Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother charged with murdering her three young children, had become a rallying point for thousands of women who believed she was the true victim. During her trial, more than 300 women gathered outside the courthouse to support her. For these women, Clancy is the true victim of a patriarchal justice system that did not understand women’s needs, and an overburdened medical system that refused to properly treat the postpartum depression that allegedly led Clancy to kill her 8-month-old baby, her 5-year-old daughter, and her 3-year-old son.
Clancy admitted that she killed each of her children by strangling them to death with the stretch bands she once used for exercising. She was charged with murder, but her attorneys claimed that she was not responsible for the murders because of her impaired mental state. Her uniformly pink-clad supporters agreed and converged on the Plymouth, MA, courthouse like modern pilgrims in their matching bows and pink shirts designed to shape the emotional atmosphere around the courthouse and subtly sway the jury toward mercy.
While these women in pink certainly supported Clancy, it’s clear that many of these women came seeking something deeper than simply witnessing a trial. They will never acknowledge it, but many of them appear to have come for a sense of purpose, a feeling of belonging, and moral clarity in a world that no longer seems to provide it for them.
Their coordinated display of empathetic solidarity, replete with handmade signs stating “Believe” and “She Needed Help,” provides a textbook case of mimetic identification as they were attempting to imitate Clancy’s suffering—elevating her into a kind of martyr whose pain gave shape to their own diffuse anxieties. With sorrowful faces and tear-rimmed eyes, the women in pink appeared to mirror her grief, acting as if her pain were coursing through their own bodies.
In doing so, they ignored and eclipsed the three precious children whose lives she ended. The narrative redefined Clancy as the victim, but her children have been forgotten, just as the distraught father of these children, who discovered the lifeless bodies of his children—murdered by his own wife—has become invisible in this trial, except for the social media posts of a few unhinged celebrities who are trying to suggest that he actually killed his own children.
Fanning their faces with their homemade signs, the women in pink stood shoulder to shoulder in solidarity. Whenever the media camera lenses found them, they would drop their signs to raise their fingers in identical—and well-practiced—little heart gestures. On the many days that followed, the courthouse steps became a kind of pilgrimage site as the women, dressed in their coordinated pink outfits, became its worshipers. In some ways, these women became a mimetic congregation drawn to Clancy’s suffering as if it were a source of meaning in their own lives.
Over fifty years ago, the great Southern author Walker Percy (1916-1990) saw where we were heading: a culture slipping out of meaning and grasping for it in moments of tragedy and even in the strange exhilaration of hurricanes. In the 1975 collection of essays titled Message in a Bottle, Percy asked, “Why does a man often feel better in a bad environment? Why is a man apt to feel bad in a good environment… Why is the same man apt to feel good in a very bad environment, say an old hotel on Key Largo during a hurricane?” Percy’s fictional characters repeatedly discover that the very conditions meant to make life comfortable—safety, stability, and predictability—also hollow them out.
But in a hurricane or a crisis, we are suddenly called to pay attention. The world becomes alive again as people who have been just drifting through their days find themselves alert, even strangely happy. Percy’s hurricane theory is about seeking meaning. In an interview with Walter Isaacson published posthumously in 2015 in the New York Times, Percy recalled his theory of hurricanes and said that there is a “redemptive power of hurricanes…When a hurricane is about to hit, we no longer feel uncertain about our role in the world. Everyone is focused, connected, and engaged. We know what we’re supposed to do and we do it.” In his 1977 novel Lancelot, Percy applies his theory of the redemptive power of hurricanes. As Isaacson writes, “people help each other in catastrophes… they don’t feel good because they help each other. They help each other because they feel good. The hurricane blows away our alienation.”
Percy understood that we often feel most alive when life becomes most fraught. As Isaacson concluded, “Percy’s diagnosis was that when we are mired in the everydayness of ordinary life, we are susceptible to what he called the malaise, a free-floating despair associated with the feeling that you’re not a part of the world or connected to the people in it. You are alienated, detached.” In his first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), Percy’s emotionally volatile character, Kate Cutrer asks the question: “Have you ever noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck, people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too.” As he put it in The Moviegoer, “Everydayness is the enemy…nothing breaks it—but disaster.”
