When I first heard about the Lindsay Clancy trial, I was deeply uninterested in learning more. I’m not a true crime person, and this is about a mother who killed her three children and then tried to kill herself in a daze of postpartum psychosis. Much too sad for Emily.
But then I was on Internet and people were saying that maybe her husband did it. That’s when I whipped out my little Sherlock Holmes tin foil hat to get to the bottom of things. Thank G-d I’m here.
Lindsay and Patrick Clancy were a nice couple with three young children — Callan, Dawson, and Cora Clancy. Cora was 5. Callan, the youngest, was 8 months old.
After Callan was born, Lindsay reduced her hours as a labor and delivery nurse to deal with her mental health. At the time, she thought she was dealing with anxiety and postpartum depression following the birth, although medical professionals would later believe that she was bipolar. But when she started treatment in September 2022, Lindsay was most concerned about her anxiety and insomnia.
She started working with a psychiatrist and a psychiatric nurse practitioner, who, over the course of five months, prescribed a dozen different medications. Lindsay would frequently express concerns over becoming addicted, but I think anyone who’s taken SSRIs knows there’s no chance you’re abusing those bad boys. With side effects like weight fluctuation, sleep disruption, and lowered sex drive, no one is taking SSRIs out for a ride and a good time.
Lindsay specifically expressed concerns about the antipsychotic drug she was prescribed, detailing in her sessions with her nurse that she was having suicidal thoughts but had no plan to harm herself or the children. Because she wasn’t showing signs of psychosis or mania, her nurse encouraged her to keep taking the medication, explaining the initial side effects and advising Lindsay to stick with it.
Lindsay disagreed. While her nurse was on a planned vacation, Lindsay committed herself to a psychiatric hospital. At no point did her nurse practitioner or psychiatrist consult with the hospital about the care Lindsay received there. Lindsay was discharged after two days in the hospital, but it does not seem that she was discharged with a care plan agreed upon by all her mental health providers.
Just nineteen days after being discharged from the psychiatric hospital, Lindsay strangled her children and attempted to kill herself.
On January 24, 2023, Lindsay said she heard a commanding voice tell her to “kill the children so you can kill yourself.” Aside from that, she had a pretty normal day.
She took Cora to the doctor in the morning, and played in the snow with Cora and Dawson as Callan napped. Around 4:45pm, Lindsay texted Patrick asking if takeout would be okay for dinner. He said yes, and Lindsay asked him to pick it up, along with some over the counter medication for Cora from CVS.
The prosecution argues that Lindsay used the errands to get Patrick out of the house. Patrick claims he left around 5:15pm and returned around 6pm. When he got home, the house was oddly quiet. He looked around the first floor before going to their bedroom on the second floor, finding the door locked. Using an emergency key, Patrick unlocked the bedroom door to find the room in disarray — blood splatters on the floor, the bed moved, and the window open in the dead of winter. When he looked out, he saw Lindsay laying below in the yard.
After crushing pills and making (superficial) cuts to her wrists and neck, Lindsay had apparently jumped from their second-floor window. Patrick said that he rushed down to her, immediately asking her where the kids were. He said that she was able to respond to him that the children were in the basement. Interesting, because the paramedics described her as unresponsive and unable to speak when they got there.
Patrick called 911 with some difficulty, but was ultimately able to connect with emergency services. When officers arrived, he yelled for help in the yard, leaving Lindsay with them while he went to check on the kids.
Patrick was still on with 911 when he discovered the children in the basement, all three of them strangled. He began to remove the exercise bands from their neck, calling for help. Only Callan, the 8 month old, was still alive at the time. He was rushed to the hospital, ultimately succumbing to his injuries three days later.
Lindsay too was taken to the hospital. She went into cardiac arrest on the way over, waking up two days later on a ventilator, paralyzed from the waist down. Her first word upon waking up was written on a white board was “horrified.”
The trial, which is expected to last six weeks, kicked off on July 27th. Lindsay’s attorneys do not dispute that she killed the children, but they are saying that she should not be held criminally responsible because she was in a psychotic state, believing that she heard voices ordering her to take the lives of her children and her own.
