On January 24, 2023, in a house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, Cora Clancy was five. Dawson Clancy was three. Callan Clancy was eight months old. Their mother killed them. That is not a theory. It is the one fact both sides of the courtroom have already conceded.
A jury later split. A judge declared a mistrial. Commentators rushed to the language that always arrives after a mother kills her children: illness, voices, medication, tragedy, “she was sick.” Some, even all of that language may be true as well as medically serious. Postpartum psychosis exists. Delusion exists. Courts have a test for criminal responsibility. None of that answers the only question that should come first.
What happened to the children?
Not what happened to the adult’s diagnosis. Not what happened to the adult’s marriage. Not what happened to the adult’s spine after she tried to follow them into death. What happened to Cora, Dawson, and Callan while they were still alive enough to know who was in the room.
A public remark put it without anesthesia: I wonder if she looked in her son’s eyes as she took his life. Could you imagine the horror as that life went out looking into his mother’s eyes? Can anyone imagine more evil?
That is not a request for a medical footnote. It is a demand that the defender change places — not with the woman on the gurney, which is the easy seat, but with the small person who could not leave.
The seat no one wants
It is cheap to stand in Lindsay Clancy’s shoes after the fact. The after-the-fact shoes come with a hospital, a diagnosis, a lawyer, a narrative, and a chorus explaining that the hands which ended three lives were not really hers. Those shoes are padded.
The required shoes are earlier.
You are five. You know that face. It is the face that feeds you, bathes you, buckles you in, kisses you in the dark. It is the safest object in a child’s universe. If there is a last thing a child should see on this earth, it is not supposed to be that face turned into the instrument of the end.
You are three. You do not have a theory of psychosis. You have a mother.
You are eight months old. You have no words and no defense. You have only the person who was appointed, by nature and by law, to keep you from harm.
If you want to defend the woman, you do not get to begin in the psychiatric wing. You begin there — in the last minutes the children had — and you stay until you can say, out loud, what they were owed and did not receive. If that exercise makes you nauseous, good. Nausea is the first honest response. The second is to stop sanding the act down into a case study.
Illness can explain a broken mind. It does not unmake the children’s last sight. It does not convert three killings into a weather event. A storm does not look back at you. A mother does.
Pity is not a verdict
The law may yet find that she lacked criminal responsibility. A second jury may find the opposite. Prosecutors may retry her or they may not. That is a separate machine. It is allowed to grind. What it is not allowed to do is confiscate moral language from the rest of us.
“She was sick” is offered as a full stop. It is not. Plenty of people are sick and do not kill their children. Plenty of people hear ruinous thoughts and walk into a hospital instead of a basement. The defense says a voice commanded her and she could not resist. The prosecution says she sent her husband out of the house and used the time. The public does not have to pretend those two stories are the same size. One is a claim about her inner weather. The other is a claim about three bodies that never got older.
Callan died days later. Even the calendar refused to let the story be tidy.
If your instinct is to protect the mother from the word evil, ask why that instinct is stronger than the instinct to protect the children’s names from being swallowed by hers. Cora liked princesses. Dawson liked fire trucks and Paw Patrol. Callan was, his father said, a happy baby. Those are not decorations. They are the lives that ended. A culture that can recite the diagnosis faster than it can recite the children has already chosen a side.
What “in her shoes” actually requires
People who defend her want the hard night to be understood from the adult’s skull: terror, command, collapse. Fine. Include it. Then finish the sentence.
If you are in those shoes at the moment the children die, you are not only a patient. You are the last adult in the room. You are the face they know. You are the person whose job, that hour, was to be safety. Whatever stormed through her head, the children did not get a vote. They did not get a lawyer. They did not get a jury note. They got the person they trusted.
Could anyone imagine more evil? Not as a slogan. As a measurement. Evil is not only the stranger in the alley. Evil is the betrayal that uses love’s own doorway. A child looking at his mother is looking at the one person who was not supposed to be the danger. If you cannot bear that image, do not ask the rest of us to look away so you can feel sophisticated.
Mental illness deserves treatment. Children deserve to live. When those two sentences collide, the second one does not become optional. The first one does not get to erase the second.
Look at Cora. Look at Dawson. Look at Callan. Then talk. If your defense cannot survive their eyes, it is not a defense. It is an escape.
