The Children Lindsay Clancy Killed

Cora loved princesses. Dawson loved trucks. Callan laughed at everything. Their mother strangled all three.

I have watched the media ignore Lindsay Clancy’s victims for long enough. Today is for Cora and Dawson and Callan.

On the night of January 24, 2023, a labor and delivery nurse named Lindsay Clancy sent her husband out of their million dollar house in Duxbury, Massachusetts to pick up dinner and stop at CVS. While he was gone she took her three children to the basement and strangled them with exercise bands. Then she cut her wrists and her neck and jumped out a second story window to try to kill herself. She survived. They did not. Three and a half years later her murder trial is in its final hours in a Plymouth courtroom and as I write this the jury has already told the judge once that it cannot agree on a verdict. Her lawyer holds court on the steps outside every afternoon. Yesterday he bragged that her supporters have mailed her enough letters to fill three banker’s boxes.

I have spent the last week reading and watching everything I could find about this case and I keep running into the same hole. The coverage is about her. Her medication list. Her postpartum diagnosis. Her hospital stays. Her tears at the defense table. Whether she was a good person who had a bad day or a cold-blooded, child killer. The media loves shoving that woman down our throat right now.

I am sick of seeing her plastered all over my newsfeed. While Lindsay is everywhere, I have not found one video on social media or one article from a major outlet that gives those children more than a sentence. They are set dressing. They are props on a stage while the spotlight stays fixed on the woman who killed them.

One TikTok influencer with millions of followers told her audience not to think of the Clancy children as people at all. She said to think of them as ceramic vases that Lindsay broke. That is not a slip of the tongue. That is deliberate dehumanization. You turn three children into objects so that strangling them feels no different from breaking a glass while doing the dishes or tossing out a worn pair of shoes. Millions of people watched that and nodded along.

So before I say one more word about the woman I am going to tell you who these children were. Because somebody has to.

Cora Marie Clancy was born on December 4, 2017. She was five years old. She had an infectious laugh and a head full of information about princesses and her favorite was Sofia the First. She had two baby dolls named Caroline and Charlotte and before she turned two she could swaddle them perfectly. When she left the house she would pick someone to watch them and make sure the sitter had everything they needed. She said she wanted to be a doctor and a mama when she grew up and she practiced by giving her baby brother checkups. She loved sloths and unicorns and tea parties and going to lunch with her Nana and Grandpa. She loved giving people presents. She was the cautious one in the family and the people who knew her say that was only because she cared so much. At the end of each day she liked to say thank you for a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

Dawson William Clancy was born on September 30, 2019. He was three years old. He had big bold brown eyes and the kind of generosity you almost never see in a toddler. He shared his toys without being asked. His father says his best quality was pure kindness. He loved trucks and tractors and dinosaurs and Paw Patrol and what he called worker guys. He loved being outside. He was mischievous and adventurous and he liked causing a little trouble and usually found it hilarious. On the morning of the day he died his mother sent his father a photo of Dawson standing there proud because he had gotten dressed all by himself.

Callan Clancy was born on May 26, 2022. He was eight months old. He laughed so much that his family called him Happy Callan. He thought his big brother and sister were the funniest people on earth and his father says he could have listened to that laugh all day. The doctors got his heart beating again that night. He fought for three more days at Boston Children’s Hospital before he died.

Those are the ‘ceramic vases’.

I know something about being raised by evil parents. Mine were two dropouts who thought it would be cool to quit school and join a biker gang and then somehow found themselves with two children before either of them turned eighteen. What I remember of childhood is watching them snort coke at parties, getting screamed at for reasons I never understood and being told again and again that I had ruined their lives. My father liked to say he only had kids because he wanted slaves and he said it so often that it stopped sounding like a joke and started sounding like some sort of psychological torture. He put cigarettes out on my arm. Thirty years later the scars are still there and to this day he denies he ever did it.

Then there was the afternoon my mother had a breakdown and threw a lead crystal vase my wealthy grandparents had given her as a wedding gift at my head. It went through my hair, missed my skull by an inch and shattered into a thousand pieces against the wall.

For days afterward both of my parents screamed at me for breaking it, because that vase cost three hundred dollars and ‘thanks to me’ it was gone. All I did was be a kid.

I did not ask to be abused and Cora and Dawson and Callan did not ask to be murdered.

I wrote about this case yesterday and this morning I woke up to find that three hundred free subscribers and four paid subscribers had left. I also found about a hundred comments from women who believe Lindsay Clancy should walk free because she had a bad day and is not a bad person. Several of them told me they have thought about killing their own children many times as if that were a normal part of motherhood. I want to say plainly that this terrifies me. I am starting to wonder whether there is a large and growing section of this country with severe mental health issues (or they are just plain evil in the Biblical sense) and whether we are watching child murder get ‘normalized’ in real time on a phone screen.

