By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, September 03, 2026
Lindsay Clancy has admitted to strangling her three young
children — five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old
Callan — to death in her suburban Boston home in January 2023. She is now on
trial facing three counts of first-degree murder; she has pled not guilty by
reason of insanity.
As of this writing, the jury is still deliberating.
That jury is not working in as much privacy as the judge
would like, thanks to the actions of a self-described “crime junkie:”
A woman arrested Tuesday outside the Massachusetts courthouse where
the trial of Lindsay Clancy is being heard took video of jurors
in her case leaving the court, a state prosecutor said Wednesday.
Massachusetts State Police said
56-year-old Dawn Light, of Sutton, was arrested minutes after jurors had been
dismissed for the day at Plymouth Superior Court. She was expected to be
charged with intimidation of a witness, juror or person furnishing information
in connection with criminal proceedings.
A self-described “crime junkie”
and Clancy supporter, Light said she has attended several days of the
Massachusetts mother’s trial, along with other high-profile cases, including
those of Alex Murdaugh and Karen Read.
Light was found inside a vehicle
in the parking lot, and told police she had been waiting to see whether Lindsay
Clancy would come out of the building. Piacentini said Light allowed police to
look through the photographs on her phone. Troopers found a deleted video of
jurors in the Lindsay Clancy trial coming out of the courthouse building,
Piacentini said.
The Clancy trial is occurring in Plymouth Superior Court
in Plymouth, Mass., about an hour and a half’s drive from Light’s hometown of
Sutton. The Alex Murdaugh trial was in Walterboro, S.C. Apparently, this woman
is some sort of high-profile trial tourist? The world has a lot of people with
strange habits, but if you’re a “crime junkie” who has traveled to watch
high-profile trials, then you would understand the importance of keeping the
identities of the jurors private during the trial, and why you shouldn’t be
taking pictures of them. This makes it difficult to believe this was just some
innocent mistake.
My old
podcast co-host Mickey observed that some people who think they are “true
crime” fans are in fact just fans of messy human dramas. They’re not all that
interested in the police work, forensics, or evidence that led to the arrest of
the person who committed the crime. They just enjoy a detailed look at someone
else’s life that is much worse than theirs.
As for Clancy’s case, postpartum depression is real; it
is not merely a reflection that a new parent was or is “selfish,” as a certain attention-craving influencer contended.
Postpartum psychosis, manifesting in the form of hallucinations, delusions,
mania, or other symptoms, is also real, but very rare; affecting “between 0.089 and
2.6 out of every 1,000 births.”
I’m not a psychiatrist, but I figure hallucinations,
delusions, or mania would not manifest in the form of Googling to figure out the amount of time your husband will be
out of the house while picking up take-out food. An action like that
indicates forethought, which suggests that the person doing that recognizes the
likely consequences of her actions.
However, Massachusetts law is different from many other states in
the country, in that once the defendant has pled insanity, it is up to the
prosecutors to prove the defendant was sane while committing the crime:
In many jurisdictions, insanity
is an affirmative defense, meaning the burden falls on the
defense to prove that a defendant had “a mental disease or defect” that prevented them from
understanding the nature of their actions, [Northeastern University law
professor Daniel] Medwed said. But that is not the case in Massachusetts, he
said.
Procedurally, that means the
defense “doesn’t have to do as much” in the way of persuading jurors compared
with other states, according to Medwed.
It still has to present expert
witnesses, demonstrate that Clancy had postpartum psychosis and contend with
the 15-minute timeframe wherein the alleged crime took place while her husband
was out running an errand.
Even when a defendant uses the
insanity defense, there often isn’t a fixed list of mental illnesses that
qualify for the defense. In some states, statutes or case law identify specific
disorders that may satisfy the legal standard, Medwed said.
Massachusetts doesn’t have such a
list and leaves the determination largely to jurors, who must decide whether a
defendant’s mental defect impaired their cognitive capacity or ability to
control their actions at the time of the alleged crime.
Considering how Massachusetts law requires jurors to make
an enormously consequential decision about Clancy’s mental state, it is not
exactly surprising that the jury is coming back to the judge with questions.
Our Caroline Downey laid out how, “No, Not All Women Identify with Lindsay Clancy,” contending
the trial is “Luigi Mangione madness all over again.”
The phenomenon of members of the public becoming
enthusiastic fans of defendants accused of terrible crimes is not a new
phenomenon.
Think of the crowds with signs saying “the Juice is loose” during O. J. Simpson’s attempt to evade
police in a white Bronco. Serial killer Ted Bundy received hundreds of love letters
while behind bars. Or go back even further:
In April 1934 Warner Brothers
released a newsreel showing the Division of Investigation [the precursor to the
FBI ]manhunt of John Dillinger, one of the nation’s most notorious criminals.