These basic insights, I think, can be applied to the Clancy courthouse drama, which did not occur in a vacuum. It was simply the next mimetic formation in a recent three-part social media-driven sequence that began with the sacralization of Luigi Mangione, the 28-year-old man who shot and killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside an investor conference in Manhattan on December 4, 2024. Mangione traveled to New York with a 3D-printed gun and stalked Thompson before ambushing him. Mangione developed an online following of supporters who presented him as a kind of anti-corporate avenger, projecting their own rage onto him against the healthcare system. Like Clancy, his court appearances drew crowds of admirers—especially young women who mythologized him—declaring their love for him.
The women in pink are yet another sign of a futile search for meaning through proximity to tragedy. The Clancy drama followed the same pattern as the Mangione murder, yet another Massachusetts murder trial that unfolded a few years earlier involving Karen Read, a Massachusetts woman charged in the violent death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe. Prosecutors claimed Read intentionally hit O’Keefe with her car, causing his fatal injuries on a snowy Boston night. And although she denied it, the evidence against her was strong. Yet, this did not stop the trial from becoming a kind of public theater. Crowds gathered daily outside the Massachusetts courthouse as the mostly female audience formed alliances, traded gossip, and performed their loyalty, as though Read’s trial was a communal ritual replete with livestreams, fan groups, alliances, and a rotating cast of courthouse regulars.
Providing a powerful model for the Clancy trial, Read’s female supporters also wore pink clothing, custom pink buttons, and ribbons to protest outside her Dedham, MA, courthouse. According to media reports, Karen Read personally suggested that her supporters wear pink when her defenders sought a unifying visual theme.
Percy provides a powerful framework through which to view this dilemma. When institutions fail to form us, when culture no longer provides purpose, people begin to crave the intensity of rupture. Disaster—and murder trials—become a substitute for meaning. We seek transcendence in tragedy. A murder trial feels more real than yet another ordinary Wednesday afternoon. It feels more authentic than a life lived in quiet comfort.
Percy’s insights anticipate our hunger for drama and apocalyptic narratives. This is because, at their core, so many people are starving for significance, meaning, and purpose. In a world where institutions have collapsed, many people, oddly enough, are craving catastrophe or disaster. In some ways, the courthouse crowds are more like a mirror that reveals what happens when institutions fail to offer purpose and when communal life disappears, enticing many to construct their identity from fragments of online narratives.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
I don’t see the big deal about Clancy murdering her three children. Women have been murdering their children by abortion in the MILLIONS since 1974.
And, of all hypocricies, Clancy committed her crime in that lunatic of a Commonwealth called Massachusetts where the Democrat legislature and governor just enacted a bill allowing women to murder their children right up until the time they are about to be born.
Let’s face it, Massachusetts is a place where it’s perfectly alright for women to murder their children. Everybody can be assured “sanctuary” in Massachusetts as long as they’re not the children of the women who live there; then it’s ok to murder them.
“the courthouse crowds are more like a mirror that reveals what happens when institutions fail to offer purpose and when communal life disappears, enticing many to construct their identity from fragments of online narratives…”
The continuing abdication of manliness among men and femininity among women is not due to “institutional” failure, unless the would-be positive influence of authentic religion is reduced to being one institution among others. Then again, the message of salvation for all that afflicts a human soul is precisely what many unmanly priests and prelates have been delivering for decades now.
More often than not, ideologues are what they are because they seek to avoid coming to terms with identifying failings in their own lives and need to explain evil in terms of other people. It is not only women who have had abortions, and who refuse to accept repentance, that seek to rationalize and justify a certain level of hatred of children for the sense of burden they create. It is all women and all men, who give support for the practice of exterminating the inconvenient and seek to purge their nagging repressed guilt by desperate attempts at political exoneration. A dying civilization protests divinely endowed responsibilities.
I’ll note, by contrast, as a veteran of about forty March for Life events in Washington every January, the most courageous identifiable group participating are the women who gather around the Supreme Court building holding their signs reading, “I regret my abortion.”
Thank you for going to the March all these years; your reward is in Heaven. Yes, the women who regret their abortions are the ones, in the vast majority of cases, who have faced that tragic event with the strength of Christ’s healing presence and have experienced the exquisite freedom found in Divine forgiveness. Those who refuse to repent, to admit they were wrong, endure a lifetime of sorrow. That sorrow and regret, though repressed, is never extinguished and leads to other destructive choices.
What a sick narrative.
