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Posted on 09/10/2026 7:38:02 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The declaration of a mistrial in the filicide case of Lindsay Clancy coincides, for me uncomfortably, with a new UK reissue of my 2003 breakout novel We Need to Talk About Kevin. The book concerns a mother whose son becomes a high-school mass murderer. She agonises over whether something has always been wrong with him or something is wrong with him because something is wrong with her. Prior to publication, I’d imagined that the commercial hook would be the frequency with which self-pitying adolescents were taking their misery out on their classmates and teachers, since when I wrote the novel school shootings had yet to be fictionalised.
Instead, what hit a cultural nerve was ‘maternal ambivalence’. The text dares to explore parenthood in de-romanticised terms. It gives mothers permission to admit that they sometimes find caring for small children dull, that the unqualified devotion to offspring we expect from mothers is not necessarily innate or automatic, and that even normally loving parents sometimes dislike their own children. At publication, opening a more honest conversation about the reality of bringing up baby seemed like a good thing. Now I’m not so sure. Given what passes for feminism these days, I feel guilty.
Let’s give no credence to fanciful internet claims that the husband did it just because the husband always did it. The grisly facts of the Clancy case are not in dispute. Having sent her husband on an errand to get him out of the house in January 2023, Lindsay took her three children, aged five, three and eight months, to the basement and strangled them with exercise bands one by one. She killed two outright; the youngest would prove brain dead. She then cut her own wrists and neck.
The seriousness of her suicide attempt is debatable – the cuts were shallow – although jumping from a first-floor window did paralyse her from the waist down. Her husband returned home to the kind of horror it took me 400 pages to build up to.
Plausibly, having to live forever after with the enormity of such a crime seems sufficient punishment – although jurisprudentially that would mean releasing any lawbreaker who feels bad.
The defence argued that Lindsay was in the grip of postpartum psychosis, thus not criminally responsible. And frankly, the whole business of mental illness and criminality is an unsettled mess. Maybe any woman capable of that atrocity is insane by definition.
I always roll my eyes at films in which characters are mortally smothered with a pillow in ten seconds – because, for fatal results, Lindsay must have cut off the airway of each child for four to five minutes. That’s an incomprehensibly long time to watch your own children die. Surely such a killer had to be mad.
Yet this circular reasoning could delegitimise the entire justice system. We could submit with the same circularity that people who violate the moral codes of their culture are insufficiently socialised and therefore evolutionarily defective; if their psyches are damaged or broken, bad behaviour is not their fault. In fact, the whole left-wing trend is to place the locus of control outside the offender. Not the culprit but racism did it. An abusive childhood did it. A history of sexual violence did it. That’s a mechanical, soulless model of personhood – human as inert object, without agency, merely acted upon – and to competent novelists, anathema.
The argument over how deranged you need be to no longer exercise moral free will may be insoluble. What alarms me more is that the conversation I helped start has moved on. If the pink-clad boosters outside that Massachusetts courthouse are any guide, we’re no longer discussing maternal ‘ambivalence’ but maternal depravity. Online and off, women have identified with Lindsay Clancy, joining a veritable chorus to proclaim that the murderer in that basement ‘could have been me!’. Clancy’s family’s GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $1 million. Missing from protestors’ posters is any concern for the fate of the children.
The Clancy fan club insists their heroine was neglected by a medical establishment that fails to take postpartum mental illness seriously. Yet Lindsay sought help from multiple therapists, outpatient programmes, ERs and doctors. They issued her 30 prescriptions for 13 potent drugs. Her problem wasn’t lack of healthcare but too much of it.
The impression her sympathisers leave is that bearing children is intolerable. That motherhood is an affliction. Women have videoed themselves screaming hysterically at their own young kids, posting the clips proudly on social media as if to say: ‘See? This is what the grotesque imposition of raising another generation drives us to. Lindsay’s crazy? We’re all crazy! We totally understand strangling your own kids because we’re tempted to do the same thing every single day.’ Obviously, such performances aren’t doing wonders for the hard-won popular belief that women are capable of rationality and self-control. Maybe we should never have been given the vote after all. Maybe a female president really would press the button when she’s having her period – right after murdering the first family’s kids.
I chose not to have children. That was probably the right decision for me, but being ‘child-free’ is no claim to fame. Rather, my unsuitability to motherhood betrays a deficient generosity of spirit. I’m grateful to my own parents for sacrificing on my behalf. I wasn’t always fun to have around, either –but I hope I’ve redeemed their efforts now that my temper tantrums are down to three or four a year.
