Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children to death with exercise bands in the basement of their Duxbury, Massachusetts home on January 24, 2023. Five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan. She sent her husband Patrick out for takeout and medicine, used Apple Maps to time how long she had, did the deed, then slashed her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window. She lived. The kids did not. Callan lingered three days on life support with no brain activity before dying.
She admits she did it. Her defense is postpartum psychosis and a cocktail of psychiatric drugs. Prosecutors say it was planned murder: she was a labor-and-delivery nurse who knew exactly what she was doing. The jury of nine women and three men has been deadlocked for days as of September 2, 2026. The judge gave them the dynamite charge. A hung jury or mistrial is possible.
Meanwhile, hundreds of women showed up outside the Plymouth courthouse in coordinated pink shirts reading “Believe,” “She Needed Help,” and “Peace For Lindsay.” Some brought their own babies. They made heart shapes with their hands, prayed, and cried. Online they sell merch, raised over a million dollars on GoFundMe for her parents, and film themselves weeping while holding their living children and quoting Clancy’s diary. Some even floated the idea that the husband did it.
This is not mental health awareness. This is a deranged personality cult built around a woman who killed three small children.
Women in pink rally in support of Lindsay Clancy who is on trial for killing 3 children | Courthouse News Service
Look at them. Grown women traveling from other states, sleeping in cars, standing behind yellow caution tape in matching pink, treating a child-strangler like a feminist martyr. One organizer said any of them could have been sitting in that chair. Another admitted she wasn’t really thinking about the dead kids. That’s not empathy. That’s a complete collapse of moral reasoning.
Postpartum depression and even rare postpartum psychosis are real. Most mothers who experience them do not systematically strangle a five-year-old, a toddler, and an infant while the father is on a timed errand. Treating Clancy as “every woman” is an insult to the millions of mothers who suffered and did not murder anyone. It is also an insult to Cora, Dawson, and Callan.
Patrick Clancy found his children with the bands still around their necks and screamed on the 911 call that she killed the kids. That audio exists. The supporters prefer the version where she is the primary victim.
This Has Happened Before. The Outcomes Were Not Pink Rallies.
Andrea Yates (2001, Texas). She drowned her five children — Noah, 7; John, 5; Paul, 3; Luke, 2; and Mary, 6 months — one by one in a bathtub, then laid them on a bed. She had a long, documented history of postpartum psychosis, hospitalizations, and suicide attempts. First trial: convicted. Conviction overturned because a prosecution expert gave false testimony. Second trial: not guilty by reason of insanity. She has been in a Texas state hospital ever since and has declined opportunities that might lead toward less restriction. That case is the closest analog to Clancy’s defense. It is also the reason “postpartum psychosis” is now a household phrase. It is not a reason to hold a pep rally. No pink merch line. No “I stand with Andrea” TikToks with living babies. People understood the difference between a genuine break from reality and a cause célèbre.
Susan Smith rolled her car into a South Carolina lake in 1994 with her two sons, ages 3 and 14 months, strapped in the back. She invented a story about a Black carjacker to buy time. Motive: she wanted a man who didn’t want kids. She was convicted of murder and is still in prison. Denied parole. That was cold-blooded. No one organized solidarity rallies calling her a symbol of failed healthcare.
Susan Smith, nearing parole after murders of young sons, says she’d be ‘good stepmom’: report | FOX 5 DC
Diane Downs shot her three children in 1983, killing one, and blamed a “bushy-haired stranger.” Convicted. Still claiming innocence decades later. Classic psychopath playbook. Again, no army of women in matching shirts insisting “it could have been any of us.”
These cases are not identical. Yates had a long, documented psychotic history that even the state eventually accepted. Smith and Downs were calculating. Clancy’s case sits in the middle: she sought treatment, was on many medications, claimed a voice on the day of the killings, and also mapped her husband’s return time and chose a method that required holding bands tight around the necks of three children of different sizes until they stopped moving. A jury of mostly women is currently struggling with that distinction. The pink crowd already made up its mind.
The supporters are not “raising awareness.” They are performing. They are turning three dead children into content and a dead woman’s alleged voices into a brand. They brought living toddlers to a rally for a woman who used exercise equipment as a murder weapon on her own toddlers. That is deranged. Using the word “retarded” here is not a medical diagnosis. It is an accurate description of the judgment on display: the inability to hold two thoughts at once — that mental illness exists and that strangling your children is still an atrocity that does not deserve cheerleaders.
If your response to three small bodies in a basement is to put on a pink shirt, form a heart with your hands, and say “she needed help,” you have lost the plot. The children needed their mother not to kill them. Everything else is secondary.
The jury is still out. The pink brigade already issued its verdict. It is the wrong one.