later you might get married. To which he did. Oh my God. Then he also went on a trip. He went on a, like, when I read about the trip, people were like, oh, he went on a vacation. No, he didn't go on a cruise. He didn't go to Sandals. It sounds very much like a soul-seeking, quite honestly, when I read about where he went, I believe it was Costa Rica originally, then he was staying in hostels in Europe because he didn't want to be around families because he couldn't stand the sight of it. So this, to me, sounds like a soul-finding trip, or you might find him out dead in a wood somewhere because he's decided he's had enough. It could have gone either way.
That that was inappropriate as well because he left a review about a hike he went on. Oh my God, it was a hike that was peaceful for him after the living hell he's gone through. Somehow these are all horrible things.
Where do you think this goes off the rail? Is it because people just are never satisfied with how someone grieves so we must make them into a villain when it's not congruent to everyone else and how one would handle such a horrific situation if it happened to them, God forbid?

**Shavaun Scott** (3:00)
God forbid. Yeah, this is, folks, and this has disappointed me in humanity again reading those things. I've just had to stay off Instagram because it's just flooded with it.
As we've spoken, it's a lot of trying to turn him into a monster.
Or the other group is trying to turn Lindsay into a monster. As we've said, there are no monsters here. And it's tragic because this is the kind of thing a therapist would suggest. Get away, change your scene, because if you're staying, let's say he's staying in the home, staying in the town where this happened, he's going to be perseverating and never be able to get this out of his mind. I mean, I'm sure every day, most moments of the day, certainly at this point, this is in his mind. And clinically, these are all good things. Take a trip, rediscover the meaning of life for you after this, the life that you thought you had was shattered. And it's a therapeutic thing to do, it's a healthy thing to do. And certainly finding a person who is healthy, who is comforting to you, who has compassion for you, that's also good therapy. So I find this urge to punish him, it's sadistic and it really disappoints me and people.

**Robin Drake** (4:31)
I'm so glad to hear you say that, that that's what a therapist would recommend, because I thought about this yesterday. It's not just him witnessing and seeing and being part of the loss of his three children and to a large extent the loss of his wife.
I can't imagine and help me understand how he can even deal with survivor's guilt on this one.