The Women Obsessed With Lindsay Clancy

Photographs by Alexandra Howland

On one of the final days of the trial, dozens of women streamed into the back of a Plymouth, Massachusetts, courtroom, filling two long rows of wooden benches. They stood and watched the judge and jury take their seats. Then they strained for a view as a nurse wheeled in the defendant, Lindsay Clancy, who has admitted to strangling her three young children to death in her suburban Boston home in January 2023, before swallowing prescription pills, slashing her wrists and neck, and throwing herself out of a bedroom window headfirst.

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Seeing her there in a wheelchair, one woman crossed herself and whispered, “Please, God.” As an officer gaveled the court into session, others pulled out notebooks, folders, and scraps of paper. “WHY,” Marta Quijano wrote as a prosecutor called a psychiatrist to the stand. “Motivation,” she added, starring the word as the doctor began explaining his opinion that Clancy was not in the throes of psychosis on the night of the killings, as her defense has argued, but deeply suicidal and still capable of knowing right from wrong. In the back row, a woman who had flown in from Cleveland shook her head. She had a true-crime novel in her lap and turned to a blank page at the end. “Stupid experts,” she wrote.

Americans have long been obsessed with murder trials, especially those involving the primal nightmare of mothers who kill their children. The public loves to watch mothers on trial and partake in their judgment. There was Susan Smith, who had drowned her three children in a South Carolina lake and was found guilty of murder in 1995, despite having a history of trauma and sexual abuse. And there was Andrea Yates, who had drowned her five children in a bathtub and was convicted of capital murder in 2002 and then retried in 2006, when she was found not guilty by reason of insanity after witnesses testified that Yates had experienced severe postpartum psychosis and schizophrenia.

The Clancy trial is now part of this sadistic American tradition, but it has also become something else for the women who have been showing up in person. It was not enough for them to watch the proceedings on television, or listen to some lawyer on YouTube, or even stand outside the courthouse wearing pink and waving signs in support of Clancy, as hundreds of women did one day earlier this month. They did not want to be outside rendering judgment; they wanted to be inside, on the third floor, sitting on the wooden benches, as close as possible, in case they could notice some detail, some gesture, some pause or expression or word that might  reveal a truth they could recognize from their own experience. Each was there for their own reasons.

A jury of nine women and three men will decide in the coming days whether Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor-and-delivery nurse, is criminally responsible for killing her children or not guilty by reason of insanity. The two prosecutors have argued that the killings were the premeditated decision of an entitled and controlling woman who had been frustrated that she could not master her worsening depression and sought a way out of a life that she no longer wanted. Clancy’s defense attorney, Patrick Reddington, has cast her as a loving mother failed by a fragmented mental-health system even as she repeatedly sought help for intensifying depression, anxiety, and insomnia after giving birth to her third child. 

[Read: Why Lindsay Clancy’s insanity defense might fail]

Clancy saw her psychiatrist 14 times, tried 13 different medications, called a suicide hotline, went to an emergency room, tried to enroll in an inpatient program, and confided to her husband that she’d had thoughts of harming her children. Defense experts testified that doctors had missed an underlying bipolar disorder and prescribed pills that made Clancy’s symptoms worse, starting a downward spiral that culminated in a rare condition called postpartum psychosis that can cause hallucinations. Clancy has said that she heard a male voice telling her to kill her children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan, on January 24, 2023.

After being resuscitated following her suicide attempt, which left her paralyzed from the waist down, Clancy was handcuffed, placed under armed guard, and arraigned from her hospital bed. A judge allowed the moment to be livestreamed from the courtroom; a video screen showed her unblinking eyes above a white surgical mask. The trial itself has also been livestreamed, fueling conspiracy theories that have tended to blame the killings on Clancy’s husband or an intruder, attempting to find clarity where there is little, as many women at the trial already understood. At first, only a few showed up. By last Monday, they were waiting in an hour-long line to get into the courthouse, and another that stretched down a bright hallway to the courtroom doors.

Alexandra Howland for The AtlanticA crowd of mostly women waits in line to get inside the courthouse.

