On the evening of January 24, 2023 in Duxbury Massachusetts, Lindsay Clancy sent her husband out for takeout. He was gone half an hour and came home to find their three children dead. Cora was five, Dawson was three, and Callan was seven months. Lindsay Clancy was charged with three counts of murder. Her defense is postpartum psychosis made worse by the psychiatric medications she had been prescribed. Nobody disputes what happened in that house. The only argument is whether she goes to prison for it.
An army of female influencers on TikTok would like you to know that Lindsay Clancy needs space to heal and you need to think of her dead kids as ‘ceramic vases’. (Seriously, watch the video.)
They say it into ring lights in the voice people use for guided meditations and hostage negotiations. Clancy should not go to prison. Clancy should pick her own doctor and go see him whenever she feels up to it. Clancy has been through something traumatizing.
The ‘traumatizing’ thing is that she strangled her three children.
I had not heard about any of it. I quit mainstream news when it turned into a twenty four hour psyop with weather updates. So I went and read about it online.
Her own lawyers admit the kids are dead and admit she killed them. Their argument is that she has bipolar disorder and postpartum depression and belongs in treatment instead of a cell.
I have the same diagnosis she does. Nobody hired me one of the most expensive defense attorneys in the state. Nobody went online to explain my mental health issues to strangers. Nobody ever offered to let me pick my own doctor. What they offered me were lies and a filthy jail cell.
The Part Where I Also Had A Mental Health Defense
About 7 years ago I was just getting started as a freelance journalist, trying to launch a true crime podcast. I learned the hard way that until you have at least 25,000 subscribers it pays about as well as competitive kite flying. (With the added bonus of making you an enemy of powerful people before you have any way to fight back when they come at you.)
The story I was chasing was the murder of a young woman. Police called it murder at first and tried to pin it on a homeless man. That held up until somebody checked and found he had been locked in a psychiatric hospital the night she was murdered. Hospitals keep records. Records are inconvenient.
So the cops changed it from murder to death by exposure. She ‘froze to death’. Neat and clean. Case closed. She was found naked on the floor of an abandoned power plant in the dead of winter and the city decided winter did it. Not foul play. A season.
Because that is TOTALLY a thing young women do. They walk into an abandoned building in freezing weather, strip off every piece of clothing they have on, lie down on a filthy concrete floor covered in dirty heroin needles, and wait to die.
I knew who she was. I mean not ‘well’. I didn’t know her name or much about her. I just gave her money some mornings when she was panhandling on my way into work. Some of the homeless in that town knew me on sight because I volunteered at the shelter and had done my own stretch in one after losing my job and my apartment in the same two weeks with nothing saved. A dozen people told me the same story.
She had been kidnapped and gang raped and left to die. They told me who the guys were. Street names. One of them allegedly worked at the shelter and drew a paycheck from the city.
I had been asking questions around that town for weeks and word travels fast in a place that size. About a week before the night everything happened I picked up a tail. A big, bald black guy who spent his days at the same shelter she used to hang around in. I first noticed him in one of the gas station cafes where I ate breakfast back then on account of being too broke for the McDonald’s Dollar Menu. I was sitting there with my laptop open doing research on the case. He kept asking what my laptop was worth and telling me how nice it was. He said it the way a man admires a car he has already decided to steal. I got up and left. He followed me ten blocks until I ducked into the hospital. Hospitals have security. He peeled off.
A couple days later I was in another gas station cafe when in walks the big bald guy with a friend. Some gangbanger type with cornrows who looked like he stepped out of a gangsta rap video circa 1999. They came straight over and dropped into the booth beside mine.
They were saying it loud enough for me to hear every word and that was the entire point of it. I sat there scared out of my mind with my head down and I finished my breakfast and I left. I started walking toward the bus stop and looked back and both of them were standing outside the front door smoking Newports and dead staring at me and smiling. Message received.
I knew by then that these guys were following me and I knew it had something to do with what I was investigating. What I cannot prove is that the girl those two were talking about raping and killing was the girl they found naked and frozen in that power plant.
