6 min Click here to listen to this article

Share via Close extra sharing options Email Facebook X LinkedIn Threads Reddit WhatsApp Copy Link URL Copied! Print

Copy Link URL Copied!

This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred

I have the opposite of a morbid fascination with stories about mothers who kill their children. I also am deeply discomfited by stories about women who leave their children, “Kramer vs. Kramer” style, to go off and find themselves.

The mother-child bond is so deep, and so sacred, that it’s inconceivable to me that a mother would abandon her children, let alone take their lives. And yet, of course, it has happened before.

I have tried hard not to pay attention to the story of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mom who killed her three children in January 2023. Cora was 5, Dawson was 3 and Callan was 8 months old when Clancy strangled them with exercise bands in the basement of their two-story Duxbury home.

This week, my curiosity overcame my revulsion. I watched parts of Clancy’s livestreamed murder trial.

I don’t pretend to understand what, exactly, drove the former labor and delivery nurse to kill her children, but I do understand the way that postpartum hormones, anxiety and sleeplessness can upend even a sane woman’s mental health.

In the months leading up to her catastrophic act, according to trial testimony and a lawsuit she filed against her providers, Clancy was prescribed 13 psychotropic medications by multiple professionals, and was even briefly hospitalized. She called a suicide hotline twice, and because she did not have a specific plan to kill herself, her attorney said, the hotline told her to contact her medical provider. Clancy told family, friends and neighbors about what her attorney described in court as “intrusive thoughts, dark thoughts, homicidal and suicidal ideation.”

To say the system failed her is to believe there actually is a system in place to help a woman like Clancy. No single provider was in charge of her care. Her husband testified that he had never heard of postpartum psychosis, a rare but severe mental health emergency.

I have immense empathy for Clancy, who also slashed at her wrist and neck before jumping out of a second-story window. Clancy is now paralyzed from the sternum down, and attended her nearly five-week trial in a wheelchair. I have to stop myself from imagining what the children felt as she killed them.

The prosecution contended that Clancy acted intentionally and with premeditation, that she knew right from wrong and deliberately sent her husband out of the house so she could carry out her plan.

“She left them discarded on the basement floor, like broken toys, because she was done playing the game,” Plymouth County prosecutor Jennifer Sprague told the jury.........

© Los Angeles Times