“I can’t imagine what’s going through her head,” one woman was saying to her friend.

“It’s not just cold-blooded murder,” the friend said.

“I had suicidal thoughts, clear as a bell,” a retired teacher named Dottie Kiley told another woman in line, explaining her experience with antidepressants. “So bad I called the police and told them, and they had a cop come down and sit with me. It was a small town, and they had time to do that.”

The woman behind her nodded. “She could be any one of us,” she said as the courtroom doors opened.

Inside, the women listened to Avram Mack, a psychiatrist and prosecution witness, explain his clinical opinion that Clancy, having made up her mind to kill herself, then made the decision to kill her children to prevent their suffering a life without her—a theory called “altruistic filicide.” Quijano leaned over to the woman sitting next to her.

“What is the validity of this three years later?” she whispered, shaking her head.

After the morning break, she stood in line again for the afternoon session.

“With my first daughter, because it was so difficult breastfeeding, I had insomnia and anxiety—I was worried the baby is hungry,” Quijano told a woman she had just met. “I remember one time—she was a cranky baby—and I remember not so much shaking her but going like this,” she said, demonstrating how she squeezed her daughter’s shoulders and screamed. “They are called intrusive thoughts because your brain says something, and you don’t recognize it.”

Ashlyn Rizzo, who’d been attending the trial for two weeks straight, nodded.

“I had been planning to run away,” Rizzo said, referring to a moment after her first child was born. “I liquidated all my 401(k) and squirreled the money away. I was going to go without the baby. I figured everyone was better off without me. I had delusions. I couldn’t tell wake from sleep. I didn’t confide to anyone. I wrote a note.”

“My cousin had a plan,” Quijano said, not needing to finish.

“I was just going to start driving,” Rizzo continued. “Stay in hotels.”

As it happened, Rizzo said, she had called her psychiatrist, who that very day got her into the same specialized program in Rhode Island that had rejected Clancy one month before she killed her children. “Saved my life,” Rizzo said.

Alexandra Rose Howland for The AtlanticA second courtroom was made available to accommodate the large crowds.Alexandra Rose Howland for The AtlanticA woman waits outside the courthouse.Alexandra Howland for The AtlanticFrom left: Kerri-Ann, a therapist, sits outside the courthouse discussing the case with Sheila Sullivan, who researches postpartum health.Alexandra Howland for The AtlanticKerri-Ann took extensive notes during the trial.

On Tuesday, the line was longer.

“I wonder, what does justice look like in this case?” a retired teacher named Lisa was saying. She had been keeping the livestream of the trial on in the background of her daily life all month, until she decided to come and see it for herself. She had driven up from Virginia.

“My daughter had a moment,” Lisa, who didn’t give her last name, told the woman standing behind her, referring to postpartum depression. “I’ve been there, trying to get psychiatric appointments.”

“I had a miscarriage in the second trimester and drifted into depression,” Sheila Sullivan replied, explaining that she wound up committed to a psychiatric facility in the 1970s. “They gave me shock treatment. Back then they didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry,” Lisa said, hugging her.

“Thank you,” Sullivan said.

“They don’t do any research on how hormones affect mental health,” Lisa said.

“She didn’t have any symptoms until they put her on the drugs,” Sullivan said.

“It’s all interconnected,” Lisa said as the courtroom doors opened and the women filled the back benches.

[Read: Pregnant and depressed]

“Can you tell us what peritraumatic disassociation is?” a prosecutor asked an FBI forensic psychiatrist, Gregory Saathoff.

“It’s when you feel things are unreal, not you—like you’re watching yourself,” Saathoff began.

A woman wrote down, “Witness staring at jury,” and whispered, “I think that’s weird.”

Sullivan took out her notebook.

“Moral judgement??” she wrote.

She listened as Reddington, the defense attorney, questioned Saathoff, going through his 75-page résumé and pointing out that he had treated only two women with postpartum depression, and that was decades ago. Reddington went over the times that Clancy had described feeling “like a zombie” and had been in a “disassociated state,” and asked why health-care providers did not ask more questions when Clancy indicated that she was suicidal.