The newsreel showed footage of Dillinger’s father, an elderly farmer, and the
residents of Mooresville, Indiana, Dillinger’s hometown. Movie audiences across
America cheered when Dillinger’s picture appeared on the screen. They hissed at
pictures of D.O.I. special agents. When he heard the news, D.O.I. Director J.
Edgar Hoover was outraged . He put the town of Mooresville under surveillance,
and threatened to prosecute the Dillinger family unless they cooperated with
the D.O.I.
There are, no doubt, quite a few women out there who
struggled with postpartum depression and feel like no one listened to them or took their problems seriously.*
There are women out there who have had a bad experiences with antidepressants and bad experiences
with mental health professionals.
None of that justifies murdering your children.
And virtually all the women who faced those issues did not murder their
children. Not only did step one (postpartum depression, medication, bad
experiences with mental health professionals) not automatically lead to step
two (murdering children), step one almost never leads to step two. Thus, at
least from where I stand, you cannot escape the consequences of your actions in
step two by citing the factors in step one.
We tend to see this cause
célèbre effect when an accused defendant attempts to transform themselves
into an avatar of a particular group.
From the Atlantic’s article, “The Women Obsessed with Lindsay Clancy”:
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.
Lindsay Clancy, you see, is every woman — or least that’s
the argument they want us to believe.
Except she isn’t. She is just about as extreme an outlier
as you can get. There are about 85 million mothers in the United States; about
250 mothers murder their children each year.
O. J. Simpson was not every black man. Luigi Mangione is
not every person who’s been frustrated with a health insurance company. John
Dillinger was not standing up to a corrupt establishment when his bank-robbing gang was killing people. There are certain
segments of the public who are distressingly gullible whenever a defense
attorney or an unscrupulous media set out a heroic narrative about someone who
violently harms others, a narrative that often requires us to hand-wave away
the victims of their crimes.
But we live in the era of the influencer and the social
media algorithm, not the reporter and the editor. The systems of public
discourse in the past (generally) put higher priority on accuracy; people
didn’t like being misled or finding out that what they had been told wasn’t
true. (When Dateline NBC admitted it had secretly used explosives
in its depiction of the effects of a gas tank rupture of a General Motors
truck, it was a big deal.)
Now . . . the social media algorithm doesn’t measure
offerings based upon accuracy; it measures offerings based upon the number of
reactions and responses they get. Provocations, outrage, the most incendiary
claims, the hottest takes — the simple mentality of the algorithm is that if
something is getting a big response, it must be good and deserves to be
promoted to an even wider audience.
My colleague Kathryn Jean Lopez, who has a heart the size
of Alpha Centauri, urges us to pray for wisdom for mercy and justice. That sort of
sensible, empathetic, victim-centered approach to this horrific crime is never
going to get picked up and promoted far and wide by a social media algorithm.
It’s too reasonable and compassionate; it doesn’t make you angry.
You can say you don’t care about Candace Owens, and I’m
not saying you must care. But note that on August 20, a video of Owens laying
out her views on the Clancy case was posted
on X:
Lindsay Clancy is obviously not
guilty. There is a fleet of doctors who should be imprisoned for what they put
her on. I regularly speak out against Big Pharma. They get away with murder,
all the time. And in this case, they are getting away with the murder of,
really, her three children, but also completely destroyed her life. Lindsay
Clancy, in my opinion, is not guilty. She was put into an intentional
psychosis, when she probably just needed to give her kids away for a weekend to
get better. But they constantly give you these drugs that do not make things
better. And the cocktail of ten pharmaceutical drugs that she was on was
absolute madness.
That post has 2.4 million views. Remember, creator
revenue is tied to the number of views a post gets.
*From Psychology Today: “A recent survey of 900 women
aged 25-34 found that 93 percent reported feeling dismissed when seeking
medical help. The survey also found that over 40% visited multiple providers to
receive a diagnosis, and almost the same percentage were prescribed medications
without a full investigation into their symptoms.”
Maybe we have an astonishingly bad crop of doctors out
there, and they’re all treating women ages 25 to 34. Or maybe the poll
respondents’ threshold to not feel dismissed is unreasonably high. The fact
that around 40 percent kept going to doctors to get the diagnosis they wanted
to hear or that made sense to them, and that about the same percentage ended up
getting prescribed medications without a full investigation into their
symptoms, makes me suspect that some degree of this phenomenon is patients who
want a particular prescription drug and who will keep doctor-shopping until
they find one willing to write that prescription.
ADDENDUM: Yesterday, the good folks
at CNN had me on to discuss Senator Ed Markey’s not-all-that-surprising
primary victory — “Next to the Supreme Court, being a Democratic senator from
Massachusetts is the most secure job in Washington” — and the upcoming
Republican midterm convention in Dallas — “I want to see the political
strategist in Texas who said, ‘Let’s do our big convention. Let’s do something
we usually do in a presidential year, and let’s put it right up against . . .
NFL football.’ Because as we all know in Texas, football is just not a big deal.”
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