There are moments when a society's response to a tragedy becomes almost as revealing as the tragedy itself.
The Lindsay Clancy case is one of those moments.
In January 2023, three children in Duxbury, Massachusetts—five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan—were killed in their home. Their mother, Lindsay Clancy, has acknowledged that she strangled the children with exercise bands. She subsequently attempted suicide by jumping from a second-floor window and survived with paralysis. She is now on trial for three counts of murder.
The central legal question is not whether the children died or whether Clancy caused their deaths.
Even her defence does not dispute that.
The question before the jury is whether she was criminally responsible for what she did, with her lawyers arguing that she was experiencing severe postpartum psychosis and other mental-health problems at the time. Prosecutors argue that the killings were deliberate and that she remains criminally responsible.
That distinction is fundamental.
But outside the courtroom, something much stranger has happened.
A section of the public has transformed the case into a movement of sympathy for the accused mother.
And the question now confronting American society is not simply whether Lindsay Clancy was mentally ill.
It is whether compassion for a perpetrator can become so overwhelming that the victims disappear from the story.
Three Children, Three Lives, One Horrific Night
The victims were not abstract statistics.
Cora was five.
Dawson was three.
Callan was eight months old.
According to prosecutors, Clancy strangled all three children in the family's Duxbury home before attempting to take her own life. The prosecution argues that she waited until her husband, Patrick Clancy, had left the house before carrying out the killings.
The defence tells a radically different story.
It portrays Lindsay as a mother suffering from a catastrophic psychiatric illness after the birth of her third child. Her attorneys argue that she repeatedly sought medical assistance, struggled with suicidal thoughts and was inadequately treated and possibly overmedicated.
That argument is now being tested in court.
And it deserves to be.
Postpartum psychosis is real.
It is rare, but extremely serious, affecting roughly one to two women per 1,000 births. It can involve hallucinations, delusions, confusion and a profound break from reality.
Understanding that illness matters.
But understanding mental illness and excusing a criminal act are not automatically the same thing.
That is precisely what the jury must determine.
Then Came the Pink Rally
On August 20, hundreds of supporters gathered outside the Plymouth County Superior Court.
Many wore pink.
Some carried messages including “She Needed Help,” “Believe” and “Peace For Lindsay.”
The demonstration was organized around solidarity with Clancy and broader concerns about women's mental health and the treatment of postpartum psychiatric disorders.
And this is where the public reaction becomes uncomfortable.
Imagine the scene.
A mother is on trial for killing her three children.
Outside the courthouse, hundreds of people gather wearing the same colour to express solidarity with her.
Some supporters say they are not celebrating the deaths.
They are protesting a mental-health system they believe failed a woman in crisis.
That distinction matters.
But symbolism matters too.
When hundreds of people visibly rally around a woman accused of killing her three children, the emotional centre of the story inevitably shifts.
The murdered children become background.
The accused mother becomes the protagonist.
And that is where society must be careful.
The $830,000 Question
Then there is the money.
A GoFundMe campaign established for Lindsay Clancy's parents had raised approximately $830,000 by August 17, according to reporting by CT Insider.
But there is an important correction to the viral narrative circulating online.
The money was not technically raised for Lindsay Clancy herself.
It was established to support her parents, Michael and Paula Musgrove, who have supported their daughter throughout the case and reportedly faced major financial and logistical burdens.
The campaign was created by Brandee Mulligan, a TikTok creator with no known prior relationship to the family. Mulligan received permission from Lindsay's father before launching the fundraiser.
That distinction should not be erased.
Saying that “women raised $830,000 for a child murderer” is rhetorically powerful, but it is not an accurate description of where the money was directed.
The more accurate—and arguably more interesting—story is that hundreds or thousands of people were willing to financially support the family of a woman accused of killing three children, while the case remains unresolved.
That tells us something important about contemporary American culture.
Why Are People Rallying Around Her?
The answer is more complicated than “Americans support murder.”
They don't.
The supporters interviewed by the Associated Press described their motivation differently.
They see Clancy's case as a symbol of failures in maternal mental-health care.
Some have personal experiences with postpartum depression or other mental-health problems.
They believe women experiencing severe psychiatric distress are frequently dismissed or inadequately treated.
They fear that if society treats Clancy solely as a monster, it will become harder to discuss the medical circumstances that may have contributed to the tragedy.
That argument deserves to be heard.
But there is a line between understanding how someone became dangerous and turning that person into a moral hero.
Those are not the same thing.
And Then the Internet Made It Worse
The case has also produced an extraordinary online phenomenon.
Some social-media users have gone far beyond supporting Clancy's mental-health defence.
They have accused her husband, Patrick Clancy, of being responsible for the children's deaths.
One viral TikTok poll reportedly attracted almost 130,000 votes, with 93 percent of respondents selecting Patrick as the person they believed had actually killed the children—even though Clancy's own defence acknowledges that she killed them and is instead arguing that she was not criminally responsible because of mental illness.
This is where legitimate advocacy becomes dangerous conspiracy.
There is no evidence establishing Patrick Clancy as the murderer.
He discovered the aftermath after returning home.
He called 911.
And the defence itself is not arguing that Patrick killed the children.
Yet social media has created an alternative reality in which the husband is recast as the villain.
Why?
Because some people find it psychologically difficult to reconcile two ideas:
A loving mother can commit an unimaginably horrific act.
