Most family annihilators are men. It’s a grim fact that such incidents are common enough to have a discernible pattern. The massacre is carried out by a husband and father, often one who is on the verge of bankruptcy or divorce; typically, it forms the finale of a long reign of domestic violence terror.
About half the time, the perpetrator kills himself after slaughtering his family. Gun use is common – a large number of what are termed “mass shootings” in the United States are in fact family annihilation killings, in which a man turns his weapon on his family members. Other times, the killer uses knives, or fires.
This kind of killing does not always make the news. When it does, news organizations often run family photos, in which the killer smiles on a beach or beside the Grand Canyon with his arm around the wife and children he will later shoot or strangle.
In this context of pervasive and normalized male domestic violence against women and children, the Lindsay Clancy case was always going to attract outside attention. Because in that case, when three Massachusetts children were strangled of their family home in January of 2023 – Cora, who was five, Dawson, who was three, and Callan, who was just eight months old – the killer was their mom.
As is fairly common for family annihilators, Clancy attempted suicide after killing her children. But Clancy survived. Injuries left her paralyzed below the waist. At her murder trial, which lasted an unusually long six weeks and concluded in a hung jury on Friday, she rolled to the defense table each morning in a wheelchair.
The mistrial means that Clancy – along with her children’s father, their grandparents, and everyone else who loved them, to say nothing of the state – will now face the possibility of being subjected to a second trial. All because of a hung jury.
Eleven of the 12 jurors accepted the argument put forward by Clancy’s defense, that Clancy, who does not contest that she killed her children, was suffering from an acute case of postpartum psychosis, and hence could not be held legally responsible for their deaths. But according to notes that the forewoman of the jury sent to the judge, one juror, a man, expressed “reasonable doubt” about Clancy’s culpability under the law, but refused to apply that doubt as is legally required.
That this lone juror who wanted to convict Clancy was male is relevant, because the Clancy case itself became, in the distorting ways that such stories tend to when they are witnessed en masse through social media, a referendum on motherhood, mental healthcare, and the status of women.
Some mothers have expressed deep sympathy for Clancy’s postpartum mental health crises, citing resonances with their own experiences and a hope that the case can bring greater attention to the rare but acute and debilitating kind of postpartum mental suffering that Clancy seems to have experienced; others say that medical neglect of the condition, and of the experiences of postpartum women more broadly, create the conditions for tragedies like that of the Clancy family.
Some on the misogynist right, meanwhile, have seized upon Clancy’s actions and the support she has received as evidence that women are congenitally evil, disposed to violence, untrustworthy, and unfit for public life.
Your opinion on the Clancy case will likely largely depend on whether you believe her defense team’s claim that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis that was severe enough that she experienced the kind of delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, rapid shifts in mood, and other departures from reality that would render her not responsible for her own actions. In other words, do you think she was really ill, or do you think that she killed her children in cold blood, and is lying?
The facts suggest that she isn’t. Clancy had a history of postpartum psychological distress following the births of her first two children, in 2017 and 2019. She was prescribed medication after those births, and seems to have been a loving and attentive mother to them for years.
But following the birth of her third child, a little boy named Callan, in 2022, reports suggest that Clancy began to experience something different, and much more serious, than her previous bouts with postpartum anxiety.
She couldn’t sleep, wasn’t eating, and would experience bouts of sudden, acute terror. Going back to her job as a nurse in a labor and delivery unit seemed impossible; she could barely function. She sought help again and was diagnosed with anxiety.
Later, she would speak to other mental health practitioners, too. A series of providers issued her a stunning array of psychiatric medications. As her sleeplessness continued, Clancy was prescribed increasingly powerful tranquilizers.
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More than a month before she killed her children, Clancy reported that she had begun to hallucinate. She kept seeking help, saying that she was thinking of killing herself; she told both her mother and her husband that she feared she would harm her children, though she had never mistreated them before.
Clancy briefly checked herself in to inpatient treatment, but left after just a few nights. The Clancys seem to have thought that longer-term hospitalization was out of the question. After all, she had kids to take care of. Soon, she was hearing voices.
Those who are most outraged by the Clancy case, and by the sympathy that a homicidal mother has received, are disturbed by the unnaturalness of a woman killing her children, disturbed by what they fear is a secret core of hate and depravity in women that could be unleashed at any time.
But if I were a psychoanalyst, I might say that the right wing that imagines all women as potential Lindsay Clancys is projecting their own guilt: on some level, they know that what our culture asks mothers to do is unsustainable, cruel, and often quite literally maddening.
Because to me, what is most haunting about the Clancy case is how ordinary and unsurprising all the failures were that led to her break.
She was failed in ordinary ways by providers who saw a woman living in relative comfort and assumed her suffering could not be very serious; she was failed in ordinary ways by a community that understands motherhood to be a state of variously mild and acute suffering, and has so normalized women’s disappearance into the family that they can barely see the mother for the baby.
She was failed by the expectation that women will persevere through their own suffering, even their most disturbing and agonizing moments, to care for their children; she was failed by the trivialization of women’s lives, and by the blithe assumption that the so-called “baby blues” were mere neurotic episodes, not psychotic breaks requiring serious clinical interventions. Her children were failed, too.
