The Crucifixion of Patrick Clancy

On our national psychosis

Thank you so much to my very patient readers for bearing with a longer hiatus than usual in this little corner of the Internet. Long-time readers will know I am as a rule far more on top of things. Unfortunately, being a freelance writer means wearing many hats at the same time, and some summer procrastination on other work came home to roost, leaving me no choice but to press pause here. But as of this week, we are back! This post is free. Exclusive content is in the works for paying readers. Your support is sincerely appreciated.

I don’t normally do this, but I’m going to put a trigger warning at the top of this post. You may want to skip it if you are a new father or mother, especially a new mother who has struggled with postpartum depression. I often see young parents report an abrupt drop in their ability to handle content dealing with endangered or dead children—even in movies, much less in real life. I will not be graphic, but you may very well still want to click away. Please be attentive to what you can handle, and feel no obligation to read on.

Despite not being a parent, I myself have spent the last weeks trying to avoid reading or watching much of anything around the horrifying case of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother on trial for killing her three small children three years ago. I caught glimpses of takes I expected I would agree with, but I just didn’t want to look long enough to form an opinion. However, as the trial drew to a close, I couldn’t resist the temptation to look at a few things the algorithm sent me. Among many other heartbreaking things about this case, I just couldn’t get over how young this couple looked. They were about my age when the crime occurred. Their photogenic quality is surely one reason it’s become a national phenomenon. The archetypal “perfect” suburban couple, raising their perfect babies in a perfect house in a New England town ending in “-bury” where Things Are Not What They Appear—it sounds glib, but it’s such a true crime cliché.

Under Massachusetts law, the burden of proof rested on the prosecutors to show beyond a reasonable doubt that Lindsay Clancy was fully sane, in touch with reality, and cognizant of the moral valence of her actions. This is unfortunate and unusual. It’s the reason John Hinckley, Jr. was found not guilty by reason of insanity. And this weekend, it was the reason most of the jury voted to acquit Clancy. But the jury was hung thanks to a single holdout, 12 Angry Men-style. The country has been tearing itself apart over the verdict, one side saying that man should be lynched and the other saying he should never pay for another beer in his life.

I am not a legal analyst, nor an expert on postpartum depression or psychosis. Picking through the sea of commentary, I will say I’ve found Ben Shapiro’s takes even-handed and compassionate. Someone said Shapiro has dealt with an older mentally ill family member, and you could guess this from the sensitivity with which he approaches the case, while not losing sight of its three tiny victims or the mass psychosis of their murderer’s female fan club.

That mass psychosis took the form of protests outside the courthouse (protesting what, exactly?) and a wave of social-media sleuthing in which, most appallingly, the blame was shifted to Lindsay’s innocent husband, Patrick.

I read the transcript of the 911 call that captured the moment Patrick found his dead children. I have studiously avoided listening to the original audio, although I’ve watched him sit in court and relive those moments blow by blow. He answers each excruciatingly detailed question with flat stoic calm, occasionally disrupted by hard breathing. A policeman testifies to the state in which they found him when they arrived on the scene minutes later: screaming, swearing, “losing himself.”

After getting extended leave from work, Patrick would leave the country for a time, then sell the house, file for divorce, and throw himself into a new life. From this, the jury of the Internet has concluded that he must have been the story’s true villain all along. Look, over here we discovered that he left a 5-star review of a running trail in Costa Rica a month after the crime. Surely, no man who had been truly traumatized by his loss could have done such a thing. Also, he appears to have started dating again a year later and gotten remarried this year. The plot thickens. What did Lindsay know? What was he doing to her?

Never mind that Patrick had tirelessly fought through the molasses-slow post-COVID pipeline of mental health support to find care for Lindsay, becoming frustrated as he sensed that she was repeatedly being palmed off with pills that might be doing more harm than good. Never mind that he not only asked the public to “forgive” her in the wake of the murders, but he continued to search for any way in to understanding the crime, any possible way he could give her some shred of grace—searching so hard that cruel voices from the other side say he’s a coward who should have “finished” his wife as soon as he came home to find her alive after her unsuccessful suicide attempt. In a long New Yorker profile, written by one of his friends, he speaks of her in tones of gentle anguish, saying he didn’t marry “a monster” but “someone who got sick.” He and his sisters have started a non-profit to raise awareness for perinatal mental healthcare.

He agonizes over what to say in a one-year anniversary address to the Catholic church they sporadically attended over the years. Most of the brief speech is taken up with thanking the community, sharing tender memories of the children, and celebrating With Love From Duxbury, the local charity initiative launched in their honor. He tells his friend at the New Yorker that he thought about including a prayer request for Lindsay, but he could see the headlines now: “All he cares about is the wife.”

Why do they hate this man? This poor, tormented, gentle man, this “software guy” who knew nothing about psychology and had never even heard the phrase “postpartum psychosis” until after his three children were dead?

Perhaps it’s partly because in so many ways, men like him are already fair game—for envy, for resentment, for casual cruelty. He is the ultimately privileged man, after all: white, good-looking, well-off. By definition, nothing really bad can happen to white, good-looking, well-off men—at least, nothing so bad that they didn’t deserve it.

Privilege envy can extend to women too. In a similar way, it has been open season all year on Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow. Self-styled Internet sleuths who watch Candace Owens have spun out the most grotesque conspiracist speculation about her, judging her every public gesture and facial expression, exactly as Patrick has been judged. Like Patrick, she is treated not as an embodied person but as a character in someone else’s bad novel. And also like Patrick, she responds by continuing to be unfashionably earnest in public, which only makes people hate them all the more.

Let us call this what it is: a crucifixion. The cruelest social punishment for the least deserving victim.

In typical cradle Catholic fashion, the Clancys don’t seem to have been devoutly religious. Yet Patrick speaks with a humble, unforced sincerity about those weeks when he did make an effort to bring the children to church while his wife was working hospital shifts (as a labor and delivery nurse, of all things). He recalls one Sunday struggling to focus in the pew while feeding his son a bottle in a car seat with one hand and cradling his daughter with the other.

Their last service together was Christmas 2022. He remembers how that night, his boy Dawson stared at the crucifix over the altar and asked the question he always liked to ask: “Is that God?”

“Yeah buddy,” Patrick said. “That’s him.”