The dark side of America’s obsession with the Lindsay Clancy trial

Shumita Basu (0:00)

Hey there, a quick warning before we get into today's show. This episode includes descriptions of violence against children, adult language, and mentioned suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, please contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988

This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, what Lindsay Clancy's murder case reveals about America.

For weeks, people across the country have been gripped by the trial of Lindsay Clancy. The Massachusetts mother accused in 2023 of killing her three children, five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan, before allegedly attempting to end her own life. Clancy's defense team didn't dispute that she killed her children, but they've argued that she shouldn't spend the rest of her life in prison, that she should be found not guilty because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis after being prescribed more than a dozen medications for mental health conditions, including depression and anxiety. After seven days of deliberation, a jury couldn't come to a unanimous decision, and it ended in a mistrial. The trial was live streamed and picked apart on social media in a way that's so excruciatingly of this moment, in part because it touched on so many high-stakes systems, postpartum care, criminal justice, mental health.

Jessica Winter (1:36)

I think in making sense of the case, it is representative of so many ill in our society. It is representative of so many systems and structures and habits that we need to reform and break, but it's really hard to look at the whole thing at once.

Shumita Basu (1:53)

Jessica Winter is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She's followed and covered virtually every detail of this case. I spoke to her on this show back in 2023 when she first wrote about it. Today, I'm bringing her back because I wanted to talk to her about why so many people have become so deeply invested in this case. And what does it say about us as we try to make sense of such a horrific story?

What has it been like for you now watching this unfold over these past years and of course, watching this trial unfold?

Jessica Winter (2:28)

I think it was inevitable that the trial would get a lot of attention. It's a case that obviously triggers really heightened emotions for people. A mother killing her three small children. I mean, what could be worse? How could you possibly understand such a thing? So it was always going to get some attention. As the trial unfolded, I was surprised at first how much attention it was getting because it seemed like a lot of this was a foregone conclusion. We know she killed her children and we, at least from my perspective, having written about postpartum psychosis, we seem pretty well assured that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she killed her children. And so I kind of wondered what there was to see here other than a woman suffering, a husband, a family suffering, and it all being put on public display for us to gawk at.

So I thought at first that it was just morbid curiosity.

And then the more it went on, and the more and more people seem to latch on to it, as this is an occasion to talk about postpartum mental health. This is an occasion to somehow show solidarity with Lindsay Clancy, which feels to me a pretty misguided thing to do. We also saw on the other side of things, a lot of right-wing influencers kind of seizing on the case. People like Matt Walsh, Katie Miller, saying things like she should be executed, she should be executed publicly, all of those kinds of statements. And I think that there were also genuine questions being raised about the rigor of the police investigation into this case.

And I think a lot of that has been kind of painted with a broad brush as conspiracy theorizing, and a lot of it is. I've seen some outlandish alternate theories of the case on TikTok involving doppelgangers and literal co-conspirators, and I think we can set all that stuff aside. But I think some of these questions were rational and reasonable and coming from a place of genuine concern and curiosity. And it all kind of snowballed into this international spectacle that we really haven't seen in a long time. I mean, we just had, in Massachusetts, Karen Reed last year, but this completely eclipsed that trial in terms of this becoming almost a monocultural event, which is just strange when you think about the core of the story, which is the violent deaths of three young children.

Shumita Basu (5:28)

Yeah.

Well, let's back up for a moment and touch on the basics of this story. What did we learn during the trial about what was happening in the Clancy family before this tragedy?