But I have never believed it was anybody else.
A couple weeks later I was walking near where she was murdered when a man down the block started waving at me. Big urgent arm swings, the way you flag down help on a highway. His hair was cropped so short he looked bald. Hispanic with gang tattoos up both arms and even on his face. It was freezing and he was standing out there in a wifebeater with no jacket on. Nobody dressed like that had walked any distance to get where he was. He came out of a door close by or somebody had dropped him off there.
I walked over to see what he wanted and then all hell broke loose.
Something hard came down on the back of my head. My vision went hazy as the world turned blood red and there were hands on my backpack. In that backpack just happened to be the laptop that big, bald black guy had been so interested in a few weeks back. The laptop with all the evidence and every note I had been collecting on who killed that girl.
I got loose while they were still working the straps off my shoulders, went up a footpath toward the building where she was murdered and buried myself in the brush for an hour listening to my heartbeat do things a heartbeat should not do. When I came out onto the street a truck sat dead center in the road with its lights off. Someone was waiting for me. The lights came on. The engine revved and the truck sped toward me. They were trying to hit me, I thought.
I ran for the nearest building to hide in. The whole neighborhood was dead factory space so I figured it was empty. I did not ‘break into’ anything. The door was rotting off its frame like every other dead door on that street. I ran into at ‘I am going to die’ speed and it opened. I stood in the dark to catch my breath, heard voices, and went toward them thinking ‘Thank God, I’m safe!’. What I walked into was a church running a service in the middle of the night. Kinda weird if you ask me.
There was a pastor on the pulpit and a room with people in it. I came out a side door right next to him with blood running down my face and told him I needed an ambulance. I was bleeding out of my scalp and scared out of my mind and asking a preacher for a doctor.
He called the police.
The first words out of the arresting officer’s mouth were ‘we’ve been expecting you.’ Then he said my name.
I had not told anybody in that church my name. And I have never worked out the rest of it. Expecting me from where? Expecting me on whose word? Expecting me since when? What the hell was going on?
I think the whole night was a setup. I cannot prove it and I will not pretend otherwise. All I can give you is the order it happened in. A tatted up Mexican gangbanger waved me into position. Three men beat the crap out of me and took every piece of evidence I had on a murder crooked cops had buried. Then someone tried to run me over with a truck. Out of a whole street of dead buildings I ended up in the only one with people awake inside it. That pastor, a man I figured would be on my side considering I am an ordained minister myself, watched me walk into his church with blood running down my face and called the damn police instead of helping me. Then a cop showed up already knowing my name.
I will say the rest of it straight out and you can do what you want with it. If you were running a criminal operation and you needed a building nobody looks twice at, a reason for men to come and go at three in the morning and books nobody is allowed to look at, you would have a hard time beating a church.
Two Weeks, Give Or Take Six Months
I could not afford a lawyer so the court issued me one. He came once and explained that if I pled guilty I would do two weeks and walk out with a trespassing charge. That was the pitch. Two weeks. I figured I could do two weeks standing on my head.
I took the plea.
Six months later I was still in that jail writing letters to a lawyer who never answered one. I have no idea whether he read them. I have no idea whether the guards mailed them. Then a woman I had never seen turned up to explain my options. I could enroll in treatment court or I could do twenty years in prison FOR RUNNING FOR MY FREAKING LIFE FROM 3 MEN THAT BEAT THE CRAP OUT OF ME, ROBBED ME, AND THEN TRIED RUNNING ME OVER WITH A TRUCK!
What she had on me was three things. A bipolar diagnosis. A drinking problem I used to have. And the fact that in my twenties I smoked weed and took pills, same as everybody else in the early 2000’s club scene.
Out of those three things she built a raging alcoholic drug addict with severe mental health problems who needed programming.
Not one person in that building asked me a single question about my own life. If anybody had, I would have told them about my father. About the beatings and the screaming and the cigarettes he put out on my arms and the running commentary about how I was ugly and stupid and fat and lazy.