“She was trying hard to get help,” the doctor acknowledged.

“I can relate to all of this,” Jodi Fournier said as she stood in line later that afternoon. “Not at the extreme, but I can understand.”

For several days, she had been driving to court with two friends from a town 30 minutes away.

“The other thing is, when you work in health care, you learn not to trust the doctors,” her friend Susan Hatfield said. “She was questioning her doctors. She didn’t trust them, and neither did I.”

“See that woman over there?” Fournier said, noticing a blond woman standing by herself and praying at a window outside the courtroom.

“She’s does it every day,” Hatfield said.

Sullivan joined the line behind them.

“I had a miscarriage, then depression, then thoughts of suicide,” she began, retelling her story, and soon they went inside.

Alexandra Howland for The AtlanticKevin Reddington, Clancy’s defense attorney, is surrounded by journalists outside the courthouse.

Every day, the court officer gaveled in the session, a call to order that ended with the phrase, “You will be heard.” Every day, a nurse wheeled in Lindsay Clancy.

“That’s her,” Fournier whispered.

On Tuesday afternoon, Reddington continued questioning Saathoff. “Do you remember Linsday talking about how she can’t feel love? She can’t feel fear?” Then he quoted from Clancy’s journal: “It takes all the effort in the world just to breathe,” she had written, as well as “I want help” and “I want to be well.”

In the back benches, the women leaned forward so they could hear. They pulled out notebooks.

“WTF,” one woman wrote as Reddington went over Clancy’s medication list.

“I am afraid,” another woman wrote down on Wednesday, quoting something Clancy had said.

Rebecca Olszewski, a pharmacist and mother of three, had flown in from Cleveland to attend the trial. She told me that she was recovering from anorexia, bulimia, and generalized anxiety disorder, all of which she said she had learned to mask, as Clancy had apparently done at times. Prosecutors submitted into evidence photos of her smiling with her kids. “There would be outings, and my mom would be like, ‘You seem in good spirits,’” Olszewski said. “And I’d say, ‘Mom, I’m just here going through motions.’”

She wrote down a list of questions: Why hadn’t the people who answered the suicide hotline asked Clancy more questions about her suicidal thoughts—not simply whether she had a plan at that moment, but whether she’d ever had a plan? Why hadn’t doctors placed her in an inpatient program? Why hadn’t they paid closer attention?

[From the May 2023 issue: American madness]

Now Olszewski sat on the wooden bench, studying the jury to see whether they were paying attention. Then she watched the judge, noticing how he looked at Clancy and the witnesses.

Alexandra Howland for The AtlanticThe prosecution delivers closing arguments.

On Thursday, the day of closing arguments, the line was longer than it had been all week. Not everyone could get into the main courtroom, so another one was made available, and women filled more wooden benches, including Joni Villemez-Comeaux, a mental health counselor there from Texas.

“This is shining a very poor light on our field, and it needs to” she was saying, and now several women began asking her about how she would have handled Clancy—which sorts of details mattered, and which didn’t. “Every fucking thing matters,” Villemez-Comeaux said, and soon the courtroom was quiet.

In closing, Reddington once again went over all the ways that Clancy sought help. The medications. The psychiatrist visits. The journal in which she chronicled her worsening symptoms until her handwriting turned into what he described as “chicken scratch.”

“My God, what does she have to do?” Reddington said, and when he finished, women clapped and cheered, and then listened as the prosecutor for the Commonwealth, Jennifer Sprague, delivered her closing argument.

“This case is not about the mental health system,” she began.

On the wooden benches, a woman quietly said to herself, “Yes it is.”

After that, Sprague continued for nearly an hour. She talked about how depressed and suicidal Clancy was but emphasized how much support she had. Her parents, a nanny, health insurance.  “She had more access to care and treatment and support than most people do.”  She once again painted Clancy as an entitled woman who knew what she was doing was wrong, who decided to strangle her children anyway, leaving them “discarded on the basement floor like broken toys because she was done playing the game.”

By the time she spoke those words, though, many of the women who’d stood in line, and listened to days of testimony had already left the courtroom. They had heard enough.

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