But postpartum psychosis is poorly understood in the legal system, and in a case like this, where jurors will hear about the violent deaths of three young children, there’s a chance that they overlook her mental state because her actions were so horrific.
Because of that, her defense team is making a brilliant move. Yes, they’re putting forth their main argument — that she did not have the mental capacity for murder — but they’re also planting the seeds that Patrick was the one who murdered the children.
Lindsay’s team does not have to prove that she’s innocent. It’s up to the prosecution to prove that she did this beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s therefore a genius back up plan to point out the inconstancies in Patrick’s story, undercutting the prosecution’s case and their ability to meet their burden of proof.
This is where Internet is really spinning out. There are a million rumors buzzing around, like Patrick’s brother being a police officer (not from what I can find). Below, I’ve compiled the top things I’m seeing with my analysis on their relevancy.
Patrick claims that he left the house at 5:15pm. He says he called Lindsay at 5:33pm to ask if generic meds were okay, and there’s video of him picking up takeout at 5:54pm. Here’s his complete timeline:
5:15pm: Leaves the House
5:20pm: Arrives at CVS
3 minute drive from the house
5:33pm: Calls Lindsay from CVS
5:44pm: Leaves CVS
Mama, that’s 24 minutes in the CVS to get one thing…
5:54pm: Arrives at takeout restaurant
10 minute drive from CVS
6:05pm: Arrives at home
10 minute drive from restaurant
6:09pm: Calls 911
This is all feasible, minus anyone willingly spending 25 minutes in a CVS. And if he left the CVS after the call with Lindsay, there are 20 minutes of unaccounted for time. The CVS is a 3 minute drive from their house; the restaurant is a 10 minute drive. It’s possible that Patrick could have returned to the house. If he had an accomplice (there were mixed-person DNA on the bands), he could have checked in on the murders before finishing his errands and solidifying his alibi.
The issue with Patrick’s timeline is that we know he was home at 5:24pm because he sent an email from his work laptop. In the basement.
Honestly, huge win for capitalism if sending a work email leads to Patrick’s conviction. You’re telling me this man was such a corporate shill that he had to shoot off a “will do” email while killing his kids? G-d bless America.
This is why I think he went home. Because Patrick is on the CVS cameras wearing brown boots. And he’s at the takeout restaurant wearing tennis shoes.
Patrick says that he didn’t call 911 right away because he was having a hard time getting through, with the call connecting to wifi and then dropping off.
But according to 911.gov, “all wireless phones, even those that are not subscribed to or supported by a specific carrier, can call 911.”
Meaning that even if you have no service, no cell plan, and no internet, a call to 911 will immediately bypass the usual connection routes, finding the closest cell tower and dialing out.
So, why all the difficulty Patrick?
Yes, Lindsay has confessed to the murders. But at the time of the murders, she was dealing with anxiety, insomnia, and brain fog so severe that it impacted her ability to plan or reason with herself. In her journal, Lindsay wrote “I feel disconnected from myself, time, reality.”
Add in the fact that she was being improperly treated for bipolar disorder, and you have a person who was clearly not functioning or understanding the world around her.
In her civil case against her care team, Lindsay alleged that ”each failed to properly diagnose [her] bipolar disorder with postpartum onset and instead subjected her to a disorganized, uncoordinated course of polypharmacy that exacerbated her condition and precipitated a severe psychotic break”
A dozen meds in five months is a lot. It’s clear that Lindsay’s health care team failed her when they failed to communicate with each other and coordinate care. And the severity of that failure calls into question her ability to accurately remember the events of that day.
Lindsay’s prints were not found on the exercise bands or on the knife that she used to cut herself with.
This, however, is pretty common. It’s difficult to pull a print to begin with. Add in an irregular surface and the fact that Patrick removed the bands himself, and it’s unlikely you’re going to get fingerprint evidence.
When paramedic’s arrived, Lindsay’s body temperature was 82o, roughly a 12-14 degree drop in an hour, tops.