Nobody wanted to know. What they wanted was a code on a form and a body in a cell. Somebody worked out there was money in the combination.
I kept saying I was innocent. I kept explaining that I had been RUNNING FOR MY FREAKING LIFE FROM 3 MEN THAT BEAT THE CRAP OUT OF ME, ROBBED ME, AND THEN TRIED RUNNING ME OVER WITH A TRUCK!
My attorney told me the law does not protect you from running for your life. I believed him. I was operating under the impression that your own lawyer cannot look you in the face and lie to close a plea. That belief turns out to be about as sturdy as the tooth fairy. The tooth fairy at least leaves money. (Both state and federal law protect a man fleeing danger but they could not have me running around loose asking questions that might expose a county actively covering up the murder of a young woman.)
So I did the program. I tried to, anyway.
The program was obnoxious county employees ridiculing me, third party hospital employees holding nine week certificates in peer mentorship telling me I could be whoever I wanted to be if I would just BELIEVE, and coloring. A lot of freaking coloring. This sounds like a bit and it is not one. Grown adults with documented psychiatric conditions were put in a room with coloring books and ten year old crayons and told to color. That happened more than once. That was part of the treatment and you better not complain.
Somewhere in a building I never saw a form crossed a desk saying billable therapeutic services had been rendered and the federal government paid the invoice.
Staff wrote it up as a program violation and the judge agreed. I have never worked out where a county judge gets the right to decide when a man can have a dental exam. Everyone in that room seemed satisfied that he had it.
None of it was treatment and I do not believe it was built to be. It was built to move bodies through a building at a per head rate paid out of federal and state subsidy money into the pockets of whoever owned the place. I would not fall over to learn some of them were taking money under the table either. A couple of judges in that state went to federal prison for exactly that. That is not a theory I invented in a cell. That is a case with a docket number.
From the inside it stops looking like they were just bad at their jobs and more like a pyramid scheme or conspiracy to shut me up through attrition. Threaten a man into a plea. Use the plea to put him in front of treatment court. Use treatment court to bill the government for him by the head. I reported all of it to the Department of Justice more than once. Nothing happened and nothing was ever going to.
In this country a problem does not exist until Fox and CNN and a thousand influencers online with ring lights are saying the same word on the same day. Anything less would require a lazy federal employee (whose real job is doing as little work as he can get away with) to do the job he is already paid for.
I went into that program with a bipolar diagnosis. I came out with that and PTSD stacked on top and I have dealt with it ever since. My mental health is worse today than it has ever been and I know what did it. It was that fucking program.
That was the sentence for my crime of RUNNING FOR MY FREAKING LIFE FROM 3 MEN THAT BEAT THE CRAP OUT OF ME, ROBBED ME, AND THEN TRIED RUNNING ME OVER WITH A TRUCK!
Same Diagnosis, Different Zip Code
Now set that next to Lindsay Clancy.
She had a privileged childhood in a Connecticut suburb and came out of a private university with a biology degree. Poor people do not go to private universities. Poor people go to community college if they are lucky. Nobody hands out biology degrees to people who cannot think.
She also has a defense team. Not a lawyer. A team. Teams come with investigators and forensic psychiatrists and expert witnesses who will explain what was going on inside her head to twelve strangers. They charge more per hour than I make in a week.
Our lives have one thing in common. The same diagnosis sits on both our charts. Mine kept me in a cell. Hers is going to keep her out of one.
Two Systems Of Law And One Of Them Keeps Rich People Out Of Jail
The first one runs on money. The lawyers in it charge more for a single case than most of us make in a year. That includes me. They have known the prosecutor for years and they have known the judge longer. A case is one afternoon in a working relationship that will still be running long after everybody has forgotten the name on the file.
The system is rotten straight through and the rich buy their way out of it. Judges can be bought. Prosecutors can be bought. Juries can be reached. Those two judges I mentioned earlier got caught doing exactly that. Most of the ones who actually are crooked never get caught. The ones taking bribes now are a lot more careful and thanks to privacy coins like Monero, bribing an official today is easier than wiring cash to an unmarked Swiss account was in the 1950s.
