Clancy Fans Turn on Husband as Jury Deliberates

Lindsay Clancy admits she strangled her three children — and a movement of supporters and online sleuths is now insisting her ex-husband did it instead.

Clancy, 36, a former labor and delivery nurse, is on trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Massachusetts. Jurors began deliberating Thursday and were back at it Friday, deciding not whether she killed Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, but whether she is criminally responsible for it.

Outside the courthouse and across TikTok, that narrow legal question has been swallaowed by something else: a campaign that recasts Clancy as a victim of the medical system and her ex-husband, Patrick Clancy, as the villain.

No one in the courtroom has accused Patrick Clancy of anything. Her own lawyer says she did it.

What Happened in Duxbury

In January 2023, according to the New York Post's account of the case, Clancy sent her husband out for takeout, then strangled the three children with exercise bands at their Duxbury home. She slashed her wrists and jumped from a second-story window in a suicide attempt. She survived and is now paraplegic.

She does not dispute killing her children. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington argues she was overprescribed a cocktail of psychiatric drugs and was suffering from postpartum psychosis — that she could not appreciate the wrongfulness of what she did. Prosecutors argue that whatever her psychiatric condition, Clancy was clear-minded, planned the killings, and understood that killing her children was wrong.

The jury's choice, as Variety summarized it: whether Clancy spends the rest of her life in prison or in a locked, state-run psychiatric facility.

The Pink Shirts

Newsweek described the Aug. 20 scene: about 300 supporters outside the courthouse, many dressed in pink, wearing messages including "Believe," "She Needed Help" and "Peace For Lindsay." They applauded Reddington, formed hearts with their hands and joined in the Lord's Prayer.

New York Post columnist Rikki Schlott went to Plymouth this week and found the supporters were overwhelmingly women with their own psychiatric histories.

"I think she's a victim of a failed medical system, and I think women's mental health isn't taken seriously enough," Melissa Merrill, 41, of Saugus, Mass., told the Post. "I've been a mom where you don't want to say how you feel because of the stigma… 'If I say I feel this way, what if my kid gets taken away?'"

Merrill added: "She's in her own hell. She lost all of her babies. She lost her husband. She's in a wheelchair… I don't think prison is going to help her with her mental state."

Sarah Miller, 38, drove 17 hours from Indiana and slept in her car to be outside the courtroom, and told the Post she had watched nearly every moment of the trial on YouTube. She said she had postpartum depression after her second child and related to Clancy because both had been a "guinea pig for medications."

Danielle Buckley, 53, of Maine, drove down carrying the cremated remains of her 22-year-old son Evan, who died by suicide in 2024. She called standing outside the courtroom "therapy." Of the three dead children, she told the Post: "I'm not really thinking about the children. I think probably my son's death has colored that because I'm in grief over my own child."

The Case Against Patrick Clancy — Built on Nothing

Online, the defense of Lindsay Clancy has curdled into an accusation against her ex-husband.

"All right, he did it. Patrick did it. Patrick's the one who did it. Not Lindsay. Patrick did it. Because, you know, I also heard that women typically don't strangle," Rinna said in her Aug. 17 TikTok, according to Variety.

Variety catalogued the theories circulating on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook: that Clancy was "shaking" when Patrick entered the courtroom; that he took his eldest child skiing after dropping his wife at a mental institution; that he was an absentee father because he worked so much — he was the family's only source of income at the time of the killings; that he brunched with friends and took a two-day trip to New York after his wife disclosed she feared harming the children; and, above all, that he moved on too fast by remarrying this year. Commenters have also accused him of cashing in on his children's deaths.

There is no evidence for any of it, and no one at the trial has suggested otherwise.

"As far as the rumors of Patrick Clancy, it just seems like there isn't one iota of evidence whatsoever at all to back this up," criminal defense attorney Peter Elikann told Variety. "Lindsay's attorney, an extraordinarily talented counsel, has said that she was the one who did it."

Patrick Clancy has spent three years defending the woman who killed his children. On the 2023 GoFundMe he wrote: "She's recently been portrayed largely by people who have never met her and never knew who the real Lindsay was. Our marriage was wonderful and diametrically grew stronger as her condition rapidly worsened… I forgive Lindsay." Variety reports that his support for his ex-wife has been twisted by citizen detectives into proof of a cover-up.