That contradiction is uncomfortable.
So the internet searches for another explanation.
Maybe the husband did it.
Maybe the doctors did it.
Maybe the healthcare system did it.
Maybe society did it.
Maybe everyone is responsible except the person who physically carried out the killings.
The problem is that reality can be more complicated than a villain-versus-victim story.
The Children Should Not Become Collateral Damage in the Mental-Health Debate
This is perhaps the most important point.
America absolutely needs a serious conversation about postpartum mental illness.
Women should be able to seek psychiatric help without stigma.
Doctors should recognize warning signs.
Families should understand the symptoms.
Healthcare systems should provide appropriate treatment.
And nobody should have to reach the point of psychosis before receiving meaningful help.
But the existence of a healthcare failure does not erase the existence of victims.
Cora was still killed.
Dawson was still killed.
Callan was still killed.
They were not responsible for their mother's psychiatric condition.
They did not create the healthcare system.
They did not cause the alleged medication problems.
They did not choose their mother's circumstances.
They were children.
And they died.
That fact must remain at the centre of the conversation.
Compassion Has to Have Boundaries
There is nothing wrong with feeling compassion for Lindsay Clancy.
A person experiencing psychosis is not necessarily operating with the same understanding of reality as a healthy person.
If the evidence demonstrates that Clancy was genuinely psychotic when she killed her children, that should matter enormously to the legal outcome.
But compassion does not require us to rewrite history.
We can say:
She may have been desperately ill.
And simultaneously say:
Three innocent children were murdered.
We can demand better maternal healthcare.
And still remember the victims.
We can believe that mental illness deserves treatment.
And still believe that the deaths of three children demand accountability.
We can reject simplistic notions of evil.
Without turning the perpetrator into the victim.
The Most Dangerous Development Is Victim Erasure
The disturbing part of this story isn't that Americans are discussing postpartum psychosis.
They should.
It isn't that women are supporting another woman.
There is nothing inherently wrong with solidarity.
It isn't even that people are raising money for her parents.
People are free to decide where their money goes.
The troubling development is what happens when the narrative becomes so focused on the suffering of the accused that the suffering of the dead becomes almost invisible.
That is when sympathy becomes distorted.
The children cannot give interviews.
They cannot defend themselves.
They cannot explain what happened.
They cannot tell the jury what they experienced.
They cannot participate in the debate over their mother's mental health.
Their father must live with the loss.
Their grandparents must live with the loss.
Their relatives must live with the loss.
And yet the public conversation increasingly revolves around the woman who survived.
That is the strange moral imbalance at the centre of this case.
America Does Not Have a Monopoly on This Kind of Contradiction
It would also be lazy to portray this as something uniquely American.
Every society has examples of people sympathizing with perpetrators.
Every culture has its own ways of explaining away terrible behaviour.
What is distinctly modern is the scale and speed at which social media can manufacture communities around a criminal case.
A murder trial can become a fandom.
A defendant can become a celebrity.
A lawyer can become an influencer.
Strangers can raise hundreds of thousands of dollars.
People can conduct amateur investigations from their bedrooms.
And algorithms can repeatedly feed users content that confirms whatever conclusion they already prefer.
The result is what some observers have called “forensic fandom.” The Lindsay Clancy case has become a particularly striking example of how online communities can transform a criminal proceeding into an emotional identity battle.
But There Is One Thing We Should Not Forget
The courtroom is not TikTok.
It is not Facebook.
It is not a pink rally.
It is not a GoFundMe.
The jury will eventually have to decide a narrow legal question based on evidence.
Was Lindsay Clancy criminally responsible when she killed her children?
The defence says no.
The prosecution says yes.
And until that question is decided, calling her a convicted murderer is legally premature.
But there is no legal requirement for society to suspend moral memory while the trial continues.
Three children are dead.
That fact is already established.
The Real Lesson
Perhaps the most valuable lesson from this case is that mental-health advocacy must be careful not to become perpetrator advocacy.
If postpartum psychosis contributed to this tragedy, America needs to learn from it.
If doctors missed warning signs, investigate.
If medications were improperly prescribed, establish what happened.
If hospitals failed a desperate mother, hold institutions accountable where appropriate.
If families did not understand the seriousness of her condition, educate them.
But do not turn the murder of three children into a story in which the children disappear.
And do not manufacture a villain out of an innocent father simply because the alternative explanation is emotionally unbearable.
The truth does not need a convenient villain.
It needs evidence.
Cora, Dawson and Callan Deserve to Remain at the Centre
Lindsay Clancy's mental state may ultimately determine whether she is legally responsible for what happened.
That is for the jury.
But regardless of the verdict, the historical record should preserve the most basic truth of this tragedy:
Three children died.
Cora was five.
Dawson was three.
Callan was eight months old.
Their lives should not become footnotes in an adult argument about mental health, feminism, marriage, medicine or social media.
America can have compassion for a mentally ill mother.
America can demand better healthcare for women.
America can support her parents.
America can debate the insanity defence.
But none of that requires pretending that the children were anything other than what they were:
innocent victims of an unimaginable tragedy.
The challenge is not to choose between mental-health awareness and accountability.
The challenge is to hold both truths at once.
Because when compassion for the accused becomes so overwhelming that the victims disappear, society has not necessarily become more humane.
It may simply have forgotten whom the tragedy was supposed to be about.
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