Most family annihilators are men. It’s a grim fact that such incidents are common enough to have a discernible pattern. The massacre is carried out by a husband and father, often one who is on the verge of bankruptcy or divorce; typically, it forms the finale of a long reign of domestic violence terror.

About half the time, the perpetrator kills himself after slaughtering his family. Gun use is common – a large number of what are termed “mass shootings” in the United States are in fact family annihilation killings, in which a man turns his weapon on his family members. Other times, the killer uses knives, or fires.

This kind of killing does not always make the news. When it does, news organizations often run family photos, in which the killer smiles on a beach or beside the Grand Canyon with his arm around the wife and children he will later shoot or strangle.

In this context of pervasive and normalized male domestic violence against women and children, the Lindsay Clancy case was always going to attract outside attention. Because in that case, when three Massachusetts children were strangled of their family home in January of 2023 – Cora, who was five, Dawson, who was three, and Callan, who was just eight months old – the killer was their mom.

As is fairly common for family annihilators, Clancy attempted suicide after killing her children. But Clancy survived. Injuries left her paralyzed below the waist. At her murder trial, which lasted an unusually long six weeks and concluded in a hung jury on Friday, she rolled to the defense table each morning in a wheelchair.

The mistrial means that Clancy – along with her children’s father, their grandparents, and everyone else who loved them, to say nothing of the state – will now face the possibility of being subjected to a second trial. All because of a hung jury.

Eleven of the 12 jurors........

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