I’ve no doubt that in the spiritual realm there is a connection between the law which was just passed allowing child murder up to birth, and the public support rallying to this murderess’s side. Why not extend the female franchise for child murder beyond birth! The devils, unlike most of our confused world, know what they are about and what they want to accomplish, and are always prepared for the next step. There is no shortage of useful idiots to help carry it out.
And all the women at the signing of the “OK To Murder Act” smiled and clapped. Seems that simply because we were born allows us to prevent someone else from being born – through murder. Birth Supremacy.
Good point…..we do sometimes miss that truth and shame on us for doing so…
The jury appears to be deadlocked. If a mistrial is declared, will the District Attorney go for another trial?
Why wouldn’t there be another trial? This woman murdered her three children. I think we can all agree that she should not be allowed to simply walk away from that with no consequences.
I’m not criticizing the court system in this country but it’s failing to mete out justice.
Many times it’s a technicality.
Women who commit infanticide/child murder often receive light punishments, if any. Yet there’s universal outrage against pedophilia. So killing a child is trivial but raping one is horrendous.
“Making sense of the surreal storm of the support for Lindsay Clancy”
Not possible.
Is there any moral person remaining in Massachusetts? As long as they have the Red Sox and abortion, they’re content. What we need is an “apostle to the BayState.”
Forget the gender wars, media circus, etc. Postpartum psychosis is one in a thousand, but trust me, it can happen.
Unfortunately, I am dealing with a dear friend’s case right now. It’s all hands on deck. She is a fantastic mother! We are all worn out. When healthy, she is very devout, fun, kind, energetic, charitable, etc. Her illness began to set in about a week or so after birth. She is convinced that she is in Hell, abandoned by God and constantly being attacked by devils. It’s worse psychosis than after her last childbirth, which was bad. (Note that this came out of the blue after her third was born. Her first two pregnancies had no complications). Understand that her psychosis is way beyond depression and risk of self-harm.
Praise be to God, a dozen friends are pitching in to help her husband. She cannot sleep without feeling attacked in dreams with her worst fears. She has massive mood swings, is constantly confused, has terrifying hallucinations, including commands to harm. Her doctors are trying. She has a host of new, experimental and complex drugs – all of which might be making the psychosis worse!
Please say a prayer for her and all of us trying to help.
All I can say about this tragic case on trial in Massachusetts is ”judge not.” (Matthew 7:1-2)
I’ve no doubt that postpartum psychosis is a real thing, just like other mad state and actions. One problem I have with much of the discussion even among Christians is that they leave out the real possibility, I would say likelihood, of demonic activity. This is not just a matter of chemicals in the brain, and can never be solved by adding new chemicals to the mixture (though sedatives, etc. may be necessary to stabilize the situation). In the depths of her mind she is being lied to, misled and frightened by demons. That is part of what is going on, in my opinion, and the failure of society to factor that in to our conceptualization of such things leave us without any fully sound way to deal with the phenomenon.
She may need to see an exorcist. Has anyone mentioned that in their observations of her situation?
Thank you for a truly Christian comment.
Dear Believer (as am I): Please do not regard my comments here as intended to be critical, for I offer this only (I hope) to be of possible biblical use to you. Your reference to Mt 7:1 is correct insofar as it refers to Our Lord’s admonition against judging souls or internal forums. We are, however, summoned to judge actions (John 7:24, 1 Thess 5:21-22; CCC 1786-1789, 2478), lest we salute or embrace what is profane or sinful. Your pastor can elaborate. I pray for you and the struggling mother about whom you wrote so charitably. God bless you. Very Respectfully, Deacon Toner
She seems a deeply unwell woman who had repeatedly asked for help and was prescribed a boatload of drugs by a psychiatrist who admitted to never having met Mrs. Clancy in person.
Whatever degree of responsibility she may or may not have had in her actions lifetime confinement in some sort of institution seems appropriate. I was reading about another case in New England where a mother had a psychotic break and killed her 3 children. Her forgiving husband reunited with her and they had 3 more children following her release from the psychiatric hospital. She went on to kill those children also.
Women should not be entrusted with governance nor leadership. Repeal the 19th Amendment too, while we’re at it. Our society faces tough choices. This trial is revealing that a society that capitulates to women’s propensity to emotionalism and irrationality will destroy itself. Society needs to be led by masculinity. That’s why the Church restricts ordination to males.