Roughly fifty of those women told me I could not possibly understand what Clancy was going through because I have never had postpartum depression so I have no idea what dealing with a mental health crisis feels like.

Bullshit.

I have spent my life in and out of psychiatric facilities with maladies that have been diagnosed as: Severe Major Depressive Disorder with Psychotic Features, Schizophrenia, ADHD, and a few others that are so uncommon that I can’t even spell them. My mental health issues are the sort that people end up taking their own life after dealing with them for so long. Thank God I am still alive.

The most terrifying disorder I suffer from is the fugue states I sometimes get when life becomes too stressful and I just ‘break’. I know what it is to wake in the night certain someone is coming to kill me. So I throw on my clothes and run off into the night and come back to myself a hundred and fifty miles away covered in blood and bruises with no memory of how I got there.

I know what it is to come to in the middle of the woods three weeks after I vanished with my body torn open and no idea what happened in all that lost time.

I do not need to imagine a broken mind. I have lived inside one since I was a teenager and it was built for me in a house where my mother tried to kill me and my father abused me because he enjoyed it.

Lindsay Clancy grew up upper middle class. She attended an exclusive, private university. She lived in a million dollar house with a husband who earns more in a year than I earn in ten. Her life was a fairy tale next to mine. She never went through anything painful enough to justify murdering three toddlers. So when a stranger tells me I cannot understand a broken mind it makes me laugh. I understand it better than anyone commenting on her case.

I also know exactly what her supporters are doing, whether they know it or not, because I have watched it spread from one video to the next. They are not thinking. They are parroting the same three talking points a handful of influencers shoved down their throats. With everything that has happened inside my head I have never once laid a hand on a child. Not one of them can get around that.

Now look at what her supporters refuse to look at. She fired the nanny about six weeks before the murders. She researched online how to kill children. Her defense keeps telling the jury she was crying out for help and no one would listen. Fine. Then why did she never say the one sentence that would have put her in an inpatient facility that same day? I am thinking about killing my three children. She never said it because saying it would have ended the plan. She had every chance to hand those kids to a grandparent or a sibling or a neighbor for one night and she never did. Instead she built an errand. She sent Patrick to a restaurant they did not normally use and then on to CVS and she checked how long the round trip would take so she would know exactly how many minutes she had alone in that house. To the morons insisting Patrick did it and pinned it on her: he is on camera at both locations. She has admitted in open court that she killed them. If he had done it her attorney would be standing up every morning pointing at him. He is not because Patrick did not kill anyone. She did. And when it was finished she cut her own wrists and neck and jumped out that window because she did not want to spend the rest of her life in prison for what she had just done.

Add it up. Whatever else was happening in her mind this was planned. Planned people go to prison. Lindsay Clancy is a psychopath who belongs in a prison cell or a forensic psychiatric facility for the rest of her natural life. Instead her million dollar lawyer is working toward a hung jury and he may well get one. Three boxes of letters for the killer. I have not seen one for the children.

The fact that anyone in this country is on her side makes me want to walk outside and scream at the sky for God to pour His wrath out on a society this sick. I will be honest about that. But I have been an ordained minister for more than twenty years and my faith tells me something else too. Those three children were never vases. They were never objects. They were souls and souls do not break and get thrown away. Cora and Dawson and Callan are with the God who made them and who loved them before their parents ever did. There is no fear where they are. No basement. No exercise bands. No mother coming down the stairs. There is a beautiful day in the neighborhood that does not end.

The internet may have decided those children do not matter. Duxbury decided otherwise. The people who live there knew Lindsay Clancy. They saw her at the grocery store and the pediatrician and the town beach. They saw one of their own. A nurse and a mother of three who smiled and waved and gave no sign of what she was hiding right up until the night the deceit ran out and she murdered her own children. Those same neighbors could have looked away.

Instead hundreds of them showed up at Wadsworth Field and built a playground in four days. Angel wings hang on the shade structures and a photo of the three of them greets every family that walks in. Cora’s thank you for a beautiful day is printed on a panel wrapped around a rainbow heart. Go there if you are nearby. Let your kids play. Say their names out loud. Cora. Dawson. Callan. They existed and they mattered and they were loved and no verdict and no viral video will ever take that from them.

Help Keep the Wise Wolf Howling

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Normally this is where I ask you to upgrade to a paid subscription. Not today. If you were about to spend that money on The Wise Wolf, spend it on a children’s charity instead. Pick one that keeps kids fed or safe or out of the kind of house I grew up in. I never want to turn on the news and see another woman decide that killing her children is acceptable because she was stressed out and Lindsay Clancy got away with it because some TikTok hag said those kids were ceramic vases. Kids are people. The ones calling them vases are the ones who have stopped being human.

(If you don’t want to leave the Substack ecosystem, you can upgrade to paid and I will donate the proceeds from this article to a Children’s charity of my choosing.)