What Lindsay Clancy’s Trial Gave Other Women Permission to Say

Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children with exercise bands in the family’s Duxbury, Massachusetts basement on January 24, 2023, then cut her own wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window. She survived, paralyzed from the waist down, and has appeared at her murder trial in a wheelchair. Cora was 5, Dawson was 3, and Callan was 8 months.

Outside Plymouth County Superior Court on August 26, 2026, demonstrators wave signs in support of Lindsay Clancy during her ongoing murder trial. Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP via Getty Images.

Nicole Russell’s USA TODAY column takes aim not at Clancy but at the mothers who’ve adopted her online. She describes TikTok and Instagram posts reading “I am Lindsay Clancy” and “Same, Lindsay,” often filmed while the poster holds a healthy child of her own.

Sandy Carreiro of Dartmouth, Massachusetts, pins on a button reading “I Stand with Lindsay Clancy” during a vigil outside Plymouth Superior Court on Aug. 20, 2026. Photo via USA TODAY Network/Reuters Connect.

Her squeeze is simple. The defense theory is postpartum psychosis, which affects roughly 1 or 2 births in 1,000. If the women posting this content actually share that rare illness, how are they producing polished videos? And if they only mean ordinary exhaustion and dark thoughts, Russell argues, calling that “the same” as killing three kids is its own problem.

Lindsay Clancy, seated in a wheelchair at the defense table, listens during closing arguments in her triple murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court on Aug. 27, 2026. Photo by USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect.

Clancy doesn’t deny the killings. The trial is about criminal responsibility: prosecutors say she cleared the house and knew exactly what she was doing, while the defense says a command hallucination told her it was her last chance. Prosecution psychiatrist Dr. Gregory Saathoff rejected her account that the children were “puppets,” noting that children have a will to survive and can walk and run.

Lindsay Clancy observes as jurors are polled by Judge William Sullivan on the third day of deliberations in her triple murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court, August 31, 2026. Photo by Greg Derr / The Patriot Ledger / USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect.

The jury of 9 women and 3 men deliberated more than 10 hours across two days and asked to see the pill bottles and the knife before breaking without a verdict. They resume Monday, August 31. A first-degree murder conviction carries mandatory life without parole.

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