Many reasonable points here, Sir; initially, voting was reserved for property owners which seems eminently sensible. I would add that not all women are ruled by their hearts or emotions, and that restricting women from voting might not last, due to protests and legislation. We have, of course, all read of crimes committed by men as well: not only out of jealousy but also simply out of the desire to commit evil, and that without a motive other than just enjoying killing. Regarding the Church, I hope that ordination of women will never happen; I dislike intensely seeing women serving at the altar, whether it be reading the scriptures or serving as altar girls or Eucharistic Ministers. (In fact, I do not like the concept of Eucharistic Ministers.) The Church is led by men and it must stay that way. The women must keep silent in the Church for proper decorum and tradition, and out of respect for the headship of the man under Christ.
Ms. Hendershott’s analysis has some merit, because we want to try to make sense out of evil. I think that many, in fact the majority of the women who support her, are simply evil. The innocent children are of no concern to them. It is perverse to its core, and when the ruling comes down it will be to the detriment of all of us who love justice, mercy, and truth.
Abortion has opened wide the gates of evil, and there will be no end to the mire and filth that is stamped on the soul due to the murder of our most helpless and innocent, our children.
The woman who did the unspeakable to her own little children is evil. We all have that sin nature ready to spring up at any moment, and dead though it is in Christ, it is not removed from our hearts, so it must be crucified daily.
Christ alone has the remedy. He is the Truth. Without knowing Him, there is no end to the depth to which mankind can descend, and that is why the jury is deadlocked; she will probably be found to be not guilty by reason of insanity, will be committed to a psychiatric hospital for a period of several months or years, and then released.
A woman with as little mercy and love as you display is not a worthy example of a follower of Christ. It is entirely possible for a Christian to be concerned for the suffering of “perpetrators” as well as victims. Check out Luke 23:43.
Who appointed you Sarah’s confessor? Thanks for reminding us of the Bard’s injunction that the devil can quote Scripture to his own ends.
Sarah offered a thoughtful and coherent assessment of this unspeakably horrific serial killing, how “society” has been coarsened to excuse and accept the unacceptable. What is she supposed to do, offer some histrionic lament for this betrayal of the innocent, who should enjoy the protection of their mother, not fear strangulation?
You don’t want “love and mercy” you want a counterfeit- license for the perpetrator of a homicidal spree and yet you assault another poster as morally bereft with reckless abandon for daring to offer an opinion that doesn’t comply with yours, but is reasoned and objective, attributes that your posts invariably lack.
Life in a highly urbanized, deracinated society fosters the isolationism of solipcism. If social media are one’s primary human contact, how real are others to one, except as a source for emotional outlet? Both Clancy and her children become mere instruments. And little in most of that population’s education or daily experience counters that attitude.
Interesting that there is no mention of men protesting this case. Why the gender difference? What is the opinion of the male population? What does this say about the place of gender in society today? How did we get here and what can we do about it? How as Christians do we treat this woman? What csn we learn from this and what do we need to do differently? Massachusetts is the second most populous state, what does this say about the Church? Seems to be many questions but few answers. Many strong opinions but where’s the truth?
Where was her husband during the 8 months since their last baby was born when she was suffering and sick? Did he not take her to doctors (no) did he even know her medications (no) did he try to get her help (not apparently). This was also not her first bout with PPD, just the worst. Why did he keep getting her pregnant? Couldn’t he keep continence for the sake of his wife’s health? Or did he just not care at all? It seems as if he completely emotionally abandoned her. Where is he now? He’s abandoned her again it would seem.
I appreciate Dr. Hendershott’s reference to Percy’s “Lancelot”, my favorite of his novels.
At the risk of sounding a little crazy, I wonder if this case (and other cases of child murder)’ involves temporary demonic possession. For someone to murder innocent children, you have to think of psychosis or demonic possession.
Pope Pius XIi thought that the Nazis were demonic. Given their monstrous crimes, he might have been right.