A healthy adult in the same weather conditions would lose about 3 degrees in an hour. However, Lindsay suffered damage to her spinal cord near the T5 and T6 thoracic vertebrae.
And according to an expert in Parade Magazine (don’t judge my sources you guys, I’m doing my best over here), a spinal injury at T5/T6 “severs the brain’s connection to blood vessels and muscles below the chest. This cuts off the body’s two primary heat-generating defenses below the level of injury: constriction of blood vessels and shivering. Trauma doctors refer to the resulting condition as poikilothermia, the tendency of the body to match the temperature of whatever surface it’s sitting on.”
So, it’s possible that Lindsay, given her injuries, was unable to do things like shiver to keep her body warm. It’s therefore possible that she had such a severe drop, especially since she was laying in the snow.
Bottom line, I don’t know who killed the kids. But to me, it feels like it is not beyond a reasonable doubt that Lindsay did it. I’m not quite to the collective fervor that the internet is, but Patrick’s story is suss. And he got remarried a few months later, which isn’t helping things.
We’ve got another month of this though. Who knows what else will come out. Until the defense rests, I promise that my tin foil hat will stay on.
And she’d probably like it!
If you don’t know who Sophie Cunningham is, I’m not surprised. She’s a bench player for the Indiana Fever with a career average of 8 points a game. The only reason that people started talking about her last season was because she blatantly slammed another player to the ground in the name of “protecting” Caitlin Clark.
Since her WWE stunt, Sophie has become known as Caitlin’s enforcer. Given her shooting average, it’s about all she was going to be remembered for. That is until she decided to go after trans women.
Sophie is now using her platform to talk about banning trans women from sports, saying that she’s trying to protect young girls in the locker room. To my knowledge, there are no cases of a trans girl attacking a cis girl in a locker room. There are cases of adults abusing young girls, a la Larry Nassar, but not trans people.
So why would Sophie, as a member of a league with ZERO trans athletes, decide to speak out against trans people? The followers!
Since she made her anti-trans statements, Sophie has gained over a million new followers. She’s now at 3.8 million followers on Instagram, surpassing real WNBA stars like Aja Wilson (1.5 million) and Paige Bueckers (3.1 million). And getting very close to Caitlin Clark’s numbers (3.9 million).
She’s also shopping a tell-all book. All this while Washington state attempts to pass a bill that would require genital checks for young female athletes. Talk about harming women in locker rooms.
Trans women in sports is a non-issue that the right uses to undermine female autonomy.
Trans people are estimated to make up 1-2% of the population of the United States. But they make up less than less than 0.002% (10/500,000) of US college athletes, and even fewer of recent Olympians (0.001%).
Further, a 2024 study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine concluded that transgender women may have several physical disadvantages when it comes to competing with cisgender women. The study found that transgender women performed worse than cis women when it came to lower-body strength and lung function. And found that there was no meaningful difference in hemoglobin profiles or bone density between cis and trans women.
All of this to say that the argument that trans women will outcompete cis women is not predicated on science. The argument that they will hurt cis women is not predicated on fact. It’s all predicated on the idea that female exceptionalism must have an upper limit. To the right, women should not be aware of all the things that they can achieve.
Playing sports teaches women to be strong, to work as a team, and to support each other. It gives them power. And it’s not lost on me that conservatives are going after the WNBA, one of the most popular, black, and gay leagues in the country. And while Sophie has tried to backtrack and say that she “loves trans people” (sure Jan…), she’s still benefitting from using her platform to spread hate and disinformation.
That’s why I’ll forever be grateful for Dijonai Carrington for this block.
Sure, Dijonai got ejected from the game. But it was worth it.
Brad Pitt did an interview with Esquire (I’m pretty sure the journalist fell in love with him … it got weird). He revealed that he’s no longer sober. Which definitely isn’t helping the shitty dad allegations
Tate McCrae posted an add for Neutrogena where she refused to let the makeup wipe touch her skin
And Tom and Zendaya had a wedding ceremony in Surrey at a place called “Beaverbrook Manor.” The British mind continues to confound.
That’s all for this week!
XOXO,
Emily
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