If women collectively repudiate pregnancy and its subsequent stresses as unreasonable burdens levied by ‘the patriarchy’, our species will vanish. Purportedly ‘very invested’ in the Clancy case, while Lindsay’s jury was in deliber-ations, Corie Walsh of suburban Illinois allegedly hanged her two-year-old son from the rafters before attempting suicide earlier this month. (Walsh’s lawyer claims she was ‘experiencing a psychotic episode’.)
Behold the kind of copycatting we get when progressive icons include a fentanyl-addicted petty criminal, a cold-blooded assassin who shot a father of two in the back, and, yes, a deeply disturbed mother who choked her three children to death. Is this why we encourage having role models?
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Her demeanor baffles me. No visible grief, no visible regret.
4 -5 minutes to die for each of the children. I cannot imagine the horror they went through. Being killed by your own mother, the single most important being in a young child’s life. I didn’t hear any talk of what the kids went through by the defense or any women who supported “poor” Lindsay.
She planned it, executed it and tried an ill attempt at suicide to make things look good.
I recently heard something that actually makes sense (to me anyway):
“If Lindsay Clancy is innocent due to postpartum illness, then Jeffery Dahmer was just hungry”.
It's true of psychopathy as well.
Plus, insanity is hard for normals to understand...
Don’t worry I’m not. Lots of evil people here need to be clean up. You can delete my posts all day long and you will NEVER change my mind. I am one who has all of this one can take.
The woman is a cod blooded killer. The jury had one man and that man is a hero.
I have 0 sympathy for Lindsay Clancy.
I believe she cold-bloodedly murdered those little helpless children, denying them the right to life - and deserves the death penalty.
If those were my little grandchildren, I would offer to pull the switch...
Are you saying she’s fishy?
“If Lindsay Clancy is innocent due to postpartum illness, then Jeffery Dahmer was just hungry.”
I’d change that to: “If Lindsay Clancy is innocent due to postpartum illness, then Jeffery Dahmer just had a craving.”
But, her actions were so methodical and planned that I believe there had to be some awareness of what she was doing.
Overall, though, all I ever see is the sadness this case brings. The loss of those beautiful children is the most devastating aspect. However, when I see the pictures of Clancy sitting in court, she seems soulless and basically dead inside. Unlike a previous comment, I see a great deal of sorrow and regret in her face and manner.
My only hope is that the children are safely in God's loving arms, and the family will find comfort in God's grace and mercy.
Plus, insanity is hard for normals to understand...
It’s hard to believe that in any sane society an essay like this would be necessary. But then, we don’t inhabit any semblance of a sane society any longer.
Sociopaths are like that. She certainly had the wrong career.
An insane person is just as guilty as a non-insane person...imho. And taking drugs does not matter... to me.
Why would a 4'10" 8lb quadriplegic white woman think she was Della Reese aka Tess on Touched by an angel and think she was at her own funeral but was going to reveal herself "Tess". She also beat herself black and blue. All while clueless doctors prescribed more. When confronted with PROOF by me what was going onit was called rubbish unti I said lets go talk to your hospitals Pharmacology Professor who wrote the warning. Only then did they listen.
Look I have no idea what went on in that womans mind. But I do know for 100 stone cold fact what her medications could have triggered.
They give those out like candy but go ask for a medically needed valium or Xanax. Good Luck.
Unlike what TV shows might suggest, the insanity plea rarely works. It's not enough to be mentally ill, the defense must prove that the individual's mental illness was so severe that they had no concept of what they were doing at the time or that what they were doing was illegal. Other than a small handful of people with full-fledged hallucinatory psychosis or the severely retarded, few qualify.
If you allow any and all mental illness to be a get out of jail card, our prisons would be nearly empty - psychopaths and sociopaths are by some standard mentally ill, and they make up a very large fraction of criminals. However, mentally ill or not, they know perfectly well that what they do is illegal, they just don't care. Much like Clancy.
She was not taking the meds. She only had a large dose of serequel in her system. The meds were prescribed consecutively as she said they did not work.
I wonder who else she killed?
Forensic scientist Hillary Griffiths, who works in the toxicology unit of the Massachusetts State Police crime lab, testified to processing Clancy’s blood and urine samples.
Griffiths said Clancy’s blood tested positive for several prescribed psychiatric medications.
Her blood had benzodiazepines like Ativan, which treat anxiety disorders, and also Seroquel, which is an antipsychotic, among a few other prescription drugs, she said.
Lindsay Clancy tested positive for several psychiatric drugs after killings
People like to blame the meds and the doctors.
However, the MEDICATIONS are prescribed to KEEP HER FROM HARMING herself or others due to the insane thoughts she is having.
She may have been mentally insane at the time she killed her children. I guess you would have to be. However, she also had premeditated thoughts of how and when to kill them. While her husband was away.
There are lots of crazy people in prison for the rest of their life.
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