And the bribe is the small part of it. You do not even need one when the same four dozen people have run a county’s courts for a generation and one of them goes to bat for your client. What comes out is not justice.
It is a sweetheart deal a poor person could not get if they begged for it on their knees.
On the contrary, poor people law runs on volume. You are livestock in a meat grinder. Public defenders in most American cities carry caseloads in the hundreds. That works out to a few minutes each. It is why most criminal cases in this country never see a courtroom. They see a dirty jail cell and a form.
You do not need to have done anything ‘illegal’. You need one bad night. I learned that the hard way.
I told my lawyer I wanted a trial. I told him I was innocent. He looked me dead in the eye and promised me two weeks in a cell if I just pled guilty. That was a lie and he knew it was a lie when he said it. Unfortunately the only person in that room who did not know it was a lie was me. They ignored every right you believe you have as an American citizen and they got away with it because I could not afford to pay for the ‘God given’ rights we are all told we were born with. The rights we assume are FREE.
That is what the system does to a man with no money. It does not beat you in a courtroom. It lies to you until you quit. My own lawyer told me a trial was pointless because running for your life is not a legal defense. That was a lie. He told me two weeks. And THAT was a lie. When I filed an appeal they sent another public pretender down to explain that the judge would keep me locked up the entire time it was pending and that these things can take a ‘very long time’. He said it with a smirk on his face. That is illegal. He was there to scare me into dropping the appeal because ending up in front of a judicial misconduct board for having a public defender threaten somebody was the last thing that judge wanted. Nobody ever had to prove anything. They just had to keep lying until folding looked like a better deal than fighting.
Crazy Is Different When You Have Money
But enough griping about my shitty life. Let’s get back to the child murderer.
Nobody on TikTok mentions this part. Clancy has not spent one night in a county jail. She has been in a state hospital since the day they arrested her in January 2023. Three and a half years. The place has Yelp reviews and they are GOOD ones.
Ask yourself why. She is charged with three counts of first degree murder. A poor woman charged with the exact same thing sits in county lockup with a county psychiatrist she sees for a few minutes a month, faded out on Seroquel and Trazodone, eating slop off a plastic tray and waiting on a public defender with four hundred other clients. Nobody leaves a good review of county lockup. There is nothing in the law that says a hospital bed is where you go when you are accused of killing three children. Poor people rot in county lockup. Rich people do not.
I am not saying postpartum psychosis is imaginary. I know what a living nightmare mental health issues can be. I have a brain that tries to convince me daily that every random person I pass on the street is about to beat the shit out of me and rob me. I am saying that when a rich woman has them it is a tragedy. When us poor folk have mental problems, it means we are criminals who need to be locked up to protect ‘society’ from us.
Clancy should have a homicide conviction for each of those three children and a decade MINIMUM in a secure forensic facility. Anything less than that and everybody gets the message.
You can kill your own kids and walk away scot free if you have the money to buy your way out of it.
And I sit with what a crooked district in a rust belt shithole did to me and with a girl who is still officially a victim of the ‘weather’. They lied to me and they screwed me over and nobody ever answered for any of it.
That girl never got ‘justice’. She got raped and murdered.
And I got a coloring book and Lindsay Clancy is probably going to get away with murdering three little kids because that is the America we live in now.
If you got something out of watching me explain the American legal system from the inside of it, consider a paid subscription. It pays for reporting that does not involve a ring light or a coloring book. It pays Lily for the editing that keeps me from sounding like a man yelling in a parking lot. And it gets me a little closer to the newsvan I have talked about so much that several people now think it is real. It still only exists in my mind currently.
Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.
insane. this entire story infuri8s me
Strangulation is an up close and personal crime, and your victims struggle, unlike shooting them or stabbing them. I can't imagine her inhumanity as her older kids struggled against her attempts to kill them. The baby didn't stand a chance. Life in prison is too good for her.