Professor Hendershott’s analysis, as usual, is trenchant, reminding religious readers of the lucidity of Proverbs: “Without a vision, the people lose restraint” (29:18—and of St. Paul’s similar and broader admonition in Romans 1:18-32). Now consider this challenging one-word analysis from Eric Voegelin: pneumopathology, by which he meant a society-wide sickness of the spirit, marked by repudiation of the transcendent. We might say, with Chesterton, that we do not know what we’re doing because we do not know what we’re undoing. Permit me to add just one more layer to this—the Hebrew word sedaqah says, in effect: There is a right way for a human being to stand in the world. In fact, that one Hebrew word, in its fullness, integrates Proverbs, St. Paul, Walker Percy, Voegelin, Chesterton—and Hendershott. Moreover, it helps to explain the sickness surrounding the Clancy trial and the recent Maura Healey signature on barbaric abortion law (also in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, about which, at this writing, nothing “medicinal”—I refer to excommunication—has been done, for Isaiah 58:1 is, evidently, not commonly read in chancelleries there).
Now please ask yourselves (as I must ask myself, as a deacon): how is this, once it’s finally and fully understood, to be preached, especially to low-information auditors? The names are erudite; the concepts, abstruse; the fair conclusions, abstract and utterly countercultural (precisely because our academic educational institutions certify and train but only rarely educate [taking us back to Prv 29:18]). So how, then, do we who bear the responsibility and sacred privilege of preaching manage to speak the truth in love at a time and in a place where “[j]ustice is turned back, and righteousness stands far away; for truth has stumbled in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter” (Isaiah 59:14)? The idea that “they glory in their shame” (Phil 3:19) lacks all progressive sensitivity—and is just plain old-fashioned. (We can’t have THAT!) We wait, in hopeful trembling, for the Parousia, at which time the Transcendent, at long last, will not be denied by haughty humanity.
Aside from the crowd psychology in Massachusetts, here’s a similar case from 1979 near my hometown: https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/crime/article32221029.html
I do recall a recent analysis suggesting that mob psychology (street demonstrations) is likely evidence of a form of “affectivity disorder” whereby the anomic population–quite apart from the immediate issue–craves the feeling of belonging to something (anything!) bigger than themselves, whatever it might happen to be.
Without judging the case itself, how many of the demonstrators are desperately trying to validate their own possible abortions?
“Without judging the case itself, how many of the demonstrators are desperately trying to validate their own possible abortions?”
Your leap of logic is breath taking!
Andrea Yates (Texas) drowned her five children in 2001; she was acquitted by reason of insanity.
Dena Schlosser (California) killed her three children in 2004; she was also acquitted by reason of insanity.
Susan Smith (South Carolina) drove her car into a lake with her two toddlers in 1994; she was convicted of murder.
The women represent a rupture with reality. They a livestreaming the mystery movie of the week in their heads. Now, I watch and read mysteries, from Classic to.midern. I also enjoy crying out “he/she did (or didn’t) do it!” And I love being right. But I know it is in no way reality. These screen-addicted harpies in pink have mentally left the planet some time ago and can no longer tell Truth from Screen. But thus is just one primates opinion.
Peter writes: “Without judging the case itself, how many of the demonstrators are desperately trying to validate their own possible abortions?”
I would venture to guess that the vast majority of them have had at least one abortion.
Anecdotally, I worked for many years in a psych hospital where so many of the women were admitted for treatment of depression. I often wondered that if, on admission, every woman were asked the following questions what it would reveal;
#1. Have you ever been pregnant?
#2. If yes, how many times have you been pregnant?
#3. For each pregnancy, indicate how the pregnancy ended:
a. live birth
b. spontaneous miscarriage
c. pregnancy terminated by abortion (either by self or medical practitioner)
I think that the results would be very telling. .
Questions have suddenly, spontaneously erupted among some of us regarding demonic possession of Lindsay Clancy.
God does not allow Satan or his demonic auxiliaries to possess the human soul. What he does permit is the possession of the body and its faculties. If we notice in the many Gospel accounts the possessed are relieved and thankful, in the instance of the possessed by a demonic legion in the Gerasene region. Who after relief of his possession wished to be a disciple of Christ.
Nor is there marked evidence of possessed persons going on a murderous rampage. There are manifestations of violence, attacks, but not outright murders. However, obsession with the demonic is another matter.
Obsession involves willful consent to evil. That can be evident in extreme hatred, desire to torture as occurred among certain Nazis and Himmler’s SS. Also among the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Ted Bundy was an instance of extreme demonic influence but not possession because the jury had abundant evidence of his freely willed consent.
In the case of Lindsay Clancy the Jury does not and should not consider spiritual, demonic cause or influence. The Jury has one dynamic to consider. The age old standard of determining guilt. Whether the defendant understood the difference between good and evil, wrongful behavior when she committed her act of killing her children.